The thing about writing stuff is that you find yourself navigating all over Google - and Wikipedia, and turn up some wacko stuff sometimes.

It got started because there was this woman  (Karen Siff Exkorn) who was interviewed on the radio. Her claim to fame is she wrote a book all about Autism that gives tips on how to deal with it. And get a lot of education paid for it sounded like. And she said her son Jake had sort of been cured or recovered.  

Autistic kids like to pile up and line up stuff. 

Incidentally, statistics from the U.S. Department of Education revealed a 657% increase in autism between 1993 and 2003, so it’s becoming a bit of a problem - and there’s all those radicals out there saying it’s all to do with shots our kids get (especially MMR) or mercury in our teeth or something in our diet rather than just better detection.

So I’m thinking maybe that’s a good story for Pulse back in England, that controversy over all the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) between those who think you need to be cured - like the organization Defeat Autism Now (DAN).

And those like  ‘Aspies for Freedom’ who don’t, and are mad at DAN for its “negative terminology and images”.

And along with them is Jim Sinclair an autistic guy who says “Don’t Mourn for Us”. And this other bloke, Ari Ne’e-man, who has Asburgers and just can’t stand velvet (I’m not that fond of it myself - though I did have pair of velvet pants in the’60’s)

He calls himself a “neurodiversity activists” and fears that the next step after the smartarses have figured out the genetics of ASD will be “eugenic elimination.” (like people are doing when they find out they are having a baby with Huntington chorea or Downes syndrome).

We just have a different style of information processing - ‘mono-tracked’ in a ‘multi-track’ world says Ne’e-man.

Sounds like these guys got really pissed at an ad created by New York University’s Child Study Center to raise awareness about autism which featured a ransom note saying “We have your son” and are “driving him into a life of complete isolation.” And was signed “Asburgers Syndrome”

So, I’m surfing around, unearthing all these fascinomas about autism/ASD. The biscuit taker was a gem I found in Wikipedia.

There is, apparently, a description of a twelve-year-old boy with what sounds like severe autism in the ‘Table Talk’ (translations of Divine Discourses) of Martin Luther (that reformer and rebel, but who was generally thought to be upstandingly moral, and ethical).

According to Luther’s note taker, Mathesius, Luther thought the boy “a soulless mass of flesh, possessed by the devil, and proposed he be suffocated”.

Nice.

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