For
Gary McKinnon, Asperger’s has had a profound effect on his ability to
fit in to society. When will we accept this disability?
Ignatieff to Harper: Give answers or face defeat
15 June 2009 — coreyschmidtI’m back, kinda. I had to rant about this story. CBC should as a matter of course include links to material that relate to the story. In this case link to a page that says what the EI benefits of the time are. And links to the Charter and constitution!!!
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/06/15/ignatieff-economic-report-response834.html?ref=rss
My Comment:
K, now, last I heard, you only received as much EI as you worked. If you work ten-weeks, you received 10-weeks of EI. If you worked for ten years, you receive at the moment, 45-weeks(not sure-used to be 52-weeks). How fair is that? If you are self-employed (true back-bone of society) you get nothing.
If Ignatieff and the boys decide to topple the Tories, that doesn’t automatically trigger an election. Dion almost did that before the coup that removed him. If G-G Jean, as Queen’s representative, chose to replace Harper with Ignatieff or Layton or even Duceppe, there wouldn’t be much that we could say, because she has that power. It is just precedence that she doesn’t use it. Harper badgered/threatened her (I would like to have been a fly on the wall at that meeting) her into calling an election.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, Harper is PM only because he is the leader of the party with the largest number of seats.
This is not the US. We don’t vote for the PM directly, we vote for the party that the eventual PM is the leader of.
LOOK IT UP!!!!!!
You know I swear that knowing the constitution and charter should be a requirement for citizenship of people that are born in Canada not just immigrants. At least make it a requirement of graduation.
There’s my rant. Now: “Let loose the flamers of idiots” (“let loose the dogs of war” for those that don’t get it)
Still?
15 April 2009 — coreyschmidthttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/world/asia/16afghan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
This will not change until religion is removed from the law making process.
Who do they think they’re kidding?
18 January 2009 — coreyschmidtArticle from networkworld.com discussing the appointment of Julius Genachowski to head of the FCC in the US.
The telcos don’t give a lot of credit to the public for their intelligence. They’re just trying to get away with staying in markets that have the highest profit margins.
“…The major telcos, meanwhile, have uniformly opposed ‘Net neutrality by arguing that such government intervention would take away ISPs’ incentives to upgrade their networks, thus stalling the widespread deployment of broadband Internet. In order to keep maintaining and improving network performance, say ‘Net neutrality opponents, ISPs need to have the power to use tiered networks to discriminate in how quickly they deliver Internet traffic…”
It is nice to that Google is supporting ‘Net neutrality.
And they wonder why….
14 January 2009 — coreyschmidtThis Tom’s Hardware article is just ridiculous. OK I know its old but…
Kids sue school district for millions over MySpace prank
9:33 PM – January 31, 2007 byHumphrey Cheung
Source: Tom’s Hardware US –
Category :
A trio of Brighton, Tennessee, high school students are suing the
school district for $3 million after they were disciplined for a
MySpace prank. Christopher Barnett, Kevin Black and Gary Moses created
a MySpace profile page and pretended to be their school’s assistant
principal. The page was taken down after three days, but this wasn’t
enough for the school district. Barnett was expelled, while Black and
Moses are now on probation.The boys’ parents believe the district overreacted and think the
disciplinary actions could harm their kids’ college chances. The
parents have now banded together in a $3 million dollar suit against
the Tipton County Board of Education.
People wonder why the education system in the US is showing problems. Why work and be responsible when all you have to do is sue someone when you screw the pooch.
These kids got what they earned. Impersonating someone in authority is fraud in my books. They were lucky that they got nailed now. If they had tried this in the real world, the FBI or whoever, who have punished them a lot more than a measly little expulsion. They can probably appeal. An expulsion probably won’t mean a lot if they can prove that they’ve learned their lesson and can show maturity.
Response to comment
13 January 2009 — coreyschmidtSeeing as I received my first comment during the last day or so, I decided to study the other side of the political spectrum. The Intellectual Redneck has something interesting, if somewhat outlandish views, at least in my mind.
His 12 January posting includes a video explaining ’some’ of the issues surrounding Obama’s citizenship.
