Autistic problems
The article below could be misleading. Autism occurs on a spectrum -- from completely non-verbal people to high functioning autistics who can live a fairly normal life. I am one of the latter.
And although I had a rather withdrawn childhood, I was pretty happy. I just read a lot of books instead of going out socially. And seeing I am now 80, I can't complain about my lifespan.
My autistic withdrawal was largely responsible for the failure of my four marriages and other relationships but I enjoyed all four marriages plus some good relationships. And they all ended amicably. And my three university degrees came easily.
So at 80 I find myself with several girlfriends and live in material comfort. On balance, autism has been for me a privilege. So I wanted to say all that as a counter-balance to the tale of woe below. Not all autistics are the same
Below are two pictures of me taken 60 years apart (yes, 60). Do they suggest a life of suffering?
I was in primary school when I told my mother for the first time that I wanted to die.
At age 12, tortured by tiny noises in my head, I had my first nervous breakdown.
At 16, when my father died from a long, traumatic fight with cancer, I fell into a deep depression I couldn’t escape from.
At 23, while studying overseas, I battled an unknown illness that left me dizzy, half-deaf and in constant pain. As fellow exchange students went clubbing and enjoyed German Christmas markets, I stopped eating and wandered the empty, icy streets of Berlin alone contemplating suicide.
By the time my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack and when I was 27, I’d already resigned myself to a life of suffering. Despite medication and therapy, depression and anxiety had been my constant companions.
Unbearably sensitive to the world, unable to sleep, constantly sick, and achingly lonely, I also couldn’t shake the feeling there was something else going on. Something was secretly, fundamentally “wrong” with me.
Why did I feel alone in a crowd? Why couldn’t I verbalise my innermost feelings? Why was eye contact painful, and human touch sometimes electric?
Why did I feel comforted and connected lying alone listening to the same albums on repeat but feel nothing talking to the people I knew in real life?
At 28, I was finally diagnosed with autism.
Though finding out I am autistic has made my entire life made sense, my relief at the diagnosis has been short-lived. As well as looking back and reassessing every pivotal moment in my life, I’ve begun to look forward, and the future is terrifying.
As well as experiencing higher rates of homelessness and being eight times more likely to be unemployed, autistic people have a life expectancy 20 to 36 years shorter than the general population.
Though the exact reason for this horrifying lifespan discrepancy is unknown, it’s most likely got something to do with the comorbidities autistic people often live with.
As well as facing physical and neurological comorbidities like congenital abnormalities, epilepsy, insomnia, and gastrointestinal disease, autistic people are also prone to psychological conditions like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and bipolar disorder.
We’re also more far more likely to commit suicide.
In one Australian study of autistic people without intellectual disability, 66 per cent of respondents reported suicidal ideation, with 35 per cent reporting suicide plans or attempts – about five times higher than the general population.
But why can life be so unbearable for autistic people?
The sad reality is that we’re just not made for the neurotypical world. In a world built by and for neurotypical people, is it any wonder that autistic people struggle to work, house ourselves, or fight constantly against our physical and mental illnesses?
In Australia, up to 75 per cent of autistic people do not complete education beyond year 12, with a federal parliamentary inquiry finding that a “significant proportion of autistic people are reliant on their families and/or government funded services and benefits, such as income support payments”.
What governments fail to mention, however, is that these income support payments are rarely above the poverty line, with many autistics ineligible for the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) let alone the DSP (Disability Support Pension) anyway.
Currently, the maximum “basic rate” DSP a single adult can receive is just $501 per week. With Australia’s poverty line at $489 per week and the median rent in Sydney now at $670 per week, it’s hardly surprising that even autistic people with access to the DSP or NDIS are struggling.
So how can we make life better for autistic people, and help change the terrifying statistics we live with?
In my opinion, it begins with our governments and communities listening to us – to what we really need to not only survive, but thrive.
In October, Australia’s first National Autism Strategy (NAS) opened for public feedback, and I’m hoping our voices will finally be heard.
Having grown up in poverty and government housing, with no idea I was autistic, I’m lucky I’ve made it out. Though it’s taken a huge toll on my mental and physical health, I’ve managed to graduate university, hold ‘good; jobs, make friends, and find secure housing (well, as secure as rentals can be). Today, even with a diagnosis and (expensive, self-funded) support, I still struggle. Mostly, however, I am doing OK.
But I’m in the minority. And like my parents who died young and the quirky, sensitive friends I’ve lost to suicide, autistic people deserve better.
