Overlooking the Obvious: The Search for Better Health

Lately I've been experiencing some rather debilitating health issues. Suffering from brain fog, nausea, weakness, low energy, and endless symptoms associated with allergies has forced me on a journey to find the cause. These health problems have steadily taken their toll on  my creativity and ability to contribute to society in a meaningful and valuable way. For a while I attributed it to aging, prescription drugs, or cat allergies. Despite keeping the cats off of the entire floor that I live on, reducing my exposure, the problem has been getting worse.

When one feels like total shit all of the time, one tends to self medicate. Legal or not, prescription drugs take their toll, and society needs to understand that there is little  difference between illegal and prescription drug addiction. Just because my pills come in tamper proof bottle with my name on them does not mean that it's actually in my best interest to take that stuff. Legal drugs actually kill more people per year than illicit drugs, and that says something about our society's medical practices.

While I admit that prescription drugs are definitely a contributing factor to my health issues, I don't believe that they are responsible for all of them. I am not denying that Big Pharma is putting profit in front of health to keep us sick and sell us cures, in fact I strongly agree-- but I'll save that for another post.

If it's not the meds, than what is it? Perhaps the answer is the most simple, and obvious one. We've all heard that saying "you are what you eat". It's a scientifically accurate notion, and I don't think anyone could raise a logical argument that claims we are not compromised of the matter that we consume. We are products of our environment, and that environment is perpetually growing ever more toxic. In the time it will have taken you to read this blog, approximately 666 acres of rain forest will have been demolished or degraded. You may be wondering how I arrived at that figure: Simple math, using estimates from credible sources in my bookmarks:

anon@sketchbox:~$ curl https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-talks-daily-destruction/|grep "acres"
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:--     0<p>Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day&mdash;or some 50,000 species a year&mdash;as the forests fall.<br />
100 78408    0 78408    0     0  31646      0 --:--:--  0:00:02 --:--:-- 31641
anon@sketchbox:~$ # Scientific American estimates we lose 80,000 acres per day while degrading another 80,000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 80000 + 80000
160000
anon@sketchbox:~$ expr 160000 / 24 / 10 

666

Six-hundred and sixty six acres every six minutes sound devilish indeed. The next logical question is why are we doing that? We know that the rain forest and oceans create the majority of the oxygen that we breath, so it would appear to be in our best interests (if survival really is the point of life) to conserve and protect these precious ecosystems. So why are we doing the opposite? The surprising answer is that 70% of all deforestation is the result of the global animal agriculture culture. Most of that land is used to either graze cattle or grow grain to feed cattle. The majority of crops that are grown on this planet are fed to cattle, not humans.

Deforestation is not the only negative impact that our meat obsessed lifestyles have on Mother Earth. Agricultural pollution is an increasingly problematic phenomenon that only gets worse as the human populations grows. Pesticides and fertilizer tend to seep into our groundwater, or run off into the ocean. This both changes the pH of and pollutes freshwater aquatic ecosystems, drinking water, and the oceans.

For example, along the US Southern coastline, there is a "dead zone" that's been growing for decades now. The farm runoff enters the ocean, increasing the acidity and introducing toxins into the water. This stuff is so toxic that it kills practically everything that it comes in contact with. Even before BP blew up the Deepwater Horizon rig and essentially murdered the rest of the Gulf of Mexico, which used to be the most productive ecosystem in the world, aquatic life was suffering along the coastline.

Off topic, but worth mentioning is that the Deepwater Horizon spill was handled extremely poorly. Rather than actually clean up the oil using effective, natural methods like spreading hay bails over the water to soak up and remove the oil, BP chose the "out of site, out of mind" approach. It's actually worse than it sounds. A chemical dispersant that has been banned in Great Britain for over a decade called "CoreExit" was dumped into the ocean, to dissolve the oil into the ocean.

Typically, oil and water do not mix, which makes it (relatively) easy to clean these spills up. Somewhere along the line, BP decided it was more economically convenient to disperse, rather than actually remove the oil. The toxic chemical dispersant was sprayed from airplanes, and dumped deep under the ocean, near the leaking well. The people of Louisiana suffered terrible health effects as their environment became more toxic than ever. CoreExit rained down upon the Southern coastline, and possibly traveled much farther than that. The long term effects have been devastating. Shrimp born without eyes, fish born with lesions on their skin, dolphins with lung disease... it goes on and on.

This is just another of the countless horrors that stem from corporate greed, which brings me back to cattle agriculture. When I was very young, I was diagnosed with an allergy to milk. From age 3-10 I did not consume dairy products. I would eat pizza without cheese, drink soy milk, and use dairy products like butter very sparingly. One day when I was 9 or 10 years old, I got tired of being allergic to milk, and ate some pizza during school lunch. I didn't notice any allergic reaction, so I figured I'd outgrown the allergy and could now consume dairy again. I was always a skinny, scrawny kid, and due to the false notion that drinking milk is vital to producing strong bones, I started drinking a whole lot more of it, to make up for all the years I went without it.

In retrospect, when I began drinking milk is when I started to develop some problems. I was actually getting fat for a couple years, and this is something that I didn't think was possible because I had always been underweight. I had anxiety by the time I was 12, and depression by age 13. Coming from an upper middle class family, we always bought organic food. Most of the milk I drank back than was "organic" milk from grass fed cows. While this milk certainly tastes better and appears more humanely produced than milk from factory farms, the reality is that it's actually less sustainable and worse for the environment than grain fed, factory farmed milk. This is because grass fed cows require a hell of a lot more land to graze than their caged counterparts at the slaughter houses. With population growing rapidly, and with 70% of our farm lands growing food for cattle, it makes me wonder... is there any sustainable, humane way to raise enough meat to support a population expected to hit 9 billion by 2050?

If the environmental toll is not enough to dis-way you from eating dairy, than perhaps the effects that cow's milk has on our own bodies will. Despite relentless campaigns to promote the health benefits of milk (Got Milk, anyone?) , science is beginning to tell us that milk is actually bad for your health.

