I remain cynical about online anything - are you sure this is what it looks like?

 Yet again this year I've been reminded just how shallow and bizarre this medium is.  An apparently confused man (by which I mean he appeared to not understand some of our dialogue and was genuinely confused by some of what I said.  Which he either ignored or just interpreted any way he wanted) called Dave Francis turned up, trolling and trawling for screen grabs in order to make me look....whatever he felt like.  Lying as they do, reinterpreting my materials online in order to make me out to be...well, what he wanted.

I had to make a very long, experimental documentary commentary just to explain my experience of him.  (See my YouTube for the epic film with his name on it.  A close encounter with Dave Francis of Being Frank Autism Channel.  You will understand why he's ADW whilst saying he's not got a clue what that means.  Which is not possible as I have enough screen shots to link him to Jill Escher, Thomas A McKean and the whole infrastructure they have built in America).  

For this I am grateful for the experience.  The whole dialogue we had hinged around asking him some simple questions around some statements he was making.  Which seemed to be the whole point of all his films on YouTube and engagements on social media.

DO YOU HAVE ANY PROOF THAT SELF ADVOCATES, WHO GET A LOT OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA ATTENTION, DO ANY HARM TO THE FAMILIES OF THE SEVERELY DISABLED, AND THEY THEMSELVES?

DO YOU HAVE ANY EVIDENCE THAT FUNDING IS BEING TAKEN AWAY FROM THE SEVERELY DISABLED WHO ARE AUTISTIC, BECAUSE OF SELF ADVOCATES LIKE MYSELF (and himself, I kept trying to explain to him.  Because if you claim to have a wife of 20 years and 3 disabled children that you manage to look after and make films and use social media AND describe yourself as autistic...well...you are basically the very Neurodiversity Movement you seem to reject.  Default you see?  Also he provided zero proof they existed whilst in his character and posting, typifying the opposite.  The classic mature man who has grown up living with his parents type.  Check his films).

If you look at my YouTube film to the end you will see that I received z e r o answer.  Because he was lying his head off to himself.  He's part of a whole cult of such people.  

This my friends is the point of my post here.  My buddies in the great advocacy field tell me to ignore anyone with these unprovable ideas.  I told such people that they could go to the Police or Local Government if they felt that autistic advocates were taking away services and financing to their loved ones and even themselves.  It's easy.  But do they?  Erm....well...Ever heard of that?

In the film I omitted references to the bizarre mother of two disabled children, Jill Escher.  The American who co started the infamous NCSA.  The National Council for Severe Autism.  She who promoted to the point of interviewing the arch troll Tom Clements.  Who I see as being 'behind' the Autistic Dark Web trollers in 2019, on Twitter.  One reason for this is that stories of her paying people to attack others online emerged.  I have a screen grab one one Thomas A McKean point blank admitting he was paid an awful lot of money by NCSA (Escher) apparently to do nothing but the activity I have explained.

All of which, as far as I can see, amounted to zero again.  Achieved nothing.  

Which brings me to the idea that a smaller number of people than they realise, seem to spend their time in the world of autism in a bubble like world of their own, wasting their time whilst thinking it means something.  Which I see as very much a trait of social media and the internet in general.

Here in the real world, the UK weather has now gotten rather cold.  Will it warm up?  Ah, we shall see.  Meterology is not an exacting science.  Climate changes.  No I will not talk about planetary environmental damage.  That seemed to me to be something painfully obvious - and that was in 1979 as a school boy.  Now I still think we do not know the half of what goes on in terms of pollution, all over the world.  

The above is REAL.  It's something rooted in empirical actuality.  It's not made up in peoples minds and then actualised/realised in some corporeal form on file servers.  Even then, can you touch and taste it?  No.

Here in my home the weather manifests in terms of cold and damp.  You can do something about both those things easily.  You can go walking, swimming or use my local gym, and do something about your own body and mind.  I often find myself working and down my olympic sized sports centre pool, reflecting on how this is all you need for a fix on reality.  

Why do people need to overcomplicate life?  To feel substantial.  My wife was saying that this morning.  That most people are simple in themselves.  That they complicate their identities and their minds in order to induce an experience of meaning something in life.  Stories of people doing self harm to themselves due to what is (very loose use of the term) existential crisis are commonplace.  

