Genetic selection against us

Genetic selection to prevent our existence is now demonstrably happening. See this page by Helen Keeler on fertility services rejecting eggs from women who have had aspie kids.

the-newrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/12/genetic-screening-for-as.html

Mentoring Aspies and providing them with Moral Armament

We Senior Aspies have a paramount duty to young Aspies who have just set out on Life's journey in a manifestly evil world. When I left school in 1960 I admit that I was still emotionally a schoolboy until my mid twenties. I did NOT fall prey to charlatans as have so many young people today thanks to the lifeskills I learned at Red Hill Remideial School which decisively moulded my character in a quite unexpected way. Today a young person is readily drawn into gambling, binge drnking, indebtedness, drugtaking, and violence. Young Aspies are naive and gullible; so very much at risk from people with thoroughly ulterior motives who see them as soft targets - easily exploited. MORAL ARMAMENT of the kind I had learned at Red Hill Schiool enables young Aspies to see through deceptions and adopt measures to thwart the nefarious goals of people with evil inclinations.

Our duty to young Aspies is to provide them with this MORAL ARMAMENT. Our goals must always be kept in mind; our proteges deserve rewarding careers, happy marriages, the joy of parenthood, friendships and widening horizons that come about by the development of all their latent abilities.

(Important: Do not confuse Moral Armament with MORAL REARMAMENT a religious movement founded by a German that flourished for about 40 years and is now quite moribund).

Despite our Aspergerisms and ingrained autonomous relexes that give rise to distressing behaviours, we can overcome these Aspergerisms by acceptance, understanding and the lifelong exercise of STERN WILLPOWER. So each is destined in his own right way, an exemplary life to display (Q.v. below: "Exemplary Life Movement") We have apparently intractable problems to solve. The young Aspie who sees through the shallowness of modern society may well retreat into his private obsessionalisms and become totally isolated in what amounts to a private fantasy world. This is no less damaging than being corrupted by his peers and so acquiring a criminal record. IF Senior Aspies befriend such vulnerable young people it is OUR DUTY to provide them with a varied menu of life-affirming pursuits and training in vocationally related lifeskills.

We need a better Code of Behaviour than traditional morality.

Traditional Judaeo-Christian morality is very much a packhorse bridge truly collapsed under the traffic of modern wrongdoing. This morality was satisfactory for a quite primitive agricultural society. Its prohibitions are no longer appropriate to our world. Hence it is rightly rejected. But as the French philosopher Durkheim observed a century ago:

"the central problem of every civilisation is the restraint of greed" and

"those most in need of morality are those most likely to reject it"

I owe my late, devoutly Christian father an enormous backhanded compliment following his fatuous fulminations during a row about religion in 1967. This spurred me to construct a Rational Code of Human Conduct thjat made God redundant, that came to be known as Contributionism. As 1967 was the year of the Gay News blasphemy trial I feared that I would be charged with blasphemy if I was found to be the author. So I invented a myth that it was the work of a schoolpal called Alan Wright, and this mythology has given rise to my greatest achievement in life, my trilogy of novels about Alan Wright, a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford (q.v. Appendix)

Functional and Dysfunctional Prohibitions

Orthodox Judaism lives in the past and its practitioners share a corporate obsessional compulsive disorder. It has failed to come to terms with science and the need for society to operate continuously day and night. Never more so than the Sabbatarian restrictions. A reliable source told me about an Orthodox Jew who alighted in a tiny Shropshire town just before dusk on a Friday in December because his religion FORBADE HIM TO USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT after dusk on Fridays and the train was delayed. He is said to have made a thorough nuisance of himself and eventually was taken willy nilly by police car to Shrewsbury! He lacked the intelligence to realise that no harm could come to him by travelling by train after dark on a Friday!

All those dogmatic religious people whom I have ever suffered were those who lacked the intelligence to cope with the world as we find it. That included my late parents, for whom, the correct wine to serve with roast beef was far more important than my schoolwork. I have yet to meet Christians who understand the elementary general science I had mastered even at age 12. All too often I meet Christians who are dangerously incompetent at such matters as using electricity. At Red Hill School, boys were encouraged to find out for themselves so I read science textbooks. Ar age 12 I had understood the principles of flight so well as to design and build a small model aircraft with swept back wings like the then state of the art Hawker Hunter fighter. My father sternly frowned upon my scientific hobbies particularly model railways. It was through model railways that I decisively overcame one major Asperger handicap - clumsiness with hands, and absorbed far more applied maths than I learned in school. Today however Christians in the Blair government are bent on prohibiting all those life affirming pursuits which form good character in young people.

YET self-destructive behaviours are tacitly condoned indeed encouraged (e.g. by the extension of licensing hours).

I have coined the word GRICEHOOD from the German GREIS, stupid old man, to denote a state of self-inflicted stupefaction. Our society is GRICEBOUND, incapable of rising out of this stupefaction. Advertisers GRICE (maliciously stupefy) the public.

What grices, diminishes people, and is evil. A rational code of behaviour would prohibit anything that diminishes anybody in any way. So to a total ban on smoking, gambling, and the consumption of substances which impair mental or physical functioning. It would however encourage every possible kind of life-affirming, mentally expanding activity. The outcome would be a society of polymaths such as I describe in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET (q.v.).

Moral watertightness is expected of Mentors.

All in a fellowship of Mentors have to struggle to live exemplary lives and abstain from any behaviours that diminish themselves or anyboidy else. They must therefore be teetotal non smokers who do not gamble, do not get into debt and do not over eat. Yet they can be excused minor peccadilloes which can be the vices of their virtues. It would be inconsistent of a Mentor for example to jump on anybody with bad handwriting if he wrote with an illegible scrawl. But Mentors can be excused such traits as parsimony, untidiness and scatterbrainedness.

Young Aspies at risk of psychotic breakdown if rejected by their peers.

We Senior Aspies must reach into the hurt minds of such people and gently guide them into as wide a range of wholesome challenging intelligence-enhacing pursuits as possible. Othersise as they are rejected by their peers they will be locked into their own private fantasy-worlds and never acquire either the lifeskills or the motivation to hold down jobs, still less find partners and ultimately when their partners die they will be totally incapable of fending for themselves.

Conflict with Religious Fundamentalists.

Aspies from Muslim, Catholic or fundamentalist Christian homes need very special care. There is a likelihood of a head on clash with paretns or siblings and priests because AS is seen as a besetting moral failing to be extirpated by cruel and ineffective "treatment". The client needs to be taken away from the damaging home environment and transplanted into a community where his latent abilities are drawn out (e.g. by taking up challenging outdoor activities). So to redefining himself in terms of his new found prowess and so to a convulsive paradigm shift, a penetrating change of attitudes, values and behaviour. Then (as I portray my characters in my Socrates of Charford scripts) the young person finds a partner and lives happily ever after in the felowsip of insightful people. However (as I have portrayed in a few of my scripts) it is likely that the young person will abruptly and painfully regress to his former self when in the company of culprit kinspeople. Then the young person needs a Mentor and Guide of the calibre of Alan Wright who always scorches the culprit kinspeople with righteous wrath. Aspies from fundamentalist backgrounds desperately need champions of the downtrodden, of the calibre of Alan Wright.

Conflict with "Mammonism"

The young Aspie has to live in a society bent on self-destruction. I am one of many who foresee the imminent breakdown of civilisation. Accordingly I have described a Successor-civilisation in my novella WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Here American businessman Lincoln Steen has a severely emotionally disturbed son who will not talk. He flies to "Avalonshire" in south Wales to observe Alan Wright's Contributionist civilisation - a society of polymaths whose only passion is to share the fruits of their self-createdness with their neighbours and Distinguished Foreign Visitors. Alan Wright agrees to treat Steen's son and his son moves to Avalonshire to flourish ever after. The basis of this civilisation is moral deveopment to Alan's own lofty level. This is quite independent of any pre-existent religious teaching but its ethics are congruent with those of Judaism, Nonconformist Christianity and to a certain extent, Buddhism. Masefield's poens SEEKERS and A CREED synerae to form much of Contributionst theology so that the fictitious Welsh city of Romanbridge becomes the "City of God, where Radiant people meet" in SEEKERS, whilst A CREED's Reincarnationist Strict Consequentialism is a more certain moral sheet anchor than any Christian prohibitionisms. So I portray a society where people with distressing peculiarities of every possible kind redefine themselves by their Contributions to the Common Good; and paramountly their practice of the Higher Loves.