I did a search on evidence from third parties and found this site israelnews.com. The article, posted 13 October 2008 has two links about where he was born. The first links to Obama’s Wikipedia article. The second is a link to Wikipedia article taken from the Google cache from 30 Nov 2008 05:00:56 GMT. I didn’t find any reference to Barack Obama being born here. I guess they should have copied the entire article instead of just linking to it.
I also found an article at snopes.com refuting it. But, an article like this is likely to ignored.
The first US President to be born an American citizen was Martin Van Buren. All of his predecessors were born before the Revolution, a key organizer of the Democratic Party. Coincedence? There’s something else for the conspiracy theorists to ponder.
I have a question. How many people have their orignal/long form birth certificate?????. I have a laminated card that was issued a month after I was born.
It is very possible that the long form, if it was giving to his mother, may have been lost. She did leave the US for a while after he was born. It is entirely plausible. It does happen sometimes.
I would have kept reading but it was starting to give me a headache.
But, it doesn’t help to fight them with logic, because they just dismiss it out of hand. I have had many discussions with people like this. Any argument or talking point that I have, even if it born on years of scientific proof, is dismissed as fantasy. Yet these same people that God exists, even if there is no scientific proof one way or another. They call Evolution ‘just’ a Theory. But The Theory Gravity is just a theory too. It just happens to be a very persistant one. Although I wish that gravity had local ‘contradictions’ sometimes.
Autism: equality’s last frontier
13 January 2009 — coreyschmidt-
-
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 January 2009 08.00 GMT
- Article history
Asperger’s syndrome is
characterised by a strong desire for order and justice, but
unfortunately it also means that people born with it struggle with
non-verbal communication and social interaction. Without support and
understanding, it causes them to be picked out as “different”;
rejected, bullied, written off and left behind. Which of course affects
their self-esteem and life outcome.
Imagine being dropped off in
the middle of a foreign country, unable to understand or speak the
language of the land? There are no classes to attend and no
translators. After a few months or years, most people learn to
communicate – almost on subconscious level – and do so quite well. But
that’s just language: words and grammar, a system with rules that
eventually can be understood.
With Asperger’s syndrome,
non-verbal communication will always be a hit-and-miss scenario and
even those of us academically educated to the level of professors still
have to make an effort to deconstruct non-verbal communication – such
as body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, reading “between
the lines” and decoding the intent of others, because it will never
come naturally to us.
With support and understanding, even with
an accidental mentor or two along the way we can fast-track that
learning and at least not be “forever lost in the foreign land without
a guide or a hope in hell”. We can start communicating better and feel
as if we finally belong with other humans.
Word recognition –
which autistic people mostly rely on – comprises just 8% of all
communication, meaning that the remaining 92% is out of our reach. That
explains why Gary McKinnon
– a man accused of hacking into Nasa and US military computers and
currently fighting extradition to America – was so naive and trusting.
He admitted blindly what he did and didn’t do and did not have a lawyer
present when he was first arrested. And he’s now facing decades in a US
jail if convicted. And even before there is a trial, he’ll have to stay
in prison for years, without bail.
McKinnon may have made a
mistake, but it would not have happened if he had had better support
for his autism and obsessive behaviour. Even after his official
diagnosis, he has yet to receive any professional support.
The way the law stands today, it is not just McKinnon. The same could happen to any one of our autistic children
– even to my son – should they get obsessed with “the wrong thing”
because they were trying to cope as best they could “in the foreign
land of communication”, all by themselves.
Yet people on the autistic spectrum can be very good at certain things like technology, art, music, computer programming, languages – anything system-based.
With
the right support we can and want to become productive members of
society. Unfortunately, that support is currently lacking, often
non-existent. Many autistics rely on peer support and accidental
mentoring from good people who care. But what happens to us is still a
lottery with pretty poor odds. Things could have been so much better.
Discrimination
on the basis of someone’s height, age, race, sexual orientation,
accent, social status and disability is against the law: we all
innately know that it is morally wrong. If you took a white stick away
from a blind person or a wheelchair from someone who could not walk,
society would be outraged and rightly so. But autism is an invisible
disability and people on the autistic spectrum are subjected to
inhumane treatment and are bullied and rejected every day in Britain.