It seems to me that having decided to do more reading of paper and less of social media right now, I am heading back to reality.  I am rebooting Stealth Aspies, and it's script reading time.  Suddenly I am critiquing and deciphering work in order to find out if it does the job.  Do these scripts mirror the autistic experience?  Are they uplifting and positive?  Do they achieve anything for audiences of autistic people?  Are the goals of my Buddhist faith achieved?  Is there self love here, or is self loathing that one is not neurotypical (perfect according to the likes of Francis) equally if not more pertinent to portray?

Are we all aspiring neurotypicals?  Do we all really just want to be able to achieve things and function.  If you do not have a relationship, a family or a job it's understandable that you may want those things and go blame being neurodivergent for not having them.  I CANNOT RELATE.  I CANNOT MEET PEOPLE I CAN RELATE TO.  I CANNOT DO THOSE THINGS...  Well yes I have been there myself.  But now that is not the case.  Because I found ways to achieve them.  

I mean, lets face it, if you did not have your autistic/Neurodivergent nature, you'd be able to do things you think you cannot due because you are disabled/disordered.  Right?  It's that simple for everyone?  Well no actually it is not.  In fact these things can come and go.  You can have the family and the job and lose the lot in one car crash.  You can wake up one day and find it all gone.  A note on the kitchen table.  The family cleared off.  One woman I knew came home to find herself locked out of the house and her husband refusing to have anything to do with her again.  He never did either.  

The garden we have is full of leaves that need scraping up again.  I may go out there later on and do that.  I have things to do.  Presents to wrap.  People to talk to.  Meantime the internet goes on and on, as if it's changing anything when a reality wall often presents it's leaking out into reality to make any real difference.

You see, the severely disabled are never fully supported.  I have seen this year after year.  Families ALWAYS think they never get enough support and understanding.  So any kind of initiative to change that is welcomed by many.  Just one problem.  WHAT EXACTLY IS IT THAT THEY REALLY NEED TO MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER?  Ultimately in the world of autism you get the usual - to remove autism and leave the subject not autistic.  MOTHER!  FATHER!  I AM FREE OF AUTISM!  IT WAS HELL IN THERE....The very words of an advocate from 2011.  Funny at the time.  But with a very serious point.  He himself had a very disabled son in his early 20's.  He had the authority that many parents involved in such a scene seem to treasure above all else.  

What you just read was words.  Perspectives.  Engineered ways of seeing life.  I believe there are no 'cures'.  There will be no 'recovering' people who 'autism' as they characterise it.  Just the writing, the agitating and the complaining.  Just the reacting.  I do of course wish I was wrong about this and all could be different in the future.  But get real.  Care about people.  Grow up and accept that all over the world there are families who need substantially more support than they may ever receive.  This is how desperate they can become.  They can end up like this bizarre figure on social media.  

Vaccine/mercury autism conspiracy theorists - do they have inferior and substandard children?

One of my pet fascinations over the years are the likes of Wakefield and Tommey and the Age of Autism website people.  This week Dan Olmstead, lynchpin and editor of Age of Autism was revealed to have died.  No one is saying how so far but I am sure it will be attributed to some great conspiracy by the pharmaceutical industry in general.  There is no fooling those people.

What fascinates me about the writing I find online by such people is that sooner or later, it proves to be far less than it appears.  This very day in The Times, it was revealed that the Curzon cinema Soho pulled a private booking screening of the Vaxxed film.  An article dated last year reckoned that it was supposed to be premiered in the UK last june in the same venue.

Point is, if you just study the behaviour of this actually quite small group and their writings and attempts to connect with mainstream science and the press, patterns emerge.  A constant self view that puts the judgement of the likes of Wakefield above and beyond the medical establishment that stripped him of his doctorate.  An insular community of virtually entirely parents of autistic people supporting them.  Invariably young autistic children, who are problematic rather than 'relatively functional'.  Also some parents defining themselves as 'vaccine damaged' too.  Or rather, if you read their attitude and style, people who reckon they or their children fall short of standards for human ability and function that they set themselves.