***********************************************
Feminists Are Consenting to Hamas’ Rape Culture
On Oct. 7, Hamas unleashed a savage assault on southern Israel. These marauders were equal-opportunity killers, kidnappers, and abusers. Their bloody frenzy targeted everyone in their path—babies, Thai workers, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, the elderly, special needs children, and, of course, Israeli Jews. They particularly relished targeting women—slaughtering them, raping them, cutting babies out of pregnant women’s wombs, torturing mothers and grandmothers in front of their families—and, many fear, sexually enslaving some of the hostages.
The world witnessed these perversions because the villains proudly filmed them, then inspired Palestinians and pro-Palestinian progressives to spread them across social media. This secondary, digital, GoPro assault on the victims’ dignity made this orgy of misogyny one of the bloodiest and most publicized attacks on women in history.
Nevertheless, more than three weeks later, the feminist community remains silent. In May 2021, within days of Israel counterattacking in self-defense against yet another Hamas bombardment, over 120 gender studies departments denounced the Jewish state. Declaring that “justice is indivisible,” they proclaimed that our work is “committed to an inclusive feminist vision,” as per the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2015 Solidarity Statement, “that contests violations of civil rights and international human rights law.” The call was so popular, the Palestinian Feminist Collective asked for patience. “Please note, due to the overwhelming response we are only uploading names twice a day. Please be patient as we are stretched to capacity.”
Now, despite seeing Hamas’ rape cult, not one gender studies department has defended even one victimized woman. Feminists have long taught us to believe the accuser and not blame the victim. For years, progressives insisted, in academic papers, on T-shirts, even on coffee mugs, that when fighting oppression, “silence is consent,” or even that “silence is violence.” On Oct. 7, the violated women shouted, shrieked, cried, begged, rape after rape, cut after cut, fighting off these assaults with their voices and their bare hands as best each could. Some hostages may still be struggling. By contrast, violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women and against the victims from three-dozen different countries. Some even doubt the testimonials—and the staggering, bloody, heartbreaking evidence of stripped women paraded through Gaza’s streets. Robbing someone of their story is a secondary offense—but nevertheless inexcusable.
If justice is indivisible, these women deserve justice—and empathy too—whether or not you like Israel or abhor it and its policies. If rape culture is never OK, all civilized people should repudiate so many Palestinians’ and progressives’ delight in spreading these videos and cheering these crimes. In their silence, most leading feminists became complicit, aiding and abetting this mass attempt to dehumanize women just because they’re Jews—or happened to be on the Gaza border that day.
Violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women.
Beyond the sheer cruelty and unfathomable scale of suffering, these crimes devastated so many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, who recognized the barbarians’ perverted pedigree. President Joe Biden connected the historical dots on Oct. 18, saying that when this “sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” it “brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.” He added: “The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Indeed, these crimes echoed the mass murders and sexual assaults the Nazis perpetrated during the Holocaust, that Arabs perpetrated on their Jewish neighbors during the Hebron Massacre of 1929, that Cossacks perpetrated on so many Jews during pogroms—and so many other Jew-haters perpetrated on Jewish women, no matter how young or old over millennia.
In singling out women, those guilty of this gendered violence want to dehumanize doubly. They seek to strip Jewish women of their dignity by abusing them in unspeakable ways. And they try humiliating Jewish men, treating them as so helpless they cannot even defend their women and children.
After three weeks of hearing how this sadistic saturnalia “exhilarated” too many progressives, those justifiably appalled by these enablers of evil are now being told the worst abuses never happened. Once again, the hypocrisy is stunning. Feminists teach that denying sexual assault intensifies the trauma, erasing the victim’s personhood yet again. Nevertheless, some feminists are questioning the stories—perhaps because they don’t want to question their blind support for the Palestinian cause. They want to deny the vile photos and videos, the reports from IDF officials, pathologists and volunteers at the overworked morgues, or testimonies from captured Hamas criminals describing “having sex with dead bodies, meaning the body of a dead young woman,” because the goal was “to dirty them, to rape them.”
The horrors of Oct. 7 were so unnerving that the characteristic gallows humor of the Israelis has been muted. The first joke I heard, however, is tragically on point: If gaslighting is denying you said what you said …. Gaza-lighting is denying you did what you did—after broadcasting it broadly to the world.
While I don’t judge others who watched the videos to share the victims’ pain, I refused to watch the snuff and rape videos. I will not collaborate in this dehumanization process. Those who still doubt can find relevant evidence widely here and here and here and here.
