It was inevitable that it would happen: a traveler to the US from West Africa has been diagnosed as having Ebola, having begun to exhibit symptoms about four days after arriving in this country. He has been hospitalized in Dallas and is in intensive care, and his close contacts are being investigated and “will be watched for three weeks to see if any symptoms emerge.”
There are many curious statements in the report. The first is this:
The man sought medical care on Sept. 26, but was sent home. He was admitted to the hospital two days later and placed into isolation.
With that history in terms of geography and suspicious symptoms, he was sent back home for two days? Ah yes, we’re in great hands.
Another curious statement is that the others “will be watched.” They actually should be placed in quarantine, but my strong suspicion is that this will not happen.
There’s also the following:
Frieden declined to say if the person with Ebola is a U.S. citizen. This man was visiting and staying with family members, he said.
Why would they not answer that question? It’s fairly obvious that, by their refusal to say, they are most likely admitting that he is not a citizen.
Is it beyond the realm of possibility that we would consider banning entry to this country for non-citizens traveling from Ebola-infected countries? Is that too much to ask? Apparently.
There are a number of other statements that fail to engender tremendous trust at this point, such as the idea that there is “zero risk of transmission” to people on the man’s flight, because he had no symptoms and didn’t have a fever when he boarded it. I tend to believe there is a very low risk of transmission, but zero? That doesn’t even sound like a scientific statement.
I understand that the CDC is trying to discourage panic. But the way to do it is to be straight with us.
Legal Insurrection’s William Jacobson is having a fundraiser for Mandy Nagy to help with her recuperation from her stroke. To contribute to this worthy cause, please go here.
A 37-year-old man has been executed in Iran after being found guilty of heresy and insulting prophet Jonah, according to human rights activists.
Mohsen Amir-Aslani was arrested nine years ago for his activities which the authorities deemed were heretical. He was engaged in psychotherapy but also led sessions reading and reciting the Qur’an and providing his own interpretations of the Islamic holy book, his family said.
Amir-Aslani was hanged last week for making “innovations in the religion” and “spreading corruption on earth”, but human rights activists said he was a prisoner of conscience who was put to death because of his religious beliefs. He had interpreted Jonah’s story in the Qur’an as a symbolic tale.
Iran’s judiciary, which was responsible for the handling of his case, has since denied that Amir-Aslani’s execution was linked to his religious beliefs.
Instead, the authorities allege that he had illicit sexual relationships with a number of people who participated in his sessions and the type of activities he was involved in did not follow an official interpretation of the religion…
Iran’s judiciary has presented little evidence in public relating to the allegations of illicit sexual activities. The judge who presided over his case, Abolghassem Salavati, is known in Iran for leading numerous unfair trials, including many that resulted in execution.
Amir-Aslani’s wife, Leila, told the opposition website Roozonline that she was hoping a high court would strike down his conviction but his sentence was eventually upheld. She told Roozonline that his conviction stemmed from his religious views and no evidence was presented to back up the charges related to his alleged sexual activities.
If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the fact that the sexual charges were trumped up, and that he was executed for his religious views. If you think about it, though, the fact that Iran’s government believes the sex charges would justify their hanging him is just as telling as executing him for heresy.
When George Bush called Iran part of the axis of evil he was mocked for using such a term. But I see no problem with it.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I couldn’t care less about George Clooney.
I don’t like his acting. I don’t like his movies. I don’t like his politics. I find him a bore, and I don’t follow any of it.
But you’d have to be away from a computer to have avoided seeing photos of his recent wedding to British/Lebanese lawyer Amal Alamuddin, and I haven’t been away from a computer. I also—as readers of this blog know—like fashion. And weddings involve wedding dresses.
Alamuddin has an interesting look. She’s a lawyer of some renown (yes, I know she’s on the left in her political leanings, just like Clooney, so they have that in common), but she sure doesn’t look like most lawyers. She looks like a fashion model, tall and rail-thin, a stretched-out ectomorph who is the very epitome of a clothes-horse. She’s considerably younger than he (36 to his 53), but they don’t look as mismatched as that sounds because she doesn’t really look her age.
It’s not that she looks older, it’s that she looks timeless and ageless. Her style is that of a 50s model such as these gals:
They look like women rather than girls, no matter how old they may be. Dignified and very grown-up indeed. That’s how Clooney’s bride comes across. Next to her, he seems almost boyish, despite the gray hair, and as though she’d have to give him lessons in etiquette.