"A large observational cohort study^[1] in Sweden found that women consuming more than 3 glasses of milk a day had almost twice the mortality over 20 years compared to those women consuming less than one glass a day. In addition, the high milk-drinkers did not have improved bone health. In fact, they had more fractures, particularly hip fractures." 

1. In observational studies both across countries and within single populations, higher dairy intake has been linked to increased risk of prostate cancer (cited in ^[2]).
2. Observational cohort studies have shown higher dairy intake is linked to higher ovarian cancer risk (cited in ^[2]).
3. Cow’s milk protein may play a role in triggering type 1 diabetes through a process called molecular mimicry^[3].
4. Across countries, populations that consume more dairy have higher rates of multiple sclerosis^[4].
5. In interventional animal experiments and human studies, dairy protein has been shown to increase IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor-1) levels. Increased levels of IGF-1 has now been implicated in several cancers^[5].
6. In interventional animal experiments^[6] and human experiments^[7], dairy protein has been shown to promote increased cholesterol levels (in the human studies and animal studies) and atherosclerosis (in the animal studies).
7. The primary milk protein (casein) promotes cancer initiated by a carcinogen in experimental animal studies^[8].
8. D-galactose has been found to be pro-inflammatory and actually is given to create animal models of aging^[1].
9. Higher milk intake is linked to acne^[9].
10. Milk intake has been implicated in constipation^[10] and ear infections (cited in ^[2]).
11. Milk is perhaps the most common self-reported food allergen in the world^[11].
12. Much of the world’s population cannot adequately digest milk due to lactose intolerance.

(Source: http://nutritionstudies.org/12-frightening-facts-milk/)


With all of this new evidence emerging that shows milk is actually terrible for your health, perhaps it is time for humanity to phase out dairy completely. I've been drinking almond milk and trying to avoid meat for a couple weeks now, and I can honestly say that I feel much better. I felt like so much shit that I no longer felt like writing, and it had been a while since I wrote a blog post. My cognitive functionality seems to be getting better, as have my allergies. Last week I scored 130 on an IQ test, which is ten points higher than I scored a couple years ago. I am writing better code and learning new things faster, and this is only after a couple weeks of cutting down my dairy and meat intake. Science is beginning to show that people that eat plant based diets are much healthier all around than people that eat animal based diets. It's not your fault either! We were simply following bad advice, and that doesn't make us stupid.

I'd encourage anyone that feels sick to try to eat less meat and dairy before resigning to prescription drugs. It's worth a shot. Voting with your wallet is the only effective way to send a message to the food industry, because all they care about is money. That isn't to say that they are evil, it's just the way that business works. Supply will meet demand, and if we all demand more plant based foods, than that is what we will get. It seems rather unnecessary to continue to cause massive suffering amongst farm animals when scientists are saying that everything we need to survive can be found in the plant kingdom. If we used that land to grow more fresh fruits and vegetables instead of feeding and graze cows, than perhaps we could knock out both world hunger and the largest contributer of environmental damage simultaneously.

Polluted water is the cause of about half of all human disease. As we enter a world where it's becoming harder to trust tap-water, we must ask ourselves, what can we do to reverse this destruction? With cattle causing more damage to the Earth than fracking, and with a president in office that does not seem to care about scientific facts, the world's fate is in the hands of the people. It seems overwhelming, but the truth is that there are simple things you can do to make a difference.

Sadly some things are beyond our control. There is one more issue that I want to shed some light on, because frankly it is very disturbing. Scientific evidence is confirming something that ecologists have known for years-- much of the prescription drugs that we take are impossible for municipal water treatment centers to filter out. Traces of anti-depressants, opiates, and most concerning, birth control, can be found in US lakes, rivers, aquifers, and tap water, in alarming concentrations. Hormones are potent chemicals, and it doesn't take very much exposure to these chemicals to cause damage to human and animal life alike. Premature puberty and increased testicular cancer has been observed in humans, and studies have discovered an increase of hermaphrodite fish in aquatic ecosystems. Essentially, we are seeing mass sterility as a result of second hand hormone exposure.

This happens because enough people have been passing prescription drugs through their bodies to cause an accumulation of these substances in our water supplies. I am no expert, and thus am not sure why water treatment facilities cannot filter these chemicals out of the water. I can only guess that it's because these drugs are water soluble. Treatment facilities typically utilize the natural filtration of the Earth to treat the water, so it makes sense to me that anything soluble will remain.

There you have it, anything smaller than thirteen micro-grams cannot be filtered out of waste water this way. The put this in perspective, medical grade micron filters used to prep water for injection use 0.02 micro-gram membranes, which is sufficient to remove just about everything but the water itself. Pharmaceutical chemicals will indeed pass right through a 13mm filter.

It's not realistic to ask people to stop taking medications, so we need to find another way to deal with this. Perhaps it's time to seriously rethink our waste treatment and disposal methods. According to the EPA, municipal waste water wells are Class V injection wells, which are supposed to be for treating non-toxic waste. This has appeared to work well for a long time, but it is becoming apparent that it's simply not enough, and that our sewage waste is more toxic than we thought. We need to protect our environment and the ecosystems that we are so interdependent on at all costs. Methods of treating water vary depending on the problem that the water in question has. For example, water with high levels of iron is treated with charcoal filtration, and bottled water is purified using reverse osmosis membrane. The problem is that none of the conventional methods of treatment can remove all of the contaminants-- except for properly implemented distillation.

The standard for producing medical grade water has always been distillation. It used to be a very expensive procedure that required very high amounts of energy, but that's changed thanks to the modern vapor compression distiller, invented by Dean Kamen (the segway dude from Manchester, NH). These units recycle the input energy as they operate so effectively that they consume just 1 kw per hour, and are able to produce ~ 40 liters of clean water per hour. Incredibly, these devices can turn just about any source of water into water that's not only safe to drink, but also is suitable for injection! They cost less than $ 2,000, which is amazing. Could vapor compression distillation help solve our water crisis? Would this be a reasonable replacement for the methods used by traditional water treatment plants? I don't know, but it's worth looking into, and a better approach than what we are doing now, which is basically pretending that we don't have a problem. With all of our insane tech, surely humanity can figure this out.

