what's next?

I've been reading a lot about autism and advocacy and those amazing autistics who manage to ascend their autism. This is what I've learned so far:

1. Funny thing about curing autism or 'ascending' past it; it looks an awful lot like a compromise of Self. Learning to join the human world is no less than an acknowledgement that you aren't, and never will be, lovable. What you are inside is something dark and scary and they want you to sugar coat it and be presentable their way. It's a sure and certain knowledge that affection is a reward for good behavior. There is no such thing as unconditional love. Nothing is freely given.

You can show affection. They can know you are showing affection. Yet while you must accept their terms, their 'right' version of interaction, they will not accept yours. So, you'd best learn to talk, and lie, and keep your fears well hidden, cloaked in social games, or they'll never love you or care about you. Keeping your fears hidden your way is wrong. Stimming, spacing out, tuning in, and all the other autistic methods of dissociation are wrong. Dissociating their way is right. Dissociating into a social persona and masking yourself with the right words and right clothes and right actions, that's a good thing.

2. They'll advocate for people to let you exist, but not to live. Strangle out every purity in you until you are filthy with social aptitude. Integration into their world is a resignation of yourself. They call it freedom, but we've seen how one people free another from barbarism and it seems to result in plagues and massacres. But you don't have to massacre autistics. Humans naturally withdraw from things they fear, and they fear autistics, and any child will do anything to get their needs met, including fighting to get to your world to get the affection they'd starve without.

3. Advocates are pompous and insulting. "She is to autistic people what Jane Goodall was for the wild chimpanzees." This is the praise on a book on autism. Between Their World and Ours, by Karen Zelan, isn't too badly done. It holds tight to the us versus them the whole way through, and making us more them, because NT is the right way to go. But she does acknowledge that communication requires NTs to bend to the autistics if they want the autistics to follow them back to the good world. It's really just that quote that bothers me. Or perhaps I missed the part where wild chimpanzees have integrated into our society?

4. Getting "past" autism negates the autism. If you learn to function you are cured. You used to be autistic. You used to have difficulties. You used to be difficult. But now you are normal and speak and do what you are told. Now none of the pain you fight through daily to be good and be right counts, because now that you function, you are fine and probably always had been. Just a tough little stage.

By this theory, if you break your leg and learn to walk again, it was never very broken in the first place and it is not more likely to break again because there are no scars and no other damage done. You are cured from having had a break. If you learn to read after being dyslexic, your dyslexia is cured. Never mind that you read with a ruler under each line, that's just a silly thing you do because you have no more reading problems. It's just adaptation and learning to cope. If learning to adapt turns all your effort to shit by proving you were never unadapted, or that you now have no future difficulties, why "advocate"?

Most adult autistics adapted enough to work will never get the diagnosis and never have anyone appreciate their efforts because "beating" autism means you are cured. All effort negated. And who the hell cares that you fight non stop to cope? You don't get used to it all, you learn to deal with feeling like you are dying, all the time. You accept always being afraid. You adapt to the nonstop adrenaline and cortisol and function anyway and I am certain that there is no association between that and the statistics that show autistics have a very high tendency to develop seizures in their early twenties.

Stories on autism all seem to stop when the person communicates enough to be integrated into school. Whistles and bells if they manage to graduate. End of story.

5. NTs don't know what matters. You were right growing up: you don't matter. But if you want to live, just live. You'll never be good enough or human enough. You will always be judged. NTs treat one another like dirt, too. We learn to differentiate between Human and Person and learn to despise them as much as fear them. Curing autism through forced human socialization is cruel and breeds anger, resentment, and despair. They work so hard to make sure we know we'll never quite fit in or quite get it. And how many will be strong enough to throw off the shackles of freedom, ascension from autism, and learn that your world doesn't matter?

Friends matter. Those few individuals who care beyond the number of words you articulate. You can't have honesty and social mores. Most social mores depend on lies.

6. We don't go through anything NTs don't go through. The only difference is the pace. Developmental delay. We're just really really slow and we plod through what we can, as we can, in any way that we can. The issues you have, all NTs have had. They probably just did it before kindgarten while you are an adult and still trying to get there.