Here’s the couple at their wedding:
You can see that her dress is more covered-up than a lot of the current bridal fashion, which features strapless bodices cut low, and tight form-fitting dresses that are sometimes even transparent. Ugh! Like Kate Middleton before her, whose dress was reminiscent of Grace Kelly’s 1956 number, Alamuddin’s wedding dress conjured up none other than Jackie Kennedy when she got married in 1953:
Why did it take so long for this story to come out?:
An armed man who jumped the White House fence this month made it far deeper into the mansion than previously disclosed, overpowering a Secret Service agent inside the North Portico entrance and running through the ceremonial East Room before he was tackled, according to a member of Congress familiar with the details of the incident.
The man, Omar J. Gonzalez, who had a knife, was stopped as he tried to enter the Green Room, a parlor used for receptions and teas, said the congressman, Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the Republican chairman of a subcommittee looking into the security breach. Earlier, Secret Service officials indicated that Mr. Gonzalez, 42, had only made it steps inside the North Portico after running through the door.
That wasn’t the only error made, not by a longshot. There were multiple slip-ups of basic protocol. What on earth is going on?
Well, there’s one thing going on, but you have to read deeper into the story to spot it:
Although the protocols call for an officer to be standing outside the North Portico door, there was no officer there as Mr. Gonzalez made his way up the steps. The officer who was stationed inside the door failed to lock it after an alarm was sounded that someone had jumped over the fence, the official said.
“At all times there is supposed to be someone at the outside and the inside of the door,” the official said. “The intruder was running so fast that he gets right past the woman who didn’t lock the door. She tries to catch him, and eventually she and another officer tackle the man to the ground, but by that time he was pretty far in.”
Excuse me but: WTF? A woman is stationed in a position where it could easily be expected to be sometimes necessary to physically tackle an intruder? I remember when Secret Service agents in such positions were burly men who looked like bouncers. This is no place for an affirmative action hire.
It also may or may not be relevant that a woman, Julia Pierson, is the current head of the agency. A woman director could certainly be competent in such a position, but it would have to be a very experienced and savvy woman to effectively direct a group that consists predominantly of men. Pierson is relatively new to the job; she was appointed in March of 2013 by President Obama, after the agency’s prostitution scandal.
More:
In addition, Mr. Chaffetz said a system designed to alert agents that a breach of security was in progress apparently did not work as intended, allowing Mr. Gonzalez to surprise the officer at the door. Mr. Chaffetz said that he was told the “crash box” had been silenced or muted at the request of White House ushers, who had complained the boxes were too noisy.
And then there’s the coverup:
In its initial briefings, the Secret Service did not inform the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, that the intruder had made it so far inside the White House, according to an official familiar with the conversations…
White House officials also did nothing in the last week to correct the impression that Mr. Gonzalez had been stopped just inside the front door of the building. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, was asked repeatedly about the incident in the days after it happened and did not disclose the extent of the breach.
I can understand the motivation for not publicly disclosing how far this went, although I don’t agree with the decision. It could certainly be argued that it could further compromise security to let the entire world know how incompetent the Secret Service has become, and how easy it was to get that far inside the White House. But not telling the DHS? That’s absolutely unconscionable, if true.
Pierson is reported to be about to give a statement to the effect that the incident was unacceptable and will never happen again. It was much worse than unacceptable, however. And of course it won’t happen again, at least not exactly that way. But something similarly bad may happen again, or even worse, because these problems with the Secret Service seem deep and systemic.
This is hardly the first recent breach of a serious nature. In 2011, shots were fired that penetrated the president’s residence, and they weren’t responded to properly or in a timely fashion. The investigation of that incident was bungled as well.
Here’s more on the very recent incursion and how the coverup was uncovered. To learn the bigger story required whistleblowers:
The more detailed account of this month’s security breach comes from people who provided information about the incident to The Post and whistleblowers who contacted Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the oversight panel’s subcommittee on national security…
And those crash boxes that were turned off? They are very important aspects of the system rather than tangential ones:
The alarm boxes, which officers call “crash boxes,” are key pieces of the agency’s first-alert system, according to former agents and officials. If officers spot an intruder, they are trained to hit the large red button on the nearest box ”” sending an alert to every post on the complex about the location of an incursion and piping sound from that location to other boxes around the property.
