a famous aspie does not mean all is right for us.

Let's see. You've come for a look at what aspies are all about because you heard the news about Susan Boyle? Splendid: here's what the media should be telling you. Are they?

• Our heightened physical sensitivities, including to fabric and heat, are biologically incompatible with dress codes and make them an assault on our physical wellbeing. Our existence abolishes all work dress codes and school uniforms. This has been known for years and the big charities have not been choosing to push it.
• Because some aspies find it easier to focus on the written word than the spoken, there is a correlation between aspies and child authors. There is a succession of books by aspie child authors, and there is a child cruelty offence done in long history of big charities' total avoidance and failiure to publicise that there are WRONGED child authors, like me, whose chance to write was destroyed by harmful school pressures and homework.
• With the big charities' big failings to speak for us where needed, you can see how seriously we have needed the voice developed for us, to contribute into professional awareness and policymaking, by the AUTISM NETWORK SCOTLAND, developed out of Strathclyde University and now a part of the national strategy. It's invaluable, and its creation is the great success of the scene in Scotland. So IT NEEDS COPYING IN EVERY COUNTRY. If you are outside Scotland do you think your aspies deserve not to have any ANS?
• The NAS is to be complimented on attending properly to striking off its contact list a bent autism legal service that advised me to surrender in a dispute with a council tax malpractice where I was in the right by statute law and won. There needs to be a media consumer exposee of bent services that will prey on their clients instead of stand up to councils - you want to know more, you need it publicised.
• Likewise you want to know that aspies' local groups can't be corrupted and seized control of by malpractisers bent on hushing up emotional abuses, as happened to a group near us, defunct since stood up to by an earlier post on this blog describing its malpractises: 28 Feb 2011, Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us.
• It's only the same common sense that all the details should be published of the ways we have been harmed by schools and by child psychiatry. Aspie kids not safe until these things stopped, and how do you stop them unless you have heard widely what they are? In a safely non-deletable way on paper: for it's no good putting them in an Amazon e-book where the site's lawyers reserve a power to turn round and say, no no no, delete to be on the safe side. So the media are turning their backs on child safety unless they read this and chase after these things' publishing.
• Where competitive jobsearch utterly has never worked for us, the approach that works is to have aspie employment services who talk through both our strengths and our limitations with an employer to work out a working niche for us. But more ethical accountability upon these services is needed, to prevent the malpractice of them turning round and claiming that a third party problem that arises after you are in a job is not in their remit to deal with. By obvious definition, a remit to support employment automatically includes any problem that affects the work's doability or the work environment's justice in any way. This an item I am holding Edinburgh's new local Autism Plan responsible to put right locally.

Maurice Frank

lose a small object = sent away from your friends.

In the latest tabloid racist crackdown on our European friends, anounced today, for other EU citizens begging is going to become a deporting offence.

I see an autism discrimination in this, related to travel documents and their losability. The danger we are all in from having to carry travel documents, tickets or passports, which are capable of getting lost by human error, and the sudden enormous effects if they do get lost far from home. Still not yet taken up publicly by the big charities, I have long made a case that all travel documents' losability and stealability is a discriminatory extra endangerment of everyone with autism related conditions, and this makes a disability discrimination case against their existence.

This is because of "fine motor clumsiness", having an impaired physical skill at handling objects, especially small objects and small details. Arises in dyspraxia, attention deficit, Irlen's syndrome, and simply in autistic sensory overload.

So it occurs to me, for aspies who are other EU citizens. What if you lose your ticket because of autistic issues with motor skills, you are stranded in trouble up against transport systems being totally noncommittal and unhelpful to you, you are not going to get out of trouble quickly unless you can raise money for a new fare, so you beg? Sometimes I have been begged to in Edinburgh by folks with a story of needing to finance a journey home, and can't be sure they are making it up. In a desperate situation not your fault and whose capability to happen is utterly unjust, suddenly you can be sent back to your other EU country for it and not allowed back here for a year.

Exactly the type of serious emergency possibility that is why ordinary aspies need our direct voice, like through ANS, to force the big charities' and professionals' hands to take a position on it.

Maurice Frank

trial by face.

Letter writers published in the Times yesterday and the Metro today are so important to protecting justice. Saying: a jury is supposed to decide guilt or innocence from evidence, to do it by looking at faces is like relying on witchcraft and is no guide at all to a court case's facts.

More than they may realise, there was a particular minority group put in danger by Kenneth Clarke's outburst about seeing body language in court, us. What can't aspies and all levels of autistics do? Communicate effectively and give normal social signals. That includes engaging visually, includes facial expression. Our instinct is remain stony faced and avoid eye contact because we don't have culturally learned ways to do anything else. We can neither see body language nor show it.

For courts to allow juries to look at body language in judging evidence of crime, as Kenneth Clarke describes, is to load the system unjustly against a section of society. No lawyer is responsible who still invites this to happen. He has spoken without any sign of minority awareness. Autistic people can not do body language, or eye contact. If we are judged on body language or face, we risk appearing guilty by reason of an inbuilt personal disadvantage.

