Default State of Mind

This little rant comes from a reply to conversation I was having with my Mom:

I trust that I am easily fooled. I fool myself all the time. Maybe fool is too harsh a word, but surely I am easily confused and misdirected. As much as anyone else.

I'm very curious about how people become aware of their blind spots. Everybody has a story in their head that's playing out while the real world is ticking away in front of them.

Where do people go when they are on autopilot? Do they know they've checked out? By that I mean, what story is being told- what narrative is unfolding- while the real world streams on by.

The problem I see here is that most people don't know they live in a story and don't believe they are easily confused. Maybe there is a disconnect in that having a thought isn't what I would consider thinking.

Thinking is a directed action. Having a thought is more like having gas. It just bubbles up.

What I am most curious about is the stimulus for expanded perspective and objective reorientation to an internal narrative.

What is it that helps people go, "Oh, well that's just silly."

I trust people when they display the capacity to scrutinize their own thoughts, language, and actions. This character trait Is often noticeable by how good someone is at getting other people to relax and smile.

Remember what the Buddha said, "Enlightenment arises from the realization that we are all full of shit most of the time".

Digital Humanism

Sam Harris and the inventor of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier

This podcast is from 2018, but don’t let that fool you. This is still important ground to consider. It provides a measure for what kind of changes have taken place since this conversation.

One of the biggest points here: the value of creative ideas. Ideas act as the building blocks for shared values. And culture emerges from shared values.

Cult of the Dead Cow

Under the flickering lights of our Christmas tree, I wrap presents and think about a system file check of my prefrontal cortex. It’s the part of the brain that modulates social behavior. I want to confirm the hashes on all my psychic attributes because my mind is a swarm of acronyms and random strings of numbers. Once they get in there, it’s not easy to get them out. The numbers I mean. Cryptography has scrambled my axons with my dendrites.

I refocus and fInd some tape and scissors and while finishing the gifts I think about Santa coming down the chimney as a penetration test. Perimeter check. Santa is the perfect pretense to test our physical security. Going to need a new policy. Nothing like mitigating Christmas. 

Certification is now the focus of Bootcamp. No more technical training. Now it’s review and career prep. I am a walking-talking flashcard. I’m in constant dialogue with myself. Me in my head explaining security threats to a panel of enthusiastic me. I’m describing my plan to defend employees against Social Engineering. I look back at me very impressed

Hanging ornaments, I think of all the holiday cards we got this year, and next thing I know a phishing email begins to type itself out on the screen behind my eyes. A voice whispers in my ear, “Rapport building and framing psychologies create tribal bonds, these are our goals.” I stop myself, take a deep breath, and look around at my family.  

Freeze frame for the postcard moment: Christmas tree, everyone wearing wonderfully hideous Xmas sweaters; my wife has a tiger ornament in her hand; son, headphones on, reaches high above his mother to hang basketball ornament; daughter laughing with her head back and eyes closed, whatever it is it’s so hilarious it hurts. Cats attacking ribbons and bows, rolling in liberally scattered catnip. My tribe. My love. My treasures.

The Muppet Holiday album is playing, I’ve got hot cocoa, and I sink into a deep sense of gratitude. What a crazy ride. I pray everyone is as safe and warm and loved as I am. Happy Holidays. Let’s talk about Joseph Menn’s Cult of the Dead Cow  (CDC). 

Before we jump in, here’s a little background. Academically, there are 5 basic threats in CS: APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats-national interests), criminals (it’s about $), hacktivists (philosophically motivated), pranksters (fun-power), and mistakes (distracted minds).  While Sandworm focused on the history of APTs, CDC focuses on the history of the hacker activist trying to save the internet from itself.

My instructor is fond of saying, “In the beginning, there was no security.” Simply put, the internet’s infrastructure has vulnerabilities. What kind? Well very it’s technical, so let’s try this.   If the internet was a boat, it would a paper boat headed for the street’s rain run-off drain where the clown from IT is waiting. And if the internet has vulnerabilities, then so do we. Take notice, in that story with the paper boat, we are the little kid chasing the paper boat into the street drain and we are about to reach down into the dark to find sharp teeth.