On whose order were these turned off? And will that person be fired?
The article goes on to say the boxes were making the extra noise because they were malfunctioning. They couldn’t be fixed instead of turned off as a result? What actually happened is akin to disabling a smoke alarm because it’s beeping to let you know the battery’s dying. Turning an alarm off is not a solution—but hey, we can’t expect the Secret Service to know that, can we?
[NOTE: Read the whole thing and you will find multiple incidents of incompetence in the 2011 incident which are truly shocking, even if you think you’re already cynical and distrustful enough.]
[ADDENDUM: The agent who tackled the intruder? Off duty, just happened to be in the neighborhood; he hadn’t left yet for the night.]
[ADDENDUM II: Watching Fox News just now, I see that it’s being reported that no one was fired or reprimanded for the 2011 incident’s mishandling, and so far there’s no talk of anyone being fired for this one. It sounds as though the self-esteem movement has come to the Secret Service.]
I’ve written quite exhaustively about the Obamacare narrow network problem, which I know is especially serious in California, because I spent a goodly portion of my spare time last winter researching Obamacare in California for a relative. It was tooth-grindingly, mind-numbingly frustrating and time-consuming to try to get any reliable information at all, but the gist of what I gleaned was bad, if a person wants to have the ability to choose or keep (quaint idea—wherever have we hard it?) his/her doctor.
The LA Timesnow tells us that the situation will be no better in 2015. In fact, it seems that it will be even worse, if possible, in most areas of California.
This was completely and totally predictable, like much of Obamacare’s bad news.
But did you know that Americans don’t really care about choosing their doctors? To say that, one must ignore evidence to the contrary, which says that Americans do care despite the efforts of health care insurance pundits to tell them they shouldn’t care because it doesn’t matter and all doctors are somehow the same:
Yet survey after survey has found that patients in HMOs (like Kaiser) are perfectly satisfied with their health care, and the doctors they have access to. We have a magical tendency to believe, if a doctor has done something good for us, that he or she was the only medical provider in the world who could have done that good. It’s not true.
First of all—and that’s just first of all—many people in Kaiser (at least in the past) were/are there because they chose Kaiser, which is an HMO where your choices of doctors are limited to those employed by Kaiser. Therefore these consumers are not a random sample of people; they are people who might be expected to be among those who care least about doctor choice.
Second of all, other polls indicate that many people—in fact, a majority—do care about choice for the most part.
I am most definitely one of those other people who care. My guess is that those like me, who have had a number of somewhat obscure health problems, value choice even more than most people do, because we’ve learned the value of it from personal experience.
My injuries were such that, if I had not had the capacity, through my health insurance (which for many decades I selected and paid more for in order to retain that choice), to go anywhere in the country for treatment for the nerve injuries in my arms, I would almost certainly have remained so overwhelmed, consumed, and distracted by chronic pain that I would hardly be functioning at all, if indeed I’d managed to survive (I’ve told the story here).
And I’ve seen this happen to many other people, too. Once you’ve had the experience you don’t forget it.
My guess is that many of the people who don’t care about doctor choice are young and healthy, and fortunate enough not to have needed much care, so for them any doctor will do. In fact, they probably almost never even go to a doctor. But someday they will. And most people who are older and/or sicker understand the enormous value of a doctor you like, trust, and have chosen.
Of course, choice costs money. That’s the problem. But one of Obamacare’s greatest flaws is that it not only restricts choice for those with subsidized health insurance, it standardizes all individual policies and restricts choice even for those who pay their own way (socialism is fair because it makes all people equally miserable).
If approved, South Dakota would be added to the list of states with a so-called “any willing provider” laws that requires broader inclusion in health insurance networks. The health insurance industry opposes these laws, arguing that the laws hurt their ability to negotiate with physicians and hospitals and to drive efficient care ”” which, the industry says, translates to higher costs for patients…
Twenty-seven states in all have some form of any willing provider law but they vary significantly, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of these states have had these laws on the books since the 1980s, and the laws can be broad, covering most of a state’s doctors and hospitals, while others much narrower in scope apply to just pharmacies or certain provider types.