Finally, while on the quest for better health, I realized that the environment is not limited to the outdoors. I am kind of a slob by nature, and until recently was not good about keeping my place clean. Vacuuming up about ten pounds of dust, cleaning the hell out of my bedroom, and finally throwing away a moldy pumpkin that I'd pretty much forgotten about seems to have worked wonders for my allergies overnight! It doesn't matter what you eat when your house is becoming toxic. It took me 27 years to figure out how important this is. I can even think more clearly now that my house is clean again. I mention this because it seems people have a habbit of overlooking the most obvious solutions to a given problem.

That's all for today. Remember, there is nothing more valuable than good health.

Goodbye, Oracle. Hello, KVM!

In this age of incessant cyber-security threats, virtual machines have become a popular first line of defense. In thoery, properly implemented virtualization will protect the host operating system in the event of a guest compromise. Our computer systems are getting so powerful that lately it seems overkill to dedicate all of a system's resources to one particular task. For example, my CPU load seldom goes above twenty percent since upgrading to an i7-6700k. Virtual machines allow me to get more bang for my buck, in terms of how many simultaneous tasks my computer can run at a given moment. They also provide a priceless layer of security by keeping potential compromises localized to the virtual machine that they may or may not have occurred in.

Over the years I've found that reinstalling your operating system is never a bad move. If you suspect, but are not sure if a system compromise has occurred, than the safest thing to do is to reflash-- just in case. The only issue is that it takes a decent amount of time and energy to reinstall an operating system. You've got to back everything up, save all of your configurations, perform the installation, reinstall all of your software, reconfigure your preferences, files, and so on. Of course, much of this process can be automated with some simple shell scripting, but it's still a hell of a lot easier to reinstall a VM than it is a physical machine.

Having a separate VM for every task greatly minimizes the damage that a program compromise can do. I have a VM for just about everything. A VM for watching Netflix, another for watching porn. A VM for development, another for hacking. A VM for social media, and another for personal finances. This way, if Netflix or Facebook tries to deliver an evil payload to my system via say, javascript, than the attacker will not be able to get my bank details.

As great as this sounds, until recently, one problem remained with this philosophy-- I was dependent on Oracle's closed source software, Virtualbox, to make all of this work. If you know me, than you know that I believe that there few things on this Earth as evil as proprietary software. If you can't audit the source code yourself, than how can you trust the software? It's fundamentally impossible to completely reverse compile a complex program such as vbox. Sure, you can successfully reverse engineer some software, but you're rarely going to get the whole picture. It's also a huge pain in the ass. And since there happens to be other software that can drive virtual machines out there, that has no closed source parts, it makes more sense to use that instead. Thus, I decided it was time to ditch vbox and switch over to KVM.

Making the switch was a hell of a lot easier than I expected. Virt-manger has come a long way over the last couple years, which I imagine helps people like me that are used to Virtualbox's nice GUI to feel like they can safely make the switch. It's also quite easy to convert your current vbox virtual machines (OVA's and VDMK's) into KVM's format (qcow2), using qemu-img. I've also found that KVM is actually much more stable than Virtualbox. No more random crashes, or seemingly random corrupted disc images, unexplainable data loss, or stupid error messages like "Cannot add this disc because it's already attached to this machine". I really hated that shit.

Libvirt is a hundred times smoother, more featured, and cleaner than vbox. Even being able to close the window that the VM is running in without having to shut the whole damn thing down (without having to start the machine as 'detachable' ... give me a break!) feels absolutely liberating. My CPU load is now averaging about half what it was before I switched over, so KVM, with it's type 1 hypervisor, is clearly better about resource management. Full screen, high resolution graphics are now working just fine, and in my opinion, graphics and user friendliness were perhaps the only advantages vbox had over KVM. This is not the case anymore. There's so many great reasons to switch.

Now that I have ditched Virtualbox, I can proudly say that I am running a system with absolutely no proprietary software or drivers whatsoever (except the bios, of course. We've got much reverse engineering to do yet). Hell, I even sleep better knowing that Oracle no longer (may) have a backdoor to my systems! I'd encourage any and all Virtualbox users to switch to KVM today. Virtualbox may be a decent program, but KVM is awesome.

Thoughts on Trump

As a divided America fails to understand why Donald Trump is their new president, I just want to scream "Told you so" from atop of Mount Rushmore. I'm heard all sorts of theories, like "this was a 'whitelash' ... ", or "Putin did it". How it is that nobody understands that this is primarily Hillary Clinton's fault bewilders me.

The Clinton campaign seems to have expected that the presidency would  be handed to them on a silver platter. They simply could not fathom that so many Americans would not "fall in line" after stealing the nomination from their champion, Bernie Sanders. They certainty never expected that all of the polls, suspiciously skewed in their favor, would be absolutely wrong. Perhaps some of that can be attributed to the silent majority factor (aka, people that were afraid to admit they're intention to vote for Trump), and the rest to lackluster polling. Whatever happened, in my brutally honest opinion, the Democratic party got exactly what it deserved (cheers DNC, now take a sip from a tall glass of We Told You So!).

Admittedly, I never thought that Trump had a chance, as I expected that the election fraud we witnessed during the primaries would surely continue into the general, but that turned out to be conjecture. Trump did lose the popular vote, but won more electorates. These are the rules of the race, and so all things considered, Trump did win fair and square. No matter how many Trump piñatas are set ablaze in the streets, he will be president.

This has been quite the atypical election, thus it's not surprising that there are voices petitioning for the electorate to do something quite unprecedented. Change.org hosts a desperate last-grasp petition which calls upon the electorates to "go rogue", and cast their votes against their constituents wishes and elect Hillary Clinton on December 19th. If you're a Clinton supporter, don't get too excited yet, because it's never going to happen.