"Love" is an utterly devalued word.

I replace it with the Greek words AGAPE, CARITAS and DELPHILY.

AGAPE is the general duty to care for the planet in every possible way.

CARITAS is the universl obligation of every adult to one another - "good Samaritanism".

DELPHILY is the highest of loves; care for someone as a Vessel of God, Willingness to make sacrifices for that person and in the ultimate resort, the duty to take such steps as are necessary to prevent a self-harming loved person from further harm. That may sadly include "sectioning".

Can we Aspies initiate a life-affirmation movement that might yet save Earth from Mankind?

There is NO active influential life-affirmation movement comparable to the Temperance Movement of a century ago. This was backed by the Nonconformist Churches and Scottish Presbyterianism. It provided wholesome pursuits for vulnerable young people and even operated an alcohol-free paddle steamer that took poor Glaswegians to fabulous distant places like Kilcreggan!

I put it to ELAS and PHAD and the Glasgow Autistic Centre.

I am now 64 years old and I have a paramount duty to pass on all my lifeskills, expereince, knowledge, insights and supremely my values to young Aspies before I die, so that they shall develop all their latent faculties and pursue careers, enjoy happy marriages, parenthood, friendships, widening horzons, fulfilment despite what we must all come to terms with. And so become what I term CARYATIDS after the statues in the Erectheum on the Acropolis - people who by their exemplary lives affirm the God Within Themselves and form the moral engine of society. So giving rise to that indefinitely sustainable society I describe in WHERE RADIANT PEOPLE MEET. Accordingly I seek FEEDBACK from this Account and the next stage will be to draw up a programme with my commitment to give all of myself to the service of my fellow Aspies until I drop dead. Thus my life preaches my faith.

I anxiously await that Feedback from Readers of this Account.

David Seagrave, Kirkcaldy 3.1.2006

ELAS Weekend Away 2009 - Berwick-upon-Tweed

The Berwick Trip

This year, the local Edinburgh-based AS group, ELAS, located their long weekend break in Berwick with the plan of hanging out together and exploring the attractions of the town and neighbouring Northumberland area.

The trip was organised by members of ELAS and consisted of seven AS people and a NT support worker. The ensemble took over a charming guesthouse, very close to the historic town hall, which had an elaborate layout of rooms and included external metal spiral staircases and balconies.

On Friday, we walked round the impressive Elizabethan Walls and visited the Gymnasium Gallery to see a film installation of abandoned Soviet gymnasia from the Brezhnev era.

On Saturday, we spent the morning in the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. We looked at the ruins of the Benedictine Chapel and walked around the striking Lindisfarne Castle. In the afternoon, we went to Bamburgh, a town dominated by a mighty castle, though only one of us actually visited it, the others went into town or set off on a trek along the lovely beach and dunes to Seahouses – a fish, chips and mushy peas paradise.

On Sunday, we went to Alnwick. We all went to the gardens except one who visited the large castle. With the sun shining, the gardens were beautiful. There were lots of things to see including the great water cascade, the tree house, the poisoned garden and the serpent garden full of intriguing water sculptures.

On Monday, some of us left early while others walked around the town walls down by the quay and scrutinised the ruins of the castle, viewed incongruously from the platform of Berwick Train Station. The last party caught the 3:55pm bus back to Edinburgh.

We mostly ate out. My favourite haunts were the Castlegate Café, Sinners, the Castle and the Maltings Theatre and Arts Centre in Berwick, the Bamburgh Castle Inn in Seahouses and the incredible tree house in Alnwick.

Power to all our friends

When he became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown promised to reform our democracy. He said he'd listen. He said he'd learn. But he didn't act.

Over 2 years have passed since then and a few moments ago the PM finally promised a referendum on electoral reform - but not until after the next election. This is not enough.

Our democracy needs change. I know that you've already submitted your ideas to the POWER2010 campaign - you've already played an important role. But I need your help to spread the word. You can invite your friends to take part here:

http://power2010.org.uk/invite

Maurice - our movement just became all the more important. Today the Prime Minister had the opportunity to commit to real change, but he failed to do so. Delivering change now rests on each of our shoulders rather than his.

Together we can change our politics. But we need your help. Please invite your friends to tell us their ideas for change - it should only take you a minute or two.

http://power2010.org.uk/invite

The challenge has been thrown down - it's up to each of us to meet it.

Best wishes,
Pam Giddy
Director, POWER2010.

I justify this as relevant for this blog, because this is simply about ordinary folks' opportunities to participate in democracy, and if you like you can think of any particularly aspie ways it needs making easier to participate. Like maybe? Stronger ways of forcing committal answers out of them when you write to them, and avoid the need to struggle to to go to their "surgeries" and speak to them?

The idea I have submitted, is an automatic right that any person's knowledge about any ill-treatment that goes on as a result of regularly applied practices, that is not already wide public knowledge, to be published on a wide circulation scale. The stength of this idea is, it can be demanded not just proposed, because the state is seen to commit illegal vulnerable adult abuse if it refuses to actually implement this idea! Many of the unrealised wrongs that could then be publicised are aspie specific.

Maurice Frank

America and the Royal Bank of Scotland

3 aspies in the Scottish scene, to my knowledge alone, have made recent or present visits to the United States. Others are more daunted by the fraught and risky pospect of that country's arbitrary and chancy entry barriers, which are on edge against any imperfection in foreign visitors, disabilities included, though this is never discussed in our media. It would very obviously be an injustice in the scene, if supportive chats and swapping of experiences should just accept easier US access for some than others. That the ups and downs of social experiences located in the US, for some, should be shared and receive support while not all are confident they would have access to that country at all. As a point of disability discrimination, such arbitrary difference between the accessibility of the same experience to folks with the same condition shouldn't be possible.

Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.

**

The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.

There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.

Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.

Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.

The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.

Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!

So will they?

Maurice Frank

further to the library

Sep 10: Further to my item in April, it's still current and I want folks to dig it out and remain aware of it coz this is important !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- on the library internet system being changed for a worse system, with a built-in time cut-off that can make you lose your work if you hit any technical problems over the net running slow when you are trying to save. Which is provenly bad for us if we are trying to use the web to communicate to organise to meet up with researchers and the like.

The change is going badly. At Newington library, computer users are being told that the one they have converted to the "Netloan" system that it's not working very well, and advise against choosing to use it.

Same as nobody uses it in the downstairs room at Central, where the first conversion to it was made. This is because the new system is a bad system, so bad it's not worth introducing - and the libraries trying it out are now finding that in practice.

Oct 28: The system's piecemeal further extension is a total shambles, and the system's own faults are visibly why, to every annoyed library user who is struggling with it. Timers are going wrong, starting their count with 2 minutes already missing that have not passed, just like in Fife. Sometimes computers are taking 6 minutes to log in, and the solution to slowness, available under the old system, of telling the previous user not to log out, is no longer available in this system. The system for staff to set bookings is working too slowly, so that you are frantic if they are racing against the timer to set an extended booking. Mostly the staff don't know how to work the extension system, either. There are blocks in the system that are meant to force a minimum time gap between users' sessions, the staff are struggling to override these in order to do extensions. These blocks shut you out of the system half the tmem and refute the chicken-and-egg idea that you are supposed to log in to the system just to book when you are going to log in!! I mean, what the ... At central reference where it used to be you could see exactly how long the queue was, you no longer have any idea when you will get a vacancy. Unless you stare over all the users' shoulders to see their timers, which is unlikely to be allowed or popular, so you have to bother the staff more than before and with a question it takes them a long time to answer, so the new system is not saving them work at all, and the answer is supposed to be that you have made prebookings that are difficult or impossible to get a chance to make for much of the time. Staff in every library where I have observed, which is many, are frustrated and stuck and apologetic the whole time.

Everyone can see none of this should be happening. Everyone can see only the old system worked. Everyone can see this is a disability injustice that was totally preventable.

Maurice Frank

Effort to contribute our issues to another good cause

Is the society around us seriously registering aspie issues? and the beneficial impact they make upon many other fairness issues too? Or are they just saying what the socially minded say too often: Oh dear, will we be understood if we say anything new, let's just keep saying what we find familiar? When a local project starts up for a good cause, does it do its own thing, oblivious to us?

On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.

Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.

Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:

Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system for the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !

This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.

So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.

We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.

How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:

EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.

Maurice Frank

Thoughtful culture

Popular culture at mob level has never exactly been famous for its civilised tolerance. So it can hardly be a priority of life to become a winner in a minefield of unreliable friendships and cliques. That is not the place to look for deep acceptance, it is the place where our survival advantage is the ability to go without deep acceptance and follow our own consciences. Above all, it's never worth being submissive in search of acceptance. How miserable is that? You won't know what directions it will push you in, which innocent folks the social leaders will force you to exclude and pick on, which bigotries they will force you to pretend to believe in? You could be alone in the world and still none of that will be worthwhile.

In family, in political or religious or hobby social life, at work, at volunteer days, basically at anywhere normal, there is no formula beyond personal chance that determines how much acceptance and fitting in is possible. Living within reach of as many options as possible, for the sake of adaptability, must be one sensible tip. Then it just becomes a question of trying to observe, in each person you associate with, whether they are just a closed mind, then it would be damaging to mention AS, or they have any spark of thoughtfulness and civility. If they have, I find, then a casual mention of AS, not a deep sermon about it, is good because it helps to secure that the person stays a nice way. It gives them a reason not to drift towards being on more dumbed-down and ribald terms with you just from thinking you want that normality, which is exactly what we don't want. From chances grabbed as they arise here and there, with the right folks, ground can be gained for awareness and acceptance on decent terms. Slowly it builds up, to all our benefit.

Thoughtful folks have always aspired to find or own congenial community outside the conformist horror world of the type of normal thickos who booze and gamble and iron and believe what the tabloids tell them about foreigners. That type of popular culture is a starkly treacherous place to get by in, even to win a place in at all. It does not operate rationally or thinkingly. So the point of describing it so grimly is not snobbery, it's to illustrate that culture's own choice of enmity towards us. How it is not designed for anyone guided more by reasoning and logic than by gang following, to survive or thrive in. Thoughtful folks of all types need to defend ourselves from having to belong in social conditions like those. We have always needed an alternative and been in search of one.

What better justification can there be, for needing our own scene, our own space, than an impairment to communication? But even in thoughtful activities, groups become ruined by the normal cultures' influence and the resulting fear of ribaldry and derision that comes to enslave the socially minded to take the rougher and more dumbed down life attitudes. I have watched an astronomy society die in this way. As the traumatic nature of science education has driven away from enjoyment of science the potential keen new blood the society could have kept attracting and formerly had, firstly the more practically minded strongman types came to stand out as the leaders. Then that meant all abstract chat about the subject's wonders petered out and stopped being expected or thought comfortable. Then that left the shrunken society's core life reduced wholly to happening among a few normal hard-edged cynical sneery impatient men, further alienating the non-core membership. To a comment on the virtues of serving ethical coffee the vice-president could say, "Don't let's bring ethics into it, this is the astronomical society not the ethical society, I'll get some more Nescafe." Any time you are thinking of joining an astronomy society, quote that and ask them if it could happen.

Casual evil like this, and like the pointless cliquiness we all know can pop up out of the blue in the personal boundaries of workplace social life when least expected even in health-conscious workplaces, are why the struggle for a secure thoughtful counterculture to belong to has repeatedly been defeated and savaged all through the history of semi-civilisation. Before AS was known, I had already seen, and been dismayed by, the failiure of such scenes to last permanently, in 2 settings: around children with unusually intellectual interests, and around folks going through emotionally intense problem youths.

Aspies are another grouping who could deliver a parallel culture for nice thoughtful non-ribald characters totally opted out of the majority hard soul-dead culture. We need each other's acceptance as a higher priority than to dream about finding it with any consitency outside the caring circles. Trouble is, aspies are no more immune from having nasty ways than any other grouping are. It's only as an overall tendency that our society is made nicer than average by our willingness to think critically. There are still some aspies who don't think much at all, who just want a quiet life, or who feel clever by having sarcastic uncaring characters. So the quest depends on willingness go be combative about the aspie scene's standards of personal fairness whenever they wobble, and never just passively take what the big organisations deign to give us. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

The work the Scottish Autism Services Network is doing with us, putting our own voice into the info produced about us for all sorts of health or other service providers, is part of this vigilance. That won't be delivered to us by submissively trusting the big organisations who speak without consulting us, to "choose their priorities."

All organisations who don't speak out about how school homework destroys some aspies' chance to be child authors like the 2 well-known ones, commit a crime of child cruelty and endangerment. All organisations who ignore the case that because aspie clumsiness and gaps of attention give us a greater than equal likelihood to lose small objects, public transport can no longer require any passengers to carry losable tickets or passes, commit an endangerment of our safety. Yet one director of a lobby group for us just wrote to me, "I note what you say", a well-known bureaucrats' answer that says utterly nothing. If they lobby employers about us without mentioning the biological entitlement to dress freely, that is proved from our sensitivity and metabolism issues, they have lied about us while gambling with our life opportunities. Which all makes it important to keep local groups self-run, not provided by the big organisations, and independent of any urge to keep in their favour. There must be no divisive attitude of one generation against another, because that's not friendly, and there must be a declared automatic right for all members to count each other as equal in social worth and wantedness.

No group, big or small, local or national, is ethical unless it declares that in every conflict between personal fairness and the group's wider interests, personal fairness shall always automatically win. Our web communities too have good and bad among their number. It would be so much easier on emotionally stressed aspie reasoning if our scene was all good, it's not, but a dedication to keep the good parts of it going is our best strategy to belong and keep some part of society even half-reliably worthwhile.

Maurice Frank

Library internet

What is the point of making known the particular needs or medical interests of a minority, unless it is to ensure those needs are never abused? Malpractice is usually reckoned the right word to describe decisions made in disregard of any group's biologically real needs, and made without even giving any committal answers to aspects of need that will be overridden. The type of politician you know to run a mile from, is the type who leaves any point about harm, that you have put to them, utterly not acknowledged by so much as a word. Your disgust is invited at the smug ruthlessness of our local politicians, who are treating in this way a problem put to them on these terms. It concerns an idiotic change being threatened to the library internet service.

It should not be down to 50-50 luck, as it is, whether each county's library internet uses a system with automated timers, that cut you off when your time is up, or not. It makes a big practical difference. Timers are unfriendly, they force you to rush to save work for fear of losing it, instead of completing it, in case your time runs out seconds before you can complete your task. As you know, in all internet work there is always the chance of making a bad connection, and being stuck fuming while you wait for the screen only slowly to show any result, which even then might be a failed connection. That can happen when your time is close to running out, and it means, however careful you are about remembering to save your work, you are always at risk of losing it. Bad connections can result in you failing to save before the timeout happens. Then, all your work and a big chunk of your time have been wasted. That possibility is an abuse.

If there is no timer, you can make sure your task is safely completed before you hand over to the next user. That way, everyone is happier and less stressed. The occasional problem of a user encroaching seriously upon the next user's time and having to be pushed out, and from experience in Edinburgh that is rare, costs you far less user time than the danger of losing all your work because of a timer, and than the way a timer deprives you of effective use at all of your slot's closing minutes because of the risks in starting any new task. Timers don't protect library staff from a difficult user, either, for they provide no physical means to make that user leave their seat and instead they can make it worse by giving the difficult user justified anger over lost work.

They obstinately persist in having timers in Fife, and the difference between their library internet and Edinburgh's, in neighbouring regions, is extraordinary. I belong to both. The line taken by Fife, and by Galloway which shares its system, towards cases of lost work, is: we sympathise but tough. Yet the problems suffered in Fife have discredited timers utterly.

The timeout often does not happen exactly when it should, it can happen up to 2 minutes early or late. You can have less time left than the clock on the screen says you have. You know what that means: work is lost or not accomplished. As for when you log in, sometimes you get connected within a half minute yet the timer appears showing only 57 minutes left. Several staff at Duloch library in Dunfermline told me some most insightful info - the timeout drifts out of sync with the clock, this problem increases over time, until periodically they have to reset the system. Where does that leave the users?!

When printing is done, it is more work for the staff to worry about not letting the timeout happen during the printing. The system does not freely let you log out and back in if the computer gets clogged up, which in Edinburgh's you can do perfectly easily. At 5 minutes and at 50 seconds before timeout, a reminder appears, that locks the screen until you acknowledge it, so further interrupting any writing you are doing and costing time and adding to the stress. Yes you can ask for extra time if it is available, but the act of going to the counter and asking for it consumes some of the time you already have, and you are panicking to get served in time as well as to save your work. Those 2 needs are in conflict.