Maurice Frank.

I've started so I'll finish.

A tip to autism workers throughout the entire scene. The type of tip that only an experience prompts you to realise is needed to give. Concerning us speaking in meetings, and "facilitation" or chairing.

A basic item you will have been trained is that anxiety affects our confidence and fluency to be able to speak up in a group, even at the moments when we have something to say. Now, one of anxiety's focusses is on successfully conveying what you want to say. By common sense, this means being allowed to complete saying it.

But aspies can become focussed on banging on at length on the topic that concerns them, losing all focus on the audience and the discussion's need to flow on. When we are saying something long, it is not necessarily the case that we are going to monologue endlessly until stopped, but of course, to any worker hearing it the possibility exists. The potential problem exists, and any worker or meeting facilitator does not know whether we are going to monologue or finish our point quickly, and the discussion might get disrupted. So what should they do?

Obviously, they should find out. They should ask us how much we have to say, to complete our point. That way they will find out if we are focussed enough that we are completing a single point at all. if we are, we are taking part in the discussion fairly. If there is a lot left to say it might need abbreviating - but having started, having been allowed to start making a point, which includes stating the facts that back it up, we must be allowed to finish. So that we are heard and construed correctly. So that our communication succeeds. SO THAT WE ARE CARED ABOUT as participants. Find out how much is left to say to complete the aspie's point, engage with them to fit that to the discussion's available timescale.

What then is obviously wrong and workers should not do? They should not assume "oh, aspie banging on, must cut the flow" without further thought. They should not cut across our flow without intent of letting us continue, to just assert that it will fit better to say at a possible later time and the meeting must now move on. If they do that, if they don't bother about letting us finish what we have started, that is uncaring towards the content of what the aspie has to say. It shows unconcern for it to be heard accurately, which means completely. It shows disregard of the potential for embarrassment when an unfinished half-said point is misconstrued.

Sometimes a monologuing aspie may be of a type who habitually has no awareness of how long they intend to go on speaking and who is regularly not offended by curtailing unfinished and gets to live with it habitually. The danger is this makes it a habit for the autism worker too, to apply the same standard towards every aspie, and towards the very different ones who are not regular monologuers and who are saying something a bit long because they need to, with every clear idea of its ending. The one case is no guide to the other. They are 2 very different circumstances of meeting participation fairness, and hence of impact on the person when it is got wrong.

• Just saying it's the wrong moment to bang on and cutting off our speech arbitrarily without regard to its content: wrong, bad, damaging, harmful.
• Asking us how much more to say and arranging that, even if rushed, we get to finish the point we have started: good practice, always the right thing to do, caring, need.

Maurice Frank

Emails that look successfully sent may not arrive! Reliability.

You can actually be sent emails, that look properly sent to the sender and have not bounced, and not receive them. Did you think you already knew that because of the arrogantly strong spam filtering systems some folks like to have, taking the decisions for them and never showing them the selected against mails? Ah, no this is not about spam filtering. Quite apart from that, proper emails, from your well-established contacts, even your listed contacts! From anyone! Can look entirely successfully sent, to the sender, does not bounce back to them, yet does not arrive to be seen by the recipient.

Are all the technical whizzkids used to this sort of thing and unsurprised? For the rest of the world it is a shocker, we need to circulate lots of messages about it.

We have got into a habit of relying on records of sent mails to know a mail has arrived, unless it bounced back. Usually we have found that reliable in practice. But it's still not reliable. This affects the entire reliability of sending emails, for everyone, between every system. Every email hosting company still needs to ascertain that every other company's system will either bounce an email or actually get it to the account holder.

I have experienced it in the context of BT (British Telecom, for overseas readers) ending its relationship with Yahoo. For 9 years it totally appeared that BT addresses had simply been taken over by Yahoo and so permanently were Yahoo really. It has turned out they are not: all that time BT was paying Yahoo for the service, mostly being associated with its broadband service. After the change was announced, I did not leave any more email life in my old BT account than continuity of uses I was already using it for: everything else I moved elsewhere. With BT's new service unknown in nature, and becoming paid for too, it would have been wrong to stay dependent on it in any long term way. But to help with continuity I thought it would be a fair deal to keep the BT address temporarily until I was satisfied I had disposed of every piece of email business where address continuity would be helpful and avoid confusion - a gradual changeover better than a sudden abrupt change. Surely a fair bargain to pay a small amount for that. But this common sense has been rebuffed by their unbeatable total shambles in which the service has not been delivered - ever since the changeover day Sep 16 I have not received any incoming emails! Including test ones sent to myself.

BT's technical helpline is a monster consumer experience of impenetrable call centres, a chaos where they seem to clutch at every possible cause to try that they can think of, with no real idea whether it is likely to be right, and where they are all differently informed and give you conflicting information on which of 3 phone numbers you can use and their opening hours. On an 0808 number that I was twice told is open 24/7, but it's not, eventually a 45 minute call went through both companies, the second attempt at that - previously there had been a call where they said they were putting me through to Yahoo and didn't! In the second phase of this call I got a guy who claimed he had fixed it, but it would take several days for the missing emails to be "retrieved" and show. Will believe it when I see it, there is no sign of them yet. Looks like won't be keeping that account for as long as planned.