These laws reflects people’s dissatisfaction with narrow networks, a dissatisfaction Obamacare advocates are busy denying. How bad is the narrow network problem? This bad:
About 70 percent of health plans sold on the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces this past year had narrow or ultra-narrow networks, according to McKinsey and Co., which defined “narrow” as excluding at least 30 percent of an area’s largest hospitals. Narrow networks were increasingly being used before the ACA, but they’ve become more prevalent under the law…
Yes, this was already a trend. But there were a lot more choices available before Obamacare. After the passage of the Act, narrow networks made a Great Leap Forward:
Those of you who follow this blog know that I don’t ordinarily make too many predictions about who will win an election. I didn’t do it in 2012 either, although unlike many other pundits I felt very pessimistic about Romney’s chances (maybe that’s why I didn’t make a prediction; it was too depressing).
So I’m not going to predict who will take the Senate in 2014. It’s just too close, anyway, or at least it seems that way. In general I believe the polls are fairly predictive, but they are moving around an awful lot lately. However, the general picture remains tight.
One of the states that was once thought to be an important tossup but where the Democrat now seems comfortably ahead is New England’s New Hampshire. Scott Brown is the Republican and Jeanne Shaheen the Democrat. Both have good name recognition, but Brown (despite having older New Hamphsire roots than Shaheen) is seen as a newcomer and a Massachusetts guy. And of course, he’s a man in a state that seems lately to have strongly favored the election of women.
Shaheen is a puzzlement to me as a politician. She was worse than a mediocrity as NH Governor, and has been an undistinguished and loyal Democratic party operative in her tenure as senator. And yet she is comfortably ahead in the polls in a state widely perceived as still being purple, but which I suspect has become almost (although not quite) as blue as its other New England cousins. New Hampshire was a semi-conservative and somewhat libertarian New England anomaly for quite some time after its brethen had turned liberal/left, a single throwback to an older rock-ribbed New England sensibility that now is confined to the northern and more rural (and less populated by people from “away”) areas of all the New England states.
So the following statement isn’t a prediction; it’s a wish: I hope the polls are wrong, and/or that the race will tighten up before election day. I think that’s at least possible, because the polls have been very very wrong in New Hampshire before, although in general I think polls—especially over time, and if averaged—are quite accurate.
One of Obama’s biggest failings as president has been the rise of ISIS under his watch. He can blame it on George Bush, as is his wont, and some will swallow it. But it’s a little more difficult to do than in many other circumstances because Obama and his administration are on record as saying that, when they engineered the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, the country was in good shape. That makes it hard for many voters—even some who generally support Obama—to avoid drawing the conclusion that he missed the boat on this one, and that his own actions (and/or inactions) have largely contributed to ISIS’ ability to gain power and territory.
…[I]n an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.
It’s an interesting ploy on the part of Obama. In order to counter it, the listener would have to have a fair amount of specific information about what our intelligence knew and when, and what the president was actually told.
And it has that superficial grain of truth that makes it plausible if you don’t dig too deeply. After all, Clapper did say that “he [had] underestimated the will of the ISIS fighters in Iraq and overestimated the ability of Iraq’s security forces in northern Iraq to counter ISIS.” But “he also said his analysts warned about the ‘prowess and capability’ of the group.” They warned over and over, for months—some of it in hearings that occurred in January and February, and are a matter of public record—and still Obama did nothing. He also did nothing after the threat and its scope was obvious and required no warning; even the casual observer could see the danger after the group took over Fallujah, for example.
So Obama was warned before it became obvious, and even after it became obvious he dawdled and pondered until the threat was overwhelming and would be far, far more difficult to counter. But Obama is both constitutionally unable and generally unwilling to take the blame for anything, ever, and so he must find someone else to blame.
The fact that we’ve gotten very used to this trait of Obama’s tends to obscure how very uncommon it was in presidents prior to Obama. It’s not just that Truman made the opposite behavior famous with his “The buck stops here” desk sign, it’s that taking responsibility used to be required of presidents by the public, and all this blaming would have been considered weak and—that overused word—“unpresidential.”
It’s not just the blaming and the excuse-making itself, it’s the fact that such behavior is unprecedented in a president in my lifetime. What’s more, it’s that nearly half of the American public isn’t yet turned off by this sort of thing in a POTUS. Back when I was growing up, such an approach by a president would be unthinkable and even (yes, I know this isn’t PC) unmanly. It just wasn’t done; it was weak and unseemly and showed lack of leadership.
