Child adoption: parents that had been through this system were telling me to run away leave the country

"there is a vast amount of money given to councils to get children under 5 adopted. Before I got involved in it I wouldn't have believed that you could have a child removed when it hasn't been abused. My son was put on a protection plan before he was born"

"When I was pregnant with my son, parents that had been through this system were telling me to run away leave the country because child services would make sure my baby was taken away regardless one way or another. Of course I didn't believe them at the time."

www.assupportgrouponline.org/apps/blog/entries/show/42961801-a-s-s-g-o-christmas-message-d
- a case from England. From the mother's own siteASSGO. Aspie and OCD with an alarming and morally disturbing story of social services constantly on her back ever since a single past event. It's a reminder of Christine MacVicar's flight to protect an adult son too.

Trefoil

www.facebook.com/pages/Trefoil/619203181449072

The FB page of Trefoil, a "working Asperger group", a self-employment project trying to start up, crafts and gardening. Seeking a grassroots level economy and making the point that it should be made easier to do. Arguing that such projects should be encouraged "to help take the unsustainable pressure off social services".

Link from James Smith a friend of ELAS from Teesside.

warning needs passing on, a site that can part families

Warn as many folks as possible who use the big family tree site Ancestry, about an immoral danger there. This affects folks all over the world. I have saved all info + contacts ready to get thrown out of Ancestry for campaigning on this. Would you support an online petition on it?

Here is the danger. If you get sent an invitation for access to a tree, you can only accept it once and then it is gone. But if by accident a different user account, not your own, is signed in on the computer where you are accepting from, your acceptance will go to that different account. The acceptance of your invitation can actually go to the wrong person, there is nothing to make sure it only goes to you. You will not know this can happen before it does. Then after it has happened, that's it, the invitation is gone.

When there isn't a username to give but the member is traceable from other details, support will go in 5 days from "if you could call us on... with the username for the owner of this tree once we verify your account details we can accept this invite for you" to "Unfortunately our privacy policy does not allow us to contact that member on your behalf nor to have the invitation resent to you". This is negligence. No explanation even of why they should have such a privacy policy. Only if you are a full paying member have you any means at all to initiate a contact. This includes if you do a member search on the inviter's real name - you can only find them if they have a public tree, and then if you find them you can't message them unless you are a paying member. But many folks who are free Ancestry users without knowing it's possible for this situation to happen, may not be able to become paying members even if they want to - because only folks with bank cards can do it, and nowadays it's surprising who may not have one, I have seen a bank not want to give one to an old lady with no debt history at all. Anyone without a bank card, using Ancestry without knowing this can happen, could be left totally powerless to contact an inviter whose invitation gone to the wrong Ancestry account. Nor will the inviter will know it has happened.

This is a breach of service to the inviter too. What are you paying for, if this can happen to your invitations and you would not know it? This will leave cousins cruelly cut off from each other, by accident, after Ancestry momentarily let them know each other existed. My lost invitation was exceptionally warmly worded: "With thanks in anticipation. Warmest regards Your cousin." But for the luck that (1) I have a bank card and (2) discovered he belongs to another site too, I could now be utterly cut off from that cousin with no way to let him know this happened, with Ancestry not caring and not explaining any sensible reason for refusing to tell him.

SHARE THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO DOES TREE SITES. If a paying user of Ancestry, demand safeguards before you will stay with them.

Maurice Frank

Action for Botton

A friend of ELAS from that region told us about the present shocking story of use of power in a charity to wind down a long-running support community for a mixture of autistic and learning disabled residents,Botton Village, www.actionforbotton.org/. Though the Botton story is in England, the entirely discretionary insecure nature of charity regulation is equally a concern here.

No matter how corrupt the goings on in any charity, OSCR (Office of Scottish Charity Regulator) has the power to choose whether it regards it as serving "public interest" to bother to do anything. The mere fact that an offence has happened in a charity, a supposedly legally binding constitution has been ignored, does not oblige them to do anything about it. e.g. Even an actual case where a charity closed a bank account belonging to a mental health advocacy group, seized it contents, and only informed the group after doing it, ignoring its constitution, OSCR declined to pursue. Likewise, the Charity Commission there described itself as having the power to "feel" whether or not a case requires its response. Thus:

"Your enquiry will now be assessed. If we feel that the issues do not fall within our regulatory remit you may not receive a response from us. However, if the issues raised fall within our regulatory remit we will aim to respond to you within 15 working days from receipt. Please do not send us a paper version unless we have specifically requested this." Thankfully the news from the Botton site is that the Commission has been induced by sufficient opinion to "take a fresh look at" it: www.actionforbotton.org/Betrayal-of-Trust/Breaches-of-trust