You don't want to be on the end of any email company's technical helpline fighting over not receiving emails that look successfully sent to their senders. You need to know that sent can be relied on or else you will receive a bounce back: you need that to be continuously reliable, you can't carry on your email business with this frequently failing and emails missing. Email companies need to know that too, to provide their service, that they are not up against unreliable non-service messes like BT. Everyone tell their friends. It needs circulating as widely as possible across the web, that every email company needs to ascertain this freshly, all over again, with every other email company.

Maurice Frank

UPDATE RECd 20 SEP 14. The eventual explanation of this, found after 9 months, was:

"There was not an alias built on the server recognising your account. Once this was recognised and built you were able to send and receive emails as normal, so unfortunately any emails presented to your account during this period would not have been received for which I apologise for."

Sounds like a technicality most folks would have no idea is possible. It remains a particularly bad technicality for it not to bounce the missing emails back to their senders. There is no word on them fixing the system to prevent that situation, in a world where most folks expect emails to either arrive or bounce.

Re: An interesting new autism theory

This post below from David Seagrave is in response to an article recently posted on the ELAS Google Group.  See here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/05/11/a-radical-new-autism-theory.html

 

From David Seagrave

 

As a small boy I was convinced that I was a LUNATIC and that was greatly reinforced by the events in 1953 which I have described in detail,which are outside the scope of this Account I can recall how my photographic memory picked up trivial details even when I was aged 5 and living in Bideford (for instance coming across a seemingly empty shell on Westward Ho beach and finding a hermit crab inside it which squirmed and I was frightened of it) Then  such matters as the route numbers of buses Perhaps someone can check to find that Route 101 ran from Bideford to Barnstaple in 1945 ! It was as if my developing brain was a blank videotape which recorded things entirely at random if it had a shutter mechanism that took snaps as I travelled around and a few of these "mental  snapshots"  persist in my mind even now

 

With ageing these mental photographs fade and nowadays I have acquired a filtering mechanism for example I skim headlines but a few things stick easily such as reports of sex-abuse by Catholic priests I once had a photographic memory for junk facts about railways After diagnosis with AS I became aware how I BORE PEOPLE so I consciously willed myself to forget junk facts about anything When afterwards I met rail enthusiasts who rabbitted on about railway matters imperceptible to nearly everybody  else I saw myself as a CRASHING BORE  I found that this tendency crept into my knowledge of photography when junk facts about the subject crept into my short stories 

 

We are perhaps unable to judge the relevance of all this detailed input to everyday life It DOES come in useful for example in remembering the precise location of road hazards so I recall how when returning to Stafford after dark I would crawl past a crossroads with sign for DERRINGTON to look for a raised grating that nearly threw myself off my scooter and then weave past it at about twice walking pace THIS is Asperger strength !

I cannot explain  why EYES SCARE ME so intensely that I cannot bear to look at people even now and eye contact induces mental tremors utterly beyond the limits of language  So I have never learned enough about body language or facial expression to be an accurate judge of it Yet in today s portrait of Andrew Marr in the Herald I see a man whom I would describe as a Radiant Vessel of God - it conveys the image of God Revealed In All His Beauty gushing  forth from a courageous man who has conquered a stroke Andrew Marr has a timelessness in his face I can spot facial expressions of what I call degenerate people but I cannot define what it is about their faces which silently shouts that they are alcoholics or drug users   

 

Whenever I feel GUILTY I cannot bear to look at myself in a mirror Yet when the light is in the right face I see myself as a timeless Radiance and never more so than in my Mynydd Mawr portrait taken in 1982 when I was 40 years old with ample shock of hair

 

 There are many sensory inputs which disturb me in the same way I find that the type face now in use on Ryvita cartons is too frightening to look at I have ALWAYS felt that certain lettering is  frightening ,for I could read at the age of three by means of the contemporary advertisements for Oxo,Bovril & all in distinct type faces I perceived car and bus radiators as MOUTHS OF MALEVOLENT CREATURES

 

In "The High Road To Bickulphstow " I explore the language leakage with germs and Germans and how as a very small boy Alan confuses flies with aircraft This is a reconstruction of my own earliest perceptions of aircraft as malevolent beings .

 

I have written how I was scared at the sight of a burnt out Womens Institute on the way to primary school ,and an overturned car and particularly disturbed by photographs of railway accidents and air disasters in the contemporary newspapers where facts such as the location and type of aircraft stuck readily in my mind

 

My conviction of being a LUNATIC ,as a boy was in fact a precocious foreknowledge of my present panache as a writer where my characteristic style is to put myself into the shoes of my leading characters -including SCHOOLGIRLS and ELDERLY LADIES ! as i write through their voices as their streams of consciousness  in "the First Person Present Immediate " to convey often very tragic themes and above all the stories about Parfitt and Smethurst that lead to their deaths  and of course John Barming s streams of consciousness in both the Narrative (Welcome To Alloa ) and the Radio Dialogue 

(The Arnsbrae Litter Bin ) whilst I use the same technique in my most wicked story of all-perhaps unpublishable -I wo nt reveal the plot -who se title refers to me- 

 

WITH A LOUD CREAKING OF HIS ARTIFICIAL LEG   !

