Guest Post - Jamie B Musing

With all that's been happening in the news in politics lately, it's been a while since this blog hosted a true culture article. In the spirit of both this and advancing the blogosphere, I present you a guest post from the esteemed Jamie B Musings of "Culture Shock: Everything Pop Culture 5 Days a Week." The above blogger image is authorized for use on this blog only.

Back in college, I was listening to the radio when I heard a story that disgusted and irritated me. It was about two boys, ages 15 and 13, who were molesting their 8-year-old half sister. The mother had left the girl in her brothers’ care while she was at work, and the child reported it to a teacher at her school. The boys claim they got the idea from watching Jerry Springer. It wasn’t just the molestation of a child that bothered me. It was also the fact that, once again, someone is blaming their own actions on media and this case would more then likely stir yet another debate on the effects of media of small children.

This is not the first time this has happened. Different forms of media have been blamed for everything from rape to armed robbery. Different songs by artists such as Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne have been blamed for suicides. Not only that, but the artists have been sued because of it as well. Then there was "The Catcher in the Rye", which has been linked to several celebrity stalkings, including the death of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of former President Ronald Reagan. Once, Christopher Pike, an author of young adult horror novels was asked if he felt responsible for the suicide of a kid who had read some of his books, even though he never promoted suicide in his work. In fact, he portrayed negative consequences for the act in his "Remember Me" Trilogy. What is even worse, many conservative groups use these cases as ammunition to censor certain materials which is not the answer and one step towards creating the world Ray Bradbury wrote about of Fahrenheit 451. What it all comes down to is too many people are trying to use the media to make excuses for the crimes they commit.

I find it hard to believe any sane and rational person would commit a crime just because they saw it in the media. It is time for people to stop searching for the easy answer. Let's face it... there are no easy answers in life. The human mind is a complex machine and I believe when someone commits violent acts, we need to look much deeper than the media to understand them. We also need to be more aware of what's going on around us and act accordingly instead of burying our heads in the sand. Look at the Virginia Tech shooting, for example. The shooter was known to be a problem on campus and had scared more than a couple of students and teachers and that wasn't the first time something that that had happened somewhere. Nothing will ever stop all violence, but I really do believe that we can only make it better if we're willing to look deeper than media to solve the problem.

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie

Guest Post - "Dr. James McPartland is a Dick (and more)"

I received an email from a friend whose a member of an Autistic Issues student group called SWANSA that made some very valid points about not only autism, but "civilized" society in general, that I felt my readers would very much benefit from taking a gander at. The friends name is Walt Guthrie (he never told me whether or not he was related to Woody and Arlo):

I caught the James McPartland talk at Emory November 8.
Off the bat, three things you need to know about him.
One: he's the Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center.
Two: He's the Associate Director of Developmental Electrophysiology Lab
Three: he's a dick.
He's actually more than that. But we'll get to that.
First, the dick:

In the course of his "research," McPartland makes use of a computer program called "Cyberball," which is a sort of "video game". Now, I have put quote marks around the words "video game" because it is the most primitive-looking thing you can possibly imagine. We are not talking "Gears of War" here. From the brief demonstration, given during the talk, it appeared to be something that might have come out in 1975 just prior to the introduction of "Pong." But what do I know? For all I know it might have just popped out of the MIT Media lab last month. In any case, I cannot emphasize enough how boring this game is.
It is a simulated game of catch between three players. Each player can choose to throw the ball to the person on his left or the person on his right. That's it. That's the game. It doesn't appear that you can miss or that the other person can fail to catch the ball. There is no skill and no chance whatsoever involved. For all intents and purposes, assuming the demonstration of this game was representative of actual "play," the "game" is the equivalent of nothing more than three people with one person calling out the name of one of the two others, and then that person being able to do the same and so on and so on.
Of course no human being would ever willingly choose to waste their time playing such a "game," but McPartland has apparently made countless kids waste irretrievable hours of their childhood at no discernible benefit for themselves "playing" this simulation that simulates nothing.
But this is not what makes McPartland a dick.
This is:
What is the purpose of Cyberball? Well, it turns out it does have a one. According to McPartland, Cyberball is designed to make a player feel excluded and outcast. You see, the other two "players" of Cyberball don't exist. They are just part of the program and what they do is ignore the player and just toss the ball back and forth to each other. Now, McPartland claims that the children he works with are, by the nature of their autism, already shunned and socially mistreated by their peers. So what does he do with them? He experiments on them by making them play games designed to increase their sense of isolation and social ostracism. And these are experiments solely for his benefit since McPartland made no claim during the course of his talk that these sessions would provide any benefit whatsoever for the children playing them.
McPartland tricks ostracized children into performing activities designed solely to further their own sense of ostracism.
Where I come from this sort of person is also technically known as a douchebag.
Oh, and did I mention that he was excited about the prospect of a computer program that might test for empathy.
Let the irony of THAT sink in.