The Charity Commission guidance states:
"A power to expel a member must be exercised in good faith and not capriciously and the basic requirements of a right to be told the nature and details of the offence and reasons for the expulsion or suspension, a right to notice of the hearing and a right for the members to put his case are well accepted". But as the Botton campaign describes: "In 2012 they managed to alter the charity constitution by threatening every member with expulsion if they voted against a key proposal, as a consequence of which the board now has only independent trustees and nobody left to represent Camphill co-workers and their values."

www.facebook.com/action4botton

>Maurice Frank

None out of 3

Besides an NAS social group discriminatorily only for aged under 35, and how is that legal? there is still no adult aspie support in Clackmannanshire. The Forth Valley's position with small council areas has left it as a void in the national coverage, left on the sidelines whle the bigger more prominent conurbations get to set up services. What about a job placing service equivalent to Edinburgh's Intowork, which should be particularly important in this economically oppressive era?

The services that Autism Initiatives has developed in a wide spread across Scotland, Borders, Perth, Highlands, are being missed in the Forth Valley. The perception of why is alarming. It is perceived locally there, that the local dominance by Scottish Autism, headquartered in Alloa, is a discouragement to AI from setting up any projects in the Forth Valley void. That the 3 national autism charities are behaving territorially with each other, allowing each other to be the big boy in certain localities and not intervening in their patch.

Who does that fail to help? The autistic folks ourselves, who are supposed to be the point of all 3 charities' existence. If SA has not set something up in that locality, which AI can set up and has done in many other places, then AI should. Ain't that common sense?

Unless the charities function by common sense and not by mutual politicking, all their supporters and donors must ask themselves who the charities actually care about? Whose interests they work in?

Maurice Frank

ever so easy to get partners

How does this sound to all the single aspies? A question Elas focussed on and held meets on for many of its members? In a society where any action at all towards acquiring a partner is capable of counting as sexual harrassment and getting you into trouble, particularly for straight men, the Home Office are certain enough that anyone with any real orientation is bound to get a partner that on grounds of it they are deporting a Ugandan gay woman to a danger of barbaric stoning. "a 30-year-old Ugandan woman who was raped and identifies as lesbian is being deported because she's been single for 5 years. She has been unable to develop a relationship with a woman because her rape left her traumatized. When she returns to Uganda, she expects to be attacked and stoned."

- from www.thepetitionsite.com/723/403/128/uk-home-office-stop-humiliating-lgbt-asylum-seekers/?z00m=21236825&redirectID=1398972051 So sign it.

Maurice Frank

where was the late Dr Wing for 20 years?

This Daily Telegraph obituary to the recently deceased inventor of the term Asperger Syndrome, Lorna Wing is staggering and baffling, quite angering. It quotes her claiming that her first use of the term in a scientific paper in 1981 opened a Pandora's Box. Over the next 20 years there were 900 published papers on it, including the first diagnostic criteria proposed in 1989 by Stephen Gillberg.

If Wing an academic voice with such effective impact as this, why couldn't she stop it taking 20 years for the condition to become widely known of? It is a too shattering thought to cope with. In the meantime, we were still living out lives not knowing of it, without the back-up and fellowship of an aspie scene, missing out utterly and tragically if we died during that time, and getting into avoidable life troubles including getting into poverty in the right wing neocon economy. Adolescent psychiatry was missing AS and still wrecking lives applying oppressive conformist agendas of personal change that AS proves wrong, and by it leading to neocon economy troubles too. The Enyclopaedia Britannica was still describing autism as Kanner autism with 80% of subjects learning disabled, I remember that from the period when I was beginning to notice the was attention on autism linked to childhood problems, in the years before I discovered modern aspie awareness in 2002.

Where were you left in the neocon world of 1989 if you heard nothing of what Gillberg was doing, and you would never cross the path of a fortuitously well informed and open minded psychiatrist after an adolescent service had already in 1983 acted totally obliviously to autism towards your school crisis?

Wing's experience in the world of academic papers does not match at all the experience of real society and real aspies outside it. She must rationally have realised there were many unreached all through those unbearable lost 20 years, when she made that comment. Why never give us the support of being more angry about that? An urgent social change should just progress with ever so slow effete composure through doctors and the cases that chance across their paths?

Maurice Frank

Don Weitz's 25 reasons why psychiatry must be abolished

www.antipsychiatry.org/25reason.htm Slightly revised version of the original written in Spring 1998. Invites all to SNOWBALL, COPY AND PUBLISH THIS STATEMENT INCLUDING THE NOTE. NO COPYRIGHT OR PERMISSION REQUIRED.

If it is objected that psychiatrists are now diagnosing aspies, they are using a piece of modern knowledge whose emergence psychiatry much slowed and delayed and that undoes lots of what psychiatry said and did. Critical psychiatrists can bear the job title and move away from the practices of psychiatry.