On election night, I felt some very mixed emotions while watching the electorate map grow steadily red. Although I really didn't want Hillary Clinton to win, I just always assumed that she would. Until around midnight, I kept thinking "any minute now she'll take the lead, there's no way ..." However, there came a point when I realized that the only way Clinton could win was if she won every remaining state. There were only a handful left at this point, and it seemed quite dubious that the pattern would suddenly break, permitting Hillary to shatter that glass ceiling in celebratory fashion. But it didn't happen. That glass ceiling was instead trashed, and with it, the Transpacific Partnership Agreement. Others claim a looming war with Russia may also have been avoided. I have no idea if that's accurate or not.

Don't get me wrong-- I am not an idiot. There are many things about Trump that not only bother, but genuinely scare me. And I'm not talking about his lack of filter, but rather his total incomprehension of how technology works:

David Sanger: You’ve seen several of those countries come under cyberattack, things that are short of war, clearly appear to be coming from Russia.

Donald Trump: Well, we’re under cyberattack.

Sanger: We’re under regular cyberattack. Would you use cyberweapons before you used military force?

Trump: Cyber is absolutely a thing of the future and the present. Look, we’re under cyberattack, forget about them. And we don’t even know where it’s coming from.

Sanger: Some days we do, and some days we don’t.

Trump: Because we’re obsolete. Right now, Russia and China in particular and other places.

Sanger: Would you support the United States’ not only developing as we are but fielding cyberweapons as an alternative?

Trump: Yes. I am a fan of the future, and cyber is the future.

Trump clearly doesn't know  what he's talking about. His responses contain literally nothing of substance. Okay, he was new at this, so I do cut him slack here. However, governments using offensive security tactics and developing cyber weapons could blow up in our faces. I truly hope that he realizes that he only won this election because of the nature of our free internet, and that protecting our constitutional rights on the internet is every bit as important as protecting them in the physical world (no pun intended).

This also could turn out to be a particularly dangerous time for the future of the internet, thanks to the changes to rule 41 of the the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which absent some massive popular uprising, will become law on December 1st. In fact, I am quite frustrated that the country is so distracted by Trump that nobody is paying attention to this pertinent issue.

I am also more than a little concerned about his environmental positions. Science does not lie, and we are headed for quite a disaster if we don't stop tearing this planet apart in search of gas and oil. Fracking , along with tar-sand oil production are some of the most disgusting, terrifying, toxic, and counter-productive energy extraction methods in use today. We should not inject poison into our drinking water sources to make a buck. We should not, in any way, contribute to, or purchase anything that is responsible for that giant cesspool of tar-sands waste in Northern Canada; you know, the one that's so large that it can be seen from outer space.

 What Now?



Trump could do a very good job. He is in a rare position where he could make real positive change occur. As he put it on 60 minutes, this is a unique moment in time where politicians have been taking advantage of people for a long time, and that all needs to change. 60 Minutes also reported that they felt the radical things said in the campaign were not meant to be taken literally, but were "opening pitches". 

To everyone whom is fearful of or concerned about Trump's presidency, I say this-- I hear your concerns, and I also have mine. But give him a chance,and I would encourage you to take a constructive approach toward securing your futures, and share your concerns and ideas with him. At this point, it would be far more effective for us to try to work with, rather than against, our president elect. He has asked for our council, and has encouraged us to share our ideas, concerns, and viewpoints with him. You can do that right now, at this website.

Whether or not he will listen to us remains to be seen, but at this point, unless you've got a better idea, and as the saying goes; if you can't beat them, join them-- No, not the Republican party. That's not what I am saying. I am saying, work within the system. Hold Trump accountable for every decision that he makes, and every (sane) promise he made during the election. Tell him what he's wrong about, and help him see your point of view. He's expressed that he would like to unite people. Surely this is a more constructive approach than burning piñatas.

Sometimes I Prefer Computers to People

Computers are easy. If the computer is not making sense, or doing something weird like crashing, freezing, or shutting down spontaneously, than it's definitely either your fault, or something is simply broken. It's almost always easily fixable. People, on the other hand, are much more complicated. People don't keep kernel logs, and are much less debuggable. I wish human brains ran on Linux and kept verbose debug logs. Than I could just sort of like ...



# ssh into the brain in question
anon@nixbox:$ ssh root@brain
Last login: n/a          
##############################

# get uptime, unset history, and grab emotional/chemical stats
 
root@brain:# unset HISTFILE ; uptime ; env|grep "EMO\|CHEM"|tr -d '\n'
14:50:31 up 1 day, 19:24,  1 user,  load average: 0.61, 0.74, 0.93
EMO_HAPPY=0 EMO_SAD=1 EMO_FEAR=1 EMO_LOVE=0 CHEM_DOPAMINE=44% CHEM_SERATONIN=53% CHEM_GABA=50% CHEM_epinephrine=87%
root@brain:# dmesg | grep 'because\|reason'
# remount the responsible parts of brain as writable
root@brain:# mount -o remount,rw /dev/amygdala /mnt/brain0
root@brain:# mount -o remount,rw /dev/hippocampus /mnt/brain1
# strace whatever program is responcible for emotions for a while
 
root@brain:# strace -v /mnt/hippocampus/bin/emotions > out.log
 grep "happ*\|sad*\|ang*\|anx*\|fear*\|*secure*\|love*\|hate*\|irritat*\|panic*\|comfort*\|joy\|despair\|disgust\| \
 trust*\|scare*\|relief\|bliss" out.log > debug.log ; shred -zu out.log
# diagnostics: figure out what they're feeling and why
root@brain:# grep "feeling\|because\|reason\|suggest*\|CHEM*" debug.log