The bulk of his talk is old territory that I've addressed before. More laser-pointer-on-the-head sort of nonsense. This time we learn that autistics take 200 milliseconds or so to process faces. Regular folk take, on average, 180. Noting that that might not seem like a big deal, McPartland admitted as much and then went on to claim that it actually was, without offering the slightest bit of evidence except to note that those 20 milliseconds add up over time (Yeah, he's right Those two percents of a second add up. Work those face recognitions, kids. You only have 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day to work with!) During it all he performed the verbal sleight-of-hand of telling us that some of this was hard science, some was unpublished and some was just speculation. It was almost like a psychic doing a "cold reading" to the room, leaving himself plenty of wiggle room should anyone call him him on any of his claims (The main one being that autistics maybe just aren't properly motivated to have the desire to be social. Or something. As someone who understands the spectrum from living it, listening to McPartland's meandering theory of autism was like listening to my great aunt and her circle describe what goes on in Grand Theft Auto). There was more talk about perceiving upright faces vs inverted faces. If you believe this is relevant to anything on Earth then God love. I won't be dragged into another discussion on it.

Afterwards, in the reception following McPartland's talk, I asked him directly whether or not autism was empirically or definitionally a "disorder." He responded that it was definitional and that ALL people on the autistic spectrum are, by definition, "disordered." Then, having admitted this, he jumped to the it's-only-a-word defense. If I found the word "offensive" (a word I never employed in the course of the discussion) then that was on me. Because who could find any objection to being labeled "disordered?"
I told him what the word "disordered" actually means.
It means "nigger."
It means "faggot." It means "kike."
It performs the same societal function and is derived in PRECISELY the same manner. It is a derogatory classification whose purpose is to dehumanize one arbitrarily grouped and categorized set of humanity. And like the white racist, who feels that he can designate, by his own criteria, any one that he chooses to include into or exclude from the inferior class of "nigger," James McPartland and his intellectually low-functioning behaviorist brood think they are entitled to arbitrarily classify an entire subset of humanity as definitionally "disordered" and then have full power to say who is and who is not in that set. Neither James McPartland nor the typical hardcore white racist feel any need to empirically justify their respective words. Why should he? Just as the word "nigger" empowered and elevated the white power structure, the word 'disorder' gives the behaviorists their power, income, and justification for their very existence.
James Mcpartland is a grinning clown, the moral equivalent of a racist, who experiments on vulnerable socially outcast children to make them feel worse about themselves, all so he can grind out a steady stream of lazy speculation disguised as science.
Fuck him.

Guest Post - The Irate Dog

A real live Englishman has been kind enough to write a post on English culture for this blog. Tom Jardine-Smith is a good friend of mine and quality journalism student in England who I've stayed in contact with over the past year or so, debating, contributing, exchanging guest posts and getting to know one another on BlogCatalog. As you will later see with the sheer number of tags on this post, he really has covered all the bases and in a fantastic way.

In addition to his current blog, Thomas Bobs, he used to run the Irate Dog.

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British Culture, and Where to Find It

When Jeremy asked me to write another guest post for him I was of course delighted. Through the BlogCatalog we have debated on many things; well, mostly politics and God’s existence. But here we have something completely different. British Culture! Enjoy.

Visit my blog for more: http://thomasbobs.webs.com

British culture is, in many people’s views, one of the richest in the world. I’m not talking about Pop here. There’ll be no references to skinny Oompa Loompas who think they can sing because that isn’t culture, that’s a horrifying disappointment. When I say we have a rich culture I am referring to a fantastic variety we have; from people who actually are pretty good at singing to those who can do pretty awesome things with a city wall and a can of spray paint.

That is not to say that we are the masters of Culture; a vote announcing us the official “Most Yobbish” country in the world would reveal that much. But we are proud of it none the less. Sometimes, unfortunately, for entirely the wrong reasons.

No talk about the British and their culture can be said without mentioning our Empire. For example there are a great many people in my country who are still proud of our now ex-British Empire which, in 1922, covered over 13,000,000 sq miles - a full quarter of the Earth’s surface.

Personally, and with my predominantly left-wing mind at work, I find the idea of an Empire cringe-worthy. To go to an entire continent (i.e. Africa) and label the entire population as “animals” and ‘uncivilised’ was, in my view, despicable and I would like to grab this opportunity to apologise on behalf of my country to anyone who’s family has the words “slave” in their history.

However, (and there must be a “however”) I also believe strongly that if it weren’t for us effectively owning a quarter of the planet we wouldn’t be nearly as diverse in culture and demographic as we are today.

In the last few hundred years our country has grown in other ways; not just geographically. We have learnt to respect other nations and, most importantly, we have learnt to laugh at ourselves. An American comedian whose name I’ve annoyingly forgotten said recently that “that is a very advanced thing y’all do”. And it is. It is a sign of a matured and laid back society. We don’t take ourselves too seriously anymore. The majority of us don’t have faltering hopes that the ‘once great Empire will rise again’. That isn’t what we’re about anymore.