This was shared on the blog Psychiatric Survivors Resources.
Thomas Leonard is a local friend who has researched bad effects of psychiatric medications that are used too frequently. Our fear is always of unrecognised autistics, who got caused up with psychiatric treatment instead, still suffering that physically harmful pseudoscience. www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0044/00448708.pdf‎ This is his submission, number MHB108, on the presently proposed Mental Health Bill.

Have you heard the great news that Switzerland has banned ECT? The Irish Republic also is abolishing giving it against a patiennt's will. There is an awareness ahift about its nonsensical and serious effects.

Dear Luise

wp.rxisk.org/written-on-water/

The story of an aspie girl in Denmark who was slightly too old to be diagnosed in childhood in the 80s, younger than most of us, who was medically murdered by an irresponsible self-perpetuating chain of ever intensifying mental health drugging. Written by her mother. Taken up by American publisher Jorvik, perhaps from e-book impact first.

Trans Pacific Partnership

https://stopthesecrecy.net"

Site of a Canada + US based campaign worried about, and organising against, the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. Among other things claimed to override national laws, it would be about controlling and censoring the internet, making ISP site hosts take down sites. as we know from the deportation of Talha Ahsan, what goes on in web hosting that takes place there affects web use here.

How much difference will it make, when site hosting comapanies like 1&1 self-censor sites already without caring about the background situation's fairness? Which is why blogs are popular and an important alternative to sites.

consumer action

ANS's projected writing on consumer issues is an opportunity to effect a lasting empowerment of us in consumer situations, through open record of the problems that can happen. We should build up some sharing with each other, through ANS, of consumer pitfalls. The resulting responsibility for autism workers to be on guard for them for the folks they work with, helps also the independently living aspies who don't have any workers, because the whole scene has to respond to what is seen can happen.

*If you should buy a bed, avoid any with joints held together by a part called a "dowel", which is a silly flimsy wooden pin a few centimetres long. They are a ridiculous design, because they are made to carry too much weight and they are not substantial enough to do it. they can snap easily, When they do, the whole structure is unusable because half the dowel is left stuck in flush the hole preventing reuse. So see what all the joints are held together by, make sure they are not dowels. Don't ignore any joints where you can't see what holds them together, dowels are likely to be hidden from view because both ends of them insert into a hole. The bed I bought not knowing about dowels I succeeded in getting returned and refunded. A dowel snapped when attaching an end part to the bed's main body, within 2 hours of receiving the bed! They were going to send a whole replacement end part, what an expense for them to have to do that because one small piece of wood snapped. I asked them how they could guarantee that what could snap would not snap again, how in that case the structure could be safe to use, and how expensive would it then be for them to have to keep sending large new parts repeatedly? Unanswerable. I did not have to use trading standards to actually chase them, the company knew I had made them aware of these questions, that was enough. Returned, at cost of an extra delivery outing for them: they had to take it back just to avoid admitting the rest of their stocks of it should not be sold, for it was surely physically worthless to them to take back the actual bed.

*Now, having ANS's consumer writing to cite in my flyers is helping me respond to a particularly bad bus issue. It concerned a council supported service, the 63 Queensferry to Hermiston. That they can leave you for an hour then change their mind about putting on any replacement bus, when one breaks down, it happened with the 0830 first morning bus from Queensferry on Mar 19, is a serious enough failed standard for a supported service they are paying them to run, that the council transport office is chasing them for an explanation. The community council's interest is secured, quite properly, in the prospect of not renewing the support contract for that route with the same company if it defends and does not show measures guaranteeing to eradicate, the practice of leaving passengers misinformed for an hour. But the issue should not be just left until the contract renewal comes up top save bothering. It affects passengers now. To make a significant number of potential passengers living along the route know that this happened and is what they can expect, both is what the bus company deserves and puts a proper pressure on the council for more immediate action. So how can you create some passenger awareness? By putting a flyer around!

Headed:

63 BUS WASTED AN HOUR OF PASSENGERS' TIME.

That is a strong consumer action. I wrote why the council needs to bother:

" This not an innocent consequence of technical problems. To mislead passengers for an hour, kept there awaiting a provision that is then not provided, is a chosen avoidable malpractice. Meanwhile, further down the route folks' morning bus never turned up. Not for the first time. This was why.

Queensferry community council indicates the council support for running the 63 route is due for recontracting in the autumn. For public health, against getting tension and raised blood pressure and strokes from risking this experience too often, the council must not wait until autumn to take Horsburgh off all its supported routes. "

Maurice Frank

Our website is here not there.

Elas's website is now aspergersnet.wix.com/elas.
But the former site is still up and taking time to stop coming higher than the new site in google, because of old links still pointing to it. But it's a broken uncontactable site so we can't put a link into it to the new site. Ain't it frustrating when such blooming chaos makes you harder to find?