 
Mon Aug 08 01:23:59 EDT 2016 DEBUG: feeling happy because: 'sun is shining, skies are blue '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 75%] [seratonin: 89% ] [GABA: 90%] [epinephrine: 10%]
Tue Aug 09 18:23:53 EDT 2016 INFO: feeling angry because: 'smells like teen spirit playing on radio again '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 45%] [seratonin: 57% ] [GABA: 70%][epinephrine: 51%]
Wed Aug 10 12:02:26 EDT 2016 INFO: feeling happy because: 'got paid today, '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 75%] [seratonin: 60% ] [GABA: 100%][epinephrine: 3%]
Thu Aug 11 09:55:41 EDT 2016 WARN: feeling irritable because 'craving nicotine, low dopamine '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 24%] [seratonin: 51% ] [GABA: 70%][epinephrine: 60%]
Thu Aug 11 12:30:44 EDT 2016 ERR:  system unstable, reason: 'chemical inbalance! '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 15%] [seratonin: 42% ] [GABA: 10%][epinephrine: 88%]
Fri Aug 12 08:12:43 EDT 2016 WARN: feeling anxious because: 'sleep deprivation [-2 hours] '
 CHEM: [dopamine: 55%] [seratonin: 60% ] [GABA: 42%][epinephrine: 90%]
Fri Aug 12 08:12:43 EDT 2016 INFO: suggest: '10 mgs diazepam to induce somnia and more sleep'
Fri Aug 12 11:56:01 EDT 2016 FATAL: feeling: 'depressed because: '(null) error: no reason found'

# shred the evidence (not sure that in any universe this would be legal)
 
root@brain:# shred -zu debug.log 

# create a boot script to kill bad emotions, trigger good ones, and let's just do our brain owner a favor and correct that seratonin inbalance once and for all, each reboot (or, every morning, i suppose. [it's pseudo science fiction].)
 
root@brain:# grep -v "exit 0" /etc/rc.local > /tmp/rc.tmp ;
root@brain:# echo "echo 1 > /proc/emo/happy ; echo 0 > /proc/emo/sad ; echo 0 > /proc/emo/fear ;echo 1 > /proc/emo/love;\
 echo 100 > /dev/chem/dopamine ; echo 100 > /dev/chem/seratonin ; echo 0 > /dev/chem/epinephrine ; echo 100 > /dev/chem/GABA \
 exit 0" >> /tmp/rc.tmp && mv /tmp/rc.tmp > /etc/rc.local

# turn panic attacks into blissful trips, in fact, lets just unset panic as a variable altogether and save some pharma costs. than we should be good to simply reboot the brain and all will be well
 
root@brain:# echo 'alias PANIC="echo 1 > /proc/emo/bliss;echo 0 >/proc/emo/panic ; unset PANIC\"' >> /etc/profile
root@brain:# ln -s /dev/chem/GABA /dev/chem/epinephrine ; reboot
Broadcast message from root@brain
        (/dev/pts/1) at 13:21 ...
The system is going down for reboot now!
Connection closed by remote host.

# log back in and make sure nothing went terribly wrong




anon@nixbox:$ ssh root@brain
Last login: Fri Aug 12 15:29:57 EDT 2016 from nixbox.lan
##############################
root@brain:# env|grep "EMO\|CHEM"|tr -d '\n'
EMO_HAPPY=1 EMO_SAD=0 EMO_FEAR=0 EMO_LOVE=1 CHEM_DOPAMINE=100% CHEM_SERATONIN=100% CHEM_GABA=100% CHEM_epinephrine=0%
root@brain:# >$HISTFILE; exit
Connection to brain-099343343322.lan closed
anon@nixbox:$ # All better now

# Looks good. Our subject is flying on dopamine, has a health seratonin balance, lots of GABA, and we've disabled adrenaline (for now, cause ya, adrenaline has it's uses)


As nice as this would be, it's just not the way life works. Life is not binary. The world is not black and white, it's rather colorful. But it's nice to dream.

Making Facebook Chat Suck Less: Messenger Over IRC!

The Problem: 

We all know how bad the Facebook Messenger platform is, so I won't go into too much detail. The CIA probably has access to every single message ever sent over the service, and the mobile messenger app requires permissions to just about everything on your phone. The only other option is to use the HTML service on facebook's site, or the standalone messenger client, which is equally inconvenient. But if you are using a mobile device, you may have noticed that you can't even use the browser anymore (at least, not without spoofing your user agent string). If you're on a smartphone, it seems Facebook will stop at nothing to get you to install their spyware-oozing, trojanized, piece-of-shit app. (Why, Zuckerburg, in God's name, WHY?)

There used to be an alternate way, connecting via the XMPP service that Facebook used to provided. This allowed users to use the service on the XMPP client of their choice (profanity is mine, Pidgin is more commonly used). Many users, myself included, were quite angry when Facebook killed that service. After that happened, I pretty much gave up on ever using facebook chat for anything other than occasionally tracking down long lost friends.

After all, who needs this crap? There are plenty of ways to communicate with your friends securely, with end to end encryption, and away from the prying eyes of Google and the NSA. There is Signal Private Messenger, a plethora of XMPP servers available for public use, and hell, even doing clumsy shit like:

echo -ne "Decrypt this shit"|gpg -a -r 'Alice' --encrypt|nc lol.com 6969

is better than facebook messenger! The problem is getting your friends to use the encrypted services (which, btw, are very easy to use). Sometimes the party you need to talk to just doesn't know how or care to use alternate communication services. Maybe you're dating someone who is not as technically oriented as you are, or someone that just really likes to use facebook. Or maybe you have to use Facebook because of your job, or maybe your friends simply don't care that every word exchanged over that service is being stored on tape inside one of Dick Cheney's underground bunkers.

The attitude toward perpetual warrentless wiretapping in this country is somewhere between an apathetic "oh well" and a misguided "i don't care because i have nothing to hide". I could tell you about how those attitudes, throughout human history, have lead to awesome events such as the rise of the Nazi Germany, but I digress. Besides, if you're using Facebook's servers in any way, than forget about hiding messages from three letter organizations.

Messenger's Annoying (Anti)Features:

That aside, I cannot be the only one that feels like their chatting experience has been wrecked by all of these new "features", such as the ability to see when your friend has "seen" the message your sent, or the distracting ability to see when your contact is typing you a message. Perhaps you also don't appreciate the fact that everyone in the world can see your idle time, down to the second, from which you were last online (this is how my mom used to know when I stayed up till 3:00 AM).