One of the hardest questions I ever had to answer during my college studies was this; What is ‘Britishness’? I imagine this is a much easier question for foreign people to answer but, as a British citizen, I don’t have a clue. I would be tempted to sway towards the traditional politeness and sense of ‘good manners’ but let’s be honest, that’s not really the case anymore. Not when you look and see the sorts of prejudiced hatred of ‘immigrants’.

So perhaps ‘Britishness’ is our political system? Unique in the world for being completely and utterly mad. We have no written constitution and the law effectively changes after each and every judicial decision. Our Prime Minister effectively holds Parliament by the balls if his/her party holds a big enough clout. Our electoral system has been proven to be unfairly weighted in the larger party’s favours. And our Queen is the head of State but ‘Her’ government could, if it wanted to, over throw her at any time. Why don’t they? Because she’s a shell of power anyway; little more than a tourist attraction. There hasn’t been a threat to sovereignty coming out of Buckingham Palace for a long time and I doubt there will ever be again.

Maybe ‘Britishness’ is the NHS. Yes, I mentioned the NHS is a guest post for a right-wing American. I imagine if I said the same thing in some places in the US of A I’d have signs depicting me as Hitler scattered about. But I truly do not understand what the Americans have against the NHS. It is a medical marvel. Free at the point of use (mostly). The saviour of countless lives; including Steven Hawking who, I was delighted to find out, apparently became American over night when anti-Healthcare reformers thought his American-accented computer was his actual voice. Hilarious.

In short, British culture is a combination of our nation’s age, a generally progressive nature, and immigration. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you.

Guest Post - The Irate Dog

This logo is exclusive property of "The Irate Dog," authorized for use ONLY on this site. Use this image, and I will kill you, with my own two hands.

Our guest, who is also a regular reader and a follower of this site, has chosen to speak about health care, and in particular, health care in the UK. The name of his blog is "The Irate Dog."

After talking at lengths on BlogCatalog, Jeremy and I decided I should write a guest post for his blog. After flicking through his posts and editorials I landed on one particular post that caught my eye; “Healthcare Co-ops - The Third Option”.

We all know that healthcare has been the subject of heated debate over in the USA in recent months - coming to a peek at Obama/Hitler posters being brandished (that scene still confuses me. How can Obama be compared to a fascist when his idea for national healthcare takes him to the left...in the opposite direction ideologically?). Unfortunately a lot of public outrage at the idea of a national healthcare system is based on a distinct lack of knowledge. For example that classically ignorant argument that came out of the US that said that if Stephen Hawking were treated by the NHS he would be dead - a case clearly made in the heat of the moment because Stephen Hawking was and is in fact treated by the NHS and has said himself that he owes them his life.

I’d like to take this opportunity to explain my own country’s healthcare system. For me it is the crowning jewel of the post war Labour government. It is not, as apparently many Americans would describe it, an institution of Death Panels and inferior-quality healthcare. It is not a last resort. It is not an example of a Communist or Socialist victory.

It is, in short, magnificent. It is, excluding dentistry and some prescriptions, free at the point of use. You go in, you see a personal General Practitioner, you go out. Not a penny has left for wallet, your bank account or your insurance company. This means two very important things. 1)Diseases can be caught earlier and 2) Poorer people can get the same healthcare as everyone else.

Think about it. In a country where there is an economical dis-incentive to seek medical attention people will tend to leave things be and see if they get better. If they don’t get better, they then go to the doctors and find out they have something “that wouldn’t have been a problem if only you’d come to us sooner”. Here in the UK, you can have a slight sniff, maybe a cough, and go straight to your GP without any monetary worries at all. That means serious diseases, cancer etc. are caught much earlier and things can be done about them much more easily.

People say the NHS is a Socialist, even Communist idea as if that was supposed to be insulting. Well, if it was so terrible, wouldn’t the various right-wing political parties in the UK want to get rid of it? The Conservative party (who are likely to gain power again next year) are doing no such thing - just like always. They have in fact pledged to fund it better and make it more efficient. Even the BNP (the most right-wing party we have) isn’t talking about getting rid of the NHS. Why? Because it is a genuinely genius idea and there would be public uproar if it were taken away.

Here in the UK you see a lot in the news about long waiting lists and patients having to wait on trolleys for days on end before they get a bed. But the fact is, at least those instances are unique enough to warrant their own news headline. It is not a trend but a hot topic that sells newspapers. Like all teenagers being anti-social and a terror to society - yes, a great story, but totally inaccurate and frankly insulting.

That’s all from me. I hope Jeremy and I continue to trade posts like this. It’s been a very good experience.

Bye!

Tom

Visit my blog at http://theiratedog.blogspot.com

(For your personal convenience, the post that caught Tom's interest can be found here.)