Society
Cost Accounting
Fellow contributor Clay is happily bemused this week over at Comet’s Corner, reflecting on his recent release from some of the lifelong difficulties that finally led to his late-life diagnosis of au...
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Mark Stairwalt on 02/26/10 | 7 Comments | Read More
Covert Ops in Autistic Self-Advocacy
Pandemic autism that’s hidden in plain sight, an autistic spectrum populated overwhelmingly by undiagnosed fellow travelers and autistics-in-hiding—if this is an accurate description of autism’s...
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Mark Stairwalt on 02/19/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
Autism and Societal Individualism
There is a paradox I’m trying to tease out here having to do with raising a child when we as a species were still largely lodged in primary process, the way an unconscious or dream self thinks, ...
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Andrew Lehman on 02/17/10 | No Comments | Read More
Meeting the Extended Family
I’ve never been able to take in the big picture at family reunions. Between the carnival of overstimulation that comes with all that social interaction, and being the odd neurology out as an adopte...
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Mark Stairwalt on 02/12/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
Creoles, Aboriginal Identity and Autism
… I might suggest that particularly ancient aboriginal societies, matrifocal cultures, for example, might display earlier stages of biological/neurological/hormonal evolution. If those particul...
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Andrew Lehman on 02/11/10 | No Comments | Read More
Ghost Dance
The Native American tribes of the Northern Plains, forced onto reservations and near starving in 1890, were drawn in large numbers to a new religion called the Ghost Dance. Led by the shaman Wovoka, t...
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Guest on 01/25/10 | No Comments | Read More
Autism and the Hacker Manifesto
Late last year I posted an entry which included a quick list of people and ideas my wife and I found heartening or helpful back before we fell out of active involvement with autism as a topic of publi...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/22/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
Good Manners Reconsidered
“Good manners applied without regard for differences are in fact bad manners.” Those words, wherever it was I found them maybe two decades ago, struck me as so apt, so applicable to what I had lon...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/15/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
Ouroboros, Autism and Future Past
I’m starting to consider that the highly ritualized environment of aboriginal matrifocal societies, along with the ways children are raised and what they are fed, are preventing the further leftward...
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Andrew Lehman on 01/14/10 | No Comments | Read More
An Autistic Ethos: It’s All About Respect
I have been privy to conversation among sexually active librarians in which catalogers, above all other sub-specialties of librarianship, were identified—with good humor but still in earnest—as be...
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Mark Stairwalt on 01/8/10 | No Comments | Read More
Autism and Aboriginal Society
Bouncing around Pub Med looking for patterns connecting handedness, ethnicity, disease, conditions characterized by maturational delay such as autism and social structure, it seems pretty clear that m...
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Andrew Lehman on 01/5/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
Autism: Canary in the Coal Mine
“Nonright-handedness (NRH) has been attributed to hypoxia-induced brain changes in the fetus and associated pregnancy and birth complications (PBCs). Maternal smoking during pregnancy is known to pr...
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Andrew Lehman on 12/30/09 | No Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity and African Americans
Two biological processes impact the American Black population, resulting in increased learning disabilities, specific medical maladies and challenges not familiar to most other ethnicities and most wh...
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Andrew Lehman on 12/23/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Barriers to Understanding Autism
My work has proposed three primary causes of autism and conditions characterized by maturational delay. All three causes impact fluctuating testosterone levels inside a mother, which determine her chi...
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Andrew Lehman on 12/9/09 | No Comments | Read More
Rush to the Beginning
It has been observed that a human baby displays many of the characteristics of an embryo in the womb. The infant is unable to slumber longer in the dark or he or she would not be able to depart. Their...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/17/09 | 3 Comments | Read More
Abortion, Female Infanticide and Autism
Male control of the female body is a hallmark of a patrifocal society, the Right Wing and hierarchical societies. It is no mistake that the contemporary Republican Party has its roots in the anti-abor...
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Andrew Lehman on 11/11/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
Self-Starters
There is a short story I read years ago that I’ve always remembered as a tiny masterpiece of irony. It was set among what are sometimes called First Nations people, but viewed with a slightly diff...
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Mark Stairwalt on 11/6/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
Autism Is As Autism Does
While the notion of Everyday Autism Everywhere is still in the air around here (welcome, William Stillman readers), I’d like to further expand some of the ideas Mr. Stillman and I have been floating...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/30/09 | No Comments | Read More
Minnesota Somali Autism
When I was a kid, my sisters and I would place a marble in the middle of the dining room linoleum floor and watch it begin rolling toward the hallway. Quickly, it would pick up speed, pass through the...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/29/09 | 51 Comments | Read More
Grandma, They’re Not Santa Claus!
There’s a comic on XM Radio’s Canadian Comedy Channel who’s gotten good mileage out of his grandmother having told him that she does not believe in gay people. He recounts going around and aro...
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Mark Stairwalt on 10/16/09 | No Comments | Read More
Lefties
Four out of five of our last presidents were left-handers. Researcher Marian Annett hypothesizes that there is a gene for being right-handed and a gene for being nonhanded or random-handed. One could ...
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Andrew Lehman on 10/8/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
They Call Me Quiet, But I’m A Riot
Ebulliently defiant on your car radio, Katie White—no matter what friendly guess or nickname she’s offered—is all sass and holding her ground: that’s not her name. Performing live, though, a...
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Mark Stairwalt on 08/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
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