Then, as recently as within the last year, Fife's system sprang a fault where the timer can jump to zero and cut you off, just spontanously at any moment during your whole session. They had to stick up notices, and they only bothered in some libraries, warning users to keep saving their work very frequently for fear of losing it: all through your session. Which disrupts flow of work and takes up time, and is always subject to the danger of bad connections. This is a system that does not work.

It is not practical for anyone to rely on at all, a system that can function as chaotically as this. Timers' unreliability impacts on the communication needs of those autistics who can express themselves with less difficulty by words composed on screen than by conversation or phone. Timers are easily discriminatory to our friends in the dyspraxic community, for the demands they make on dexterity both mental and physical. Mental because it takes quick thinking and a build-up of multitasking, especially if you have to panic what to do about a slow connection. Physical to get mice clicked and keys pressed quickly to beat the clock, or even worse, to beat an unreliable timer that may malfunction.

Last summer, some of us took part in an AS research project by an Edinburgh University student, but done through NHS Fife and so with sessions held in Fife. I suffered disruption to organising my participation, when a bad internet connection was overtaken by a timeout on a Dunfermline library computer and resulted in loss of a message. For this, I got the fact recorded in the project, that the computer system with timers had disrupted medical research by frustrating participation in it, thus working against our interests as a minoirty group, and has added unnecessary coping stress to the whole process, for the participant to deal with. This would not have happened in a system without timers, like Edinburgh's, hence it proved the timer system is both medically harmful and an obstruction of science. This was recorded as a real fact experienced in practice.

This should be a basis for me to get timers abolished and banned everywhere, as discriminatory and a medical abuse of us. Discriminatory also upon all the populations of counties with them, compared to without them. Edinburgh's present system stands proved the ideal model for introducing everywhere. Our friends in Fife need the case proved for this change. Edinburgh owes them that. Imagine then the inconceivable looking-glass horror, of instead catching early word of a plan for the head-on opposite to happen, for Edinburgh to change to using timers too? In the face of the harmful mess they have made in Fife?

This is what I was lobbying my 3 local councillors for help to prevent, on grounds that it would be knowingly a medical abuse and intrusion upon our needs. My council ward is called "Almond" because there is a river called that. Its 3 councillors all belong to different parties, you would expect them to be keen to score against each other's ethical failings. I put that to them all at once. Norman Work, SNP, Kate Mackenzie, Conservative, and of particular interest because he is actually the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Grubb, Lib-Dem. These councillors are public figures, elected to keep all the health needs in their community remembered by the planners, right? There is a pressing public interest in revealing them falling short of that.

At first the only response to me came from the first named. He said he had gone to speak to the staff of 2 of the outlying and less busy libraries, not saying if he had mentioned my point about the medical research record. Nor the point about timers being bad for library staff's safety. He wrote not a word about that to me either, made no acknowledgement of its existence at all, as he wrote: "As the staff I spoke to were in favour of a timing system I am not going to go against their wishes". He then argued ridiculously that the time extension system, problems of already discussed, should be a reassurance!

The second named has never said a word. The third named declares these councillors all work together and answer on each other's behalf - and remember he is Lib-Dem, the party with the longest history of keenness for the electoral reform that gave us multi-member seats. "Thank you for drawing this to my attention. The 3 Almond Ward councillors are working together on most community issues." That is not the choice that multi-member council seats were created for. They all belong to different parties, yet the voter struggling to stop medical abuses is presented with a single line of brush-off from them all jointly, that is not even an answer to the problem. On what basis is there any party contest?

So you can put to them a point of medical harm and they are capable of completely ignoring it without mention, as one gives you the wrong answer and the others back him. Where does this leave you if you are a parent fighting a more serious issue over children's illnesses? Looks what it shows: that they don't have the first shred of an ethic to hold their answers accountable to whether they knowingly approve medical harm whose nature is on scientific record. Whose health is ever safe in hands like these?

"If he had acted supposedly for all 3 councillors and not just for himself", I asked, then the only way for the other 2 councillors not to be seen by name to choose culpably in favour of doing medical harm and hurting vulnerable groups, was "if they are committal not noncommittal in disagreeing with" his line. That is logical. Answer: "I have been following your emails about the libraries situation and I will ask Head of Libraries for an update on the situation". This resulted only in getting a copy of a report on the plan.

No position taken against the plan, by any of them. NO ANSWER, from any of them, to the medical harm point, or on the needs of groups affected adversely by the change. Does that sound at all committal to you?

Any answer directly from libraries management, to justify the change, is still awaited, since Feb 3. So in conclusion: Here is the state of democracy and of disability rights, going on all around you. Councillors across party are allowing a disability wrong to be done without taking any position against it, and he is ignoring how local scientific research already records that the proposed change will abuse us. The Lord Provost of our capital is going along with this and not a word of committality on it can be extracted from his office. If you are a visitor here in the Year of Homecoming, these are the standards you are homecoming to.

Maurice Frank

PS - added Jul 28. The library has now taken its first step, introduced the timer system in one department of Central library, the "Learning Centre" where the computers were already unstaffed. The result? Nobody uses them! Previously this section of computers was always full, now it is often empty and you never see more than the occasional user. The library users have voted with their feet, between the merits of the 2 systems. They have all totally chosen the old system without timers, as easier and friendlier to use. Observing this, the library now has no other honest choice than to find that the timers system is a total failiure, to cancel all further extension of it, and to share this practical test result with the rest of the country to force banning of the timers system wherever it is used.

endemic bus malpractices

Here is an action towards a public office, citing disability discrimination on our behalf, that consequently they have a duty to act on, and they are not doing. Now, what is the point of having a disability discrimination law if we are not supplied with the means to pin down any public office to give answers according to it???!!

These 2 emails were to the "Bus Passenger's Platform", the complaints department of an entity called Passenger View which advises the Scottish government on what bus passengers need without at all having to ask bus passengers what we want it to say! When you complain to BPP about malpractices by bus drivers, usually it is on the bus companies' side and completely in their pocket. BPP will scrape the gutter for any excuse to find that the bus company couldn't have taken an absolute line on preventing the malpractice.

BPP is one of those bodies that exists to make it look like something is being done. In reality, even if you have been blatantly bullied by a bus driver and the advertised bus sevice blatantly not honoured at all, as long as BPP's decisions are discretionary it is utterly pointless to lodge a complaint to BPP. The only thing there is any point in doing, is to extract from each bus malpractice any aspect you can of distinct ill-treatment of a minority needs group, and lobby BPP about it, telling BPP it is acting illegally concerning discrimination unless it admits that its duty to make findings in favour of the minority need is automatic, not discretionary. You need to ask BPP to confirm this to you before you file an actual case to them. This is what I sought to do in the following emails:

Mar 5: I belong to [mentioned Elas and Sasn].

The vulnerablilities caused by Asperger Syndrome include a reliance on literal information, and lack of facility to make contextual guesses that information is not meant literally. This would include, that we more than other passengers can't be expected to guess, by cultural norm, that some information given in a bus timetable is less true than other parts of the timetable and may routinely not be honoured by the bus operator. It would be illegal disability discrimination to expect any such thing of us.

A consequence of this, is that it would be illegal disability discrimination against us, ever not to find against the operator, in a case where a particular service frequently jumps one of the stops it is advertised to observe, and the operator has ignored or evaded all efforts to pin them down committally to do anything about it. A case where there is always a 50-50 chance that the bus you want will sweep past the stop in the central dual carriageway lanes that block it from observing the stop, instead of taking the side lanes to observe the stop, and this is on a long distance service so that total wreckage of a day's travel plan is inflicted by it.

In any case of this nature, it needs only be established that the company is allowing the offence to happen, by its lack of committal answers, and that makes it a simple 100% certainty that the complaint would be upheld. Hence, it would be illegal disability discrimination to a recognised medical group who have public speaking outlets, for you not to agree that this is the case, to this enquiry in advance of an actual case being brought, or to be noncommittal about it.