Everyone panics, gets overstimmed, and is in a fairly steady state of fear. The poison is in the dose. They have built in shock absorbers: filters and structure. NTs fear themselves and others and the world around them and they dissociate into their little worlds too. The difference is they agree upon a world and live in it together, a world of social constructs and all those weird little things they evidently find important that baffle us entirely. Kinda nice to know it's mutual.

It's just that it's easier to empathize with your own sort than another. Cross cultural empathy is actually very difficult and we are acultural. We never picked it up. It's a natural knack NTs have. So they can't empathize with us easily because we're not in the cultural context that allows it.

7. They really think we don't have feelings. I'm not sure how this works but it seems to follow along with their Theory of Mind game. Since they aren't communicating with us, we have no thoughts or feelings. I think it's the same theory that allows them to say they have souls but "animals" don't.

Some day, an advanced alien race will meet humanity and since they don't speak english and write english and use the same gestures as humans, they will be discounted as illiterate barbarians.

Okay, so I haven't learned much, but I'm starting to learn how they think about us. That is probably not a good thing. I'm not sure it's going to help me really want to learn to communicate with them on levels they're capable of comprehending. The more I learn about NTs the more I think they aren't capable of those basic things they accuse us of lacking: empathy, communication, bravery (pushing past fears), intelligence, theory of mind...

It makes me question how hard all of us fight to get "beyond autism".

I think rising above autism has three stages. First you hide from OutSector in yourself. You hide from yourself in yourself. Then you emerge from your dissociation into the social world by locking more and more of yourself away - you hide yourself from OutSector to interact with it. Finally you have to decide whether to integrate the two and in what way. Do you hide in yourself and from OutSector and become a hermit? Do you emerse in OutSector being the perfect docile puppet and lose yourself? Do you somehow manage to pull your self into OutSector and be you while interacting? What are you going to do?

Will you implode or explode under the strain? I've met very few happy autistics.

No one has thought very far beyond a cure. People only now seem to realize their children that are so difficult will some day be difficult adults. All the focus is on children and early intervention. There is very little "then what" being discussed. Those around us might feel good about a successful rescue operation, but then what? It's great you conquered enough fear to hang out with the humans, but what next? You are still autistic. They still fear you. You will never be wholly comfortable with them nor they with you. So now what? Sit and be awkward with other between world autistics and hide in one another's neuroses? Wrap yourself in isolation or isolate yourself in social constructs you don't grasp? If you are more than a mimicking monkey, what are you? Advocacy asks: how are you going to make yourself useful and survive in this world? I ask: what's beyond survival?

It's well and good to learn to hold down a job. It's one of the most important things there is. And it doesn't matter at all. Why exist if you are miserable?

Why aren't there more happy autistics? Why do "successful" autistics have a list of career achievements, and not much else? Why are autistic support groups so full of self pity, self loathing, and complaints? I tried joining a couple, expecting hints on how to cope, and maybe some smug gloating that all the cool kids were autie (we claim tesla, einstein, mozart...), perhaps sharing frustrations on interactions and dissecting it into sense. Yeh, not so much.

What makes so many people so miserable? Is it the interaction we fought so hard to be capable of? Is it the daily living tasks we fought to do? Is it the words we fought to speak? The proper gestures and appropriate motions we fought to mimic? Or is it this constant fighting that doesn't seem to get us what we started all of this to achieve?

What makes any child fight so hard to get out of their world enough to interact in OutSector where all the inner worlds collide in relationships?

Probably the same thing that makes the NTs so miserable. This shining picture of what should be, if you are normal enough and good enough. But we're all just folk. And no one is good enough. And if you don't find your own way, you're just going to stay lost. At some point, the autistic hits the stages that all children do and, like all children, they get the idea in their head of what should be. It's perfectly normal. And it draws them from InnerWorld to OutSector and from there there is no going back. You cannot make yourself smaller or younger. You can only go on. Choice after choice after choice.

aliens

Illegal aliens are currently big in the news.

If I understand right, and it's always possible I don't, this being a social issue, people are upset that someone illegal is taking a job a good American could have, and using up all the welfare money, to boot.

So, if we are admitting that 11 million people is too many extra (and that isn't an annual growth, that is simply how many were counted in 2008), why is it okay that we add 27,855,843 a year (9% growth a year)?