Similar to It, CDC is the story of a bunch of kids who discover that beneath the normal world there is an underground system stalked by an otherworldly predator. Ok, maybe I’m pushing the comparison. I’ll stop there but if you’re a Stephen King fan at all, you can see how ugly this could get. Let’s try a different tac.

At the dawn of the digital age, the prehistoric version of the internet was built for nerds by nerds to share information. They weren’t worried about anyone listening, cause the idea was to be able to listen or at least hear. The main point was sharing. 

Quick note: Kopimism is an official religion whose faith it is to copy and share information. They believe that information is holy and to share it is to take part in that sacred process. I mention this because sharing on bulletin boards is how CDC was born. It all begins with people sharing ideas through text files and trying to make phone calls on the cheap. But that small (dare say meager or mild) attempt at fan fiction and manifestos might just have saved us all. For now.

CDC is a history lesson of the internet and the people who grew up with it, love it and are afraid of what could happen if our grand experiment goes wrong. Put simply the Internet of things, IoT, the Web, our phones, every application, and service they provide has not been planned well. 

Well, it wasn’t planned at all. It was co-opted. Repurposed. You might even say, hacked. Because now the Internet is actually an ATM. The biggest wealth maker ever seen in the history of humanity. So much wealth we could feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and provide medical care to the entire world. But we don’t. So the CDC has been trying to hack the hack and give us the Internet back. 

I keep using the word hack. Before the Bootcamp what did I know about hackers?

Hackers. The movie War Games introduced me to my first hacker. Remember the 1980’s: VCRs, Miami Vice, John Hughes. Then maybe you recall a young Mathew Broderick almost starting a nuclear war by hacking into a government war simulator.  “Would you like to play a game?”  

Cult of the Dead Cow is kinda like what would happen if Mathew’s character was actually represented by a dozen or so hackers who grew up with the internet, made it their habitat, learned to forage and hunt, found treasures, discovered pitfalls, and then rushed back to the outside world to warn us of what lurked in the digital forest. There are highwaymen, rickety rope bridges, hidden passages, boobytraps, spies, pirates, swindlers, and more. Oh so much more.    

Think IT meets Mr. Robot and the show runs for 50 years.  

You don’t know it yet, but we owe them big. Because while we were sleeping, they held the great glowing neon firewall. They snuck behind the GUI and took a look at the code holding the data-world together. What they learned scared them. They could have said nothing. They could have robbed us blind. Instead, they played David vs Goliath and set about hacking the world. 

They went up against Microsoft, mass media, and terrorists. Along the way, they crafted code, political philosophies, mayhem, and modern-day security analysis. Not all of them are heroes. The truth is complicated. They hacked for good, for fun, for country, and sometimes merely for chaos. They are at times activists, inventors, mercenaries, vigilantes, pranksters, soldiers, spies, and even Presidential hopefuls. Ugly warts and all CDC doesn't try to hide the flaws of the community. Instead, it gives enough space to let things be as they are and the reader to make their own judgments. 

My takeaway: The future is coming and we are going to need a bigger boat.

What do I mean by that? It’s the line from Jaws. That moment when they are chumming the water and Scheider’s character sees the shark for the first time. That’s me after 6 months of CS training. We are going to need a much bigger boat than the paper one we are in now.

That translates into: we need a much broader understanding of what we are dealing with.

Next: Matthew Holland talks about Cyber Security

Sandworm

The Solarwind hack is all over the news. How bad is it? Hmmm. Say you’re at the grocery store and some random person walks up to you, hands you an envelope, and then walks away. You open that envelope and inside is a picture of your young child asleep at night taken from inside your child’s room. There is a timestamp at the top of the picture. According to the time and date, this picture was taken last night. Someone snuck into your house and took that picture while you were there. They could still be there. I’m simplifying things of course, but you get the picture.