It would be disability discrimination to insist that the actual case is brought before you take any position, because by so insisting, you would be keeping in existence a visibly provenly illegal margin of discretion against the position being an automatic certainty. You would be forcing the case to be a gamble instead of a routine upholding of a literal principle. You would be saying that in a case where the factual finding was that yes the events concerned have happened, it could ever be at all possible even in theory to find against a complaint of the nature described and to allow a bus operator to behave in this way.

Past experience proves the need to put the case's committal medical principle to you before being forced into taking any gambles on which way you might go if it is left to arbitrary discretion.

Mar 12 BPP's answer: [first an unnecessary para explaining what BPP is]

Unfortunately you have not indicated whether or not the bus company has had an opportunity to address your complaint. I would be grateful if you would advise this office accordingly. If the operator has responded to your complaint and you are unhappy with the response, you must sens a copy of all relevant correspondence to this office.

If the complaint has not been taken up with the bus operator in the first instance, I regret that BPP is unable to consider your complaint at this stage.

Mar 14: Yes, we are talking about a case here the bus company has had this problem repeatedly put to it over a year and a half, and has only gone from explaining each incident as an isolated driver error, to not answering at all.

I know the rules about sending correspondence with an actual complaint - I have experienced the process before. But I have not made any actual complaint to you yet. I was enquiring about BPP's attitude to a principle: the committally automatic wrongness in every case ever, of a bus service being allowed to persist in often jumping one of the stops it is advertised to observe, by passing it in the wrong traffic lane for stopping.

I pointed out the disability discrimination to a whole population group, that would be done if BPP refuses to take a position on this principle that would be known in advance to apply to any specific case of it that is brought to you. So that cases are not forced to be brought to you with the discretionary possibility of BPP choosing not to uphold the principle even if the facts are found to be as described.

Thank you,

- To which there has been no further answer. You can see that BPP is meticulously evading making any comment at all on the question asked of it. Does a complaint of this particular malpractice by buses have to be upheld automatically if it is established the malpractice happened? BPP is blatantly committing disability discrimination and acting corruptly to the oppression of bus users, by ignoring this question and seeking to hold onto a discretionary power to reject such a complaint.

Let me tell you where this bus malpractice has been happening - it is on an important trunk route. It is on Citylink's M91 stopping service from Edinburgh to Perth, some coaches continuing to Inverness. One of the advertised stops on the more frequently stopping coaches is at the south side of the Forth Bridge, the former tolls, which is still stubbornly being called "tolls" in bus timetables long after the tolls have been abolished. Quite often these coaches just charge past in the central lane of the dual carriageway and ignore this stop. It can happen in both directions, but mostly in the northward direction where the stop is located on an entry sliplane, so that if the coach fails to take an exit from the main carriageway it is then barricaded into the central lanes and can't access the stop.

For a year and a half I have had repeated cause to make complaints to Citylink about this, and the only answer they ever give is a one-off apology for the driver error in forgetting the stop. The first time they said they would remind drivers about it, but this changed nothing. They will never say anything committal specifying how they will force all their staff to observe the stop. Twice I have enquired on behalf of both Elas and our equivalent in Fife, telling them that aspies have no instincts to guess in some cultural way that their service's published details should not be taken literally! and formally asking which coaches they will guarantee for certain will observe the stop, if we should organise some group travel starting at that point. CITYLINK HAS IGNORED AND NEVER ANSWERED THOSE ENQUIRIES. THIS ITSELF IS DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION, THAT THE BPP's ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED TO STOP, YET WE LIVE IN A STATE WHERE THE BPP ITSELF CAN GET AWAY WITH BEING EQUALLY CORRUPT. If you are a visitor in the Year of Homecoming, this is the state of the state here. If you are an aspie as well, and if you are trying to head north of the Forth, you have cause to complain that you are left in unclarity how the hell you are supposed to plan travel in a state where nobody enforces the honouring of published transport services in reality. If you tell Year of Homecoming about this, do you find them committal or noncommittal about caring? - for that will tell you whether it's just a con.

Some other bus malpractices that BPP's attitude also encourages to happen, are these.
* A driver on Stagecoach who drives away from the present diversionary stops in central Edinburgh, with their long queues, before passengers who were well back in the queue can reach him, and visibly laughs about it.
* First refusing to give any committal answer that their buses can be hailed from the wrong side of the road, even when they know this evasion is an offence against road safety because it meant you had to run in front of a very late bus that suddenly appeared in Galashiels' one way system, and which still drove past you anyway,
* or even when you are walking from East Linton to Haddington in the evening because 3 successive of their buses have not turned up, ("mechanical failure!") and then one passes you on the road some way short of Haddington just when it's starting to rain.
* Drivers on First who refuse to believe that the fare you want exists, in First's preposterously muddled zonal system.
* Who insist that a day ticket is just an ordinary return, or
* who take a £20 note from you then refuse to give it back or to sell you anything but the fare they think you should want instead of the fare you do want. NB - I got signed for a free bus pass as a direct result of that experience, actually on grounds of the burden of coping with communication with bus drivers! and this establishes every aspie should get one. But that is no get-out from the need to enforce proper trading standards upon First too, is it? including sacking that driver?

The Green Party, which always insults our intelligence by saying please use public transport and save carbon, never takes any position on any specific transport malpractice. I asked their council candidate in 2007, for a position against First because of the Sunday morning trains that had repeatedly been leaving early from Dalmeny station, that I had twice in 6 weeks seen ruin the travel plan of a mother trying to take 2 small infants to Glasgow visiting family. I got, "If you will forgive me, I can only respond to your general query about public transport and accountability, rather than your ongoing problems with First." DON'T FORGIVE THEM - this is the worst offence that democracy's entire effectiveness is still abused by, it is NONCOMMITTALITY. If the Greens keep this up in the coming Euro election, they are committing a specific minority uncaringness upon the autistic spectrum, because we can't be expected to communicate successfully with corrupt bus or train staff or to observe corrupt unstated principles of how to get by despite them.

Maurice Frank

Asperger Syndrome and neighbourhood living

It's recognised that people with Asperger's are a lot less likely to live independently than the general population, once they have reached adulthood. I would like to write though, much of it from personal experience as an independent adult Aspie, about the situations that can be faced by Aspies who do make it to independent living.

Chances are if you live alone (most independent Aspies are just that, independent and won't be with a partner) you'll be living in a flat, and in turn it'll probably be in a communal stair, with anything from 6 to 12, or more, flats. The independent Aspie can be seriously stretched in such an arrangement. Many people living independently have problems with the antisocial behaviour of other residents, such as noise, groups of people loitering, vandalism etc. This can expose the independent Aspie to distressing situations from neighbourhood living. Sensitivity from stimuli such as noise do not help. Neither does it help when neighbours or locals notice your social and communication challenges and so pick up what they feel is a "differentness" in you.

I think that living in a stair or block of flats in close proximity with a number of neighbours takes a lot of social skill to cope. This particularly challenges Aspies. It's all very well if you keep yourself to yourself, but you wouldn't have space all to yourself but instead are sharing communal space with other people. Affordability becomes an issue especially with the problems many Aspies have with unemployment and underemployment. This can have a knock-on effect on where you can obtain housing. In turn that would increase one's chances of antisocial behaviour, as would the number of properties within any one stair.

I am an advocate of housing that is more specific to the independent adult Aspie where one way or another they may be protected from antisocial or nuisance neighbours, and will push for this to happen. One way to achieve this, perhaps, is for housing associations to allocate blocks for people with AS or autism, with support as appropriate, once need for the amount of housing is identified. It wouldn't necessarily have to be sheltered, but certainly out of the mainstream private or council housing, where you never know who is next door. But this way the independent adult Aspie could have a better go at a settled life.

By: An Edinburgh Aspie

Dragon's wings - by David Seagrave

GROW YOUR DRAGON S WINGS !

I weite this to explain what we do and how I can help adults with high functioning autism .I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome in 2004, 50 years too late to avoid a blighted life when my troubles began in 1952 and it is a long and harrowing story .

I attended Red Hill Remedial School in Kent which so decisively moulded my character that my most important achievement in life is my burgeoning literary collection called The Socrates Of Charford It is about a fictional Welsh classmate Alan Wright from Charford in Avalonshire a fictional county between Glos and Gwent.Alan acquires that soubriquet because he invents a life affirming Standard to Live By called Contributionism and lives according to its teachings to become the headmaster of a similar school in my storyline.