The fact that it now seems acceptable is probably a result of the decades-long abdication of the idea of personal responsibility, beginning in the school system with the self-esteem movement. Obama may be the first president who not only is a product of that system, but more importantly, was elected by people raised in that system. He knows his audience well.
So Obama is to blame for his blaming. But the American public is to blame for rewarding him for it.
Andrew McCarthy says the Khorosan Group is not a separate entity at all. It’s just a useful construction, invented by the Obama administration for its own purposes:
…[T]here is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned [by the Obama administration] to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.
As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole ”” a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way…
For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict…
The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.
I think it’s that last bit that’s especially important to Obama. The very last thing he wants to do is to have to engage in a serious, broad, committed, lengthy, military campaign, especially one against Islamist forces, especially one requiring ground troops. It is maximally un-PC to declare any connection of Islam to terrorism, which puts him in an especially awkward position, but one he’s not going to abandon.
McCarthy goes on to describe how the Arab states who are allied with us for the moment against ISIS are only behind a very limited aspect of this war. One can’t help but think that Obama, also, is only behind a very limited aspect of this war. To acknowledge more would be to do a host of things Obama cannot and will not do: admit Bush didn’t do so badly after all, fess up to having failed to evaluate the situation properly at the outset and prevent it from growing, see Islam as part of the problem, become a wartime Commander-in-Chief, and defy much of his party.
Commenter “T” asks whether I’ve turned off my spam filter, because more spam than usual appears to be getting through in the last few days.
I’d never do that, I can assure you. Spam comes into a blog like this at a pretty fast clip, and if I turned off the spam filter, spam would quickly overwhelm the comments. For example, as I write this it’s around 11 AM, and just this morning about 125 spam comments have already been blocked. And sometimes there are runs of spam that are a lot faster than that, close to that many in just a couple of minutes.
Spam continually seeks to find a way around the defenses ranged against it. Some small amount always gets through the filter, although the great majority is effectively blocked. When I’m at my computer, I periodically check the comments section and delete the spam that has gotten through. You don’t usually see the spam I delete, because most has been placed on threads that are no longer active. But lately, although the amount of spam is the same, it’s been deposited more often on active threads instead of old threads. So it’s been a bit more noticeable lately for that reason.
Since—contrary to what it might seem sometimes—I don’t spend my entire life at the computer, when I’m away from it this rogue spam piles up just a little bit more. That’s why you’re seeing a slightly increased amount of it lately. Most likely it will get better in a couple of days, if past experience is any guide. I’d rather not add extra hurdles to posting, such as Captcha (which I detest) or further registration, so I’m going to see if other approaches will effectively control it. I think they will.
It turns out that the case of autistic 13-year-old author Naoki Higashida is more complex than that of Rom Houben. When I Googled his book (The Reason I Jump) online, I was expecting (hoping, anyway) to find at least a couple of scientifically sophisticated discussions of Higashida’s method of communicating, but I didn’t find much except for a few naysayers in the Amazon comments section for the book.
From the articles about it that I did find, it appears that Higashida first started communicating by having his hand guided in the usual facilitated communication manner, but now he does a lot of his typing himself—but always with a helper around to cue him somewhat and clean up and transcribe his copy. So it has been difficult—in fact, impossible—for me to sort out the contribution of the boy versus the contribution of his helpers.
I struck pay dirt, however, when I found the following video of the boy at work. I believe it’s from a few years ago, and my best guess after watching it is that Higashida does have some rudimentary language and even spelling and typing skills, but that the bulk of his book is the product of his helpers and his translators, whether they know it or not.
You can watch the video for yourself (the video, by the way, was made and presented by the group at Syracuse that was previously implicated in the most misleading and bogus cases of facilitated communication with autistic patients). It cannot be embedded, so you’ll have to go to the website to watch it; scroll down about three-quarters of the way to the video entitled, “I Write, So I Am Alive.”
In the video, Higashida is seen writing by way of pointing to a letter board in a form of syllabic Japanese, as well as typing on a computer keyboard in the method of Japanese spelling that’s based on Chinese characters. Of course, as a non-Japanese-speaker, I can’t evaluate what he’s actually pointing to or typing, and how it relates to the words the video is quoting him as writing, but he definitely is using his own hand to point and to type (one-handed, by the way). What’s more, as he points to the syllabic characters, he sometimes says them. So there’s no question he knows something about what they stand for in terms of sound.