Sandworm is an excellent history primer for current events. But before we chat about the present, let’s take a stroll back in time. A time just a little while ago that already feels eons past. And answer the question: why did I get into cybersecurity?

End of Summer 2020, Portland, amidst other trials, suffered from the forest fire smoke. On the radio, NPR reported the air was toxic. Those traveling from homes for necessities were specters in an ochre haze. All of us foragers under a road-rash sky. The sun a blood-orange orb dragged across heaven into the howling darkness of night where megaphones and sirens sounded across the river coming from the protests at the Federal Court House. The civil rights activism hadn’t let up for months. The news reported the feds responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and unmarked vans snatching people off the streets.  

Things looked bleak when I started Bootcamp. And it wasn’t just Portland. Much of the world seemed on fire and headed to hell as well. Honestly, the whole planet was feeling a wee bit dystopian. I made a mental apocalyptic checklist: Global pandemic (check), financial crisis (check), social unrest (check), runaway wildfires (check), and expanding authoritarian rule (check, double-check).  

Part of me wanted to believe that things really couldn’t get worse. After a run of bad luck the world was going to get a break, right? Ummm…not likely. In fact, I felt we were actually on a break and things were going to get weirder. But I am biased.

Quick insight about me. I grew up in the South with Christian narratives of many interesting persuasions. The most mentally potent versions blended Pentecostal absolutism, evangelical exaltations, and rapture debates. Yes, there were rapture debates. As a senior In high school, I worked at a Christian radio station. My role was to review and identify possible links between biblical prophecy and international events in the news. These “threat assessments” were for a news report designed to inform those concerned with calibrating their rapture clocks. I was entrenched, mind and soul for a long time. It’s the kinda thing that sticks with you.

So, that End-Time part of my mind had the sneaky suspicion things could easily get tougher, weirder, or just plain worse. If there was anything I learned in the sweet arms of the church it was that there is always enough room to fit the devil.  

My faith was renewed by the patron saint of cyberpunk, Sir Mr. William Gibson. Since starting school, when I slept, Neuromancer danced in my dreams. Why cybersecurity? Because if I’m going to be stuck sitting on my ass in front of a screen watching the world burn and crumble, then I damn well need to figure out a way to interact rather than eating popcorn and binge-watching movies about the end of the world. Look out your window. It’s surreal for real.

How do you handle the end of the world? Get a new job, and I needed something amazing to do. Something that offered a sense of control. Maybe even a little bit of agency, Something that I can do to make my family and friends safer without buying a gun. 

With cybersecurity, I imagined, I could punch people on the other side of the planet with a digital fist. It was/is energizing to be in school again. Juiced! My brain feels like it’s on steroids. The metaphor is literal. When I flip open my laptop it feels like I am going to train at the martial arts school. I mean you are learning how to fight with a keyboard. Dare I say Kung-fu Console training.

Anyway, it felt like the world was getting kicked around and I could hear the ghost of 80’s heroes calling to me. In the back of my head, the opening phrase to the Last Starfighter video game was looping: “Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.” (My wife thinks I should mention this to my therapist). I know I’m not really saving the world. But who knows, their time left yet.

To expand my understanding of the cyber-landscape in which I dream of doing battle I read Sandworm. 

The title is from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Dune is a science fiction novel from the late 1950’s.  I studied the book as part of a focus on messiah narratives in science fiction. Loved it. David Lynch made a movie of Dune in the 80’s and a remake is scheduled next year by Denis Villeneuve (directed Arrival and 2049, the Blade Runner sequel).  

Sandworm references the leviathan worms that rule the desert planet known as Dune. And for our cyber history purposes, it represents a group that is responsible for possibly the most costly cyberattack to date.