Aristotle declared “An exemplary life is the ultimate beauty “.I struggle to emulate Alan but I am thwarted at every turn.I have offered a portfolio of edifying pursuits which I have practiced since my schooldays but I am in severe difficulties.I am bound to declare that I am simply appalled by attitudes in Scottish society that were absent in my days at Glasgow University in the late sixties.Leading contributors to the Scotsman and Herald all concur about the social evils that have grown in recent years .I am not I trust being a SNOB when I put across Alan Wright s Contributionism as a way forwards and quote a couplet “Moelwyn-Wright,our Leader –Guide/His Code of Conduct doth provide/A path to grace up mountains steep/Our way of life I vow to keep” allegorising Alan s middle name MOELWYN a 720m high mountain near Portmadoc his birthplace borne as his long deceased uncle s forename .MOELWYNHOOD is the state of maturity which all adults should grow into- as Socrates and Plato explained – the development of all the virtues – diligence, honesty,patience,imagination,.tolerance, good humour, single mindedness, ignoring adversity,thrift, foresightedness,lateral thinking, loyal service freely given,and steadfast adherence to Higher Principles in the face of evil

I have coined the expression “Growing Dragon s Wings” to denote a frame of mind where someone has reached such a mastery of worthwhile pursuits that distressing peculiarities shrink to insignificance and figuratively aloft on those dragon s wings he is beyond the reach of scorn.When I climbed Cader Idris 6 months after being maimed I had in spirit soared a thousand metres above the mindless common herd and small-minded .people like my late and devoutly Christian father.He practiced “Thomas-the –Tank-Engine-Christianity “ –that is Christian dogma at the reading age of 7 –and so did my mother whose intellectual level was that of tiddley-winks .She could not understand the everyday English of London quality papers let alone the contents of my university essays !

The shy sensitive ASD young adult needs what I call Moral Armament to cope with the evil people he must collide with on leaving school.My mentors at Red Hill School taught me about charlatans and crooks and the many deceptions practiced even in the 1950s .Today every high street is full of premises who se real purpose is to extract MONEY from gullible people such as gambling-machine arcades I was taught the mathematical proof how gamblers always lose their money and took it to heart along with much else I had assimilated at that school.During civil disturbances in 1981 when I was maimed I wrote playlets about a young man who got into trouble and the Court sent him to Alan Wright for treatment They illustrated the predicament facing young men today ,then too ASD adults are picked upon at work and by relatives so they end up isolated and embittered

I am simply appalled by the attitudes of some people in the corridors of power.Without naming them influential religious factions hold that involuntary peculiarities and mental illness is a sign of SIN in the individual and thus justifies unspeakable cruelty.The victims spiral into severe mental illness and alcoholism and crime and come before the courts as people so severely damaged that even my fictional Welshman might fail to heal the scars in their minds.Funding for mental health services is being cut and with that comes closure of facilities for ASD people.

I have been IN TROUBLE for disclosing my hurtful past in autobiographies which I will gladly share AND for explaining the principles behind Alan Wright s Contributionism which clash with religious authoritarianisms- who would all execrate me for being a threat to their moth-eaten dogmas that have no relevance at all in 21st Century society I am saying this in the expectation that I will again be in trouble even for presenting you with inspiring stories about ASD people like “Red Haired Roderick “ Now look out of the windows dear citizens and identify the bumps on the northern skyline Within an hour s hike along the Devon Valley Way you reach such places as Mill Glen Tillicoultry where I would like to take you to discover dare I say the God Within You And All About as you reach the Rough Confluence and sit high above it to listen to the tumbling waters and the wind s melody and behold the cloud-armadas floating high overhead, enjoy the moor-birds and the wild grandeur .Then I can show you how to make marvellous model buildings from timber found fly –tipped and on me I have a pair of Gripperbreeks that holds my false leg on -made from cloth dumped in a skip –and if permission is granted behold my photographs exposed chiefly in reloaded throwaway cameras – see views of Scotland and overseas – that illustrate what I do.

So give me half a chance and I will teach you my brethren how to rise beyond the reach of scorn as with unremitting effort as you master demanding pursuits you grow your Dragon s Wings

David Seagrave

Dignified roles - by David Seagrave

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role ?

Dignified roles have eluded me for most of the years since I moved to Scotland in 1991.I feel very acute loss of dignity unless I am “pulling my weight in society” This has arisen because of what happened as a boy and whenever I was unemployed.My father rubbed into me that I was innately flawed because I had no GOOD MANNERS and had forgotten things like christmas carols.A state of grace was conditional on holding down a job,and also by extension conforming to Christian values that meant REGULAR WORSHIP and Christian marriage and siring offspring.I was in permanent disgrace after a school expulsion in 1953 for preposterously trivial pranks where I was dared to misbehave by smutty minded classmates. I was convinced that I was a dangerous lunatic.I would be LOCKED UP FOR LIFE at Red Hill Remedial School which in fact was NO “Broadmoor for Boys” but an intellectual hothouse that has decisively moulded my character. In my father s eyes I had besetting moral failings for getting sacked because for instance I could NOT ADD UP salaries in the old money fast enough or accurately enough at the Inland Revenue .When I was sacked from a job at a London museum I was told to my face that I had been taken on against their better judgment and I would not get references from them. I threatened to end my life.I did not go head first into the Thames because I had a university application in the pipeline .I was then admitted to a mental hospital where I was fortunately allowed to attend A level classes and do Past Papers .Yet that short spell in a mental hospital was to debar me ever after from graduate level employment as I had to disclose it on every job application.It blotted my copybook as surely as a prison sentence for something really bad

It is a strange paradox that just before the sacking I had deliberately chosen to miss that 7.43 train from Hastings to London which piled up at Hither Green with the loss of many lives.I might have perished in the crash but a row with my father about that event has prompted me to write about my fictional classmate Alan Wright who dares to invent a better code of behaviour than Christian morality

After graduation the Permanent Disgrace of unemployment resumed and did not end until I was maimed in 1981 I wore my heart on my sleeve at interviews I soon realised that I could never become a university lecturer and my self esteem collapsed as a Catholic landlady made gratuitously offensive remarks that I was sponging off the State.The paradox of a triumphant recovery from the maiming led to a decade of halcyon years in Stafford but I hankered to climb every Scottish peak so moved to Cumbernauld in 1991.Apart from my roles in now defunct arts organisations and environmental pressure groups I have had NO dignified roles and my life has imploded into abject egocentric futility. Every time I offered to share all the lifelong fruits of my self-createdness I elicited humiliating rebuffs

My essentially fragile self esteem is rooted in my prowess at intellectually demanding pursuits which are frowned upon in Scotland precisely because they expand brainpower. I have been made to feel deeply ashamed of my interest in model railways yet I am the ONLY MAN in Dunfermline who builds railway models (as opposed to playing with Hornby or similar glorified toy trains) .When I die will all these models be DUMPED? . As I grow too infirm to climb lofty mountains I cannot contain my grief since so much of my self esteem is tied up with my role as the veteran amputee climber YET I am rejected by outdoor fraternities who call me a LIABILITY because I have a false leg !.This morning I received quite an insulting rebuff from an organisation because I had sent them “Grow Your Dragon s Wings “ and “Red Haired Roderick” which explicitly illustrate how we Aspies can rise beyond the reach of scorn by prowess at demanding pursuits of every kind The more I probe into the workings of organisations purportedly dedicated to the well being of people with medical conditions the more I discover that their real function is to aggrandise churchpeople with denominational axes to grind who enjoy lording over their clients and ramming their dogmas down their clients throats.Any display of personal initiative on the part of anybody with a distressing medical condition is seen as INSOLENCE .and a threat to the inflated egoes of the Christian people in charge of the organisation..therefore that person must be put down,belittled,ignored,and if he persists,be besmirched so badly that he is silenced as surely as if he was locked up as a certified lunatic.

Everybody needs to feel valued .I was jackbooted as a boy by authority for such preposterous reasons as looking up swear words in a dictionary ! (and how could I have possibly imagined then that far into the future I would be pursued by gangs of Scottish children who smashed the windows of my home, and stole NINE scooters,and how I was in trouble for mentioning the religion of my tormentors! ) Even though I feel proud of all my achievements I am forever plummeting into deep depression every Sunday because I am alone with nobody to talk to and reminded that it is the LORD S DAY ! as in my mind s ear I hear my fathers reprimands and feel that my very name STINKS of ignominy because I have failed to hold down a job.