If we are going to block illegal immigrants, shouldn't we also make population growth laws? Seems kind of hypocritical to get upset about population numbers if we don't look at our own objectively. And the fastest growth is among the poor who are most likely to need government assistance.

With the economy in such a slump, someone else having the job is a valid complaint. There's a reason the fuss is loudest now, not when people had jobs. However, if they have a job you'd be willing to take, they are also paying taxes, and spending money back into the economy. Certainly there are some with a US born child who get government help. There are also Americans scamming the welfare system. If I could find reliable numbers I'd tell you who was wasting more of our money.

"In fiscal year 1995, about $1.1 billion in AFDC and Food Stamp benefits
were provided to households with an illegal alien parent for the use of his
or her citizen child." gao.gov

"The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had previously reported that over 39.6 million people, equivalent to one in every eight Americans, were receiving food stamps during February." PressTV but I saw this stat on several articles.

The big issue is I cannot find any set of articles that agree on numbers for welfare, legal or illegal, honest or scamming. Basically, they all agree that we are in financial distress as a nation and more people are on government aid than before, but every state needs to cut the numbers down because we can't fund the number of people that need assistance.

Illegal or not, times are tough. My confusion is that people are in an uproar about illegal aliens (who if working are paying into taxes) and not to all the people scamming the system and avoiding working, paying taxes, and just mooching off the rest of us. Why aren't there protests and petitions for welfare reform to be stricter so that we aren't funding scammers? I can't find any good studies on actual numbers, but in my own experience, over half the people I've known getting government assistance could have been working. And of those, about half bragged about it and about half complained about how rough their lives were while they sat around not doing anything to better themselves (like job hunting).

And if someone has legal US children, born in the US, are you going to deport the parents and keep the kid? It's probably far more expensive to foster the child through college (foster kids are eligible for a lot of grants!) than to just let the parents stay and raise them, even if they do get food stamps. According to a government website, each child is at least 1400 a month to raise in a foster home.

Or are you going to deport a US citizen and send the kid back with their parents? If so, what rights does that mean any US citizen has?

Whatever your opinion on it, all I'm saying is to think it through carefully. Anyone we boot out is no longer giving us money (and most they catch are illegally hired, tax paying, services buying people). There are plenty of US Citizens scamming for money. And I have to wonder if it costs more to find the people, prosecute (and house during the prosecution process) and then deport than it costs to just give them all food stamps (not saying they are all on food stamps. I'm just wondering if that would be cheaper). Since the argument is mostly financial, think carefully on what is actually the least costly. I'm not sure. I've not found numbers yet.

My thought is that if they steal a social security number, prosecute them and kick them out. If they find work (and I should put honestly in quotes, but at least not through outright theft) and are paying into the system and trying to make ends meet to support their family (and usually US born kids), good on them. If they are scamming the system (welfare and food stamps), they need to go. I feel that way about US born citizens too, for the record. If they're scamming, make them work off what they stole. I fully agree with the "why are we supporting all these people who aren't giving back?" crowd. I just play it across the board, US, immigrant, or illegal immigrant.

Then again, I think everyone on government assistance should be required to do community service to give back in some small way. I'm not really big on welfare as a concept.

Where I got my population numbers:
Google Public Data

World Population Clock

Illegal Immigration Stats per wiki

EDIT: Someone else had the same idea... visit takeourjobs.org :D

Book Review

This is an early book review as I'm still reading the book.

Autism's False Prophets, by Paul A Offitt.

I've never bought the vaccine hype. In fact, I rather enjoy not dying of childhood diseases that used to plague humans. Nonetheless, I'm fairly impressed with everything that went into the anti-vaccine farce.

Everyone should read this book. It's a good reminder that anecdotes and coincidence are not science and, more importantly, believing media hype is plain dangerous.

Anyone with autistic kids should read it just to be informed. People know that desperate parents will pay a lot of money for hope and this book let's you know some of the worse ones. Better to be aware.

Nut Cream Ganaches

I know... I know...

You would rather listen to my biased and ill-informed opinions about mental health and humanity in general. But today you are going to learn about desserts. Ganaches, in specific.