Sandworm is riveting. Who are the good guys and bad guys? It’s murky. But one thing is for sure, nerds rule the world now. Maybe they have ever since Oppenheimer, but these nerds aren’t splitting atoms, they are creating code, combining with python, and developing whole new paradigms without making people evaporate inside of nuclear clouds

This first is a story of nations hacking nations. From there it gets complicated fast. A couple of disclaimers about the book. If you are paranoid at all, do not read this book. If you have a hard time getting to sleep because you wonder about government and shadow governments, do not read this book. If you wanna have a whole bunch of reasons why you should learn as much about cybersecurity as possible, do read this book. Your country may need you.

Let’s look at the broad strokes: 

1) In general, it would appear every nation is spying on every other nation as much as they (or we) can get away with. Anyone who has the power to listen is. Some nations are doing more than just listening, they are analyzing and influencing. But honestly (sarcasm),  most of this shouldn’t bother us since we signed away our privacy by using social media. Oops. No judgment, I’m included on that list.

2) Now little guys, countries with tiny little armies, who could never win a toe-to-toe can get digital leverage by hiring or training a few hundred evil nerds to hack. You don’t need all the overhead anymore when you can create an army of a trillion bots made out of people’s smart fridges. A revolution with crushed ice.

3) Arguably the most immediate danger is industrial sabotage, causing catastrophic failure to highly sensitive and critical structures. Like, say, power grids. There has been evidence of intrusion into these systems for some time, well before Solarwind.  No one has made a move but everyone is wondering who is going to push the button first.

4) The US government has a plethora of smart people working for them (probably the smartest people ever assembled in history) and, historically speaking, they/we might have a little “Han Solo shot first” issue as far as technological warfare goes. It all depends on how you look at it. 

5) Spoiler: Russia is Sandworm and has been (and probably still is) digitally terrorizing Ukraine. Ukraine is target practice for destabilizing the EU.

Ukraine is where Sandworm cut its digital teeth, but they were just breadsticks before the buffet. Now with the Solarwind breach, Russia is done looking at the menu and ready to order the all-you-can-eat-data-plan meal.  In this particular case we are really worried they have seen all our secret recipes and now can they make better-fired chicken than we can. That would be my no jargon way of describing it.

Not to worry though, Russia isn’t trying to make better chicken/take over the world. Running a world is way too difficult. They just want to cripple all global authority structures and do backstrokes in a wave-pool of political chaos. 

5) There are many private players who hold the proverbial Firewall. Every day hacker is keeping an eye on the electrical-wire of things and companies with good hearts and good intentions trying to protect us physically and digitally. And then there are mercenaries and institutions that are actively disrupting and disturbing the minds and hearts of citizens around the world with an array of hacking methods.

6) It is very difficult to tell who is doing what.

7) Basically, world war has already broken out and is being fought online. It’s a battle for data that every nation and corporation in the world is playing. Make no mistake, this isn’t a game. It is war, just a new kind. Fewer bullets, but lives are still on the line. When you shut down the electricity to a hospital, people die (particularly in the middle of a pandemic). Unlike past wars fought for territory and material resources, this war is all about controlling information and obscuring perception. 

To win this war, you don’t need to defeat your adversary, you just need to distract and confuse them. Erode trust, destroy certainty, and you nurtures unrest. Why is unrest the goal? It’s a whole lot easier to sneak in and rob a bank (or a government) when the cops are busy dealing with protesters outside.  

Next, enough government nation-states, it’s time for the hacktivist. It’s time for you to discover the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Homo Deus

Notes on Homo Deus

Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future by author Yuval Noah Harari makes you reconsider what you think you know about being human.

Here is my quick review of the book: I loved it! Just like his last two. But instead of just reviewing the book, I want to share my thoughts on some of the things that stand out for me in relationship to pain management.

Real quick though, this book isn’t for everyone. If you’re uncomfortable having your political, religious, philosophical, and general concepts of self challenged, then you will find this book disturbing on more levels than the author intends.

This book is a warning. It is trying to get us to pay attention, Like a passenger in car asking the driver to slow the hell down. You can’t take the turn you need at this speed.

