My name is Whitney Hoffman, and I run the LD Podcast. I have started a ChipIn campaign to try to raise money for Ma Chen, a mother of an autistic daughter in China, who has started a school for autistic children. Her story was highlighted in the Wall Street Journal recently, and she is looking for funds to try to buy a farm, so the children will have a place to go and something to do to support themselves after they finish school. With no real social safety net in China, without this sort of program, the future of these children is uncertain at best.

I think all of us moms can make a difference. I would love to enlist your support, and if you feel comfortable, to reach out to your community as well. With small donations, many of which have been in the $5 to $20 range so far, we’ve already raised over $500 to date, in the past week.

For the $10,000 US this farm will cost, whatever money we can raise in the next 60 days will go a long way to making a long term impact on the lives of autistic children in China.

the link to the chipin page can be found here:

http://ldpodcast.chipin.com/ma-chen-autism-school-in-china

Thank you so much for what you are doing, the support others find through your blog, and for considering this request.

Whitney Hoffman
The LD Podcast
http://www.ldpodcast.com
ldpodcast (at) gmail.com

The point the guy tried to make, was (truncating and paraphrasing a whole bunch) that the Bantu are too rowdy to get along in civilized society, the Han are too tame to resist oppressive government, and we white nordic folks are, as Goldilocks would have it, just right.

Snork.

Oh, on racial differences? The external appearance has only to do with esthetics; it’s the part between the ears which counts. The AKC has encouraged breeding for appearance in dogs for years, and produced some really bad, scary, good-looking dogs.

I remember a woman who picked her husband for their handsomeness, and had to put up with their bullitude and good-for-nothingness.

Breed for behavior, dammit!

Sometimes I think we were better off when our marriages were arranged by our parents

I’ve wondered at this with my son, who is very attentive to musical pitch, rhythm, and melody. Perhaps a language that relied more on these for linguistic distinction would have been somewhat easier for him to understand—but I speculate!

@Larry, there’s also /ng/ sounds—-ngaw is “I” (it’s pronounced like waah in Mandarin).

I’ve always thought the criteria were very Westernized, but…well, I guess that’s to be expected given their provenance.

From my very first readings of the DSM and ICD I have always been struck by how culturally biased the diagnostic criteria were. I’m glad people are finally looking at autism in the context of different cultures.

I would actually suspect that if one has some degree of speech impediment the language one speaks might make the effect of that worse or less depending on how much the sound you have difficulty with is essential in conveying phonetic distinction between words

One of my boys cycled through all sorts of sounds when he babbled as a baby. The ones he was best at were not sounds common to English. Hubby and I sometimes joke that if we spoke something other than English as a native he wouldn’t have such a hard time with developing his speach.

I think Dr. Grinker would probably be the fellow to ask about that, or so I would guess.