The rise of Autism

Long piece on NPR this morning claiming that autism is much more widespread than thought. They did a study in a Korean city and declared that better than 2% of the children in the city were autistic. They went on to explain that a large number of cases were discovered even though the unlucky children had been doing well in school and not in difficulty.
The piece did not explain how these "hidden" cases of autism were detected, nor how bad the situation was.
I reflect upon a couple of young boys I know, who seem like perfectly ordinary boys to me, but whose mothers both informed me that the they were autistic.
Is autism becoming the new Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a diagnosis beloved of teachers, because it releases them from responsibility for the child's academic difficulties?

Leaf Day

In the high mountain passes of New Hampshire, the trees are putting out leaves, finally. Hurray.
Let's hope it doesn't snow on them.

Upstate NRA dinner

National is right on the ball, and forwarded my name and contact info to the local NRA organization, and they invited me to attend their dinner Friday night. So I went. It was held in the Littleton Elks hall. About 100 people turned up, all ages from two, thru teen age, thru old geezers like me, and a fair number of girls considering the nature of the event. Dress was informal, I was overdressed in coat & tie.
The event consisted of talking, eating, and auctioning. They auctioned off a raft of cool stuff to raise money, including a fair number of firearms. Two guys from NRA national turned up, which is not bad considering the remoteness of Littleton, NH from most of the US of A. On the other hand, 100 votes is enough to tip a lot of elections up here, and most of the 100 people present were NRA members. Who will probably pay close attention to NRA recommendations about who is and who is not, a supporter of the right to bear arms. I know for a fact that Charlie Bass, our current US rep, owes a lot of votes to a letter the NRA mailed to all New Hampshire members just before the 2010 election.
Gives one some appreciation of the effectiveness of the NRA as a lobbying organization.

Firefox 4

My Firefox has been nagging me to upgrade to V4 for some time now. I googled Firefox 4 and failed to turn up any bad reviews of it. So I upgraded today.
Be golly, Firefox 4 is faster than 3.6. I'm getting less "site not found", and when I click on a site it comes up faster. This is good. It promises a world of head spinning inprovements, about which I don't care much, but it is faster, about which I do care.

Al Quada gives the US a freebie

According to Fox News, Al Quada has admitted, on a website somewhere, that Bin Ladin is dead. With that, we no longer have to release photographs of the body to convince the Mid East that we really got him and it ain't a propaganda play. Al Quada has done that for us. Probably a quid pro quo for all those times our CIA announced that some scratchy audio tape was really from Bin Ladin.
It may also be, that between gunshot wounds to the face and a coating of blood, the photos don't look much like Bin Ladin. Which limits the value of releasing them.

Debate, Debate, whose on the Debate?

This was a Fox news show. They had Bret Bahr, Shannon Bream and Ron Williams, Fox regulars all, asking the questions. It was a little rough on the candidates, the newsies had done some homework, and the questions all started off "On such-and-such a date you said thus and so. Do you want to retract that tonight, right here on national TV?" They had hot potatoes to go around. Rough it may have been, but it did get the candidates to speak in concrete terms, rather than the usual meaningless motherhood and apple pie verbiage.
The five candidates were stood up behind podiums on stage. Annoyingly, the podiums lacked signs giving the candidates names, which makes it tough on viewers who don't know all five candidates by sight. One of the purposes of these debates is to let the voters get to see the candidates. If you don't know who they are, it's sorta meaningless.
Herman Cain is my favorite, and he did well, looked good, handled questions well. Tim Pawlenty looked pretty good too. Ron Paul had some feisty answers that brought a lot of applause.
The Donald, Romney, Newt Gengrich and Sarah Palin were not there, probably on the theory that when a better known and a lesser known politician appear on the same stage, the benefit goes to lesser known politician.

What do you do with terrorists other than shoot them?

Victor Davis Hanson makes this point here. The US justice system has had a Gitmo full of terrorists for ten years and they have not done squat, other than grilling them. Osama bin Ladin was shot resisting arrest partly because every one feared some US judge would set him free after capture.
We ought to be able to bring captured terrorists before a reliable tribunal that will conduct a public televised trial with the purpose of convincing the entire world that defendant so-and-so deserves what we are going to give him. The tribunal needs to be able to sentence enemy soldiers, those who merely carried packs and rifles under orders, to indefinite confinement, even if they are otherwise innocent of crimes.
It's worth letting the enemy know that capture isn't an automatic death sentence. The enemy is more likely to surrender if he thinks he has a chance of surviving captivity. If the enemy thinks the Americans will just waterboard him and bury him at sea, they are apt to fight to the bitter end.
The tribunal has to allow captured terrorists to be grilled for intelligence, grilled harder than usual police practice, and still put them on trial, and use the intel they furnished under duress against them.
It has been ten years since 9/11 and we don't have a method of dealing with captured terrorists. So we shoot them.