Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

America, Land of the Freely Arrested

From an article in the NY Times:

By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal justice system in everyday life.

The study, the first since the 1960s to look at the arrest histories of a national sample of adolescents and young adults over time, found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated reported having been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.

...

The study did not look at racial or regional differences, but other research has found higher arrest rates for black men and for youths living in poor urban areas.

I have to laugh. Americans love to beat their chest and proclaim their "love of liberty" but they arrest and incarcerate at a rate far beyond almost every other country in the world except for the handful of despot dictatorships. You would think this report would force Americans to look in the mirror. Their myth of "freedom loving" doesn't match up with their eagerness to jail. It is much like the Founding Fathers prating on about "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. while being one of the worse slavery-based societies on the face of the earth.

Social Protest

Here is a good overview of the protests that are shaking the world and a prediction of more to come. The interview is with Gerald Celente.

My favourite phrase:

When the money on the top stops flowing down to the man on the street, the blood starts flowing in the streets.

While I don't agree with his specific "predictions" (he is no better than most other prognosticators), I do think he has the zeitgeist of the time correct: we are in an era of social upheaval because of a failing economic system with the root cause being a growing economic inequality and a growing marginalization of the bottom 50%.

The Insanity of Anti-Technology

Most people are abysmally ignorant of the role of science and technology in today's world. They have wildly romantic images of "organic gardening" and "back to nature" view of life. They are terrified of pesticides and absolutely ignorant of the fact that your veggies are packed with lethal concoctions natural to the plant as its defense against insects and other animals tempted to nibble on it.

These people think they can give up on nuclear power because it is dangerous while not aware of the deaths from traditional energy sources. They don't understand the trade-offs that must be taken in all aspects of our life. Mostly these are the coddled children of middle and upper class families, young adults never responsible for feeding and clothing themselves. But they get sucked up in a "great cause" of anti-science.

One of the most laughable was the "frankenfood" movement based in Europe. These people are convinced that if you transfer genes from one species to another you are upsetting "God's plan" and have created a great sin. They see genetically modified food as both dangerous and sinful. But they are completely ignorant of science and the fact that all life is chock-a-block full of "foreign genes" transported by viruses. This has been happening for a couple of billion years. The genetically modified food is perfectly safe unless the experiment was to move toxin-generating coding into the new species. But no food researcher is interested in poisoning people. They are trying to create stronger, better crops, e.g. move vitamin A into rice crops to fight disease. From Wikipedia:

Approximately 250,000–500,000 children in developing countries become blind each year owing to vitamin A deficiency, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Asia and Africa.

Again from Wikipedia:

Golden rice is a variety of Oryza sativa rice produced through genetic engineering to biosynthesize beta-carotene, a precursor of pro-vitamin A in the edible parts of rice.

This is the horror of "frankenfood"? This is engineered food to save half a million children per year from blindness.

The madness of anti-science was seen in the Unabomber. He was judge, jury, and executioner for his perceived "wrongs" of scientific researchers. Nobody appointed him. He had to pass no tests or get a license to go on his murderous spree. Rather than work within the system and try to set up regulations for ensuring safe research, he went on a killing spree. This is the "saviour" of mankind. Just as Osama Bin Laden was the "saviour" of a purist Islam. Self-appointed fanatics gone murderous and feeling saintly about their vicious trade.

Now I come to the purpose of this post. You should read about the latest gang of murderous anti-science fanatics and their handiwork. Here is a bit from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about attacks on nanotechnology researchers in Mexico by self-appointed "saviours" of humanity:

A package bomb that injured two professors at a university here this month is the latest in a string of attacks by a new terror group inspired by the Unabomber. Its violent actions have put campuses across Mexico on alert and caused nanotechnology researchers worldwide to take precautions with their mail.

Nanotechnology was singled out as a target for the attacks in manifestos posted on the Web by the group behind the bombs, which calls itself "Individualities Tending Toward Savagery." It has been linked to attacks in France, Spain, and Chile, and to a bomb sent earlier this year to a scientist at another Mexican university who specializes in nanotech. An analyst who helped identify the Unabomber—who turned out to be a former professor—says the posts show signs of someone well-educated who could be affiliated with a college.

The online rants credit the Unabomber as an inspiration. ...

...

In the group's online post (written in Spanish) claiming credit for the latest bombing, the terrorists complained about the growing number of nanotechnology experts in Mexico, which it estimated at 650. "The ever more rapid acceleration of this technology will lead to the creation of nanocyborgs that can self-replicate automatically without the help of a human," it said.

...

Many people in the region are skeptical of science, he adds. "In our country, and in the whole Latin American region, we put more faith in the supernatural than in reason. This poses fatal consequences, making people view researchers in science and technology with suspicion and hate, as inhuman individuals, who work against society and as the exploiters and destroyers of natural resources."

