hedonist

TL;DR Talk about First World Problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

Don't get me wrong -- it's still a pretty neat idea. It's just there's that "other 90%" (i.e. the necessary work to create anything seriously production grade) that always comes to mind when evaluating a new interface.

It was actually helpful (in retrospect) to consider the experience in terms of a temporary glandular over-reaction of some sort. As in, not "aww look how broken and pathetic I am to be all curled up in a ball like this", but rather, "look at what a complex feat of engineering I am, and look how helpful it is of my body to warn me and signal me when I'm exposing it to stresses it doesn't like very much."

So you might want to look up the terms "cortisol surge" and "adrenal fatigue". And also look into that magical chemical known as serotonin, and how it works as a cross-regulator among various cognitive and strictly physical subsystems in your body. Mind you, I've had no formal medical training, I'm just saying a bit of self-study and serious research might be helpful here.

As to how to prevent them: that's a touch one, because everyone has different trigger thresholds, and (despite what big pharma would dearly like for you to believe) there are no magic bullets.

But personally I've found a sustained, low-key meditation practice to have surprisingly positive long-term benefits. When you strip away the paranormal- and pseudoscientific baggage around it (which are really just that), what it comes down to is (1) basic common sense awareness of how mental and emotional stress works in the body, and in particular, how it correlates with physical stress; (2) how easily we fall into "monkey-mind" patterns of reacting to stressful situations, rather than simply detaching from and (mentally) walking away from them, as it were; and (3) how the same natural tendency of our minds/bodies to learn counterproductive reactive behaviors, can, over time, be used to "unlearn" them, and with surprising efficacy.

But in general -- increased awareness of how our minds and bodies aren't really separate things, but different manifestations / aspects of the same, unified (and beautiful) thing; couple with a realization of how much potential we really have (despite all of our past mistakes, and all the crummy things other people do to us, or say about us), can really help quite a lot.

Snowden fled to China with several computers' worth of data from NSANET, ..

As in, he's trying to plant the idea (and fear) in our minds that Snowden has collaborated with the PRC government in some way. There's no evidence that this is the case, and a lot of evidence (based on how he conducted himself while in HK) that no contact of any such kind occurred.

Yet Hayden is trying to plant the idea in our minds that the main purpose of Snowden's trip was to make contact with the Chinese, in the same way that Benedict Arnold collaborated with the British, or Hanssen or the Rosenbergs did with the Soviets, Ames with the Israelis, etc.

One way in which it differs:

Robert Seldon Lady is far more likely to get a fair trial in Italy (and far less likely to be subject to solitary confinement, or other forms of torture during a prolonged delay before his trial) than Snowden is in the U.S.

But Kelly is being pumped for this job solely on the basis of stature -- and nothing else. If anything it's just another sign of how useless and zombie-like the DHS has become in the short time since it was created. Which pretty much everyone -- including, it would seem, Obama himself -- already knows on some level, though very few are willing to state openly.

Brings to mind that Leonard Cohen song:

  Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
  Everybody knows that the captain lied...

[1] tased, pepper sprayed, heatblasted, subject to concussion blasts and/or other non-lethal crowd control measures as deemed necessary and appropriate by the exigent circumstances of the moment.