Dignified roles are as necessary to our well-being as..a proper diet.We define ourselves primarily by our occupational roles.Mental illness supervenes as surely as night follows day if our self esteem is confiscated.We cannot exist in solitude ; and self-banishment only exacerbates our distress..Yet we collide head-on with dysfunctional Society as we think differently.We are as lost,in crowds of self-destruction-intent people,as surely as we are in pathless forests.As we have figurative periscopes that enable us to see far beyond the mindless mobs,we instinctively act in ways that preserve the environment .
Our habits elicit scorn,reprimands, , ridicule .yet we should expect congratulations .

Some of us have taken to heart the teachings of great thinkers down the ages.I am adamant that Socrates,Plato and Aristotle provided Mankind with a better Code of Behaviour than dogma-encrusted Christian morality. Plato declared that spiritually advanced people are those who have left the cave of ignorance for the sunlight of personal growth.He also explained the workings of the emotions ; three dark horses of Greed and Fear and Aggression and one white horse called Reason; and the Charioteer has to bridle the dark horses and allow the white horse of Reason to keep the Personality on the road of life long self-improvement Long before I studied Plato
in depth I had absorbed his teachings…at Religious Knowledge lessons led by a vicar!

So I created Alan Wright,the Socrates of Charford,as a role-model who lives his exemplary life by applying his exacting Code of Behaviour to everyday affairs.IF Alan was a real person I would right now be his loyal disciple –colliding head-on with small minded Christian people by seeking to lead trainloads of deserving people up mountains every fine Sunday and teaching them all my demanding hobbies on dark winter evenings.As everybody surely knows I was forbidden to emulate Plato and set up a one-man university for Aspies in Edinburgh ..because I live “in a foreign country “! the Kingdom of Fife ! yet it would not have cost the management a single brass cent as I can travel for free !.. they would still have objected because of imagined risks to Aspies on hikes in Holyrood Park ! and with soldering-irons etc.

“No man is an island” and those of us singled out for derogatory labelling still have to come to terms with Society which rejects us .I have been officially and indelibly besmirched on a Government disclosure form by Cumbernauld people (I must not mention their religion or that WILL land me in real trouble) There is a catch line in Sartre s HUIS CLOS “ I am the skylarks mirror,my darling “ ( uttered by the lesbian Ines Serrano that got the play BANNED till 1967 !) A skylarks mirror is someone who so frequently belittles anybody that the victim believes it and takes it to heart . Everybody sees themselves reflected in their neighbours.A well adjusted person can safely ignore the few who try to besmirch him. I have Alan Wright say “I see myself reflected in 5,000 windows.Does it matter if a few are dirty ?” The windows are the people of Charford , his neighbours. We with our social impairments do not find enough clean mirrors to be reflected in as we rightly distance ourselves from the moronised common herd .Yet this is the intractable heart of our collision with Society where all our talents count for nothing when we encounter the ingrained prejudices of people far less capable than ourselves in those disciplines where we shine. In Scottish society anybody with a morally neutral attribute is STILL a target for malicious besmirchment.as my experience proves. No matter how gifted the victim may be or what he might contribute to the common good he is judged for the peculiarity rather than all that is good about him.This is explicit in the very title “Red- haired Roderick”. Whereas when at Glasgow University I was accepted as a typical classic English eccentric .in Cumbernauld I felt like a Jew in Nazi Germany and that culminated in my own personal Kristallnacht in 2000 when mobs smashed my windows and I lived from hour to hour in fear of being SLAIN by gangs of children.

For all the beauty of the Scottish scenery I am desperate to quit Scotland I felt good yesterday as while walking I appreciated the whin in bloom by the roadside and reflected that if Mankind continues to wreck Earth quite soon there will be NOBODY ALIVE to thank God for the whin in bloom on a fine May evening I worked on a model viaduct and felt that it was utterly pointless to continue with that or anything else that I used to enjoy doing since I had NOBODY to share it with.I had offered those wanton fruits of my Asperger mind and was ignored or rebuffed with dark hints that anybody who dares to dissent from the motheaten Christian dogmas of our masters will be banished from society yet what DOES society offer me? Only FOOTBALL and SOAP OPERA and BINGE DRINKING ! No wonder I feel as I did in Cumbernauld that I am the ONLY JEW IN DUNFERMLINE so I dream of Stafford as my home town where I was valued as a hero ( who went on all night vigils in November watching for nuclear weapons convoys !) I wake in Dunfermline feeling that I am as bad as a paedophile.

Even if someone was a university professor he deserves to forfeit a dignified role in Society if he behaved like Josef Fritzl But myself ! the worst I can ever do to anybody is swear at them !

…then I have nightmares which are re-runs of the assault in my bedroom in 2005 with children ransacking my home and a boy holding my craft knife to my throat ,or equally scary re-enactments of events in Cumbernauld- glasses smashed by small girls and helpless as a bus bears down on me …I wake in terror far from Stafford and weep .

…and were I to try to teach my specialist interests would potential pupils land me in court because THOU SHALT NOT : use soldering irons; superglue; hammers,,saws,files,let alone a modelmaking lathe .THOU SHALT NOT develop colour films (still assuming I can buy colour developer ) and THOU SHALT NOT defile the sanctity of the LORDS DAY by taking parties of hikers to the Highlands ….this is Scotland in the 21st century fast regressing to Independence days when everybody pried into one another s affairs and made moral judgments about one another for such matters as their BEDTIMES!

Will I ever be allowed to play a dignified role?

David Seagrave

Social Dread

One thing that puzzles and annoys me is a feeling of dread for social situations were I'm expected to appear as a confident and sociable person.

I vividly recall, particularly in my teens, sitting around or staring out of windows, trying to muster up the will to go to a disco, party or even a prize giving event were I was expected to receive a prize. A part of me wanted to go - and felt I ought to go - but another part had doubts and these doubts quickly grew into an overwhelming dread. While in this state I couldn't do much except wait for the time of the event to pass by. Strangely, even now, sometimes, when someone asks me out for a personal social event, often someone I like and would like to meet, the dread comes back and I have to let the opportunity slip by.

Even, recently, I painfully recall not be able to participate in a work colleague's birthday presentation. I was friendly with the handful of people involved but participating in this social occasion was impossible at that moment. I had to leave my office and wander about the streets killing time until the event had passed. I felt very bad because I knew my colleagues would think I was behaving in a very unfriendly manner and it might sour subsequent relations.

I think part of the social dread comes from negative experiences from past social encounters. I'm now thinking about an occasion when I willed myself to go to the house party of a friend. I was determined to try and work out a way to enjoy myself. I was thinking that if I turned up then maybe it could happen by accident. It didn't work out - but still I tried to keep up appearances and hoped no one noticed my struggle.

It was obvious to me that there was a lot of hidden social language happening that did not register on my social radar. I'm particularly referring to looks, eye contact, facial expressions, body language and tone of voice. I would like to have tried to attract some women I liked the look of and thought might have some interest in me if they just got to know me - but I really didn't have the knack or knowledge to make this happen.

I also now know that these situations caused me sensory overload. I mean, my mind and senses were overwhelmed by a combination of dim lighting, assorted noises, music, talking, smells and close body encounters. I quickly got tired and focused my mind on the best exit plan. I find leaving particularly difficult and it could take me some time to execute my plan. I was very happy to get away.

I hope to gain a better understanding and do a bit better in these situations in the future.

Paul

Perceptions

No social flow or instinct naturally connects between you and the folk you talk to. That's the essential thing that makes AS. It shows in 2 key ways. You lack the feel to relate at a casual level, with this not being out of shyness but having no instinct for the other person's angle on your best way to relate to them. Your speech connects instead with the content of a meaningful subject, and you understand the exact content of messages, what is said. You have no learned feel for guessing unsaid details or social rules that alter the meaning.

So, say, a magazine website host asked me to write something, changed her mind what types of details she wanted, and took a huff because I hadn't guessed by social instinct more about what she wanted than she told me. You can't do that with aspies. Every part of communication must be worked on consciously. I'm the quieter type, for whom this means only communicating as necessary: I get quite lost at any conversation and just go quiet if surrounded by unfocussed chat. You ask me to do errands but only tell me half of what they are and expect me to guess the rest, then I get stuck. It's nice now to have an explanation for that. These limits on communication lead naturally into another classic trait, self-sufficient dedication to my interests. For a caring and politically intense soul like me it's a virtue to be criticised for my determination in banging on about an issue until it makes a difference. I get a feeling of knowing the world better, by putting things in comparative lists in their spatial or scale order. My teenage addiction was to transport timetables.

