In “How a Drug Company Made $114 Billion by Gaming the U.S. Patent System”, Nic Antaya writes:

AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market.

Some of Humira’s patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents.

For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016.

The patent strategy for Humira was designed to “make it more difficult for a biosimilar to follow behind,” Bill Chase, an AbbVie executive, said at a conference in 2014.

This is the American way. Taking it further, Chris Hedges wrote:

we now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.²

This is what the US would like to bring to Europe. Indeed, is in the process of importing to Europe. Ursula von der Leyen personally (at least her husband) and directly benefited from the sale of billions of dollars of mRNA injections during the Covid crisis, yet continues to sit in her EU presidential throne, using her past successful scores, to fund future endeavours in graft. The text messages are destroyed, the money sits in off-shore and numbered bank accounts.

Covid affects everyone differently. What it did to you or any one person does not matter. It has killed over 750,000 in the US alone.

In answer, Junk Silver sensibly remarks:

93.75% of all CoVid-19 statistics are utter bullshit. If CoVid killed 750,000 it did so largely by miraculously eliminating all deaths from pneumonia, flu and old age.

Correct. Mortality isn’t really up much in 2021 vs 2019. Overall mortality does not reflect a pandemic but a scamdemic. That’s not to say Covid-19 is not an unpleasant ailment with horrible side effects. The vaccines neither seem to stop its spread nor the side effects. The side effects of the vaccines are enormous, striking down even professional footballers in their prime. Hence the vaccines are at the least a failure and an economic boondoggle.

nc551 makes sense of the US numbers:

The first year the lockdowns were responsible for half the deaths and they hyperinflated the death counts by testing every cadaver. That likely holds for the second year too. Since about 3 million die each year in the US anyway, we saw like an 8% increase at best with the average age of death being higher than the average life expectancy. There is no justification for the illegal lockdowns or illegal vaccine mandates.

In the worst case, the vaccines have been designed to cripple the human immune system and make its recipients dependent on regular booster shots for the rest of their lives to avoid imminent death.

Now Western governments are injecting 5 to 11 years old with what is clearly poison. They say people get the government they deserve. How awful we must be to deserve this degree of corruption, cynicism and rapacity.

Image by Michael Dziekonski

I don’t understand? Why would they need to work on modifications to reduce deadly side-effects? That makes no sense, because they told me it was completely safe and effective. Were they lying then, or lying now?

More amusing is the conversation the rats are holding among themselves:

Overhead in lab –

Rat 1: “Hey, have you gotten your Covid jab yet?”

Rat 2: “Nah, I’m waitin til the human trials are over”

It’s a rare treatment which is tested on humans first. Well there were animal tests, but some doctors allege many animals including cats and ferrets died. Others (ex-House of Lords, ex-BBC bofffins) say nonsense. Either way, the rats probably have the right idea, waiting this one out. My suggestion to prepare for Covid-19:

1. do lots of exercise
2. eat healthily
3. take your vitamins, an everyday vitamin plus vitamin D and zinc supplement in winter.
4. in conjunction with points one and two you should lose some extra kilos through the extra exercise
5. sleep properly and thoroughly so that when you are exposed to the virus there’s a chance that it won’t catch hold at all and that if it does, your body is well-rested and can stave it off quickly

The above steps will help. What will not help is over-eating, being stressed, not sleeping properly, eating poorly – that combination seems plus Covid-19 seems quite deadly. People of colour apparently are suffering more from Covid-19 than many white social groups. From reports, it’s due to diet and lifestyle rather than any genetic difference. So the above rules apply to people of all ages, shapes, sizes and colours. The best way not to get sick is to live healthily

That’s not to say go out and run a triathlon or marathon. Marathon runners, competitive cyclists and especially triathletes put absurd amounts of stress on their body. The original marathon runner dropped dead after delivering his message. Modern runners and triathletes drop dead in their late thirties and early forties very often. Moderate, reasonable exercise which leaves you feeling energised is what is recommended. Not exhausting your physique with a starvation diet and high speed distance training.

We’ll know a lot more about these vaccines one year after they’ve been in wide use and after a winter (flu season, Covid-19 resurgence). By that time, if all has gone well, ‘new’ and ‘improved’ versions will be ready for us.

First Lockdown

First, it was a temporary lockdown to “flatten the curve” and let scientists and medical doctors estimate the dangers and cobble together treatment plans for this new Coronavirus.