Losers in the race of life.  Lesser people because of their neurodiversity.  Abnormal folk with this ever present and shared standard of normality and ability that autism has deprived their children and sometimes themselves of.

Relatively low functioning people.  Brain damaged.  Retarded.  Vaccine damaged.

But thankfully they have their own community of brave freedom fighters that support them in their science fiction quest against mighty evil corporations and the governments they bribe and collude with.

One day President Trumps acknowledgement will lead to proper and unbiased study proving their beliefs RIGHT.  Then the world will know that autism is not just a man made epidemic.  It will also know that neurodiversity is a DISEASE, A PERVERSION AND A SICKNESS.  Humanity will, overnight, earn the right to HATE AND DESPISE the mental disease that has stolen so many children's minds from their families.  Neurodiversity as a concept will come to mean accepting and being nice to the retarded, the damaged and the sick neurotypicals.  There will be no spectrum any more, merely the ill and the well.

Just think about the above frame of reference.  See how cold blooded, facist, ableist and simple it is?  Hate difference.  Want cures to make people normal.  Get your children back to normal.  The way there were before the vaccines.  Eliminate or at least acknowledge brain damage.  For Wakefield himself wrote on line...AUTISM REALLY IS THE MOST TERRIBLE DISEASE.

I assumed when I wrote this that Wakefield used that phrase in an exchange with one of his supporters as a trigger phrase to get on the right side of them.  To bond with them.  This suggests to me that these so called 'parents motivated by love of their children' are actually motivated as much by the hatred of anything that is not what their group considers normal.  which is behind the scenes a very facist and nasty attitude.  I thought this close band of parents where the good guys?  The people who tell the truth and care?  What is all this aggressive and nasty business against autism then?  Oh, but they see it is nothing but a disease and a disorder.  Illness, like plague or the diseases they seek to encourage by stigmatising vaccines.  Which is what they do but always deny.

So by now you see that if you pay as much attention to the personalities involved, patterns emerge.  One comment on the Age of Autism site back in 2011 when they were attacking Ari Ne Man went...YOU CANNOT LEAVE A CHILD IN A STATE LIKE THAT.  I KNOW WHAT THIS NEURODIVERSITY IS?  IT IS EVIL.  At the time the last sentence was what fascinated me.  But later on I considered more and more the first one.  This massive generalisation about autistic children being 'in a state'.  The point blank command that all autistic children had to be cured.  That something must be done about their being autistic.

Question is, what if all these people's parents were functional autistics as I was as a nipper?  Would they be believing all this vaccines/mercury/autism business.  Do you get the feeling they would not?  Yes, exactly my point if you do.  Would they have a vicious and hateful attitude to autism if their kids were able to lead the kind of life I did?  Hey, it was not perfect.  Bullying in school, lots of inability to achieve in any forma academic way.  But still I was relatively okay.  I could work around my weaknesses.

See?  What is the precedent with these parents?  That their kids are dysfunctional by their standards rather than that they are autistic children?  That they cannot compete and achieve and lead normal adult lives in the future (they think).  That's the thing I want to leave you with - the urge to work out just what it is these vaccine/mercury people are fixated on.

Is it either their children lack of competitive ability, or the fact that they do not share the same  neurodiverse nature as they do?  Or, that they have natures that they reject because they make nosies and gestures that their own parents despise and see as inferior, weak and stupid.  Great language to use about your own children, eh?  But tell me?  Whereabouts is the unconditional love and acceptance in all of this? No matter who and what their own children are, do they really love them?

Or are they below standards.

Spaced out and simple minded. Why I am someone to be wary of.

Some people on occasion encounter this weird, pathetic looking old man.  He appears to be overwhelmed.  Now, when you look like you cannot handle a social situation you are in, the obvious conclusion is that you are not intelligent enough to keep out of the way of it.  Or, if it is understood you had no choice but to be there, some allowance maybe made in the mind of the person encountering you.

Generally people who encounter others who look childlike, overwhelmed and vulnerable assume they are of a lesser intelligence than themselves.  You face someone you can 'handle'.  Someone who is not a threat.  Someone child like and simple.

