Childhood onset schizophrenia steals autism’s lunch money
There are a lot of things that have happened to me as a result of Jack's autism that I consider positive. One is a new affection and mother grizzly style protectiveness for special needs children living with everything from physical handicaps to mental illness. I first heard of childhood onset schizophrenia from a friend from the blogosphere whose son has it. A couple of months ago I caught part of a program about it on one of the Discovery networks, specifically the story of a little girl named Jani Schofield. My friend has been supportive of our journey and this blog, so I was happy to have a chance to learn more about it. I was instantly in love with this great kid, who couldn't trust her own mind.
Yesterday, I happened to recognize the family as I was flipping past Oprah. Let me be clear, I only watched Oprah because Jani was on it, and I definitely am not linking to anything Oprah in this post. However, I found watching Oprah think she was going to call the shots in an interview with a 7-year-old schizophrenic, then watch Oprah realize that Oprah was wrong, possibly the most entertaining thing I've ever witnessed, AND SO CAN YOU! It's all over YouTube.
Jani wasn't diagnosed until the age of 5, but she has shown symptoms since birth (and they're quite apparent in Schofield family home movies). Almost all of the challenges her parents, Michael and Susan, describe regarding caring for a child with a neurological condition ring true for our experience, yet after watching the footage I know that our experience doesn't begin to compare.
It's easy to see that without schizophrenia Jani is a sweet, incredibly bright little girl, but her inevitable psychotic episodes are unpredictable and dangerous. In the interest of their 2-year-old son's safety, the Schofields have actually had to resort to living in 2 one bedroom apartments in the same complex. There's Jani's apartment and her brother, Bodhi's, apartment. They do things together as a family in Bodhi's apartment, but they keep Jani's apartment as a safe place to go when that's necessary. The strain that puts on a marriage should be obvious.
Jani describes her condition quite articulately (and probably better than any doctor could). She lives in 2 worlds, our world and the world where her imaginary friends (the good ones and the bad ones) live. She often refers to a place called Calalini that she says borders the two worlds. The challenge for Michael and Susan is to find things in our world that appeal to Jani enough to make her want to stay here. Jani has attempted suicide twice. Take a moment and imagine living with the daily fear that your 7-year-old will try to take their own life.
Also heartbreaking is that some of Jani's imaginary friends, the "bad" ones, tell her to do bad things, and she is incapable of completely resisting them. This leaves her often feeling like she is a "bad kid".
While most parents rejoice at those moments when their children are quiet and absorbed in an activity, a fleeting moment of peace to remember forgotten parts of you beyond the parent, these moments are perhaps the scariest of all for the Schofields. If they don't keep Jani constantly engaged in this world, her hallucinations take over and a psychotic episode ensues. This is what every waking moment of her day is like.
The Schofields both admit to being on anti-depressants (duh), and Michael bravely admits to one suicidal gesture. When I think about how dark my own thoughts have gotten on Jack's bad days, then remember that our bad days aren't even comparable to the Schofield's everyday, I'd be stunned if they weren't depressed.
I realize I've painted a pretty grim picture of their situation. I encourage you to visit their site to get a better picture of the challenges and joys of Jani's life.
In finding links for this post I, not surprisingly, found the spectrum of stupid advice for and judgement of the Schofields. Possession, dietary solutions, her mother didn't bond with her. Idiots. The most infuriating to me were accusations of exploitation on the Schofield's part. Like they're the Gosselins or something. No. They're trying to raise awareness. After a violent episode at school, they had to actually let Jani become a ward of the state to get her into UCLA just to get a diagnosis. If you're thinking of leaving a comment along the exploitation and unsolicited advice vein then save some time and just go to hell. On your way, thank God because it's only by His grace that this isn't your family.
P.S. Peter Saarsgard totally plays the dad in the movie.
crossposted at snarkandboobs and Audacity to Cope and KillTruck
Pension and State Finance roundup, 19June2010
- Searchable database of NY pensions [can also find general payroll info elsewhere on the site] -- I recommend searching on year 2009 for info, not all info for 2010 is in there yet.
- Mortality of the ancient Romans - if one survived childhood [disease, mistreatment] and young adulthood [military service for men, childbirth for women], life wasn't necessarily short. Of course, most didn't make it to 30.
- Betting against state finances - it's the hot market tip! Except it's no secret....
- The asset return assumption is really about who pays for the pensions: the higher the assumption, the more it's future generations who will pay
- GASB kinda sorta changes the public pension accounting rules, but if states/municipalities promises that they reaaaally truly intend to fund their pensions properly.... dear lord, this is just wasting time. You get to use the old rules if you promise to behave? Or else what? People will go "nyah nyah"?
