 A really powerful piece today in the free press, which I've often recommended to you that is Barry Weiss's publication. It's a sub-stack, used to be Barry Weiss's sub-stack, now it's called the Free Press, because it's really expanded well beyond Barry Weiss and I think she's doing a pretty good job of getting a lot of different people writing and even some reporting and really this whole alternative media that is really coming about on sub-stack is a very, very positive development news-wise and commentary-wise. You're getting a wider way of views, you're getting substantive articles, you're getting real content depth. I don't think journalism or commentary plus journalism has been in terms of diversity in a better situation than we have right now. We can complain all we want about the mainstream media, but the mainstream media is very non-dominant. The alternatives to mainstream media, they've never been more and good ones, not just garbage alternatives that they've always been, but good alternatives is pretty amazing. Anyway, a very powerful piece today in the Free Press about autism by a mother who has two autistic kids and this kind of reminds me of RFK. The piece really deals with the fact that the reality is, according to this and I have no reason to doubt it and from the little research I've done, this sounds true. The rates of autism are skyrocketing. I mean really skyrocketing in scary, scary ways. It is a non-trivial chance now that a child of yours could have autism. It's something like 3% of all eight-year-olds are being diagnosed by autism and you can say some of that's diagnosis inflation, but probably not. Probably not and so it really is scary in terms of parents. Now we talk about autism and often the examples that are brought up with people like Elon Musk, right? Yes, there's some high-performing autistic kids, but that's a minority. The majority of autistic kids, some of them have IQs of under 50. They can't do anything. Even the ones who can are very, very, very difficult and cannot function completely independently in the world out there and that is the vast majority of autistic cases and that's a big number and it's a scary number. You know, I hate catastrophizing, but when I see a number like that, it is scary. And of course RFK has a simplistic stupid explanation which has been debunked by science over and over and over again and debunked just somewhat by common sense. You can find other countries in the world which have equal levels of vaccination that have lower levels of autism, although autism is climbing everywhere. Now autism is a spectrum, but the problem is that a big chunk of the people are at the lower end of the spectrum, at the dysfunctional end of the spectrum. And now it's true that they're redefining other kind of cognitive issues as autism, but even when taking all of that into account, even when you take into account all the redefining that's being done, autism is still rising significantly. It's not true that something like a few percent of people were born in the past with some kind of cognitive problems. So something's causing it. And the challenge of course is to figure out why and what. The problem has been is that autism has become completely politicized and you have various groups trying to dominate the discussion and what happens as a consequence and we'll get into the details, what happens as a consequence is that it's very difficult to do research. It's very difficult to actually have an adult conversation. It's very difficult to actually try to find cures and treatments and ways to deal with it. And the people who really suffer from all this are the parents and of course the kids. It's truly horrific. Now on the left you have the recent rise of something called neurodiversity. Talk about sick. It's a neurodiversity identity movement. And autism there is considered just a natural difference to be celebrated where all individuals we should all be celebrated. Even if we're in a cognitive position where we can't even take care of ourselves. We shouldn't investigate. We shouldn't prevent. We shouldn't treat. We should just accept. I mean, I guess we should accept disease and accept death. That is the logical conclusion. Even though, you know, rates rise, what's happening more and more is more and more people want us to just view this as just, this is just the way it is. These are just, these are as normal people as anybody else. There is no such thing as normal, don't talk about normal. A lot of their research institutions that have a focus on autism have been corrupted by this. You know, they now instead of doing intense research and funding intent research, they now fund and talk about celebrating neurodiversity. And it's hard for them to, you know, it's the journals that are publishing articles on this have now said, you know, maybe you shouldn't just have articles treating people with autism as if it's a disadvantage. We need to talk about how we can talk about this without putting these people down. You know, we should avoid terms like disruptive behaviors or challenging behaviors or impairments. We're supposed to see children as disabled only by, you know, only because society is screwed up because we don't understand them. They're not disabled. They're just them. It's only by our standard of society standard by, by some arbitrary, random, artificial standard do we view them as bad. Yeah, this is moral relativism gone nuts. The meeting of the federal autism advisory committee, right, are now becoming social justice theater instead of actually dealing with the issues. And you know, prevention, for example, is off the table. The worst kind of cases of nobody wants to talk about them. They label, you know, if you talk about your disabled child, oh, you're just, you're just ableist, ableist is an evil term for you. So you know, the left has completely corrupted this. And the social warriors, the social justice warriors, the moral relativists, just like they wanted us to embrace deafness. You know, I remember this from the 90s and 2000s, they wanted to embrace blindness. God forbid you have a cure for blindness or deafness. That's not good. This is how they're born. This is how they are. They want to defend unhealthy obesity. They want to defend anything, any choice, anything that anybody does. Except if they don't like it. And this is just, you can see how this cripples the parent's ability to deal with this. It cripples the scientist's ability to do with it and scientists are condemned. It's hard to believe that civilization has reached such a low point. And then of course, on the flip side of this, are the RFK and the variety of different conspiracy theories out there blaming vaccines. Vaccines have repeatedly been shown not to be the cause. But because there's this constant emphasis on the vaccines, harder to do research over the real causes, harder to discover what's really going on. And you know, very few solutions. So I highly recommend subscribing to the free press. Honestly, I recommend reading this post. It's very hard to read. It's heart wrenching, I mean, it's written by a mother of two kids with autism. And she tells the kind of problems, the kind of issues that they have to go through. I mean, the big issue regarding vaccines is it looks like the autism is something that happens during development of the fetus inside the womb. It looks like it's a problem of, you know, the funnel cortex not developing properly. Not in a way that structurally you can see, but in terms of the way the neurons are connected inside. And instead of focusing on that and focusing on things that can be done about it or things that can be focused on diagnosing it, everybody's obsessed with RFK and with all these other issues. Yeah, I hope they figure this out.