That few feminists, especially gender studies professors, have denounced this familiar yet deplorable evil exposes a darkness deep in their soul. It is part of a broader scandal in higher education some are now, belatedly, starting to recognize. Call it fruits from the poisoned Ivies. For years, America’s most elite universities have been cultivating a generation of grievance junkies—dividing the world into “the oppressed,” who are forever blameless, and “the oppressors,” who are forever guilty. Those deemed “oppressors” are often accused of enjoying “privilege,” although those grade-grubbing radicals dining out on their parents’ Black AmEx card as they pay $70,000 university bills, somehow don’t count themselves as “privileged” either.
Since Oct. 7, these fanatics have emerged as Ivy League jihadis, leveraging the Palestinian brand as the world’s most oppressed and blameless people, suffering from the evils of Zionist colonialism, to silence condemnation of inhumane butchery.
The feminist blindness to these crimes is particularly outrageous given gender studies’ stated commitment to eradicating rape culture, with its silence, its skepticism, its victim-shaming, and its victim-blaming. But this violation also points to a deeper, endemic scandal the feminist movement has suppressed, namely, many radical feminists’ instinctive aversion to Jewish women and Jewish issues.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/feminists-are-consenting-to-hamas-rape-culture
*************************************************The Crime Wave In America Is Crippling Our Nation
The cry "defund the police" ushered in a crime wave
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, crime has precipitously skyrocketed in cities across the country, as demonstrated by a recent report published by Our America. One crime in particular, retail theft, has destroyed businesses across the country, hurting consumers and businesses alike.
While shoplifting is nothing new, there is more than meets the eye with this recent trend. Progressive prosecutors who refuse to prosecute retail theft are enabling Mexican drug cartels, international money launderers, and other highly sophisticated criminal enterprises.
Leftwing reformers hold out the late surge in shoplifting as a non-problem and have refused to prosecute – or even denounce – smash-and-grabs and other brazen thefts. This policy choice, championed by prosecutors aligned with George Soros, fails to appreciate the serious role organized retail theft plays in transnational crime.
It’s a grave mistake to wave organized retail crimes away as a problem of corporate balance sheets. Much like a hub and spoke, organized retail crime is linked to the most heinous transnational criminal organizations. Investigators and industry experts are finding that these Mission Impossible style crimes are a gateway to the world’s worst criminals.
Organized retail theft is sophisticated, high-volume shoplifting that involves two basic players. “Boosters” steal products in bulk from major retailers. Boosters target high-value goods such as medication, beauty products, or power tools. “Fences” acquire stolen goods at a fraction of their retail value, then sell them at a profit.
Online marketplaces, such as eBay or Facebook Marketplace, are a common vector for redistribution of stolen goods. But sophisticated fences often present as wholesalers and sell pilfered products in bulk, sometimes even to the company from which they were stolen in the first place.
Organized retail crime supports the world’s most dangerous criminal networks. The Homeland Security Department’s ‘Operation King of Thieves’ is a case in point.
The operation targeted two closely associated retail theft rings working in Texas and neighboring states, according to a third-party report. The ring leaders, two Palestinian brothers named Yasser Ouwad and Bilal Awad, paid coyotes to smuggle boosters into the U.S. Most coyotes are agents of the drug cartels who dominate the U.S.-Mexico frontier. Boosters were made to steal for the brothers until their coyote-fee “debt” was repaid.
The rings targeted chain pharmacies and stole expensive but easily concealed products such as shaving razors and diabetic test kits. Boosters cleared shelves at as 30 stores per day across multiple states, packing products into aluminum-lined bags that defeat store alarm systems. Some thefts were more brazen, with boosters pushing shopping carts full of stolen merchandise out to a waiting car, a sight that’s become depressingly familiar.
Ring leaders hid stolen products in storage facilities before shipping them to a New England wholesaler who sold the goods back to major retailers. Authorities estimate that the brothers moved $8 million in stolen goods before they were caught.
King of Thieves investigators identified a wealthy Houston-area businessman, Mohamed Mokbel, as a fence working with the brothers. Mokbel has since been indicted in a $150 million healthcare fraud scam that targeted senior citizens.
Retail theft rings do not brush up against transnational crime by coincidence. Shoplifting sprees are a low-risk, high reward proposition for crime lords accustomed to darker trades. Stolen products also facilitate money-laundering. One advanced money-cleaning technique, called trade-based money laundering, moves value through trade transactions to disguise illicit cash.
The Associated of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMLS) describes one such scheme in this way: syndicates in the U.S. steal or fraudulently obtain cellphones from a major retailer. Thousands of phones are stockpiled, then sold to a Chinese “money broker.” This transaction is often executed via shell companies. The money broker, a free agent who facilitates money laundering, sells the phones in a different country. The proceeds from that sale are then used in any number of cash-cleaning operations for any number of unsavory characters.
