If you haven’t seen Extraordinary Attorney Woo on Netflix yet I urge you to set aside some time and just relax into a heart-warming and charming drama that is utterly brilliant1. It’s typically Korean in that it defies easy classification - their writers know how to mix several seemingly disparate elements into an engaging show. There are moments of great humour, great sweetness, and the typical slightly goofy situations you find in kdramas, but they don’t shy away from difficult issues with real emotional impact either.
The lead actress Park Eun-Bin plays a (very) high functioning person on the autism spectrum - Korea’s first autistic attorney. I have no idea whether it’s a wholly accurate portrayal of autism - and I simply don’t give a flying whale2. It’s entertainment.
Park Eun-Bin’s performance is spectacular. It’s a real tour de force. You’d basically have to be a rock not to be moved by the scene at the end of episode 8 - played with devastatingly understated intensity by Park. Pure magic.
I don’t know too much about autism. It wasn’t exactly much of a ‘thing’ whilst I was growing up. Neither were allergies, and ADHD was yet to explode on to the scene - and not a single drag artist read me a story whilst I was at school (or anywhere else for that matter).
I missed out on so much!
Those of us who are getting on a bit look back and wonder where all the kids with the various conditions that plague the young today were hiding back then?
Did we just lock them away somewhere out of sight?
If you went to a good school you’d probably have a reasonable chance of being able to tell the difference between a pronoun and a prolapse, but we didn’t seem to obsess over gender - except in our Latin classes.
One claim that is made is that we’re ‘better’ at diagnosing stuff now. In other words, we’ve always been this messed up but we’re only just noticing now.
I suppose we were pretty bad at spotting all those people keeling over and dying from their peanut allergies in days gone by. It’s much easier to spot death by peanut these days.
In a recent interview Dr Peter McCullough quoted an alarming statistic. He said that when he was growing up the incidence of childhood autism was 1 in 10,000. Recent CDC figures put that at 1 in 36 today.
An increase of this magnitude cannot be explained away by suggesting that we just got better at diagnosing the condition. For every person diagnosed back then it would mean we ‘missed’ about 280 people with the condition (or called it something else). How likely is that?
And where are all these autistic adults today?
I’m sure that improved diagnoses and greater awareness do indeed account for some of the increase - but it simply cannot account for all of this meteoric rise in prevalence.
We’re doing something that is, basically, buggering up the neurophysiology in about 3% of our kids.
3 in a hundred.
3 in a hundred cases of autism in kids in the 1950’s, say, and we just missed it?
Pull the other one - it’s got bells the size of Mulvaney’s balls on it.
So, something is causing this, don’t you think?
Environmental toxins? Diet? Disney Plus? Aliens?
Or something else?
I do not know whether vaccines are the culprit here. McCullough suggests it’s not any single vaccine, but a result of a systemic overload by so many of the things. No idea whether this is true, but it makes some kind of sense - we can cope with lots of things in relatively small quantities, but go over some threshold and all hell breaks loose.
But whether it’s the holy V word that is responsible or not we need to ask that question and re-examine everything. Something is going wrong and we’d better find out what that something is.
But there’s a problem. The medical industry has yoked itself to the vaccine catechism. We’ve all been conditioned over many years to accept the ‘fact’ that vaccines are responsible for saving millions of lives - perhaps we should call it Drug Story Hour.
However, these very same people told us that the covid ‘vaccines’ were safe and effective. We’ve seen the extraordinary levels of deception and corruption that went on with respect to the covid Goo. We’ve seen how the data was manipulated and hidden - and, even now, remains inaccessible for analysis.
And we’re supposed to believe they didn’t do the same stuff for other vaccines?
How are we going to trust them to do the right research, to be open and honest with the data, to ask the right questions, when it comes to trying to figure out why there has been such an alarming rise in the prevalence of autism?
The safety and efficacy of vaccines has become a matter of faith these days. This is not good. I don’t know how we’re going to recover from this at all. In the words of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice
I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself . . . My good opinion once lost is lost forever
The various ‘health’ institutions have become worried by the rise in ‘anti-vaxx’ sentiment. They seem to think that simply doubling down on the “vax good, anti-vaxx crazy” message is the way to resolve this. They seem not to realise it’s an issue of trust and reputation. They did this to themselves.
The MMR vaccines don’t cause autism, you say? Jolly good - now tell us about how good the covid vaccines are.
We’ve seen them lie time and time again when it came to the covid Goo. Straight bare-faced lies. But we should believe them when they tell us the heavy childhood vaccine schedule is NOT a factor in the meteoric rise in autism?
Why? Why should we believe them?
They had our trust, once. They abused it. They abused us.
I don’t know where I stand on the vaccines and autism question. I don’t know where the truth is to be found, but I’m pretty certain that it’s not to be found in the people currently running the whole cozy Pharma/Govt scam.
Just a tip: don’t go for the ‘dubbing’ option. Netflix’s dubbing is usually awful and you lose so much. Opt for subtitles and let the actors’ original voices shine through.
You have to watch it to understand this reference
Another one on the bandwagon here.
I was fully on hoard with vaccines back in the day. I had them all, and so did my kids. These days, the corruption, lies and bullshit surrounding the Covid vaccines leads me to question everything about the safety and efficacy of all vaccines.
More generally, I now view everything from government, big companies, big charities (eg Gates), mainstream media etc as complete crap until proven otherwise.
They're all nudging us for their own purposes, power, profit, whatever, and are not to be trusted.
I’m with you. Before the Covid vaxx, I had no problem with vaccines.
I was vaccinated as a child and never really thought about it. I never got the diseases that the vaccines were supposed to prevent..... end of story, until Covid.
I never knew about the “new” vaccine schedule.....giving hepatitis vaccines to newborns is insane.... and the sheer number of shots recommended for children now is mind boggling.
The whole covid thing has altered my opinion on the subject.
I still think that they are needed, but for the “big’ diseases.... not for every possible disease.
And after all the lies about the Covid vaxx, the other vaccines currently in use should be retested and vetted by real regulators who have no ties to the pharmaceutical companies.