Maybe you think I am being silly, perhaps you like these features. I would not mind them if I simply had the option to shut them off, without disabling chat altogether. I feel like the seen, is typing. and idle features rob the user of some of the better aspects of text messaging that make it appealing to begin with. For instance, I like how when talking to someone over sms, I feel like I can take my time replying, and do not feel like my cell phone is eating my attention span alive. With IRC and sms, I am engaged with both the conversation and world around me. But with facebook, I feel like my attention span has been totally hijacked and monopolized. I don't want the distraction of knowing the second someone "sees" my messages. Maybe sometimes I don't want them to know when i saw theirs. I don't like when people can see that I am typing either. Sometimes I feel compelled to type faster, or feel silly if I spend five full minutes typing a message, only to delete it and say "yeah". Sometimes I feel like if I don't reply in a reasonable time, than I am somehow indirectly "ignoring" my contact. Yes, it all sounds trivial, but that's how the messenger platform makes me feel. Wouldn't good old IRC be better?

Whatever the reason compelling you to use this terrible platform, if you find yourself with a facebook browser tab open all of the time, running inside of your dedicated sketchy virtual machine to avoid cross contamination with all your other shit, than I have good news for you. If you also hate these ever increasing amount of anti-features like "seen", than this blog is for you too. The situation is fixable! Without further ado, meet Bitlbee.

Making It Suck (Way) Less: 

(Note: it should go without saying that no matter how you interact with facebook's servers, your messages will still be stored on those servers. Besides using some end-to-end encryption plugin like blowssi or copy and pasting gpg encrypted messages, there is nothing you can do about that part of the problem.)

There is finally a way to chat on facebook, using your IRC client of choice (I like irssi), while reclaiming some privacy. Finally, I can talk to people on Facebook without ever having to leave the comfort of my terminal emulator. This is possible thanks to Bitlbee, and bitlbee-mqtt. What is bitlbee?

"BitlBee brings IM (instant messaging) to IRC clients. It's a great solution for people who have an IRC client running all the time and don't want to run an additional MSN/AIM/whatever client.
BitlBee currently supports the following IM networks/protocols: XMPP/Jabber (including Google Talk and Hipchat), MSN/Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and ICQ, the Twitter microblogging network (plus all other Twitter API compatible services like status.net)
There are also plugins for facebook and steam, and you can use libpurple to get even more protocols."

Basically, Bitlbee provides a way to use all of your favorite (or most hated) messaging services over good old IRC. It is an irc daemon, so preferably you should run it on some linux box that is online all of the time.

How to Bitlbee-Facebook:

Full instructions here. You will need:

 - a linux server
 - a facebook account
 -  ~ 30 minutes
 - an irc client
 - an irc bouncer
 - an IQ =< 60
 - some basic linux skills 

First you need to install  both bitlbee and bitlbee-facebook. These packages can either be built from source, or you can use the bitlbee repositories if your Linux distribution is supported (easier). Pre-compiled binaries may also be available, but I don't mess with those, and neither should you.

For simplicities sake, let's use the repositories. First, find out if your distro is supported. Currently, a few Debian and Ubuntu releases are:

wheezy:  Debian 7.0 (old-stable)
jessie:  Debian 8.0 (stable)
testing:         Debian testing
trusty:  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (trusty tahr), Linux Mint 17
wily:    Ubuntu 15.10 (wily werewolf)

There are two repositories you need to add, the readme's are located here and here. I'll assume you are using Debian Jessie, because it's my favorite out of all of those, and this is my blog. If you're using something else, just replace the distro when you run these commands (where applicable).

First, we need the release key (same for all versions), and than we need to add an entry to our sources.list for apt:

$ wget -O- https://code.bitlbee.org/debian/release.key | sudo apt-key add -

$ wget -O- https://jgeboski.github.io/obs.key | sudo apt-key add -

Than we need to add the repositories to our sources list (as root):

# echo 'deb http://code.bitlbee.org/debian/master/jessie/amd64/ ./'\

 >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/bitlbee.list

# echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/jessie ./'\

 >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/jgeboski.list

Next, we need to update apt and than install the packages bitlbee and bitlbee-facebook, and than restart the daemon for good measure:

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get install bitlbee bitlbee-facebook;(sudo service bitlbee restart || sudo service bitlbee start)

Congratulations, you should now have a functional bitlbee server that supports facebook! Now it's time to make sure that everything works. First, generate an app password for bitlbee to use (this is much more secure than logging in using your actual facebook password). Next, using your favorite IRC client (i like irssi), connect to your server, try to add a facebook account, and message someone:

/server localhost

account add facebook <email> <password>

account facebook on 

/msg PersonsDisplayName hello from an oldschool irc client! 

If everything went well, you should be logged in to facebook chat. In the channel &Bitlbee, you will see all of your friends as they come on and offline. You start a conversation just like you would on any other IRC server, by doing /msg UserName. You will notice that Bitlbee's mqtt works much better than the old XMPP did. Hyper-links and images work properly too, they are converted to unique links to facebook's content delivery service that you can open in your browser to view. It's really quite impressive how well this works. As an added bonus, you will appear online all of the time, so nobody can get your idle time, nobody can see when you are typing, and the "seen" feature is rendered useless as well (this behaviour can be changed, see the docs).

At this point, everything works, but you may have noticed that bitlbee does not natively support SSL. And while bitlbee does have a nice feature for taking over sessions when you switch devices, everything runs much more smoothly if you configure an IRC bouncer that does support SSL, and run it on the same box as the bitlbee server. This way you can simultaneously be online from multiple devices, and you won't miss any messages when you switched devices, or if/when your connection drops. The bouncer will cache those messages for you, providing both convenience, and if the bouncer supports SSL, security (funny how that works out in this case). A popular bouncer that is available in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories is ZNC, which is very easy to configure (just run znc --makeconf , and follow the prompts).

This is what it looks like when everything is working, using irssi. This is a screenshot of my facebook friends coming online and going idle. Nerds like me will appreciate how bitlbee translates facebook mqtt messages into emulated irc messages:

This is a screenshot of a conversation in irssi. Notice how when the user goes idle, bitlbee emulates that by with an irc quit message:

Finally, here is a screenshot of the &Bitlebee status feed on an Android, in this case using the AndChat IRC client (of course you could also use connectbot and tmux or something):

A conversation on AndChat:

Pretty cool, right? I can finally use facebook on my phone without dealing with browers and user agents (I have always refused to use Messenger).