THE CULTIVATION OF HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

I seek to explore how higher consciousness should be cultivated in the population as the principal goal for the advancement of Civilisation I was jolted into an appreciation of my own personal development on a bus ride where I saw young men oblivious to their whereabouts listening to music through tiny devices which plug into their ears whilst earlier on I had been taking notes about an essay – about Higher Consciousness !

I had proposed a kind of periodic table of personality types comparable to that of chemical elements with the important difference that with the RIGHT KIND OF EDUCATION which I call Divine Alchemy people can mutate from less developed personalities into those personality types which are analogous to the precious metals I am of course following PLATO s footsteps in classifying people but whereas Plato and others saw people as locked into roles or CASTES for life I would insist that a stimulating environment enabled people to TRANSMUTE THEMSELVES into those people who have Higher Consciousness

I was greatly offended by a free brochure advertising the “delights “ of activities in the Falkirk area which are pitched at a reading age of no higher than 14 I am absolutely totally alienated by “popular culture “ and the intellectual level of the Edinburgh Festival has apparently declined ,with fewer and fewer shows or exhibitions which appeal to me.Is it that I am now a silly old man ?looking back to the years of my prime with rose tinted glasses ?

I cannot be idle as the hourglass of my life runs low I have a compulsion to make a mark on each day by some form of creative activity So my home is crammed with so many things that I can scarcely move .As I am a bachelor I have NOBODY TO BE LOYAL TO and this depresses me no end I have worn glasses since age 9 but with that came a faculty to SEE BEYOND the common run of everyday life towards some ultimate destiny for each and everybody .That I insist is the ability to create works of abiding value which are quite unique I have coined the word ENDEOFACT to describe these works ,to signify “the manifestation of God within anybody “

I have explained Contributionist theology in several other essays I have to draw attention to that cardinal principle that humans Create themselves In The Image of God by pushing themselves to the limits of their powers and in doing so through creating entirely original works add to the sum of Meaning Whenever anybody appreciates any artwork this is GOD MANIFESTING ITSELF THROUGH ONE OF ITS NEURONS

Before Men evolved the world was sculpted by ice ages and continental drift Dinosaurs might conceivably evolved Higher Consciousness and established a civilisation where beings with our kind of written language would have created entirely original works of every kind from poetry and music to magnificent urban buildings

The earliest peoples passed through the Nant Francon Pass without asking why it was formed It was left to DARWIN to deduce how it was formed (so to the Dioramas of the Pass during the Ice Age and as it is now ,in London s Geological Museum ) No0w DARWIN who proposed Evolution was by that act of setting out his theories A MANIFESTATION OF GOD EVOLVING ON EARTH His particular Godlight has been an agent of Mental transmutation for all who read understand and accept the concept of evolution When he arrived at Nant Francon and deduced how it was sculpted by glacial action and set that out NANT FRANCON GLOWED WITH DARWIN S GODLIGHT

In this life I have been so moulded by self motivated learning at Red Hill Remedial School that my whole life s orientation is towards adding to the sum of Meaning through my original works I once had a weird dream of a dinner party where everybody got drunk and threw food at one another I prepared a synopsis at Haymarket station and on the train journey wrote my short story NEXT STOP ,FLEET STREET based upon the dream as the train crossed the Forth Bridge In MY purposeful action in creating that story from what I remembered of the dream somehow the passage of that particular train was an emission of what I call Godlight – my action of narrating a story about drunken people throwing food at the leading character which ONLY I MYSELF could write

Is this how I differ from the common run of people ? Am I mistaken in the belief that absolutely anybody could master short story writing and draw plots from their dreams so that on journeys they would write polished prose and alight jubilant that they had created something entirely original ?

I read the chilling article in the London “Times “ how today s children are doomed to die before their parents of diseases caused by lack of exercise and consumption of junk foods Baroness Greenfield has warned the nation that all the children s brains are being MISWIRED AND CORRUPTED by television and violent video games so that by the time they are adults they will be merely clever animals bereft of all that makes Humans Vessels of God ( and see my story NO FOREIGN SCUM ARE WELCOME IN HEWISBRIDGE which was provoked by her stern warning )

I have argued that my father s generation were the most capable people who have ever lived since they endured the Great Depression and the Second World War to raise their families during the severe Austerity that lasted till 1952 They had imbued their offspring –MY generation –with a Code of Behaviour derived from Christian ethics which had been serviceable and sturdy enough for themselves but has now collapsed because of the way Big Business has taken over the world economy and corrupted absolutely everything in life in the pursuit of Profit If nothing is done immediately teenage children will be dying in their middle age leaving their OWN CHILDREN AS ORPHANS and that next generation will be so incapable of coping with the world of a round 2060 that I foresee the total breakdown of civilisation