It is unacceptable.
McKinnon was born with Asperger’s syndrome,
the “invisible” disability. He was an intelligent child who always felt
like an outsider and desperately wanted to belong but could not. He
found learning easy but social interaction difficult and was often
misunderstood, subsequently losing jobs.
McKinnon badly wanted
to belong but, apprehensive of human interaction that so often went
wrong, he locked himself in his bedroom, away from the world and tried
to earn his place in society by being “useful”. McKinnon embarked on
discovering information about free energy that he believed was being
hidden from the people.
Asperger’s syndrome and years of no
support absolutely affected McKinnon and caused him tremendous anxiety
and stress, triggering coping strategies which resulted in extreme
obsessions that were impossible to control without outside help.
McKinnon started to live in a world of his own. His obsession happened
to be the search for alien technology and evidence of UFO’s, via his
computer.
Autism is the last frontier
in the fight for equality of all human beings. In the current difficult
economic climate, it makes logical sense to support people on the
autistic spectrum to become independent, productive members of society.
Instead of persecuting them for having a disability they were born
with, helping and nurturing their natural talents, to encourage them to
feel accepted. That would be for the benefit of all.
Finally a voice for the rest of us
13 January 2009 — coreyschmidtA woman in England started a movement, quite by accident, in response to an ad campaign last year
There are articles in several sites, the movement’s homesite has had so much traffic, that today, only twelve days into January, the site has reached it bandwidth limit.
Now to be clear, I have religion in my family (grandparents). And some of the precepts, kindness to others, thou shalt not kill, and other tenets of the Ten Commandments, should be taken to heart by all. But when you use religion to call support to a cause, that when problems begin to occur.
My problem is that sociopaths co-opt religion to manipulate vulnerable people for their own purposes. I have read stories of mullahs using children with low self-esteem to become suicide bombers, with the promise of 72 virgins, or to be guaranteed entry into heaven.
Groups have used religion to stoke fervour and support for one war or another for millenia. Whether its the Crusades, the Thirty Years War, and even, to a lesser extent, the War of The Roses, to the jihads against the infidels, there is no end to the influence of religion. During WWII millions of Jews, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and many other groups were presecuted, arrested, and executed between 1933 and 1945.
Religion vs Human Rights. Which do you choose??
13 January 2009 — coreyschmidtAlso right now in British Columbia Blackmore and James Oler were charged with one count each on Tuesday 6 January 2009 of breaching Section 293 of the Criminal Code — which bans polygamy — by entering into a conjugal relationship with more than one individual at a time. In the same article “…Winston Blackmore said Thursday that by laying a charge against him, the B.C. Crown is attacking all fundamentalist Mormons in the
country…” He argues that polygamy is enshrined in the Canadian constitution (section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms), and that they are the victims of ‘religious persecution’. What a load of hogwash.
What about the exploitation of children? Some of Blackmore’s “wives” were 15 years old
when they were “married”. There is also some evidence that some child brides were traded from Bountiful to polygamous groups on the US, and vis versa.
These ‘men’ (and I do use that term loosely) and their predecessors have been victimizing and brainwashing men, women and children who are vulnerable to coercion and threats.
In section 15 of the Charter reads:
|
|
||
| Equality before and under law and equal protection and benefit of law |
15. | (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability. |
| Affirmative action programs |
(2) Subsection (1) |
This means that the rights of his victims and their right to equal protection and basic human dignity trumps any claim of “religious freedom”.
The separation of church and state must be enforced if we are to advance as a society. The framers of the US Constitution had it right when they didn’t place religious freedom into that document.
What an elephant..
12 January 2009 — coreyschmidtThe $58 Trillion Elephant in the Room
The roots of this year’s
financial crisis go back to a small team of bankers at J.P. Morgan in
New York. Now, their invention—credit derivatives—has helped bring down
Wall Street and has left Morgan with its biggest exposure of all.
financial crisis go back to a small team of bankers at J.P. Morgan in
New York. Now, their invention—credit derivatives—has helped bring down
Wall Street and has left Morgan with its biggest exposure of all.