So, that's how you can reclaim some of your privacy, and turn your attention-monopolizing facebook experience into something much more pleasant, with a retro IRC feel.

Important:

Do not use Bitlbee straight over the internet! Either use a bouncer that supports SSL, run it through a VPN, tunnel it over SSH, or use something else, like stunnel. The IRC protocol is ancient, and operates over plain text. Intercepting your messages and passwords would be trivial for an ISP or someone on your LAN to do.

I am considering running a public Bitlbee server, which would use SSL. If you think you would be interested in using that service, leave a message. I hope that this blog helps someone. Enjoy.

USA SOL As Usual - Fuck Trump & Clinton

Trump totally sold out to the far right. From his religious pandering to his terrible choice of running mate, it's clear that Trump was lying every time he ever said that his campaign was about taking on the establishment. Considering this, it's not hard to imagine that he was never serious about taking on money in politics either. But mostly, I can't support Trump because the Republican convention was so sickening. Watching those paranoid, miserable lunatics rant on and on about terrorism and "pro-life" policy made me remember why Obama was elected over Romney-- because allowing those people back into power would set us back decades environmentally, socially, and economically.

Maybe if Trump had picked a more moderate VP instead a far-right establishment Republican insider than he'd still hold some appeal. But can you imagine what would happen if Trump got impeached or assassinated, resulting in a Pence presidency? That would be a fucking nightmare.

Perhaps if he had at least acknowledged that we are in an environmental crisis, or had not switched his position on woman's rights, just perhaps he would be a viable candidate.

Maybe if the only insane things he had said were that we need to build a wall, ban all Muslims, and punish woman for abortions, just maybe he could deflected those particular things and still had been taken seriously.

Most sickening are his statements about "bringing back torture, even if it doesn't work". Trump, did you seriously say that and expect it not to cost you votes? The thing is folks, I don't believe that Trump is serious about winning. He is either playing the Republicans or playing us. Maybe both. I don't know.

Don't think for a second that this means I would ever vote for Hillary Clinton, however. I can't even believe that she is still running. The woman could not pass a simple background check. She is, all for intended purpouses, a closet Republican, and certainty is every bit as much of a neocon as say, Henry Kissinger or George Bush.

So, what choice does that leave us? There are two third party candidates, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. Johnson will be on the ballet in all fifty states, while Stein only twenty-three. I'll likely be voting for one of them, unless Bernie Sanders makes some kind of stellar comeback.

The Age of Shale: An Orwellian, Globalist Nighmare

Blissful Ignorance ...

A few years ago, a giant conspiracy theorist movement exploded in American pop culture. Perhaps the growing distrust of our government was because the people began to seriously question the 9/11 Commission's official story. Or perhaps it was the severe disappointment that came with the Obama administration after eight years of Bush-era tyranny. Something pushed us to the edge. Something had changed.

As I become increasingly aware of the numerous injustices committed against humanity every day, I can't help but feel like it's not smart to bring children into this world right now. From crimes against people to crimes against the planetary ecosystem as a whole, virtually every case shares at least one commonality-- that these crimes are almost always perpetrated or enabled by the very systems of protection men built to prevent these very occurrences, and not to mention, are often linked to Halliburton.

From the war on drugs to the war on terror, or from the war against encryption to the war against the American constitution, it was already enough to make anyones head spin. But than the election year came, and with it a reignited movement against hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as "fracking". I only knew that fracking was the process of drilling for natural gas, and that it is controversial. Despite this being a big issue throughout the election, for some reason I never bothered to look into it.

Perhaps nobody around here was talking about fracking because I live in New England, a region which has no large natural gas deposits, a place nobody thought would be "getting fracked" anytime soon. Whatever the reason, there was a giant media blackout and general ignorance of this issue, particular in this area. Even when the Kinder Morgan pipeline was threatening my backyard, I still didn't have a clue what was really going on. I thought that it was oil that they wanted to transport through our state... I have not asked around, but I can't have been the only ignorant one.

Than a few days ago fracking came up in a conversation with a friend. He told me, "Fracking has severely damage the Earth, possibly irreversibly." Now I knew that the f word was bad, mmkay, but nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to learn from the documentary, Gasland. Nobody could have convinced me that I of all people, one week after watching two documentaries, would literally still be nauseous because of what I had learned. In other words, absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the truth.

Awful Truth ...

So, what is hydraulic fracturing, how does it work, and why is it so despised? Are you sure you want to know? I must warn you that if you begin investigating fracking as I have, it's quite possible that you will never be able to look at the world optimistically again. Last chance to hit the back button...

The United States has several very large deposits of natural gas deep under the Earth, and spread across roughly half of the states. Deep beneath the water line, and trapped underneath shale rock, are trillions of tons of methane, a naturally occurring, highly toxic and volatile gas. Until the last decade, most natural gas produced came from much shallower deposits, and it was generally thought that drilling for shale gas was not economically viable. That all changed when Halliburton pioneered the technology to drill into shale and extract the gas inexpensively. The process is much worse than it sounds...

First a deep hole is drilled down several thousands of feet, sometimes a mile downwards. Than they drill horizontally for another few thousand feet, to reach more pockets of gas. The entire process Halliburton came up with is known as Hydraulic Fracturing because the next step involves pumping millions of gallons of fluid, which is about 99.5% water and 0.5% extremely toxic, often unknown chemicals into the ground. The pressure causes the shale rock to fracture and release the stores of methane, which than vent up through the well to the surface over the next forty of fifty years.

Before going any further, ask yourself how mature adult men could ever honestly have believed that it would be acceptable to inject a trillion gallons of water mixed with neurotoxins such as benzene, methanol and ethylene glycol into US soil over the last decade? Now speculate for a moment about what the negative effects of this part of the process could be. Now consider the fact that enormous quantities of methane gas, a greenhouse gas that traps eighty times more heat than carbon-dioxide, leaks throughout the entire industrial process, all the way from the well to the tank outside your home.