- Surprise! Blago trial involves pension obligation bonds -- gee whiz, why wouldn't I want public servants to have a big pot of money to play with? I'm sure if they promise reeaaaaaaally truly to abide by their fiduciary duties.... ugh.
- POBs are money-losers anyway, even without that extra dollop of corruption for the full flavor of public pension failure.
Catching Up
Sorry I've been out of the game. Here are some of the stories that I meant to blog about.
Illiterate Detroit Public Schools Douchebag resigns then unresigns after being outed for drubbing his ding during board meetings.
Coast Guard shuts down oil-sumping barges for 24 hours for inspection.
Members of the presidential commission investigating the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
_Co-chairman: Former Democratic Sen. and Gov. Bob Graham of Florida. He often has pushed for a drilling ban off the Florida coast.
_Co-chairman: William K. Reilly, Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President George H.W. Bush and during the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.
_Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
_Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science.
_Terry Garcia, a National Geographic Society executive and former chief lawyer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under President Bill Clinton.
_Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard's engineering school and former president of the American Physical Society.
_Frances Ulmer, chancellor of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and former Democratic lieutenant governor of Alaska.
(Research op)
Alexander Kemos, who fabricated doctorate, service in SEALs' resigned $300k Texas A&M administrative post to spend more time with family. Fake military service may have helped him land the job, but dude, WTF? Look at some of the people he was working with.
Lip service and female genital mutilation.
With regard to Walpin, DC Federal Judge Richard Roberts says Obama not obliged to follow law regarding IGs that he supported, claiming that it is too vague, which brilliant constitutional scholar seems to have missed. If you know of a collection for appeal, please let us know.
About Last Night’s DC Tweet-Up
I've been asked, so I'll oblige.
I was supposed to meet up at Saphire (one 'p') Cafe in Bethesda with a Latin-American friend from here at the Children's Inn. I thought maybe we'd gotten our wires crossed when he didn't show up in the lounge, so I left a message for him and went to the Saphire. He didn't show, but I ended up talking to a couple of young guys--twins--by the name of Gabe and Remy. $2.50 Juengling pints till 7:00, so I had three and left at 7:15.
The plan was to go to Union Station near the Hill, take 2nd Street south to Pennsylvania. I asked someone for directions, and he looked at me like I was a seven-eyed monster, and said that if I wanted to get to Pennsylvania, I should go past the fountain, up the stairs and straight ahead. I saw Pennsylvania and First Street, went by Second, Third, etc, then when I got to Ninth thought, gee, the buildings are too tall to the the one in the picture. Asked the cop at the corner, and he told me that I'd gone the wrong direction on Pennsylvania, and I had to cross the Capitol and continue another 9 blocks after that. So, I was late.
I found the gang. Dan Riehl didn't show. There were no chairs upstairs, so I went downstairs and grabbed one there. After about 5 minutes, the waitress came and asked us to abandon our table, saying another was freeing up soon. We went outside to smoke, and after half an hour or so it became clear that we weren't going to get the promised table, so we grabbed a few and put them together, though there weren't seats enough for everyone. Steve Gutowski of Eyeblast and the lovely @sarahbellum stood, as did the effervescent @dinafraioli's friend, the chivalrous Tom McCammon. So, on one side of the conversation there was Sean Hackbarth, Sarah, Steve, Kevin (@keder), and Sean's friend David Hauptmann. On my other side, @ericinva (who very generously bought a round), Dina, and Tom.
The corner we'd begun in was transformed into a karaoke stage, which is why it was hard to hear. The great advantage of having been bumped, though, was that we saw a dwarf with an Amazon, who turned out to be Dennis Kucinich and his wife. We were all dreadfully well behaved, and I even made the Metro all the way back before it turned into a pumpkin at midnight.
Thanks to all.
Krauthammer & Doctor Dan – on Scientific Breakthroughs By Decree – [Spoooky Edition]
From Fox News's SpecialReport w/ Bret Baeir All Star Panel - this transcript - I watched the show live (6/16/2010) and just about fell out of my chair... you'll see why below...
-----------
BAIER: Charles, Senate Democrats are scheduled to meet tomorrow to talk about strategy. The president is set to meet at the White House with the bipartisan group of senators next week on this. The White House appears ready to push this thing forward hard. And it feels a lot like the beginning of healthcare when they talked that way.
KRAUTHAMMER: Except the calendar is much compressed. Healthcare he did at the beginning of the presidency and it took almost a year and he had all the stops and starts, but in the end he got it. You don't have that time between now and November, and after November it's totally out of the question because they'll lose their majority or have --
BAIER: He can do it in a lame duck session.
KRAUTHAMMER: I can't imagine they'd risk something that large --
BAIER: This is an administration that risked reconciliation with not a single Republican vote on healthcare that is one-sixth of the economy.