The other day I decided to produce cloudy-sky backcloths to go behind model railways I came across a tin of outdoor white paint that had congealed into a gooey mess and decided to see if I could save it by picking up a squodge of the paint and rubbing it (made grey with addition of diluted black ) onto sheets of plywood To my utter delight it worked so well that I joyfully made about 10m of backcloth ! This is the LATERAL THINKING which is the main attribute of a fully developed mind that Edward de Bono explained in his books on the subject He cites such men as Alan Turing father of the computer as lateral thinkers and teaches the subject My FATHER was very offended indeed when I tried to explain lateral thinking

Am I being utterly presumptuous or big-headed simply by writing this Essay about Higher consciousness and drawing from my very own experiences : ? I had gone for a Sunday evening stroll in Townhill Woods to the summit of the shale-bing hill I call Lupin Hill and sat in the twilight appreciating the afterglow I felt supremely thankful for being alive and having the faculty to appreciate the afterglow Even as grey clouds massed over Townhill I gazed at the sky and considered how to reproduce the Form Of Stormclouds .The following day I produced the backcloths

I go through my literary works and appraise both exceedingly tragic stories written when I am depressed and wickedly funny stories but paramountly lyrical descriptions of ordinary things such as FIFTEEN KILOMETRES IN THE FOG which can be appreciated as entirely the result of my fully developed mind that is perhaps expressed best of all in my vivid descriptions of entirely imaginary places ,Though people who remember steam trains are now dying off I trust that my models of steam-era trains (and buildings and bridges etc ) are also intrinsically valuable as uniquely my Endeofacts

Now I turn to my literary works about Alan Moelwyn Wright which systematically describe a parallel universe where at least in Avalonshire Righteousness is cultivated by his Contributionist movement That Righteousness is defined as the promotion of Higher Consciousness in people by all possible means Alan s goal for all in his care is to bring about that passion for self-creation in the Image of God which is what drives me on till I drop dead Now just as PLATO signally failed to set up his Republic in Greek Sicily ,and ROBERT OWEN died a broken man after the collapse of his New Harmony in Indiana am I doomed to die an unfulfilled old man before Civilisation finally collapses ?

Is it therefore entirely presumptuous of me to seek to cultivate Higher Consciousness in my neighbours as Alan Wright strives to live according to his names

The Presence of God Creator who dwells by the Bald White Mountain ?

Dear Reader I dare you to expound a better goal for individual people,governments and all Mankind than the cultivation of Higher Consciousness

David Seagrave Dunfermline Library 15-8-2013

Beyond Autistic Identity

As my 72nd birthday approaches,I stand on a figurative mountaintop.The view is vertiginous and I am so high above the common herd that people in the market squares register like gaily costumed ants Though I am acutely short sighted ,from my “dragon s eyrie “ I can clearly see beyond the present day to events after I am dead which if people persist in their habits,will lead to the collapse of our civilisation.

PLATO had classified people into the GOLD caste (the ruling caste ) the SILVER caste (the merchant caste ) and the BRONZE caste (everyone else ) in The Republic Down the ages there have been ways of classifying personality types by such eminent psychologists as H J Eysenck which are in use for example to weed out conscriptees unfit to carry guns A Raymond Cattell from America perfected his 16-Personality-Factor Scale which seems to be a far more reliable way of assessing personalities than any other system .

Mendeleev discovered the Periodic Table of chemical elements Alan Moelwyn Wright is supposed to have set out a Periodic Table of personality types which is compatible with Cattell s classification He declared that unlike chemical elements that CANNOT be transmuted it should be possible for people of any personality type to TRANSMUTE THEMSELVES to “higher types of person” by dint of STERN WILLPOWER and PERSISTENCE at demanding activities of any kind So Alan s Moelwyn Pedagogy is directed at the cultivation of Virtues in all in his care

I am NOT the boy who set sail for Dieppe in September 1960 and about a week later was enormously enriched for my stay in Dieppe unaccompanied by my parents I trust that on my life s journey though I have made many mistakes (and on several occasions been a split second from a fatal accident ) I have transmuted myself through dint of my willpower to become a Short Sighted Dragon of Alan s own mental and moral stature

Since diagnosis with AS I am as conscious of my Asperger differentness as I am of my amputated leg – for most of my waking existence unaware of it just as right now wearing Gripperbreeks I can feel the library floor with my right foot Or indeed be aware that I am wearing glasses I AM VERY AWARE how I differ from the common herd whenever I am in a supermarket or suffer the ubiquitous RACKET imposed on me even in banks .