That's not even the half of it. For every million gallons of frack water that is pumped into the ground, only about four or five hundred thousand gallons, or half ever comes back up. This means that there are now potentially about a hundred thousand little pockets of highly poisonous, radioactive waste water deep underground, in the United States alone. And the water that does come back up is rarely disposed of properly. Did I mention it's often radioactive? That's because there is lots of stuff deep under ground that does not normally, and is not ever supposed to ever flow back up to the surface. You are probably wondering how this water is disposed of. This is when it gets really sickening. "Produced" water, as the industry calls it, is some of the nastiest, most unnatural shit in the world. Often black, full of glycol ethers, and smelling of turpentine, it is virtually good for nothing. This waste water is stored in a pit and sprayed into the sunlight to accelerate evaporation before being removed by truck (and taken where?). Often times it's not removed at all, and is actually injected right back into the ground, and incredibly also is often injected directly into deep underground drinking waters supply wells.

Ah yes, the water cycle. Mother Earth has the amazing ability of filtering our dirty waste water for us, naturally, through all the porous dirt, and thanks to microbes that live in that dirt, which eat crap, turn sewage into pure drinking water again. Incredible! It worked great until George Bush decided to sign a law making the fracking industry exempt from every environmental law that exists in the United States. This is not an exaggeration, by any means. Google it. But the earth cannot filter out stuff like ethylene-glycol, or
2-Bromo-2-nitro-1,2-propanediolso... this stuff is not going anywhere for a long, long time.

By now you're probably feeling betrayed, I am. How could that happen? How does a guy like Bush get away with something like that, and how can we let these people rape the planet like this. Also interesting is how just about all of horrible things Americans face today can be traced back to Darth Cheney and Halliburton. Do these guys just sit around and wonder, "What would be the darkest, most unnatural, unpatriotic, wildly deceptive and insidious way we could screw up the planet, while dehumanizing or straight up murdering people for a prophet? Hmm..." To which Cheney replies, "We will inject trillions of gallons of poisons into the Earth, starting out west, and in the heartlands near the nations food supplies, and than we will do it on a global scale."

Remember in Obama's state of the union address when he rather randomly told us that America has enough natural gas to last a century, and told us his administration would do "Everything in our power to safely develop this energy. Thank you very much and God bless America!" I recall it seemed strange at the time, like why did he bring that up? Most forgot about it, or didn't ask why natural gas, although technically cleaner burning fuel than oil, should be the energy source of the future, at a time when solar and other renewable energy sources appeared to have extremely promising futures just around the bend. Now there is a global fracking campaign, made possible by so called democrats, which is putting the rest of the Earth at risk. And what timing.The Tesla electric car had just rolled out, the solar industry was booming, and for a split second the future looked greener. But fracking was only growing, and the practice would only become more reckless. Obama, bought and owned by the energy companies, than attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, halting long overdue investigations, which otherwise could have blown the lid off of the entire fracking frenzy.

There have been thousands of cases of water contamination around the country (and world) since the age of shale began in 2002. Entire towns of people have been forced to move out of their homes because the environment around them has been completely destroyed. Entire ecosystems have been destroyed. People living close to the gas wells have suffered headaches, lost their sense of taste or smell, gone blind, gotten cancer, and in some cases died. We don't really know the extent of the damage, because every time this happens, there is a lawsuit. The families reach a settlement, are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, and the energy companies keep fracking us all the same. The truth is buried underneath the ground right along with the wastewater. The now radioactive wastewater, which originally came from sources like the Great Lakes, and our drinking water aquifers... the precious supplies of water of which the creator blessed America with so much of.... turned into black sludge... I think I am going to cry, how about you?

in Our Hands ...

While the people of Pennsylvania were discovering that post fracking, they could literally light their well water on fire because it is so contaminated, our "leaders" were trying to figure out how they could seduce the people of New York into allowing them to drill in the New York City Watershed area, which supplies drinking water to about sixteen million people. Most thankfully, the people of New York united, and twice now have been able to get legal moratoriums placed against natural gas drilling in their state. (The EPA did a study of the likely outcomes of such an insane proposition in 2009, which is worth reading.)

Around 2010-2013, a type of "Frack Off" movement developed as the toxic effects of the industries recklessness began to quite literally come to the surface. Although many states have finally began to regulate the industry, Vermont is the only state that has managed to ban the practice altogether. And it is something that must be banned entirely. Scientists tell us that there is no possible way to drill for shale gas safely. I don't know about you, but I am a firm believer in science, above all else. In fact, it was just yesterday when Donald Trump reiterated his position on climate change denial and proposals to expand this nightmarish practice that I decided I will never vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Not to politicize this crisis too much, but fracking has been the final deciding factor in my decision to be #BernieorBust. It's really quite disappointing, because until now I actually kind of liked Trump.

What happens next? With Obama and Clinton pushing for fracking on a global scale, and Hillary being #forgainst pretty much every controversial issue, especially fracking... this election, in my eyes, just became even more important. Seriously, the fate of the entire human face is at stake. Actually, the fate of the entire planetary ecosystem is seriously at risk. Remember, there are no regulations against fracking, even at sea. It really matters who wins this election. If you look at the geography of the shale gas deposites around the Earth, you will realize that perhaps a third of the planet could potentially be destroyed over the next fifty years because of fracking, and you must keep in mind that water flows everywhere, so don't let them tell you that this cannot affect you too. What happens then? You think that the Syrian migrant crisis is bad? What will happen when billions of people around the world are displaced because of this greedy industry's bloodlust? What happens when water starts to become a commodity instead of a basic human right? Because everywhere this has happened, the people are quietly being told to shut up and move.

This is war. It is another war against the people, waged by the ruling class, on their own subjects, and only in an Orwellian world would we accept that. Only in the Orwellian age would we sit by as governments use psychological warfare techniques against their own people to roll the red carpet. This is unquestionably criminal. Who would willingly allow this in their backyard? We only have one planet. Is this why finding water on Mars was such a big deal. Wake up and smell the turpentine.