The further range of AS traits are non-essential extras. For instance, I don't have the trait of not understanding metaphors and taking them literally. This delayed me being sure of having AS at all because all books before 2003 used to assume this trait was always present. Then there's the fun of learning that other quirks to do with your body's sensitivity are part of your AS. My selection includes: arm fidgetiness, wearing shorts, using sleeping bags, and feeling jolted by sudden noises.

By: Maurice Frank

Asperger's in films

Asperger's in Films

There are many films about autism but only a few specifically about Asperger's. Despite the fact that the term Asperger's was introduced into the English speaking world by Lorna Wing in the eighties, the first high profile film to describe the condition did not appear until 1994.

The film is 'Nell'. It's a film about the discovery of a woman who had been brought up with extremely limited social contact and speaks a language known only to herself. She appears to have a learning difficulty. She's an innocent woman who is fearful of people and somehow wired into a deeper and more spiritual reality. Though she is diagnosed with Asperger's during the course of the film, her extremely unusual upbringing and uniqueness means she does not make it into my Asperger's film list.

There are many films in the eighties and nineties - and in earlier decades - that have tendencies towards Asperger's or include characters with Asperger's personality traits. They can include geeks, nerds, absent-minded professors, shy naive people, eccentrics and many aliens. The list of films I have in mind are too long to detail here, but I would like to mention 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' (1976), 'Being There' (1979) and 'Edward Scissorhands' (1990).

Towards the end of 2005, the BBC showed several films and documentaries about autism as part of an Autism Awareness Week. In a documentary 'My Family and Autism', Luke Jackson decribes his experience of living with Asperger's. I was very struck by the film and it made me think I might have the condition too.

The first key film on my Asperger's film list came out the following year. It is called 'Snow Cake' starring Sigourney Weaver as a high functioning autistic adult. The film intends to inform the public about the condition and to this end Sigourney and the other film crew worked hard to ensure the depiction of HFA was accurate.

The film is about an ex-convict who ends up sharing a few days with a high functioning autistic woman. She does not make eye contact and speaks in an intelligent, intense but rather cold manner. She has a compulsion for neatness and order. She likes to be alone. She's very aware of her neurological condition and spends a lot of time explaining it.

However, another dimension to her personality is an uninhibited solitary pleasure at simple things such as flashing lights, dancing, rolling around in the snow and even eating snow. This aspect seems to suggest an ability to switch to more classic autistic state. This aspect of her personality greatly adds to her attractiveness as a character though personally I found it hard to reconcile the contradictory personality traits. Still, the film presents a positive and strong image of a disabled woman.

The second key film on my list is called 'Mozart and the Whale'. It was released in the UK a few months ago though it was actually made in USA in 2005. I have not seen the film but only read reviews and watched the trailer a few times.

The film is about the relationship between two people with Asperger's who meet at an Asperger's support group. They are intelligent, talented, articulate and attractive people. The film seems to be a fairly traditional romantic story but with rather eccentric people. The characters seem to be presented as neuro-diverse rather than disabled people. It's a shame the film has not been released and distributed earlier in the UK. I'm hoping to find it on DVD soon.

In America, the 'Snow Cake' and 'Mozart and the Whale' are much mentioned in online discussion though they're not so well known here.

A third film about to join my list is called Ben X. This Belgian film is just released and will be showing at the Edinburgh Filmhouse at the end of this month, from Friday 26 September to 2 October. The film is about a young man who is bullied at school and retreats from the harsh realities of everyday life into an online fantasy world involving role-play.

The film has received very good reviews. Because of the importance of victimisation to the storyline, I expect the film will be a much less pleasnt or inspiring expereince than the first two films but I still think it's a film worth seeing.

Another film worth mentioning - though I have not included it in my film list - is 'Somersault' (2005). This is a fine and sensitively made film about a young woman who has relationship problems. If it were not for a few very contrived references to Asperger's - from which the director intends to make us think the young woman may have the condition - the link would be impossible to make. However, the fact a film is made about a person with borderline Asperger's - or possibly not - is in itself socially significant.

Finally, a film which may or may not have an Asperger's connection is just released in the UK but not available to view yet. The film is called 'Her name is Sabine'. It's a documentary about an autistic woman filmed by her sister who is a well-known French actress. From what I have read and seen on the video clips, the film is the story of a dispirited autistic woman who appears to be an able, attractive, talented woman - possibly with Asperger's - a few decades earlier. Her story is about how she regressed and how the medical system is supporting her.

Film Reviewer

Edinburgh Transport

EDINBURGH TRANSPORT

This article outlines some ideas for improving Edinburgh's public transport network, in particular the bus network.

Transport networks are a common interest among Asperger individuals, not least because they involve a lot of systemisation. I did a talk about the various types of transport in Edinburgh at a past ELAS meeting, and among other things the tram network and perceived missing links to Lothian Buses' network were discussed, especially a link to Haddington (currently served by FirstBus but not Lothian Buses).

I do not necessarily agree with the tram network, to start in Edinburgh in 2011, at least not in the form it will take. It will pretty much consist of one line (airport to Leith via city centre) and I feel that the cost of the network would have been better expended in high-quality bus corridors around the city. The routes that the trams will follow would be part of a bigger plan of such bus corridors throughout the city (not just one or two areas which the tram network will link).

This top level of high-quality bus routes, then, would be limited stop services, stopping only at certain well-used stops. Of course the existing network would exist as it is, but at certain selected 'designated points' spaced around the city would integrate with the limited stop services.

Some such limited stop services exist, mainly for commuters during morning and evening rush hours, but the idea would be extended to form a spider-web network in the city operating all day, with stops spaced more regularly than the typical limited stop network that exists. A good model of the type of service intended is the X48. Buses on this route are specially coloured in green, so perhaps a distinguishing colour like this could represent the top-level services.

Edinburgh has many radial bus routes, coming in and out of the city centre. Selected radial routes connecting to the designated points would be improved under the high-quality bus corridor plan. The radial routes would also, where practical, extend outside Edinburgh to nearby towns.

There are also routes connecting outer suburbs, evident from looking at a Lothian Buses map, but these are usually not well integrated into anything like coherent routes (there used to be full circular services such as the 32/52 but these were done away with a few years ago). Nor are these services always very frequent, including the 18 and 21 which are half circles around the outskirts of the city. But they are a key part of the plan for reasons including that Edinburgh's circular layout makes them practical, to avoid the city centre and its traffic, and because the designated nodal points such as the Royal Infirmary and Gyle/Edinburgh Park are areas visited by people from throughout the city.

I also envisage an inner circular route, something which Edinburgh lacks but would be useful given the density of inner Edinburgh in both population and services, and to integrate with the radial routes. Again, these could also act as a bypass of the very centre of Edinburgh (Princes Street/Old Town/New Town etc.). The idea is to connect points on the radial routes halfway between the city centre and the outer nodal points. I have made an attempt at defining such a route on the map.

The key nodal points would be:

North-east: Leith/Ocean Terminal
East: ASDA The Jewel/Fort Kinnaird
South-east: Alternating between Cameron Toll, a major bus interchange; and Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
South-west: Possibly Wester Hailes/Westside Plaza, which already acts as a major bus interchange.
West: Gyle/Edinburgh Park
North-west: Waterfront development

This would entail high-quality routes between the city centre and all of the above points. The nodal points would also be linked north-west to north-east, north-east to east etc. in a circular service. These routes could for instance be every 20 minutes. The east radial route would also extend to East Lothian towns like Musselburgh, Prestonpans, Tranent and Haddington (the last two could be served along the A1 alternating with a coastal route). The south-east route would extend to the towns of Midlothian, alternating in the different directions from the city. The west and north-west routes could re-open previously closed Lothian Buses routes, i.e. west to Livingston/Bathgate, northwest to South Queensferry.

Such a network is a good idea because of Edinburgh's very dense bus route network. This makes a top-level network a good idea, as a recognised, simple, well-spaced structure around the city would benefit travellers. Perhaps the buses could be similar to those used by Citylink, or Stagecoach Fife in whose network there is a similar idea of top-level routes around the county.

Map of suggested network lines

By: Mark