KRAUTHAMMER: This would be a bridge even farther. This would be revolutionary the energy economy with the votes, members of the Congress who just lost the election. That's really stretching our democratic understanding of how you run the country.
If he does that, I think the Republicans will have a strong issue in 2012. The legislation divisions are more narrow than that.
But I love how he tried to sell it, with the war analogy, if we can land a man on the moon we can change the economy. It's the particularly hubris of a politician that believes from out of Washington you can legislative or decree a scientific breakthrough. And it's particularly ironic coming from a man who is killing our program to return a man to the moon. That's takes chutzpah to invoke that as the analogy. [emphasis: Root]
ROOT INLINE COMMENT: Krauthammer continues, paralleling this piece which Dr. Dan Collins, Senior, wrote in 1990 - and we republished here on POWIP just 2 weeks ago (finding it timely).
We can't do it out of Washington. We had war on poverty and a war on cancer. We knew how to get to the moon because we knew physics. It's rather simple Newtonian physics. We had no idea how to do organisms as complicated as cancer cells or poverty, which involves complicated social interaction. We have no idea how to create renewable energy as efficient as fossil energy we have now, and you can't invent it or will it by act of Congress. [emphasis: Root]
I love Krauthammer - and now I know precisely why I find him so very agreeable...
From Pop's piece...
In 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced the major objective of his administration: landing a man on the Moon in that decade. The American space program accomplished this by means of a “systems approach”, the forerunner of “management by objective”. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, sought an even loftier goal; one that would assure his place in history. He declared a “War on Cancer” and predicted victory within our lifetime. This program failed despite earnest efforts and damaged the credibility of medical research. In this case, the vaunted “systems approach” failed, as we should have known it would.
The landing on the Moon depended on physics and mathematics. The laws governing these sciences are predictable, immutable. The conquest of cancer depended on biology, whose laws are dynamic, unpredictable. This difference should have been anticipated and appreciated, but it was not; and it is still not. It is our job to emphasize these unique features of Medicine in a sort of Medical Macro-Ethical context to prevent society from making these mistakes. It’s not easy and we have failed by letting business put medicine “into play” as just another consumable. Economic forces will apply, we are told, in Medicine just as other “big business”. This intrusion into Medicine was inevitable, but as ill-conceived as Johnson’s War on Cancer. [emphasis: Root]
Talk about spoooooky!!!!!11!!!!
Anyway, maybe great minds really do think alike.
Near DC? Come for a Beer with the Evil Dans
Dan Riehl and I are meeting am hanging this evening at Saphire Cafe in Bethesda.
Please join us if you're so inclined.
Looks like I'll start there at 5:30, then move on to 18th Amendment in Hill country.
Walpingate Reaching Critical Mass
One year to the day after illegally firing AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin, the Obama administration is scrambling to ward off further embarrassments related to the case. On Friday, Mr. Walpin's lawsuit for reinstatement moved forward another step. For this tempest to be raging a full year later shows how badly the administration botched the situation from the start.
Rainbow Putsch and Obama’s DC
Remember this story from 2006?
Like Father, Like Son
From the Independent (UK)
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights leader, has called on African Americans to boycott BP over its record on equality.
The campaigner has set out plans to picket some of the oil giant's 12,000 petrol stations across the US because the company has so few ethnic minority- owned distributors.
And he is tying the campaign to outrage over the high oil price. This has pushed up energy costs, which, he claims, fall disproportionately on urban residents, including many African Americans.
From the ACUF.org, the American Conservative Union Foundation
Judicial Watch has released a report that details the shakedown tactics that have been used by Jesse Jackson and his Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition against some of the biggest companies in the world.
Jackson’s current target is oil giant British Petroleum. Using one of his almost patented malapropisms, Jackson has informed BP that "We don't want charity, we want parity," as he mouthed a laundry list of what the oil company needs to do in order to get the “Reverend” to go away.
I didn't. But now I do. And the only reason I remember it now is that I sensed something very familiar in Captain Queeg our Dear Leader... in the way he has been analyzing managing triangulating - is tending to - the current opportunity crisis in the Gulf.
I found this in his file folder we keep in the archives here at POWIP. But, no doubt, O'Blameya knows this play by heart. How to extort money from productive employers without spending a dime seems to be a very popular game among... erm... those who haven't produced anything of substance in their entire adult lives.
As they say, the Apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Or, in this case, the bramble.
Is Jackson Watto the Emperor to Obama's Anakin?
Updatex1 - Joe rightly points out that Jackson is more like the character Watto than the Emperor. Correction made.
Unprecedented Charts Terra Incognita
Democrats have controlled Congress since 2007.
I want my Utopia, and I want it now!
