and it ain't over yet, folks

The Telegraph is a conservative newspaper in England.  Go see what they are saying now about the American economy.  They move from one discouraging observation to another to yet another.
"America slides deeper into depression as Wall Street revels"

Oh, and don't miss reading the comments.  They're a hoot.

Sort of related, here is an interest image that shows what resources our expanding industry is exhausting.  (Peak Oil is so yesterday.  We're at Peak Everything already.)  Now you can see why China is securing its mineral access all over the planet.

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For those interested in an amusing detour...

( Read more if you have the time... )

best. autism. review. ever.

They propose renaming autism to "intense world syndrome". I approve.  They argue that autism has multiple genetic risk factors, is fundamentally an epigenetic phenomenon, and also has multiple environmental triggers.  Sound familiar?

It's an article from researchers in Switzerland in late 2007, and I'm just now discovering it. It's so long and thorough (history, challenges, heterogeneity, comorbidities, genetics, epigenetics, neuronal changes, study reviews) that I've not even finished reading it all yet. It's all been very, very, very, very interesting.

"We propose that these super-charged microcircuits render aspects of the world painfully intense and aversive, and autism is therefore proposed as an Intense World Syndrome. We present recent molecular, cellular, synaptic, circuit, and behavioral evidence to support this new hypothesis and re-interpret the symptomology and pathology in the light of the proposed syndrome in which the world is aversively intense."
http://frontiersin.org/neuroscience/neuroscience/paper/10.3389/neuro.01/1.1.006.2007/html/

Moreover, their paper still fits in with my own theory about the ultimate cause of the so-called autism epidemic.  They speak of "excessive neuronal processing in circumscribed circuits" which leads to "hyper-functionality, which turns debilitating, as opposed to disorders of hypo-functionality, as is often assumed."  In my theory, human society has turned to meta-cognition, and now epigenetics is trying to prepare future generations of humans with brains better able to process this information.  I think that their Intense World Syndrome fits nicely with my personal experience and my ideas about the primary cause of autism.

I'm sure I'll write more next month, after I've had time to ponder it.  Meanwhile, based on reviews and critiques like the above article, the American Psychiatric Association is considering removing all autism subtypes until they are better understood.  I approve wholeheartedly.