From my viewing of the video, my conclusion is that he can even express fairly simple thoughts in this form of writing. But I noticed that, even though he seems to be moving his own hand, it’s curious that his mother is always close by, and often repeats what he spells or cues him by saying something before he even spells it, or cues him by saying a few words and having him “finish” the thought or answer the question. She’s there, too, when he’s typing on the keyboard.
My distinct impression is Higashida is autistic but moderately high-functioning, with some simple language skills and ability to convey some thoughts on his own through this medium. The rest of it is a combination of people cuing him, most likely unconsciously, and interpreting and refining his thoughts, filling in the blanks with what they would like to hear. I don’t know whether their intent is to deceive; it may be that, or it may be merely to offer hope and encouragement both to themselves and to him.
Higashida is clearly loved. But his communications suffer from exactly and precisely the same flaws as Houben’s did in terms of content: they are exactly and precisely what most parents and helpers would wish such a child would tell them if he/she could only speak. The following excerpt will give you a flavor of the sort of thing I’m talking about; the form of the book is a question and answer sequence:
Q: What are your thoughts on autism itself?
A: I think that people with autism are born outside the regime of civilization. Sure, this is just my own made-up theory, but I think that, as a result of all the killings in the world and the selfish planet-wrecking that humanity has committed, a deep sense of crisis exists. Autism has somehow arisen out of this. Although people with autism look like other people physically, we are in fact very different in many ways. We are more like travelers from the distant, distant past. And if, by our being here, we could help the people of the world remember what truly matters for the Earth, that would give us a quiet pleasure.”
Watch the video, and see if you buy it. I don’t. The concepts are political as well as too PC (“selfish planet-wrecking”; “what truly matters for the Earth”) and too abstract (“distant, distant past”). They would certainly be possible for many and possibly most people who have Asperger’s syndrome, but that’s not Higashida’s state.
Here’s another quote from the book, supposedly the 13-year-old’s answer to the question “Why do you get lost so often?”:
…people with autism never, ever feel at ease, wherever we are. ”¦ I don’t think we’ll ever be able to reach our Shangri-La…
Shangri-La? Are we to think this boy has been reading that old chestnut, Lost Horizon? And knows to use as a figure of speech the name of the fictional land it describes? It seems highly unlikely.
Most poignant of all are these sorts of statements, which fit in so well with the hopes and dashed dreams of parents:
The truth is, we’d love to be with other people. But because things never, ever go right, we end up getting used to being alone.
If someone has submitted Hikashida to the sort of experiment which Houben was finally subjected to, I certainly haven’t been able to find a single report of such a test. And yet it is warranted, I’m afraid, although it’s possible that with Hikashida’s relatively high-level skills he would be able to pass a test that wasn’t too rigorous. For example, has he ever typed messages without his mother being present, and how complex are they (although of course, some people would conveniently explain any such failure to his emotional agitation at her absence)? Are his messages always interpreted, translated, and cleaned up by one of his usual helpers? Has any skeptic or scientist ever taken a look at what Hikashida is writing on his own—his raw copy, that is?
If that’s been done and he’s passed the test, fine. I have no problem with it. But till then, I’m a doubter, and I believe rightly so.
[NOTE: There’s a lot more general information about facilitated communication here. Let me add that facilitated communication is much more likely to be valid when the subject suffers from a motor problem that does not affect the mind, such as for example cerebral palsy. But autism is qualitatively different.
Watch the videos there and ask: why is the facilitator always touching the subject, even slightly? If it’s so slight a touch, why is it necessary to maintain the contact? Think of the Ouija board and how small a touch will suffice for cuing. Also, do you wonder why the facilitators’ eyes are so often more riveted to the keyboard than the subject’s? Or what would happen if the facilitator could touch the subject’s shoulder to steady him/her but was blocked from seeing the keyboard? And do you wonder why such experiments aren’t being performed?
Here’s an ad for facilitated communication. Note the unctuous tone and the attitude toward skeptics:
The world of facilitated communication is ripe for more research, but not especially receptive to it.]
Because of my back and arm conditions, I stand to work, with my computer raised to somewhat higher than counter height. I also walk about three miles a day. I’d love to combine the two.
That human hamster wheel is somewhat of a joke, but there are a bunch of treadmills designed to be used with a desk. They’re not cheap, of course. And I can’t quite imagine I’d be able to work effectively that way, although I’d like to find a model one on display somewhere and try it out.