I believe it also is a celebration of how far we have come and how far we can go. So let me throw this out there, if you cling to your belief structures like a life vest in an ocean of myths, this book is going to make you very upset, and it is going to deflate the concepts that keep your ego afloat. However, if you are looking for a better understanding of what are real challenges are right now, then buckle up because the twists and turns of history, science, psychology are going to make your head spin.

For those with short attention spans, below is a glimpse at the highlights of the book. For those who would prefer listening, here is a link (Yuval Noah and Steven Pinker) to a conversation with the author and Steven Pinker. My thoughts on how this applies to pain management follow.

-We’ve conquered- War, Plague, and Famine as the major mortality issues for humanity and next on the agenda for we will conquer death or become God-like in the pursuit.

-Spoilers: There is no soul, self, or free will as far as science is concerned and to believe so is to live in a fantasy world where you will be easily manipulated.

-The brain contains more than one mind and none of them knows what the other is thinking or why; and most of what you believe about the world (which includes yourself) is a confabulation (bullshit rationalizations) of these minds independent operations.

-The religion evolution went kinda like this: from nature to gods to a single god to nationalism to humanism and now data. Long live Data! In algorithms we trust!

-All medical science leads to augmentation science. We will be upgraded. Or at least the rich will be.

-Algorithms are everywhere and will rule us and we will like it because we are blind to the deeper realities of our existence. 

-The AI of the future will know us better than we know ourselves and we will either be their pets (if we are lucky) or their pests (if we are not lucky).

-The next class system will be based on human and super human.

Part 1: 

Why Are We Killing Ourselves?

After reading Homo Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st century, I felt prepared for the author’s diagnosis of the current state of humanity and prognosis for its future. It’s not all doom and gloom by any means, just the end of humanity as we know it. Technically speaking it could be seen more as the continued transformation of humanity.

The book’s opening argument is that humanity has conquered War, Famine, and Plague as the major factors of human mortality. That’s 3 of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. Who doesn’t think that’s a good thing? To make its point the book presents some disturbing information on mortality that I had to stop and look into myself. 

1. More people die from suicide then violent deaths.

2. More people die from poor eating habits than starving.

3. By 2050, 50% the population of earth will be considered overweight.

Here are some mortality per year (2017) numbers from the CDC.

Heart disease-647,457 

Diabetes-83,564 

Alcohol related deaths- 72,500

Suicide- 47,085  

Overdoses 47,450

Vs

Homicides- 19,510

Firearm Homicides- 14,542

Mass shootings- 335

The top half of these numbers are all self inflicted.  The CDC website reports: childhood obesity has tripled since 1970; alcohol related deaths have doubled since 1999; suicides have increased by 30% since 1999; and overdoses are up 137% (200% in relation to opioids). 

The articles I came across reported that the majority of criminal acts that lead to violent acts involve the sell or pursuit of drugs. That means for the purpose of buying drugs to alleviate pain or making money by selling drugs to people who are in said pain. What about mass shootings? I think the majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by people who are on one level or another mentally ill and suffering from some sort of psychological and emotional pain. 

The common denominator for all these fall on spectrum of pain management. Drugs are used for (I am including alcohol here) reducing some kind of pain. Mental (emotional or psychological) and/or physical pain. Sure, lots of people use drugs and alcohol recreationally, but if drugs and alcohol are the recreation or needed to have any recreation, then odds are high that there is a hidden suffering not being addressed. What we are really doing is self medicating.

It would seem that a large number of people are under a daily burden that is inescapable without chemical assistance. Drugs and alcohol for the most part are our escape. So is sugar, or in general bad eating habits.

Why are we so sad, anxious, and disturbed when we live in the least violent and most prosperous age of human existence?

How many cavemen do you think killed themselves? I’ve asked this question to a few people and the answer I get back is none (note none of those people were anthropologist). While not scientific, the question makes a point. When life and death were a daily concern, people were to busy figuring out how to stay alive to consider killing themselves. When purpose was easily defined as don’t die today, people worked hard at staying alive everyday.  

It can be argued now that we no longer hunt or are being hunted we are haunted by an inner nature that no longer fits our environment.