My Asperger differentness is therefore a total alienation from contemporary “culture “ I had received a brochure advertising the “delights “ in the new county of Falkirkshire all pitched at a mental age of no higher than 14 Is there anything happening in Falkirkshire other than the monthly Toy Fair at Graeme High School where I used to buy up bits for my model trains (and bought NOTHING on my last visit?) Or perhaps a stroll along the Union Canal towpath yes there is! A well preserved reach of the Antonine Wall !

I may be looking at my past through rose tinted glasses but it seems to me as Paul Kingsnorth the environmental writer declares “there has been a scouring out of social value “ In the name of Profit everywhere resembles everywhere else but for a few historic buildings which mark out each town along ancient highways whereas when I hitch hiked along the Great Lands End Road as a young man every market town was excitingly different Oh the magic of discovering monuments like the Monks Lavatorium in Sherborne which had hitherto been merely a smudge of rooftops seen from a passing train ! Then in 1962 I was footloose and free in North Devon my birthplaceland to discover how little had changed in Bideford where I had lived till age five and a half

I observed youths with the tiny music-players like hearing aids plugged into their ears on a bus and questioned a young mechanic about these devices They were entirely lost to the world,these youths and on that journey would not have spotted landmarks in time for them to alight from that ,the last bus from Glasgow to Dunfermline I recalled a SF story of my boyhood about a world where most people had deliberately lost touch with reality by “dream-tanks “ where in trances they acted out being beautiful and famous ( Is this the plot of Huxley s Brave New World ?) Last Sunday I went for a stroll to the former shale bing I call Lupin Hill just 15 minutes walk through Townhill Woods and dense undergrowth where a century ago there was a coal mine and fantasised how someone from 1913 might have felt as he stepped through time to find this amazing wilderness where once there was deafening racket and belching smoke The afterglow lingered and I felt supremely grateful that I am an Englishman and I have the faculty to appreciate such simple joys as that afterglow

In my other essay CULTIVATION OF HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS I expound the idea that the destiny for absolutely everybody is to grow into a Hand of God by the exercise of STERN WILLPOWER I write about the Evolution of Higher Consciousness and Darwin s role as indeed a Messenger of God equal to Socrates and Christ by his formulation of the idea of evolution I now declare that we on the autistic spectrum MAY HAVE BEEN CREATED THE WAY WE ARE expressly to work as a synergy to disseminate a Counter-Culture or Moral revolution which would galvanise NT people into developing all their latent abilities in order to adapt and survive in a world where inevitable catastrophes would bring about a severe population crash Perhaps even render huge areas effectively uninhabitable for foreseeable centuries

I ask if it is entirely presumptuous of me ,David Seagrave a quite undistinguished Englishman to have expounded through Alan Wright s voice ,a path to transmutation of every soul into the state I call Dragonhood (see my essay : Tadpoles ,Frogs and Dragons ) The lucky endowment of AS ,being moulded by Red Hill School s self motivated learning and the paradoxes of the “Hither Green Row “ and the accident near Stafford all synerge to give rise to the present moment where I on my figurative mountaintop stand supremely grateful and ready to throw a mental ladder down to the marketsquares so people can climb to my dizzy height and in doing so grow into Dragonhood Who will lend me a light omnibus and driver ? Who in the market squares wants to accompany me up a lofty mountain on a bright Sunday to discover the presence of God within themselves ?

In my self-created Dragonhood do I soar far beyond autistic identity ?
David Seagrave Dunfermline Library 16 – 8-2013

seen a light?

Comedy billed as not for the easily offended usually fairly certainly means not for me. I'm ever so'seeeeeerious, ya see, with a sick world of injustice always at the forefront of thought, and seriously down on all the ethicality of everyone who has an emotionally cruel sense of humour, which is indistinguishable from being an emotionally destructive person seriously. 1980s alternative comedy was just a fashion statement for blatant bullying and violence, for delight in destroying everything anyone cares about.

But there is a very real practical question around how referring to injustices in comedy sometimes helps the serious impact against them. Like the old Berlin Wall graffiti "Jump over and join the party". Like Life of Brian. When is comedy that refers to injustices ever constructive? Ever not just a further kicking in suffering's face?

When it is open to thinking about. When it is not an act of bullying aggro with a socially intimidating effect. The way all that distressingly aggressive 1980s alternative comedy fired up all that is ugliest in peer groups, is why it failed to get across the serious political messages it sometimes hoped to.

Fringe stand-up performer Abigoliah Schamaun makes you think, because every time she crashes through an offence barrier she actually pauses and reflects on it, checks out how the audience feels with it. It gives the whole question of offence a significantly different feel. It is more survivable for the audience, and each time you wonder whether it is more justified for the performer, because you are not just getting hammered by it, passively. For usually that aspie unfriendly helpless position, take whatever I throw at you and like it, is the relationship an audience who feel ever so super-cool really have towards a comic who wants to make them sick. An audience who have the fairness of their own feelings acknowledged are in a stronger feeling, better feeling, less pushed around, position.

Seriously don't want that light bulb she eats to be real, or she won't be performing for long. No audience can pass on the reason for doing it, because there isn't one.