And if you don't like chocolates or are allergic, you should think very carefully about the sins you committed the last life to incur such punishment.

Ganache:

Chop up chocolate. The finer you chop it, the faster the melt. This is a good thing. The better quality the better the ganache. I go for the darker the better and usually use 100% cacao unsweetened, and 77-88% dark, about half and half.

Put it into a glass measuring cup and see how much you have. I tend to end up around 1.5 cups.

Measure out that amount of heavy cream into a double boiler (ie, a saucepan filled with water, with a glass or metal bowl sitting in it. When you boil the water, the bowl heats gently, insuring you do not scorch the cream).

Once the cream is damn near boiling (that is the technical term. For me, it's when I can't touch past my first knuckle without burning), pour it over the chopped chocolate. Let it sit half a minute or so to melt and then stir gently until it is mostly mixed. Then beat it until it has a nice sheen.

Let it cool a few minutes. Put liners in muffin tins and dallop about a tablespoon or so into each one. For 1.5 cups of chocolate, this comes to about 36 muffins.

The Nut Cream:

1.5 cups of any nut butter you like. Unsalted, unsweetened. Preferably grind it yourself at a health food store.

Add 1 stick of softened butter (salted or not, up to you. I like salted).

Mix thoroughly. Add a tablespoon of molasses, honey, or maple syrup if you like. Or a few drops stevia or other sweetener.

Once the ganaches are cool enough to hold shape when you tip the muffin tin, dallop the nut cream on top. Again, about a tablespoon each. I smooth it out with my finger because I run a very clean & careful kitchen.

Refrigerate. Let sit about 24 hours before you bag them, or else they sweat.

That's it!! Yummy, low sugar, more nutritious than a candy bar candy!!

edit from auntie: for people who weigh things, 1/4 cup cream to each 3-4oz chocolate bar

anecdotes aren't evidence?

Humans go for fast thinking, not good thinking. If someone does something stupid in a crisis, people seem more likely to say "at least he did something" than, he should have stopped and thought that through.

This is shown by news stories complaining that the President chose to confer with his staff for very long periods of time before making a decision. Gathering of facts before stating something as true seems, perhaps, rather a waste of time.

But there is a huge difference between fact and opinion, between evidence and anecdote, between cause and effect and correlation... Most people don't even understand the terms, let alone how to distinguish them. Learning to think is not taught in schools. Regurgitating information in the same form it was given to you is what gets you good scores.

It's not just the way we are raised that determines this ability to think, either. The body, itself, is trained to respond to clues and come up with cause and effect. This is how one stays alive. If you eat a strawberry the same day you get the flu, your body is just as likely to grow allergic to the strawberry as any other reaction because it found a correlation.

But when this is the basis that we also approach science, we run in to problems.

We end up with a large group of parents saying that immunizations cause autism. We also end up with people finding correlations in nutrition that may not exist. We have doctors saying that fat causes heart attacks even though no study has fully proven this. All the studies have shown is that clots have fat in them. Never mind that clots aren't the biggest reason for heart attacks, nor type of fat (vegetable more often than meat), nor what causes clotting!

So most facts are, at best, incomplete. At worse, politically skewed.

Take the studies on whether or not carbs are harmful. The same studies are cited by quite a few different groups, all showing different results. And you can say that the corn industry backed a study that showed corn is healthy, and that the meat industry backed a study that said red meat is healing, and the PETA folk proved red meat causes cancer...

But when it comes down to it, what evidence of anything do we actually have? A handful of inconclusive studies (because they were not done well. Because nutrition studies are very difficult to do well), a lot of anecdotal evidence, and everyone calling "proof" wherever it fits their needs.

Now, I personally am a big fan of low carb. The studies I choose to buy into show that grains raise insulin and insulin is the basis of most modern epidemics (obesity, diabetes, auto immune disorders...). It is almost all based on anecdotal evidence (my friend went low carb and all her health issues cleared) and studies interpreted by low carb advocates. Do I have proof? No.

I'd love proof. I'd love to see some serious long term studies done. On most aspects of health and nutrition. Then again, I'd love for them to decide on what autism is, so it can be studied.

