Posts by Russell Brown
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I also thought there was something in Patel and Franklin's stand, even if the Sri Lankans had dropped their guard by then.
My heart sank as soon as Styris went out to that lame shot. He was the one who looked like getting us there. But I was a bit pissed off about Oram's dismissal - I'm far from sure Murali really thought he'd caught it.
But yeah, we were bronze medallists, half the home straight behind Sri Lanka. Michael Holding's commentary on Malinga's opening spell was priceless: "Wow ... wow ... wow ..."
Hope they beat the Aussies.
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Now I get a nasty login form every time I open a public address page.
"To view this page, you need to log in to area “Staff” on dev.scoop.co.nz."
All fixed. They were switching over to a new website and for a short time on Friday night that happened because they're serving some of our ads.
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We bought our little house in Pt Chev eight years ago for $253,000, after several years of what now seems like heroic scrimping and saving (although it was a small inheritance that actually got us over the line).
Market value shot up in the next few years and, even though Housing NZ properties in the street will always put a cap on prices, it might fetch $550,000 after a scrub-up.
Which is fine. But we need to make it bigger, soon, which means that our fairly manageable mortgage gets quite a bit less manageable. There will also be the major pain-in-the-ass factor of losing my home office for some time. The alternative is selling and buying a bigger place further out, which brings its own pain-in-the-ass factor, especially wrt to schooling. Sigh ...
Maybe if we rented we'd have been able to pay more into our retirement fund ...
But I like owning. After years of dealing with annoying landlords, it was really exciting to walk into a place that we could live in for as long as we wanted. The kids feel secure.
Nonetheless, I can see why anyone who isn't already in the market wouldn't want to bother, especially without a family and the associated nesting urge. If I was in my 20s, I wouldn't be too keen on living like a monk for years whilst deep-down knowing I'd never catch up with the Ponsonby baby-boomer with five investment properties and a designer P habit.
The interesting factor in Auckland is apartments. I visited someone in a city apartment last weekend and standing on his balcony brought home to me how many people, including families, are already living apartment lives. But how many people buy apartments to live in themselves?
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MAYBE some people on the autistic spectrum ARE born with a predisposition towards carrying out this kind of act? Autism activists might not like to hear it but it seems pretty reasonable to me - but with the CDC estimating that 1 in every 150 US children are autistic and no firm evidence about what causes the disorder I doubt focusing on autism is a terribly helpful way to prevent furthur tragedies.
No, as I said before, autistic people are no more "predisposed" to mass killing than Koreans are. But it seems likely that a failure to intervene and address Cho's problems helped create the monster.
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Radio is so educational.
So is Jo.
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Fortunately in the societies mentioned Che, there has been some effort to keep the safety net a bit wider,and perhaps catching more of the potential risks.
Actually, if he'd had a childhood autism diagnosis in, say California, these days, he'd have automatically become eligible for a range of services (which is one reason California autism diagnoses have spiralled in the last few years). It would have been much harder for his parents to ignore the problem and hope it went away.
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As for pampered, all the tribulations you describe occured after Bryant was jailed. Of course no-one should be forced to suffer like that. My point is that Bryant had no apparent reason, prior to commiting his crime, for holding a major grudge against the world.
Yeah, but doesn't the fact that he now lives (and presumably always will) in a secure hospital for the seriously mentally ill have a bearing on it?
Politically, all hell would probably have broken loose if he'd been declared not fit to stand trial, and there's no doubting that what he did was callous and evil, but I think it's clear enough that there was something seriously wrong in his head, and that that had been the case since childhood.
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__I'm not talking from much of a knowledge base but [...]__
You should've stopped there. As an ASD person myself, I can confidently say that you don't know what you're talking about.
Amen. You really have no idea what you're talking about and you'd do yourself a favour if you just stopped, Neil.
I don't put any credence in the he-was-surrounded-by-rich-kids theory (so are lots of people), but it seems clear that a failure to acknowledge the problem and intervene in Cho's early life (and you can blame his family for that) was a significant contributory factor to the disaster he became.
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I believe what the aunt said was that Cho suggested to her that he might be autistic.
No, she said he was diagnosed after the family settled in the US. A HuffPo story has more detail than most of the coverage:
The first and most obvious of Cho's symptoms - from early on in his life - was that he was suffering from characteristics of Autistic Spectrum Disorder - difficulties with: social skills, communication, obsessive tendencies, adaptability and speech articulation, amongst other possible symptoms.
A high functioning autism to be sure, perhaps Asperger's, but certainly in the spectrum.
"From the beginning, he wouldn't answer me," Kim Yang-soon, Cho's great aunt, told the Associated Press. "(He) didn't talk. Normally sons and mothers talk. There was none of that for them. He was very cold."
"When they went to the United States, they told them it was autism," said Kim, 85, adding that the family had constant worries about Cho.
Soon after they arrived, Cho's mother took the boy to a doctor, who confirmed the diagnosis of autism. But the family was too poor and busy trying to set up its new life to give Cho the medical attention he needed. Cho's great aunt said she believed Cho's mother was 'not very determined to get treatment for him' because he continued to receive good school grades after the autism diagnosis and the family hoped he would eventually straighten himself out.
The same story notes that Yahoo issued a "kill story" order and other agencies acted similarly after protests from "autism activists". Perhaps the fear of subsequent persecution was justified, but I think that was terrible turn of events. We don't learn anything by refusing to have the story told.
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The pampered simpleton Martin Bryant's 'alienation' didn't prevent him from begging his jailers for any scrap of news that might confirm his expectation that his crimes had made him some kind of hero.
Pardon!? Bryant has had a horrible life, including repeated psychiatric admissions as a child. His IQ was measured as 66. The one bit of luck he had - being befriended by an older woman and eventually inheriting half a million dollars when she died in a traffic accident - eventually only extended his catalogue of failure. He attempted suicide in prison six times, until he was placed in a solitary cell on suicide watch for eight months and remained in protective custody within the prison for a further 10 years. He is, by all accounts, a wreck.
I'm not sure if "pampered" is the right word Joe. I doubt you'd swap your life for his.
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