These anti-science fanatics can't be bothered with facts. No researcher that I know of is trying to develop this kind of dystopian technology. Everybody I know is working to make a better world, like the first fellow who rubbed two sticks together to create fire. Sure, I'll bet there were those sitting around the resulting campfire speculating that some mad caveman would use this "new technology" to set afire all the forests of the world and destroy earth. Maybe they even plotted to kill the fire-starter and ensure the knowledge was lost because they saw it as a clear danger to the lovely lifestyle of sitting in the dark and cold eating raw meat and uncooked veggies.

People need to realize that science is what gives us the comfortable life we have. Those who are anti-science should put their energies into going "back to the land" and living with a "technology-free" lifestyle and quit trying to use murderous plottings to kill of the rest of us that are quite happy to benefit from fire, metal working, the wheel, the agricultural revolution, modern medicine, etc.

Two things astound me about these fanatics:

1. Their temerity to act on own behalf to bring their twisted vision of the future to reality. Who appointed them? What right have they?


2. The abysmal ignorance of these fanatics of the role of science in technology in modern life. Their blind ideology puts ignorance on a pedestal and they worship it. They use religion or just crass stupidity as justification for their evil actions without understanding what they claim to oppose or what the consequences of their actions truly are.

In my youth I was naive and thought the aberration of the Nazis with their ignorant anti-science views (the condemnation of "Jewish science" and their idiotic race theories) was a one-time thing. But as I get older I see more and more outbreaks of this kind of insanity. What truly astounds me is that these deluded people convince themselves they are the "benefactors" of humanity by going on a killing spree (just as Osama Bin Laden saw himself as the saviour of Islam by going on a jihad against the West). Insane!

The Truth about Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole is the most insightful observers of the Middle East. Here is a bit from a post by him on his blog Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.

All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.

...

Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.

Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.

...

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.

...

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.

Sadly, when Obama took office he had a mandate to reject the Bush policies. He had campaigned against them. But he quietly adopted them as his own. He sponsored his own "surge" in Afghanistan. He increased the drone attacks. He kept the secret prisons and Guantanamo but did tone down the official "torture policy" of the US.

I think the post by Juan Cole should be taken to heart. It is an upbeat message for Americans. It is a clarion call to take back their country by rejecting the Republicans and Obama.

An Inspirational Story

I love stories about underdogs rising up and surprising everybody. Here's a story about a water-logged soccer team and its surprising success:

Obama Staggers About While "Walking a Fine Line"

Slow to the party, hesitant, uncertain Obama has dragged his feet in all the Middle East revolutions. This "strategy" worked in Tunisia and Egypt, but it is failing disastrously in Libya. From a NY times report:

The protests upending the Arab world have ranged from the climactic success of protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, to the brutal crackdowns in Syria, whose government forced just a handful of demonstrators to sign pledges never to protest again, and to the uneasy standoff in Bahrain between Shiite protesters and a Sunni royal family. Libya has begun to emerge as its own model — the darker side of the forces unleashed this year by the immolation of a young man in the Tunisian hinterland.

Everyone here seems to have a gun these days, in a lawlessness tempered only by revolutionary ebullience. Young men at the front parade with the swagger that a rocket-propelled grenade launcher grants but hint privately that they will try to emigrate if they fail. Anti-American sentiments build, as rebels complain of Western inaction. And the hint of radicalization — religious or something more nihilist — gathers as the momentum in the three-week conflict clearly shifts to the forces of one of the world’s most bizarre leaders.

“This better not go on any longer,” said Dr. Salem Langhi, a surgeon who was working around the clock at a hospital that was abandoned as Colonel Qaddafi’s forces rushed in. “It will only bring misery and hard feelings among people. Losing lives and limbs doesn’t make anyone optimistic.”

If you look to history, one reason why Communism got such a hold on Russia was that the long series of popular revolts from the Decembrist uprisings to the Narodnik movement to the 1905 revolution each failed and the people turned bitter. The same is happening in Libya thanks to Obama's hesitant shuffle. If Obama has called for Gaddafi to be ousted early in the uprising instead of late, that probably would have helped the people to a quick victory. Instead he got "tougher" on Gaddafi only after several weeks and by that time Gaddafi had entrenched and has now unleashed his military to crush the people. Obviously Obama has read no history and doesn't understand popular revolts. Obama's actions have been counter-productive in all the Middle East revolts because he is always a day late and a dollar short.

The failures of the 19th century revolution sewed the ground with nihilism which opened the way to the cynical viciousness of Communism. You can see elements of that in this bit from the NY Times article:

Sitting on ammunition boxes, four young men from Benghazi debated the war, as they watched occasional volleys of antiaircraft guns fired at nothing. They promised victory but echoed the anger heard often these days at the United States and the West for failing to impose a no-flight zone, swelling a sense of abandonment. Salah Mughrabi, a 24-year-old chemical engineer without a job, pondered what might follow their defeat.

“You can’t imagine the fire that’s going to come,” he said. “Fire.”