These are not pesky shoplifting rings. They are international criminal enterprises integrated with elder fraud, money laundering, and traffickers in drugs and people. At the risk of stating the obvious – not all, or even most shoplifters are international criminal masterminds. But when rogue prosecutors abdicate their responsibility to enforce the law, they create the conditions in which genuinely dangerous syndicates thrive.
New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, and the Baltimore-D.C. metro area lead the nation in reported organized retail crimes by volume, according to the Coalition of Law Enforcement And Retail (CLEAR). Soros prosecutors lead LA, Philly, and Chicago. And one of Gotham’s five DAs, the infamous Alvin Bragg, was elected with Soros money.
Soros prosecutors hold themselves out as upright people with big minds and bigger hearts. But their refusal to take shoplifting seriously is a boon for the worst criminals on Earth.
****************************************************
Stop telling children they can be born in the wrong body and end the 'demonstrable attack on biological reality' by the trans lobby, demand coalition of politicians, campaigners and celebrities
Children must no longer be taught they can be born in the wrong body, a coalition of politicians, campaigners and famous names demands today.
In a major campaign, more than 80 pressure groups and public figures have come together to call for an end to the spread of gender ideology across society.
They say the NHS and private doctors must never prescribe drugs to stop young people going through puberty, and schools should never allow pupils to 'socially transition' by letting them change names, pronouns and uniforms.
Their Declaration for Biological Reality also seeks to strengthen women's rights by protecting single-sex spaces such as toilets and hospital wards, as well as banning transgender athletes from female sports.
And to defend freedom of speech they say no one should be reprimanded for saying humans cannot change sex, while public bodies such as the NHS and police must stop displaying 'ideological symbols' such as the rainbow flag.
Prominent signatories include MPs Mark Jenkinson, Nick Fletcher and Neale Hanvey, peer Baroness Fox of Buckley, Olympic athletes Sharron Davies and Mara Yamauchi, plus comedy writer Graham Linehan and pioneering headmistress Katherine Birbalsingh.
Writing in the Mail, declaration co-ordinator James Esses says: 'All signatories are united by their desire to uphold biological reality in society. This is not about Left or Right. It is about right and wrong.'
The rallying cry comes amid bitter disputes in courts, Parliament, the public sector and on social media over the belief that self-described gender identity is more important than biological sex.
The declaration begins: 'Over recent years, there has been a demonstrable attack on biological reality in the United Kingdom.
This has skewed public policy and discourse in favour of an ideology that has no scientific basis and which poses safeguarding risks to some of the most vulnerable groups.'
Ministers have attempted a fightback with plans to rewrite the Equality Act to make it clear that the term sex is based on biology rather than gender identity.
Last week the Labour-run Welsh government was accused of trying to introduce gender self-ID by the back door.
And Scotland's Court of Session has ruled that a transgender woman who obtains a Gender Recognition Certificate is a woman under equality law, a decision which campaigners say means biological males can be considered lesbians.
*******************************************************
Why rule of law can’t be sacrificed to secure conviction
Does anything justify putting innocent people in jail? That is the big risk when we drop standards
Why do so many cases of sexual abuse fail? Many fail because they were weak cases in the first place that were pursued only for reasons of political correctness.
A case that boils down only to she says/he says should not be prosecuted but if the allegation gets publicity few prosecutors would refuse to prosecute -- lest they be accused of covering up an injustice
In Australia, the Higgins/Lehrman case was an example of that, and prosecuter Drumgold was an example of a politicaly correct prosecutor. In the end, Drumgold was the only one penalized, which was justice of a sort
Improving outcomes for sexual assault victims will not be achieved by diminishing the fundamental foundations of the rule of law.
As Walter Sofronoff KC recently observed, when it comes to addressing allegations of sexual assault, there are two separate but parallel systems operating: the victim support system and the criminal justice system.
In the former, accepting without challenge what a victim asserts, using language such as “victim-survivor”, “her truth” and “believe all women” often will be necessary and appropriate in that therapeutic environment to provide the best emotional, financial and other supports needed by victims of sexual violence.
However, when an allegation of sexual assault leads to a criminal investigation or prosecution, the fundamentals of the criminal justice system must be maintained.
This includes the presumption of innocence, the obligation of the prosecution to prove a criminal allegation beyond reasonable doubt and the right of an accused to remain silent.
