Listening to David Kirby last week in Chicago was one of the highlights of the AO conference for me. The guy is brilliant, super smart and so charming!
I only wish he could have talked longer, i very well could have stayed there listening to everything he had to say; it's a shame we ran out of time.
I am looking forward to his next book.
Thank you David! You are GREAT!

David did an excellent job! He has summarized the science in a way that connects the dots as it emerges.

Great presentation DK!

Have a safe flight home....

all best..

I was watching Kite Runner on dvd last night. I’d rented it because I’d thought it was something my aging father, who’d come for dinner, would enjoy. I hadn’t heard much about it, only that it had good reviews.

Got a bit of a surprise when, just before the opening credits, I saw the words ‘Participant Productions’. As some of you might remember, Participant Productions purchased the movie rights to David’s book, Evidence of Harm, a few years ago. They were going to make his book into a film. You could go to their website, and see a list of movies that had been recently released, another list of movies soon to be released, another list of movies currently in production. Perhaps EOH was in the list of movies soon to be production. Or maybe it was in the list of movies currently being produced. I don’t remember precisely.

Anyway, that was a few years ago. It’s been at least a couple of years now that that website hasn’t listed EOH. I think I probably contacted the studio at the time when it was first removed, wanting to know why they’d decided not to go ahead with the movie. I’m sure that I got no reply, if I did. I’ve gotten pretty used to that. Getting no reply. Ah well, people are busy, I know that. Especially those involved with Hollywood and with the media and such. And who am I, after all? I’m not famous, and I don’t have any children on the spectrum besides.

So anyway, I sat last night and I watched the movie and it was pretty good. Amir at the end of the movie learns to stand up for himself at least enough to speak the truth. Of course there wasn’t any real serious danger to him at that point, so it was a bit easier than earlier on in the movie. The part where he went to the child bazaar had me thinking. He went there to find his nephew and bring him back to the US, and while there he had a conversation with the man at the bazaar (I think that maybe it was officially supposed to be an orphanage. Perhaps even the orphanage that a check was made out for, by Amir’s father, at the beginning of the movie), the man who ran the orphanage. About why certain children were sold. About why certain children had to be sacrificed. The man who ran the child bazaar seemed to think that it was acceptable for a few to be sacrificed, in order to bring in cash for the rest of the children. (Certainly not for himself, though).

I found that part of the movie really interesting because it all seemed so déjà vu. I’ve seen it all before. So many people making so many sacrifices.

Then, after the movie, what I got to wondering was, given that it was a Participant Productions movie, was—whatever happened to the EOH movie?

I went online for a few minutes but most of the google results on the movie were from a few years ago. Those recent ones that I saw were neurodiversity sites, or the comments there were typical of those on neurodiversity sites. On the order of “well apparently since it was found that since the thimerosal was removed but the incidence still went up, the decision was made not to go ahead with this foolishnish.” Usually quite derogatory.

But I am aware of something. I am aware that there is an FDA website which shows that the thimerosal HASN’T been removed from some of the flu shots, and that children and babies and pregnant women are getting those advised routinely now where that was not the case in the past. And that CNN did a report that showed that actually MOST of the flu shots contain thimerosal. And so I don’t really see that an argument such as this holds water.

I’ve spoken with people who tell me that movie scripts quite often end up on the shelf for years and years before they are produced, and sometimes they just never are produced.

I was just sort of hoping that David would speak or write about what he knows or thinks about all of this. What the reasons are that Participant Productions pulled their plans for the movie. Perhaps someone there at the Autism One conference could ask him.