Maurice Frank

cumulative impact of the benefit changes

We should circulate matters of practical importance to folks' life viability. The answer to the problem that it might make the blog appear politically biased, is to state a willingness also to post for any local aspie who wants to take the opposite view.

This is circulated by Liam Byrne the shadow minister for work and pensions, seeking for folks to ask their MPs, of any party, to support a parliamentary vote for a study of the total effect all the benefit changes combined. Not just of each single change in isolation, which can always be made to sound less. Some of the impact comes from combined effects:

After more than 3 years in power, it’s time for this government to finally come clean and tell us exactly what impact their changes will have on the lives of disabled people and their carers.

So on Wednesday 10 July, Labour will drag ministers to the House of Commons to debate the changes they have made that affect disabled people, and at about 16:00 we will force a vote to demand a Cumulative Impact Assessment by Oct 2013 at the latest – and we will be calling on MPs from across the House to support it.

I am asking supporters to help build pressure on the government in 3 ways:

• Write to your MP and ask them to back the motion
• Write to your local paper and explain why we urgently need a cumulative impact assessment
• Tweet your support using #MakeRightsReality – here’s the link to the motion (liambyrne.co.uk/?p=4534)

Please share this page with anyone who might be interested.

Here’s the motion in full: “That this House believes that the Government should publish a cumulative impact assessment of the changes made by this Government that affect disabled people (to be published by Oct 2013).”

blow out loud

Campaign mail from Peter Gregson, a council worker and campaigner for the council to have system for its workers to do whistleblowing on malpractices, anonymously so they can avoid getting victimised in their jobs for it. Started as an Edinburgh campaign but this petition applies the idea to the whole country, because why not? His campaign is at www.kidsnotsuits.com

Hi petition-signer, As well as the article, the Sunday Express opinion leader gave the petition a nice puff yesterday. If you want to add comments and sign the petition, be my guest. It's at www.scottish.parliament.uk/gettinginvolved/petitions/whistleblowing and has 38 signatures now. It's "Calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to support the introduction of staff whistle-blower hotlines to report mismanagement in Scottish local authorities, with reports overseen by councillors from each party."

Forward this e-mail onto others; folk who live anywhere can sign- there's no restrictions - and no minimum number needed to get the petition heard. Edinburgh Council, due to discuss the matter on Aug 29, proposes a weak whistleblowing policy - hiding behind the Scottish Government Councillors Code of Conduct which tells Councillors "not to engage in direct operational management of the Council's services; that is the responsibility of the Council's employees". Clearly this piece of legislation is being misread, and this is our chance to show that.

You tell'em

Links received through the local bedroom tax campaign, on a reaction to a problem of GPs not knowing the regulations affecting them concerning patients' positions if they get kickings from the Work Capability Assessment system. "Doctors have been washing their hands by refusing to provide Further Medical Evidence (citing workload and fees/contractual issues as reasons) to patients appealing against erroneous decisions - 40% of which are overturned without representation and 72-80% with representation. We have pioneered a solution which would work for the GPs and patients: " blacktrianglecampaign.org/2012/11/21/important-black-triangle-dpac-regs-29-35-campaign-failed-your-dwpatos-wca-intend-to-appeal-download-these-documents-for-your-gp/">blacktrianglecampaign.org/2012/11/21/important-black-triangle-dpac-regs-29-35-campaign-failed-your-dwpatos-wca-intend-to-appeal-download-these-documents-for-your-gp/"> This is the letter we're going to distribute: blacktrianglecampaign.org/2013/05/05/leading-doctors-protest-at-cruel-disability-assessments-letter/ The submission to the Scottish Parliament to be handed to Dr Buckman and BMA Scotland's Dr McDevitt: blacktrianglecampaign.org/2013/06/05/black-triangle-campaign-submission-to-the-scottish-parliament-health-committee-open-evidence-session-on-the-role-of-gps-and-the-dwp-atos-work-capability-assessment-regime/

attack on the core of a genuine aspie scene

Picked up in conversation within Elas a morally shocking news of local group practice elsewhere, in south west England particularly. Not knowing how many groups this applies to, nor wanting to back them into a corner when it needs keeping easy for them to change away from this horrid practice, it is better not to name a particular group. Instead, to flag up that this needs checking out by prospective joiners of aspie groups in that whole reigon. There is an aspie group maybe several, run by one of the big autism charities, newcomers to the group are getting vetted, for their compatibility and whether they are disruptive, before they are being allowed to join.

Even worse, it is said to be existing women members of the group who want this nastiness done, in order to filter out men for acceptable non-lustfulness of character - that is gender discrimination and PC taken to a tarring attack on all men. For no clear line exists between social behaviour to befriend a group and social behaviour that a cliquey bully can conveniently interpret as sexual.

Both groups and charities included in these vetting practices are a direct cause of any suicides that result from the rejection experience. England still lacks an outlet like we have in ANS to pursue the cause of holding perpetrators to account on exactly those terms. Aspies who have already experienced emotionally damaging wrongs or feuds from what turn out to be other aspies, in other places, might then see the vetting charity for its own reasons decide to reject them and accept their adversary. That would be an emotional abuse.