Much recent debate in this area has ignored the significant differences and purposes of these systems and focused on raising low conviction rates, which are often quoted as being about or below 20 per cent.
These statistics generally ignore all the allegations resolved by pleas of guilty.
Proposals have included better education (and re-education) of judges and lawyers, abandoning trial by jury and standing up specialist sexual assault courts staffed with specially trained judges and advocates where (presumably) more guilty verdicts will be returned.
Such “reforms”, even if made with good intentions, would pave the way to a drastic erosion of the rule of law in this country.
If two convictions for every 10 trials is unacceptable, what number would be deemed acceptable? Fifty per cent? Eighty per cent?
Presumably to those who subscribe to the “believe all women” philosophy in the criminal justice system as well as in the victim assistance space, anything less than 100 per cent would be unacceptable.
Which, then, of those three or eight people found not guilty in this sample should have been found guilty? And why? Because it is implicit in these proposals that if we are to achieve some arbitrary acceptable metric, like a 50 per cent conviction rate, then at least two or three more not guilty verdicts should’ve been guilty verdicts.
Eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone wrote, “It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” The principle behind this statement finds voice in concepts such as the presumption of innocence, and guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Do we as a liberal democratic society still subscribe to this principle? Or are we content to allow some innocent people to suffer the consequences of a wrongful conviction (and their loved ones and dependents necessarily as well)? Do we relax or abrogate the presumption of innocence or the standard of proof only in sexual assault prosecutions or across the board?
Is this visceral (and justifiable) desire to better recognise the failures of the past, to acknowledge and address the alarming levels of sexual and domestic violence and abuse in this country, justify us essentially adopting a warlike footing where collateral damage is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of winning the war? For some advocates the answer appears to be a resounding yes. Presumably though, qualified to the extent that they, or their partner, father, brother, relative, friend, colleague etc isn’t among the putative innocents to be subjected to this form of collective punishment.
Experienced criminal lawyers across this country lament that prosecutors will rarely (if ever) decline to prosecute an allegation of sexual assault. Recently the media has reported examples of sexual assault prosecutions that, on any objective assessment, were doomed to fail.
While there may be cases of juries deciding the case having relied on rape myths – such as a genuine victim would say no or fight back or complain immediately, or a genuine victim would not go out in those clothes or to those places – I suggest these are rare.
Modern juries give little credence to such ignorant and outdated propositions. Judges are now particularly vigilant to identify and direct juries from engaging in such reasoning.
There are certainly cases where police could and should have done more thorough investigation and where a failure to secure crucial evidence may well have led to an acquittal. But the most significant factor in explaining why we have such low conviction rates among sexual assault prosecutions is that prosecutors insist on running cases that have no reasonable prospect of succeeding.
“Let the court decide” is an all too familiar refrain from prosecutors around the country who are not prepared to make the difficult decision not to prosecute an allegation of sexual assault even when it is apparent there is no realistic prospect of proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Whether this is because of a fear of being criticised by a vocal complainant, interest group or the media is difficult to know.
Not proceeding to prosecute a particular allegation of sexual assault should not and does not have any impact on that complainant’s capacity to receive support from victims of crime services. It does not mean the prosecutor does not believe the complainant. It is simply a consequence of the obligation to prosecute only cases that have a reasonable prospect of succeeding. Even assuming there is a public interest in prosecuting every allegation of sexual assault, the overriding obligation remains not to prosecute any person on a charge unless there is a reasonable prospect of obtaining a conviction.
Every jurisdiction has some variation of the “reasonable prospects” test. In the ACT section 2.4 of the Prosecution Policy provides: “The decision to prosecute can be understood as a two-stage process. First, does the evidence offer reasonable prospects of conviction? If so, is it in the public interest to proceed with a prosecution.
In any 10 sexual assault prosecutions at least four of those 10 cases are pursued without any reasonable prospects.
Apart from imposing significant financial and emotional tolls on the accused person, the prosecution of these cases also means the complainant will go through an unnecessarily stressful and traumatic trial process.
In addition, it’s likely at least one of the remaining six cases might have been successful if police had undertaken a better investigation. On this analysis, three of the six cases that met the reasonable prospects test would have resulted in guilty verdicts – giving a conviction rate of 50 per cent. A more than doubling of the current rate without resorting to re-education camps for lawyers and judges, specialist tribunals or abolishing juries.
Higher conviction rates in sexual assault prosecutions can be achieved without entering into a Faustian-like pact with the devil; in this case a bargain in which the soul of the rule of law is sold into damnation on the promise of higher conviction rates.
****************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
No comments:
Post a Comment