The natural state of humans is to be concerned about getting killed, about having enough to eat. So, we naturally worry about things. In fact, its a feature of the brain. When the mind isn’t engaged in a particular task, the Default Mode Network kicks in. This is the part of our brain that has a tendency to ruminate and make us anxious. Its the portion of the brain calmed by meditation and attention training (quick self promotion: this is what I teach).

Worrying is a survival feature. Those who didn’t worry, didn’t live long enough to reproduce. Unfortunately, just because the natural threats no longer stalk us, doesn’t mean this feature for survival is no longer working.

The exterior environment may have changed, but our inner environment hasn’t quite caught up. We were born to solve problems. I mena real concrete problems. As in identifying the best tree to climb to sleep in so your a late night snack. We didn’t evolve to solve math problems or philosophical problems. Those are abstractions made possible by leisure and extreme access to resources. Those are fairly recent add-ons to the humanities skill set. We evolved to solve physical issues.

Our emotional and psychological health is tied more to our physical capacity for adaptation than being able to think your way out of an emotional problem.

In a way, life has become too easy and we have lost our resiliency. Our ability to deal with challenge, discomfort and uncertainty has shriveled like an atrophied muscle. Much like cell deteriorating effect of zero gravity on an astronaut’s physiology, the lack of constant physical strain/challenge has made us mentally and emotionally weaker.  

We now suffer from pain that we do not understand how to properly address. We have evolved to solve problems in an environment that no longer exists.

Instead of staying alive as the main function, we now are struggling with staying happy.

Our culture that has provided us a safer world has not prepared us to deal with ourselves. We wrestle and struggle with our thoughts and feelings. This leaves us with deep questions about worth and purpose that need to be addressed.

We are the most resource rich culture in history and we are killing ourselves hand over fist. It would appear that the more prosperous we become, the more likely we are to lose hope. What could possibly save us from ourselves?

This is important to appreciate because Yuval’s argument for humanities next agenda (now that we have conquered war, famine, and plague) is that we are going to conquer Death itself and transform humans into gods. 

Considering how bad we are at handling our feelings now, I wonder what kind of gods we will become.

Part 2

Kill The Gods, Long Live Data (continued in a week or so)

Natural Born Heroes

For those people who like real adventure and a desire to know what it means and takes to be a hero, boy do I have a book for you.

Natural Born Heroes is one part World War II heist and one part history of sport science. While managing to weave a thrilling yarn about how a band of ragtag spies kidnap a Nazi general on the Greek island of Crete, McDougall also investigates the history of fitness on a large scale, covering martial arts, endurance sports, hydration, and nutrition. On one hand introducing true-life swashbuckling heroes who pulled off the impossible; and on the other, a journey from ancient Minoan society to modern day to explore what it takes to be a hero.

First it’s a detective story exploring how a team of misfit British spies and Cretan sheep rustlers could possibly kidnap a Nazi general in the middle of occupied territory and live to tell the tale. The author doesn’t sit back and armchair this adventure, he travels the world finding leading experts on human fitness to prepare for a trip to Crete to try and redo the unimaginable trek of the good guys.   

Much like his last book chronicling ultra-endurance runners, Born to Run, McDougall puts himself in the middle of the action. He wants to cover the same ground as the story's protagonists, so he trains in parkour, natural movement, forging, nutrition, axe-throwing and sharp-shooting to prepare  for a trek through the treacherous Cretan mountains. 

The training covers: fascia vs muscle strength; how learning to throw transformed human capacity for sequential thought, imagination, and language; natural movement and the development of parkour; Pankration and development of Wing Chun; and echolocation.

One of the standout deliveries of the book offers insight into the gender and age gap in sports and performance.  It points out that the difference in men and women’s performance in strength and endurance is very small and that a sport allows for more flaunting or peacocking of the body.  Any skill gap that is so great between genders doesn’t make good evolutionary sense, because if men were that much faster and stronger than women, then they wouldn’t be able to mate very well.  Basically it breaks the gender (and age) gap down to nurture not nature. The reason men appear so much superior is because we don’t raise boys and girls to play together. It also points out that sports specialization has led to an observer culture. Less and less participation, which of course leads to less fitness and cooperation.