If you want to study a disease, you isolate the virus and you test it. You can immunize 5000 folk and not immunize another 5000 folk and study their blood to see who got which antibodies. You can discover patterns because there is a damned virus to look at.

No one knows what autism is. There are a handful of symptoms that people don't really agree on. There are behaviors that show in so many ways there's no real agreement there. They keep spreading the spectrum further and further out, making any real studies even more difficult. It isn't a disease. It's a behavioral pattern that annoys the piss out of most people. It is all the annoying traits most people have to a small degree... done huge and exaggerated.

Yet, people claim "proofs" and "evidence" and make diagnoses and cite studies and anecdotes and think they have some damned clue what is going on. The truth is, you don't have a definition to parse. Without a definition, there is nothing else. Form is beauty. Without form, there is nothing. Which is probably why people are so ugly about the disorder.

And that goes for all these things people claim "to know" without any real evidence.

Anecdotes are only that. Someone did something that seemed to have an effect. That's all. And that's perfectly fine to go by. There's nothing wrong with saying "my sister did this and it worked so I'm trying it". The problem is saying "and therefore this is true" or "therefore this is right". You don't have any kind of proof. You have a story of assumed correlation.

Bad science is very aggravating. Logical fallacies make me want to kick people in the head. What ever happened to "I statements"? They have a huge place in science. "I suspect" "I believe" "I have noticed"... What are people so scared of?

fat, weight, & body size

I just finished reading Barry Groves' Natural Health & Weight Loss. My favorite part about reading books about low carb dieting is their view on a healthy weight. Women are supposed to have curves. A healthy weight is one that supports life, and that means enough fat to support breast feeding. That weight isn't unhealthy.

I have finally put on enough weight that you can't count my ribs, and then hit puberty and have tits and hips and a belly. And mixed in with the joy of finally not looking 12 is the urge to poke at the belly and wonder if it's too fat. *Rolls eyes*

Considering that underweight is far more dangerous than overweight, and that my health is better now and I have more energy and look better... I have to be impressed that even through my autistic tendency to not notice social programs... And my autistic tendency towards logic... I still poke at my little belly.

Everyone needs things so categorized today, and need approval from someone of authority, that we have invented numbers that mean nothing and all risk our health to meet those numbers.

My other favorite thing about low carb dieting is that there are no special things to buy, no special numbers to count, no weights to reach. All you do is cut out grains and sugars and most fruits and increase fats and call it good. You don't need anything you can't buy at a farmer's market or grocery. While everyone tells me how strict my diet is, I actually put very little effort into maintaining it. I would cook all my meals anyway, because I simply love to cook. Since I cook, I don't buy prepackaged foods so I don't have any labels to read. While my diet might be "restrictive" I think it's a lot simpler than most peoples'!

Most people I know have to read labels and count calories and grams of this and that and measure how much they eat and when they eat and how much exercise and of what types... That's way too much effort when they aren't getting any healthier from it all.

It seems to me that people were capable of maintaining health without the help from research groups for a pretty long time and maybe the body has a good idea of what it needs. Not a revolutionary idea, it's an evolutionary idea.

This Way to OutSector

I learned something amazing from my auntie today. I'm grounded. In reality, no less. In fact, I'm more grounded in all my realities than most "sane" folk and most NTs.

After many years of all realities being one and none being any more or less real than any other, I've finally fought my way through to telling which is which. They are still all equally real (or not real), because there are still the factors of proofs and legitimate realities.

Nonetheless, I fully understand if something is Shadow World, the Nutshell (my internal world), Abi World, or Out Sector (that being what most folk consider the world). I also know if something is Out Sector versus someone else's world. (Abi World being my version of Out Sector).

There are things that seem to hold steady in Out Sector. Gravity, for example. That we have to eat. That we have to have money in this society to get things to eat. Cause and effect, physics, biology...

Opinions create Insert-name-here World. Positives and negatives. Good and bad. Right and wrong. My Abi World is a mishmash of whimsy and logic. Not so much social and emotional constructions.

For all that I can't read a map, I have somehow figured out how to map all the various realities around me and to understand how they interact and to face each one on its own terms. I suppose most people aren't as good at it because they haven't had to fight so hard to tell them apart? More points for Team BatShitNuts!