So Sad, when that “thrill” is gone.
Obama negotiates some extra boom towing vessels with prime contractor.
It seems that I wasn't the only one who thought that Mr. Obama's oval office address last night was, perhaps, a new high in lows for him. Not only was it a CYA performance, it wasn't even his usual colorful oratory; it appeared almost as if he was merely going through the motions-JUST WORDS! And that, dear reader, is not going to fly with the public. Regardless of how smooth the flim-flam man is, people can sense when they are being conned; especially when the con artist is so blase as to not even feel the need to put any effort into the performance. That's what made it incrementally worse than Carter's "malaise" speech. Last night's Oval office address was a cheap, evasive, transparent attempt to use the oil spill to advance his "green" agenda. And although he didn't specifically mention the Kerry-Liebowitz bill by name, he spoke to a few of it's mechanisms in the only part of his address that he seemed enthusiastic about.
Predictably, many folks to the right of the President, ideologically, including myself, have panned the address for many of the same reasons. Cap'n Ed over at Hot Air has an especially interesting review, with several good links and some interesting observations, like this:
This speech was suited for Day 1 of a catastrophe, not Day 57. It had no answers at all. None. It’s as if Rip van Obama awoke after eight weeks of slumber and had been told just that morning about a massive problem in the Gulf of Mexico. For a man who has repeatedly claimed to be “fully engaged since Day 1,” and who repeated that claim last night, Obama gave every impression of still being in the spitballing stage of crisis management.
Obama didn’t even offer an original thought for spitballing. In his short presidency, Obama has had two responses to any issue: appoint a czar or create a commission. The auto industry got a czar, for instance, and the deficit that Obama’s spending has driven out of sight got a commission. Last night, Obama wanted to know he was taking this seriously by appointing a czar and a commission, the latter of which had been announced weeks ago. That was the sum total of his substantive response last night. Small wonder Obama chose an Oval Office speech rather than face another press conference.
[emphasis-ed.]
And us knuckle dragging Reich-wingerz are not the only ones to notice that the conniver-in-chief's address was painfully short of details, both about the event itself as well as what he was planning to do in the future as remedy. Perhaps most noticeably were the three un-wise men at MSNBC, Olbermann, Matthews, and Fineman. These fellows were clearly unimpressed with the lack of details or even a sense of leadership. One gets the impression that they realized that it was a con-job, and were amazed that Obama didn't even seem to be trying all that hard to pull it off. Real Clear Politics has both the surprising video, as well as some choice transcribed remarks:
Olbermann: "Nothing specific at all was said."
Matthews: "No direction."
Howard Fineman: "He wasn't specific enough."
Olbermann: "I don't think he aimed low, I don't think he aimed at all. It's startling."
Matthews: Ludicrous that he keeps saying [Secretary of Energy] Chu has a Nobel prize. "I'll barf if he does it one more time."
Matthews: "I don't sense executive command."
Wow...These observations coming from a few of his most ardent cheerleaders, Matthews of "leg tingle" fame as well as having publicly committed himself to ensuring that the Obama presidency was a success, are a damning indictment indeed and a clear indication of, let's say, the shine coming off his halo. Even Eugene Robinson, race-baiter extrodinaire and ardent Obamists, who openly admits that the speech was designed to push the President's "energy agenda" more than actually, like, address the oil spill, says that it was a failure. So sad, to watch their Obama love withering on the vine, no doubt along with many of the once zealous Obama youth and, of course, the fightin' nutroots...
This sullen and dispirited analysis by some of the most ardent Obamists also won't be helpful in re-shaping public opinion in the President's favor. On Bill O'Reilly's TV show, following the address, Charles Krauthammer opined that Mr. Obama might recieve a little bump from the address, but that it would only last a couple of days. Who knows, maybe he can fit a quick round of golf in while his numbers are so buoyed...
Because, otherwise, they don't look good. I mean, lately, Gallup has him underwater in polling conducted amongst all adults. And ObergruppenFuhrer McPollster? Well Rasmussen, who's polls of likely voters are often more acurate snapshots of the public opinion that matters, has him at an all time low today of 42% approval, 20 points underwater when it comes to the strongly approve/disapprove metric. This, dear reader, is Bush country, in case anyone had forgotten.
So, my exit questions are four-fold. 1) How long until the natinal Democrat's abandon Obama? 2) In view of her favorability eclipsing his, will Hillary challenge Obama, like Kennedy did Carter in 1980? 3) When do I get to start referring to "the failed Obama policies" as a usual and customary turn-of-the-phrase. 4) Is MoDo snarkily referring to President Obama as, "the One", a signal that he's sooooooooooo done?
Follow Dan!
All the Kool Kidz are doing it...
Creature Commentariat
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