Richard W. Posner was born in america in 1947, raised in a lower middle class, blue collar family and has lived and worked in several states including New York, Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico and, currently, Texas. He is an autodidactic generalist whose insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding motivated him to abandon the public school system so he could actually learn something. His only “credentials” are a GED. He has spent the last fifty years or so working as a blue collar labourer, playing in several rock bands, being a potter’s apprentice and acquiring enough computer skills to become reasonably proficient with several graphics and electronic music applications as well as the usual office programs. But above all else, during that time, he has committed himself to the intense study of everything from anthropology to zealotry in what has been so far a vain attempt to comprehend the undeniable death-wish of the human species.