Other cool/interesting things examined in the book include: 

-Situational awareness and compassion as a survival strategy.

-Trials of endurance and strength as passage into adulthood.

-Weeds are good for you.

-There is a hydration conspiracy.

-How Churchill used magicians to win the war.

-Just how much of a badass Teddy Roosevelt really was.

-True movement requires risk.

-Fitness should be based on being useful.

-The rise of the gym is equal to the rise of obesity.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger ruined fitness for America.

All-in-all Natural Born Heroes is super informative, absolutely compelling, and downright inspiring.  This one definitely goes into the Kung Fu Science Fiction High School library.

Cognitive Countering

Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast has a bunch of great conversations. Of particular interest are two that focus on how the mind is built to make mistakes and methods for overcoming our cognitive biases.

Maps to Misunderstanding is a conversation with Daniel Kahneman author of Thinking Fast & Slow. Discover System 1 System 2 and the difference between the remembering self and the experiencing self.

Mental Models is a conversation with Shane Parrish from The Knowledge Project podcast. Which looks like my next info-binge.

The Search for Meaning

bigthink has an article discussing Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts thoughts on the modern crisis of meaning and purpose.

"More and more each one of us is thrown on to our own resources. This seems to me an excellent state of affairs. So that in a symbolic sense we are back in the forest like the hunter of old who has nobody around him to tell him how to feel or how he ought to use his senses. He therefore must make his own exploration and find out for himself."

America is Hooked on Painkillers

Yahoo has an article that hits close to home. My mother struggled with a painkiller addiction my entire life. It destroyed her many times over. Her addiction got her arrested and institutionalized, more than once. She lost friends and a marriage. Over the years, she overdosed a number of times, until one day she did not wake. My moms’ younger brother, overdosed on the same medication not even a year later.

This is a deeply personal thing. Growing up around people suffering from pain and addiction has made me very sensitive to other’s suffering and I guess that’s why I do what I do. There are two telling quotes in the article that sums up a lot of the issue.

“The results showed that counties where marketing to doctors was heaviest had the greatest incidence of over-prescribing of opioids, as well as subsequent abuse and related deaths.”

and

Direct-to-consumer advertising by major pharmaceutical companies has also had a significant effect on pain management expectations in clients, says Chris Lee, a health care consultant and marketing manager at Family Health Centers of San Diego. “Unlike most countries, the United States allows direct-to-consumer drug ads. ‘Ask your doctor about [drug name],’ they advise patients. This generates demand levels that are simply not seen in other countries.”

Its not the final passing that is so horrible. It is the number of times you see their spirit die before their bodies give in. The article says 70,000 people died last year from overdoses. While the dead may be at peace, the living that loved them is a far greater number and their peace further away.

I miss you mom.

Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I have this fantasy about creating a Kung Fu Science Fiction High School. The kids would get rigorous physical training 3 hours of the day from msater monk-ninjas, and their curriculum would be focused on saving the world from humanity. Yuvol Noah Harari’s work would be at the center of their studies.

Yuvol should be required reading or listening for those who want to understand the human condition and the complex evolving forces that form this condition. Sapiens covers the history of Homosapiens and just about every factor that has and still does affect each of us personally and everyone of us together as an entire species. It’s not a pretty picture but his sense of humor helps keep things in perspective. By far one of the best books I have ever read covering biology, psychology, sociology, technology, politics, economy, and religion. At the end of the book you find yourself front row and center for the big Now What? Well 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuvol walks you through the cognitive dissonance of the present and tries to provide a way through the maddening chaos of tomorrow. He asserts there are 3 great dangers we must come to terms with: nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption. Terrorism, AI, Transhumans…oh my, the Apocalypse is already here, it’s just not equally distributed.