A brilliant idea from John H on Autism Blogger

It wouldn't let me respond in the thread or make a new post for some reason- gave me a 406 shtml error, whatever that is. But I don't want to lose this potential business idea.

Brilliance. Sheer brilliance.

John H:"Please make time for yourself it will be hard, even if its just time in another room or in the car. You can give 99% of your day to your family if you want but take that 1% and make it yours....No one is alone here."

I've been advocating a cheaper version of snoezelen therapy for the autistics- but it now occurs to me that this is good for the caregivers and parents *also*.

What a wonderful idea- and I bet I could put together a package deal from my knowledge of home automation to "Make it so". It even fits in with something I ran into on a post of the blog of the woman who wrote the old "Clear Blue Water" comic strip (now a web comic that hasn't been updated in months) of what her lower functioning son is suddenly doing.

How about a "meltdown timeout room kit" that includes:
1. Multicolor remote control LED lightbulb
2. DVD/CD player (the kind with a built-in screen)
3. heater/air conditioner
4. Nannycam with night vision and portable wireless monitor

I bet I could put that all together for less than $300. Possibly less than $200. The basic idea- give the autistic child an environment where he can be *alone* and can *control his surroundings*. Give the caregiver-parent peace of mind in keeping the child under surveillance *while taking a much needed break for themselves*.

Have we reached the bottom of the slippery slope yet?

Apparently, in Virginia, a child is not considered to be born or to be a separate life until the umbilical cord is cut, thus making this murder nothing more than a legal third trimester abortion there.

And pro-choicers tell me that infanticide isn't part of a woman's right to choose.

I actually see two bottoms to this slippery slope. The first is cases like this, but the second is eugenics- the use of abortion to eliminate undesirable traits, as so many parents on this website did. But that second may not quite be the bottom yet- the bottom for the eugenics fork will be in the new healthcare plan, where the government's "exchange" plans will be quite happy to let a medicare mother have a $600 abortion, but will balk at the $4000 birth.

Is H1N1 Vaccine Moral?

There is a rumor floating around pro-life groups that the H1N1 vaccine is developed from aborted fetal tissue. I decided to look into this myself, as I was unaware that any vaccine was developed from aborted fetuses.

What I found surprised me- a good number of vaccines, including those required by law of school age children in Oregon, come from fetal tissue.

The Vatican, though, long ago responded to this issue, with the result being that in most cases, it's more immoral to avoid vaccination than it is to use these vaccines. However, it is the responsibility of all to know where vaccines come from, and if possible, use an alternative vaccine.

The H1N1 vaccine is not developed with human fetal tissue however- it uses chicken eggs instead, which is part of the huge problem I blogged about previously.

As such, don't stop to not vaccinate for H1N1 for moral reasons. DO, however, educate yourself on this topic, and lobby for alternatives to become available (there are alternatives already available for everything except Rubella, Hepatitis-A, and Chickenpox; and the Japanese have developed alternatives for Rubella and Hep-A that are not available in the United States as of yet).

America without the Middle Class

Elizabeth Warren at the Huffington Post today describes, in no uncertain terms, just how quickly the middle class is disappearing from America- and how quickly our economy is beginning to look like that of Mexico.

I charge that this is no accident- but the willful sin of the investor class in an attempted coup of the government of the United States. A coup- may I mention, that is succeeding. And it's not just the US- Irish governmental employees are being asked to take 4%-20% pay cuts, as the masters become slaves. And we've all become slaves of the big banks.

I'm going to repeat what I think is the only reasonable way out: Repeal Article I Section 10 of the US Constitution, and let state governments issue currency, make their own trade treaties that fit *local* employment concerns, and separate themselves as much as possible from the big power banks in New York.

Why the Muwahiddun Sect of Islam is dangerous.

There is a real reformation going on in Islam- one that is only tangential to "post communist" global politics and we're not even the primary enemy by any stretch of the imagination.

Most of you have probably never heard of the Muwahiddun sub sect of Islam. Their enemies call them Wahhabis, after the primary preacher of their sect, but the name they prefer translates more as "Unitarian", after the primary theology they assert. Oddly enough, I consider them a dangerous sect for the same reason I consider Unitarian Christians a dangerous sect, because of their anarchy. In fact, the only real differences I can see is which books they consider scripture and of course the violence of the pillar of Jihad (Unitarian Christians, in the United States, have a tendency to be deistic agnostics in comparison, because they lack this tradition of jihad).

Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab was a contemporary of our own Thomas Jefferson, in theology as well as politics. He's the Islamic version of Thomas Jefferson as well. Thomas Jefferson was a Deist who considered the church to have corrupted the Bible (he even wrote The Jefferson Bible, a cut and paste job from several Bibles, that attempted to remove the religion from the philosophy of Christ) who considered God to be directly reachable- and within Islam, so did Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab. The problem is, he took this to extremes- and what he did, started what I am calling the Islamic Reformation.

99% of the so-called terrorism, is Islamic-on-Islamic violence as they start (well, only about 200 years in now- but look how long the Reformation in Christianity took to stop being violent) to fight their reformation. It's only very recently that this violence has turned against invaders, only in the last century or so.

The cause of the violence is similar to the heresy of Fr. Feeney in the American Roman Catholic Church, that Outside the Church There Is No Salvation (Extra Ecclesiam, Nullas Salus)- but far narrower in it's fundamentalism. The central theological concept is Tawhid- the uniqueness of God as the ONLY Lord of man. Not even secular civil governments are allowed in between God and Man, not even scholars in the mosque are between Allah and the individual's interpretation of what Allah wants for his life. And of course, the standard Sunni theology of There is no God But Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.

The result of this, when combined with the Five Pillars of Islam and certain verses of the Koran taken out of context, is an extreme form of anarchy where the duty of Jihad becomes supreme, violent, and individualistic. And the enemy is anybody who doesn't agree with that individual- including OTHER al Qaida members.

Looking back at what the Five Solas did to Christianity, it is easy to extrapolate what is happening today in the Muwahiddun community due to the removal of any sort of ecclesiastical authority.

And that, in short, is why I'm conflicted about the so-called War on Terror. It's clear that the Muwahiddun present a danger to themselves and others. It is equally clear that we can't fight them without losing our own soul. Their pure anarchy without a state and willingness to attack those we'd see as civilians puts them completely outside of both Augustinian and modern just war theory from a Christian standpoint, or even the historical state-based form of Jihad declared by a secular ruler from traditional Islam.

I just know that Afghanistan, as the place empires have gone to die since the Macedonians got really tired of war there, turned around, and went home, is probably the wrong place to do battle against them, if one can do battle against a loose group of people all believing different things at all.

And I wonder, 200 years into this Reformation, if some day al Qaida will be the name on every little house-mosque with less than 6 members worldwide.

Bankers are doing God's Work charging usury?

Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, claims that Bankers are doing God's Work, because banks help corporations grow large, and large companies employ large numbers of people.

Apparently he's never heard of the theory of economy of scale, which the Capitalists keep hitting me over the head with whenever I mention G.K. Chesterton's idea that the only thing wrong with Capitalism is that there are too few capitalists. Supposedly, the whole world would come crashing down from a lack of labor, if we merely had 100% employment by producing goods as close to the end user as possible in a distributive fashion. The reason for this is economy of scale- that you can produce more goods with less work and less waste by centralizing that work into huge factories.

Which means, that Lloyd is wrong- the fewer bigger companies in a given industry, the fewer people are employed by that industry overall. Give an oligarchy of say, three car companies producing 99% of the cars on the road, and a very small portion of the population, maybe even only one city, gets to have people employed in making cars. Give a monopoly, it's even less. But if instead you have a million artisan bakers, in every neighborhood, then there are lots more people involved in the baking industry- because it is inefficient.

Banking helps companies pile up huge sums of money to become MORE efficient, not less- and that puts human beings out of work.

Anybody know how I can e-mail Lloyd personally to hit him over the head with a 4x4 cluebat?

Abortion Part II: the other half of the sin

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971)

I've been accused of letting my economics lead my pro-life tendencies to abandon certain abortions as not being evil. Instead, I see it as being more about the things I can change, vs the things I can't.

As individuals, we can't do much about abortion being legal. We can't do anything at all about rape, incest, or weird medical conditions.

We CAN do something charitable about the young mother faced with an unexpected child. We CAN do something about the young family already working three minimum wage jobs with a new mouth to feed. We CAN do something about women's clinics in poor areas of the country that don't have ultrasound machines. We CAN do something about making sure every woman has a right to pre-natal health care. We CAN do something about teaching our children that sex is the prayer for more children- and that you shouldn't pray for what you don't want. We CAN do something about helping the disabled. We CAN teach our children that the disabled are people too, put here on this Earth for a reason. We CAN encourage the young family facing a child with birth defects that we will be there for them as a community.

And for the 800,000 children a year killed in the United States- we SHOULD. (CDC reports that this has actually been decreasing- so maybe charitable efforts are working).