This is how I have often come across to people.  It is in fact, a lie.  But am I lying and deceiving others with my appearance?  Is this my responsibility?  Also, what exactly is happening in the social intercourse taking place?


Many autistic people dont have the capacity to relate the way the neurotypicals around them do.  We are a kind have universal properties, one of which is a disconnect between how we are within and how we relate externally.  This can get bigger the more stress is put upon us both in the world and as develops within ourselves.  Internal stress is not necessarily due to external stimuli.  It can be a very traumatic business being autistic and you can easily grow up so used to abuse, you miss it.  So you work within to keep it going.

I can recall many social moments when I have been patronised and humoured.  Which is a bit paradoxical if you consider I was aware it was all happening.  Oh, so why didn't I make some sort of indication to the other people involved that I knew this?  That would have been all they needed.  Unless they deliberately played on my weaknesses and wanted to rejoice in that fact by seeing that I knew there was nothing I could do about their actions?

Dark stuff, eh?


So I posted this on Facebook:

Ever had that experience where you have been humoured, patronised and treated like you were simple minded but you knew full well what was happening to you? So how could you be those things when you had awareness?

Am I right that this single experience expresses the reality of being autistic relative to neurotypicals really well? Also that you never thought anyone would state it like this for you to relate yourself to?

Within 10 minutes, three friends had reacted positively, two of which wrote that it was like explaining physics to monkeys trying to make neurotypicals understand this?


The experience of being misunderstood or even seen as something you are not is clearly universal, since at lest one response was not from an autistic person.  It happens to everyone etc.  I would say the chief reason I get upset with myself is my inability to deal with this single issue?  Its the main thing in the real world and I always saw it as 'standing up for yourself'.

Assuming of course, my perception of such situations is accurate?

Maybe the other person or group has me right?  I am vulnerable and relatively feeble minded?  So accept it.  Well, how can you when you are that simple that you think you are not.  Quite a common thing in the Polytechnic of North London I was at I can tell you.


This is the issue with existing in a society that often means you go into situations where people don't know you, don't care about you and why should they do these things anyway?  Do you know personally and in detail everyone you walk past?  See in shops and clubs?  Interact with in lifts and on trains?  Do you want to personally care about them?  Well actually many of us do want to have consideration and respect very much.  So note the paradox?  Being considerate whilst being private from others.


I think it is time for a new slide in my show?

Aspies who do not relate. Getting reality wrong.

Many of the autistic people I know seem to have a real issue with how to relate to a world containing other people.  Other people's values, attitudes and approaches to everything in life.  In short, consensual reality.

There seems to be this need amongst some of us to operate from motives that do not have to make sense to anyone but ourselves, and which we will use force if necessary to assert upon others.  I really do think some do not even need to understand their own actions.  They do not need coherent motives.  They just do what they feel they have to.

Sound familiar?

Are you a doctor Mr. Wady? The ethics of aspie 'outing'.

August 5th 2016, the day before I travel to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for three weeks.

Recently I broke a cardinal rule of mine.  I publically outed someone.  Last time I did that the woman involved ended up bringing a show to the Edinburgh Festival about it.  True. 

After the long list I gave of autistic properties that I felt my target possessed, I was asked whether I was a doctor?  The question implied either, did you train at length in a proper medical frame of reference to know what you are talking about, and/or that only such people could make such lengthy judgments.  It does not take into account Asdar, autistic gaydar.  Or that aspies know aspies.  That because we have empathy for our own kind, we know them when we see and experience them.

Making a diagnosis of neurodiversity is usually broken down into elements like ADHD, OCD, PDA and lots of other specific properties.  As an aspie I just see it all as the ordinary and varying properties of an aspie.  Its neurodiversity – everything else is the individual.  Simple.  Actually this week I filmed two experts making a training film in which people where discussed by them property by property to see whether they fitted the profile or not? 

So what have I done apart from be born one?  I have read the books over the years.  (Regular daily access to Nas library helped in the first few years I tell you).  I have read the papers and worst of all I have looked at the dreaded internet.  The home of authority that needs nothing behind it.  Like this blog?  No wonder the anti vaccine movement lives there. 