It appears that the revolt in Libya will fail -- thanks to Obama's hapless "policy" -- and this will leave an open, suppurating wound in the Middle East. It will create "the Somalia of the Mediterranean". Tragic.

I find it funny that Obama so admired Lincoln. But one of the lessons to learn from the American Civil War was that Lincoln dithered too long, putting up with the incompetence of McClellan. This mistake by Lincoln probably caused the American Civil War to last a year and half longer than it should have and it probably led to 30% of the deaths and injuries that could have been avoided if Lincoln had quickly gone to a more decisive military leader. But Obama, like Lincoln, has dithered. But Lincoln learned his lesson and turned to Grant, a man with a doggedness and a stomach to put up with horrendous casualties, to bring the civil war to an end. Obama hasn't shown that ability to learn a lesson from history. Sad.

Unfortunately Obama has a peanut gallery of liberals who are giving him advice like the following from Maureen Dowd:

The Iraq war hawks urging intervention in Libya are confident that there’s no way Libya could ever be another Iraq.

Of course, they never thought Iraq would be Iraq, either.

All President Obama needs to do, Paul Wolfowitz asserts, is man up, arm the Libyan rebels, support setting up a no-fly zone and wait for instant democracy.

It’s a cakewalk.

Didn’t we arm the rebels in Afghanistan in the ’80s? And didn’t many become Taliban and end up turning our own weapons on us? And didn’t one mujahadeen from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, go on to lead Al Qaeda?

So that worked out well.

...

Leslie Gelb warns in The Daily Beast that no doubt some rebels are noble fighters, but some “could turn out to be thugs, thieves, and would-be new dictators. Surely, some will be Islamic extremists. One or more might turn into another Col. Qaddafi after gaining power. Indeed, when the good colonel led the Libyan coup in 1969, many right-thinking Westerners thought him to be a modernizing democrat.”

Reformed interventionist David Rieff, who wrote the book “At the Point of a Gun,” which criticizes “the messianic dream of remaking the world in either the image of American democracy or of the legal utopias of international human rights law,” told me that after Iraq: “America doesn’t have the credibility to make war in the Arab world. Our touch in this is actually counterproductive.”

He continued: “Qaddafi is a terrible man, but I don’t think it’s the business of the United States to overthrow him. Those who want America to support democratic movements and insurrections by force if necessary wherever there’s a chance of them succeeding are committing the United States to endless wars of altruism. And that’s folly.”

If the French had followed this advice in 1776, there would be no United States today. Why get entangled in a struggle between some boisterous uncivilized colonists and the English? It was sure to turn out badly.

The problem of leadership is that the future is unclear. You will always get those who tell you that "nothing can be done" because the future is so terrifying. At the same time you will get the gung-ho crazies who will tell you to "nuke 'em" as a quick and easy solution. In the real world, the mucky mess we have to work work, real leaders must make decisions that will always be unclear and are guaranteed to outrage critics on left and right.

A New Generation Takes to the Barricades

They used to talk about the "whiff of powder in the air" on old battlefields. These days there is a whiff of revolt encircling the world. There were:

• student protests in the UK against a new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government intent of jacking up university costs,


• recent demonstrations and the overthrow of regimes throughout the Middle East (here, here, here, and here)


• this week the citizens of Wisconsin have taken to the barricades to fight an right wing fanatical governor intent on dismantling the public unions

Here is a wonderful resource for would be revolutionaries. It is from the UK student protests, a book called Fight Back! Here is a bit from it by an activist named Laurie Penny:

Not every generation gets the politics it deserves. When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time for free to causes led by grown-ups.

Now more than ever, the young people of Britain need to believe ourselves more than acolytes to the staid, boring liberalism of previous generations. We need to being to formulate an agenda of our own.

There can be no question that the conditions are right for a youth movement. The young people of Britain are suffereing brutal, insulting socio-economic oppression. There are over a million young people of working age not in education, employment or training, which is a polite way of saying "up shit creek without a giro".

...

Just weeks ago, as news came in that the top 10 per cednt of earners were getting richer, 21-year-old jobseeker Vicki Harrison took her own life after receiving her 200th rejection slip. Whether a youth movement is appropriate is no longer the question. The question is, why are we not already filling the streets in protest? Were is our anger? Where is our sense of outrage?

I like the above. It is refreshing. It is the sign of a new generation of revolt with its own sense of grievances and a need for a clean break from the failed politics of the past.

But at the same time, you hear the same theme that is coming out of the Middle East: youth who are killing themselves because they see themselves trapped in a corrupt culture with no way to get a foothold with a job and a future. The theme of "dignity" plays a big role. I think the Wisconsin demonstrations are similar in that government workers are outraged that the social contract has been broken and their dignity assaulted by a state governor who is intent on breaking their unions.

You won't find any deep analysis of a "new age or revolt" in the Fight Back! book, but you get a ringside seat in the student struggles and a sense of one bit of the new wave of protest breaking out among youth around the world.