These things are a test, and they must be kept glaringly publicly a test, of the aspie scene's genuineness in each region. For the many of us who have signed up to the message of "nothing about us without us", to speak for ourselves without going through the big charities, we know that our true voice is only through a free and tolerant aspie scene, without any purging rejections affecting who it consists of. It does not consist of the voice of the filtered favoured select of a big charity. That is a controlled puppet false scene.

The concept of "disruptive" is very obviously politically abusable. Throughout life it can be used for controlling and manipulating any group into consisting only of who it suits the folks already dominating it to have it consist of. This is a fundamental test of liberty and of being a genuine voice: any participant group of any nature that has a filter for being disruptive is an unfree facade and effectively a cult, and merits distrust accordingly. Anyone who determined to continue to pursue an item of fairness, an undoing of an injustice done to them, such as a rubbishing of their character or a kicking into an inferior social status, or a very practical exclusion that worsens their lives, can be called disruptive. Unscrupulous groups who prefer them to shut up and accept a noncommittal brushing off will do this. Every case of calling such a person disruptive is always a case of abuse.

Maurice Frank

Atomised

There are several atomic clock exact time websites, that you can google in an instant. Surprisingly, why should I be surprised what a cynic, yes they do show the same minutes and seconds, the same time. They may not show the same hour depending on what time zone they are for, of course.

Useful if you are a scientist timing an experiment or a sporty competitor stressfully timing a race, and you have a spare computer screen handy or perhaps most folks bring them up on their web connected mobiles. But when else in your life would you think you might have any need to look up the atomic pinpointed time?

How about, when see that the digital clock at the Ferrytoll park and ride bus station north of the Forth Bridge is 2 minutes fast? You see, as I did this evening, that while the clock is displayed to passengers, it appears to be being used to time bus departures too. Several buses itemised as departing at what that clock showed as their correct times but were in fact significantly earlier.

It explained the mystery of an absent and missed connection that I had clearly got there in time to catch, onto one of the town routes into east Dunfermline. The atomic clock sites were the confirmation I needed that it was not my time that was wrong, to know for a fact there was a clock fault to itemise to Stagecoach along with the early departures. But arriving just after working hours had ended on a Friday evening we can guess this will go on all weekend at least. Anyway, if you travel through the Ferrytoll, check your watch by the atomic clock websites before you go, and you can check on whether the clock there is still wrong, and complain about the effect on passengers if they don't fix it for their timekeeping.

That is when we need atomic clocks. When we are trying to keep transport running properly instead of lying down and accepting having it run any old how. It is also when we need a blog based in Edinburgh to write about Fife on. You notice that 2 successive posts here have been about Fife, but the now defunct aspie group that used to exist in Fife and became too controlled never chose to go for enough of a free speaking culture to have a blog, did it, you will remember? Even when that group was still going it was still us who served Fife for this democratically necessary voicing side of what should be all local aspie groups' life.

Maurice Frank

30 years is too long to be given the creeps

Right now I am sitting in Inverkeithing library. Wonder if I will still be popular with its staff after writing this.

As many folks will know, I am a survivor of, and very emotionally defined by, a horror experience of school, 30 years ago. The work demands and their enforcement became impossible to survive, there was no rational way to function, and the result was a stress collapse involving catatonic states, and it was even a fight to get it recognised as serious, a survival fight. When I have given full descriptions of it to parties with an obligation to take an interest in child safety, e.g. to the NHS in chasing up its past actions, or to the National Association for Gifted Children as I posted on here about recently, here is an important detail I have mentioned about the danger I was in at that time. That I was too frightened to run away, because if caught I would then be considered a wilful offender and as a result would not get the stress collapse accepted.

This I am always aware of, in profound distress, the more I hear of the ever worsening police state over children concerning school attendance, that the Blair government started. Because this has been going on while the political and media systems wilfully exclude from any consideration or any platform to be widely heard and appreciated by voters, the evidence that school can ill treat to an unsurvivable extent. In the Western democracies and in an era paranoid for child protection in so many ways that have put a lot of fear into adults' lives, this danger is selected to be totally unheard and unappreciated by voters.

So the distress of my memory and what I could be seeing happen has, just now, intruded onto my space as a library user. At close quarters, around the same table, I have seen a quite young child put through a grilling by the police in front of us all, on suspicion of truancy. It was the library staff who called them.

So long as experiences like mine, of having a survival need around destroyed life not to be in school, are not in the big scale public domain and are not being answered to by government departments over education, any kid who this happens to might be as unsafe as I was. In order not to tread on my damage and by it affect my emotional ability to focus on my own serious tasks, the library has a duty to its adult users not to do things like this until after anyone with evidence like mine has had the opportunity to share it as widely as we think necessary, by automatic right. What if this duty conflicts with the library being under orders from anywhere else to take these actions? Only resolvable by having that evidence brought out, not by in any way trying to avoid it.

Maurice Frank