I think that to all the other kinds of conspiracy theorists as well, the electronic medium of written information that can be accessed (and edited) anywhere in the world is more than a blessing.  It is the perfect base of authoritative expression.  No more soap box standing or long conversations in pubs.  Now you just type it all in and it sits there.  Brilliant.

So…what’s the difference between that and what I wrote?  Simple.  I have spent nearly 12 years diagnosed and over 10 in a relationship and married to another autistic person.  By my 53^rd birthday I will have met more autistic people than I can recall. I had a purpose in doing that too.  Before I was an aspie I was a Buddhist, spending all of my 30’s in the same movement.  For me it was all about self awareness.  Meditation retreats (30 over 10 years, from weekenders to two weekers and the buddhafield retreats and festivals on top.  I loved the cold harsh light of stripped down self awareness). 

On the 24^th May 2016 I spoke for the Royal College of GP’s at a meeting in Edgbaston, Birmingham.  I can provide the PowerPoint presentation I wrote for them.  I became one of many autistic people who have had the privilege of training doctors. 

I do this kind of thing all the time for my day job with the National Autistic Society, running around the UK making presentations as part of a bigger training day.  But that is not why I assume any authority in making the diagnosis I initially referred to.

For five years, we had an autism rights group based in London.  I was closely involved with it on and off, witnessing both its formation and its ultimate disintegration.  Four men came to rule it absolutely to a degree that would have made Stalin feel like a considerate man to his old friends, or Mao rather inclusive of the opinions of non communists.  You literally could not speak during meetings unless it was on the monthly agendas.  People would turn up and say nothing all meeting.  No slot allocated you see?  You could be just as brutally shut down. 

Eventually the four dictators turned on each other and over the course of two months, two of them expelled the other two.  One each month.  Years before I emailed that it was getting ridiculous and wanted nothing to do with it.  The reply from one dictator was…WE HAVE THE POWER TO VETO YOUR RESIGNATION.  WE WILL SUSPEND YOU INSTEAD.

There then followed a macabre series of meetings, some of which were held between one or two individuals and noted in the comprehensive and detailed minutes as ‘secret’ or private.  These were not young men by the way?  One had a family and ex partner.  Some were older than I was.  Finally a huge letter arrived with a 1p stamp on it.  I had to get it from the postal depot.  I had no idea what was going on by then as I was too busy either laughing about it or avoiding it all.

Inside the huge A4 envelope was a big document, carrying various macabre charges.  I still have it somewhere.  I showed it to people to great comic effect.  I should take it to parties?  Anyhow, my point here is that if there is one kind of personality I can relate to, it is the Super High Functioner.  That is, autistic people who don't look sound and act like we are supposed to (Rain Man.  Maths savants who cannot go into public places without having screaming meltdowns etcetera).

I had an autistic father who embodied quite a few of the characteristics I detail below so I know the behaviors.  Hell, I spend my life trying not to be like that myself. 

The four dictators could be characterized thus:

• ·      Nice guy but really obsessed with a left wing communist organization and prone to lines like WE ARE NOT A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION BUT WE MUST PROTEST ABOUT THIS AWFUL COALITION GOVERNMENT. 
• ·      Manic.  A man who would spend the entire meeting on minutes arising from the previous ones if unchecked.  All of it.  Prone to literally screaming and shouting if something was not done properly or a point made incorrectly.  A man with an attention to detail that was not humanly feasible to maintain.  In his 40’s and devoutly religious.  
• ·      An alcoholic in some sort of bizarre and quite brilliant world of his own in which was a CEO, a Political and Campaigning person, A Support Worker and a great savior of the autistic world rolled into one.  Described to me as employing Stalinist tactics where you eliminated people how had helped you get to where you wanted to go, once they where of no further use.  Had the advantage of alcoholic delusion where you believe that what you decide is real, is.  Charismatic and very well read too.
• ·    Always right.  A very intelligent and educated man who if the books said one thing and he remembered another, knew which was right.  He would literally ignore screaming and shouting at him if he was certain he was right.  Years before in one situation where he met with other autistic people, someone hit him in the face because he was so intractable.  Could only be right.  Often incoherent because he spoke from his own perspective all the time.

People would only last a few meetings before they either left or stayed on as minions.  Really.  Those small dinky yellow creatures?  More or less what you had.  There was always a small crew of such people going along with whatever the gang of four got up to.  I often wonder what they had to say later on about it, but attempts to get sense out of them usually fail.  They just sort of smile and say it was all a long time ago now.  Nice harmless aspie folk. 

This then is my specialty corner of the spectrum.  The folks who don't live and behave as if they are restrained by having stereotypical neurodiverse natures.  People who never get any kind of formal diagnosis and look after themselves, and sometimes others so well, that they never get noticed as being neurodiverse.  Odd, eccentric, brilliant, criminal, problematic and even dangerous yes?  Hiding behind addiction, depression and mental health issues yes.  But not regarded as being autistic. 

Now, if you where involved in the online exchange I was initially discussing, do you see anything familiar here? 

What good does it do to out someone?  To make sense and explain someone’s personality and characteristics?  Well I think the more of us actually know what we are the better.  However, public outing is problematic.  In fact it may be disastrous in the personal work and living scenario closet aspies may have been forced to construct to survive.  Also there is the matter of not having the individuals permission? Someone’s nature is a private business and I for one should not feel I can go around doing things like that to people. 

So should I be going around doing this?  No, and I conceded I may be wrong in the example I started this blog discussing.  However, my tactic in the instant in question was to leave breadcrumbs.  To suggest and actually allow defeat.  To maybe look like I am mistaken.  But I felt I had to do all of this simply to save the poor person in question.  Because I really do think they are going to get hurt.  Rejected and ignored by their own people in the scenario they have personally created and that is clearly deeply important to them. 

I don't think they can let go and that as time goes on, the people around the aspie will simply ignore them and do what they want.  I think the scenario will simply evaporate gently.  I also think the closet aspie will not be able to adjust to and go with this evolution of what is a huge and long standing structure of organization.  Now something of an institution. 

I have already had first hand proof that a small number of people involved in this entity can be found to be using it to mitigate mental health issues.  Awarding themselves with power and authority, and the chance to do what they really want to do.  Whereas anywhere else in any other situation, they would not be able to do this.  Using the scenario to stand tall and believe that others acknowledge and relate to them as having strengths and abilities and authorities they are desperate for. 

I don't think that is a bad thing actually?  Why not if they don't hurt anyone and perform their roles okay?  Sadly such a person was very harmful to me.  (I bet you where just waiting for that one?)  Although they where also responsible for bringing me into this ‘world’, which this year I am yet again cheerfully entering.  I am certain that although the first time ended badly, the third this year will be like my second.  Great fun and an adventure.  Although surely I am getting too old for all this….

Or not.  I see my work in all of this is to positively represent my kind.  A hybrid of my Dharma/Buddhist aspirations and practice, and the skill set I developed as a teenager and in my early twenties as a would be actor (I cringe to write this but its true.  I performed in a huge amount of plays between the ages of 18 and 24, ultimately spending a year in the East 15 drama school and not completing the 3 year professional acting course.  Just as well one way or another).  Nowadays I go out in front of audiences and I relate what it is to have experienced, read and seen so much of my own kind whilst being one myself. 

I try to be a sort of Rosetta stone.  Someone who spent all his life up to the age of 41 not knowing who and what he was, then ended up married to someone in the same position.  My working and private life coupled with my past all focused on this one time of my life.  To go out there and tell the truth, whilst forever acknowledging I maybe wrong.  When I do a show, I invite the audience to join in?  Correct me if you will?  Come on, let us all create an aspie space and share?

At the end of the days training in Birmingham, two of the GP’s came out to me as being on the autistic spectrum, let alone having children who where.  I made a comparison with gay people that was commented on when I was writing online, outing the man I have mentioned.  Yes, I responded, I do indeed see the spectrum of sexuality as being a perfect parallel and metaphor for our kind.  Aspies are on a neurodiverse spectrum in relation to being non autistic – which is as relative as sexuality.  It is not an absolute.  Only when you have enough properties occurring at once can I notice you in that special way, and know you are one of our tribe. 

Sound familiar?  Well if it does, maybe best not say anything.  ;)