I was totally on-board with this step. Three month lockdown while the scientists figure out if the mortality rate is 0.1%, 1% or 4% (they already knew it wasn’t 10% – thank heavens). When it slowly became apparent that the mortality rate is more like 0.1% (1) Out of 1000 people who contract Covid-19, one will die. This is terrible. I have another statistic though which is quite depressing. Out of 1000 people, fourteen will die every year (assuming average lifespan of seventy years). Of those four who will die from Covid-19, the vast majority will be individuals suffering from pre-existing conditions who would have been likely to die in the next six months or year.

The median age of death is about 82 years. This means half the deaths are of people older than 82 and half people younger than 82.

Americans and British are more at risk. Why? The bulk of the population are out of shape, overweight (or obese) near-diabetics due to diet and sedentary lifestyle. The American statistics prompt Worldometer to do this kind of dubious arithmetic:

Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) = Deaths / Cases = 23,430 / 1,694,781 = 1.4% (1.4% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have a fatal outcome, while 98.6% recover).

Worldometer are wildly underestimating infections (many pass almost unobserved) and over-attributing death to Covid-19 (a common issue, particularly prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon countries). I recommend you check the link above and read through the calculations yourself.

While in bad taste, BandGap makes a good point about the lethality of Covid-19.

Why aren’t all the homeless dead? No masks, no distancing, no medical care, poor nutrition, etc…

Large groups outside of seniors’ homes are not dropping dead from Covid-19. The deaths in seniors’ homes seem to have been deliberately encouraged in both New York State and Ontario by placing Covid-19 patients right in those homes. This was a death sentence to thousands of our helpless elderly. Those who gave those euthanisation orders should not only be removed from office but imprisoned.

Second Lockdown: Schools and businessess

After it was established that Covid-19 mainly menaced the sick and very old, those closest to death, a decision had to be made. Either to go on with life, with those most at risk isolating from everyone else, ro

A rather silly compromise was made where international air travel continued to be encouraged (can’t have the airlines shutting down!), while more and more restrictions were pushed on domestic businesses and people. Schools shut down while people continued to fly. This was absolute nonsense. That we would prioritise airlines and international businesses and celebrities/the very wealthy over our schoolchildren’s study and workers’ work is indicative of how capitalism has corrupted both our ethics and good sense.

Frankly I was heartily displeased with these half measures destined to fail.

British PM Boris Johnson was still prattering on about “herd immunity” while Donald Trump was preparing for a grand re-opening sooner than later.

Third Lockdown: Waiting for the vaccine

The real economy is already faltering. Restaurants, hair dressers, theatres, movie theatres, nightclubs and hotels are all shut down. Western society is held together by massive stimulation packages which seem only to heat the US stock market while burning literally trillions of dollars. Billionaires are getting richer by the week, while normal folk run through their savings.

Some kind of vaccines were quickly cobbled together. It appears that the Russian scientists had a head start with other coronavirus vaccines they’d been working on. The race was on. British and American scientists were starting from a standing start. Nevertheless, everything would remain shut until everyone is vaccinated.

The vaccination program is not going particular well (less than 10% penetration) as of the end of March 2021. Authorities are now starting to talk about a real re-opening in 2022. Stealing another year of life from schoolchildren and university age young people is criminal. The economy may never recover after another year of spinning its wheels. Much of the economic activity now is predicated on a real economy returning relatively soon.

At least schoolchildren and pre-school age children and babies were exempt from vaccination. Until today. US Chief Medical Advisor Dr Anthony Fauci wants to vaccinate babies now.

[fvplayer id=”10″]

These clowns are now playing with fire. Reaction on ZeroHedge is on point (GlassHouse101):

Fauci needs to be very careful from here on out. As soon as you start messing with people’s kids, you’re blatantly asking for violence.

When vaccinating senior citizens and even people in their fifties, there’s a reasonable risk/reward. Even if the vaccine goes horribly wrong and dooms these septagenarians to death within three years or even six months, their preceding seventy or fifty-seven years of life won’t be taken from them. If the vaccine means, they make it through Covid-19 infection more easily and some enjoy an extra five or ten years of existence, so much the better.

On the other hand, when you jab a baby with an experimental vaccine, you take the chance of crippling the poor little tot for another seventy years or even cutting short sixty-nine or sixty-three of those seventy years of existence. Instinctively people wish to protect their children.

Fraggle Rocker makes the case against child vaccination very clearly.

Anyone who pushes for kids to be injected with these emergency use vector systems is a criminal. Anyone who allows their kids to be injected is a moron. It’s risk/benefit. Kids are at very low risk, so get no benefit. They do, however, risk side effects occurring over a considerable time period.

Fourth Lockdown: Forever Lockdown

The stupidity involved in vaccinating children willy-nilly and forcing them to wear masks when outside encourages dark theories about the vaccination drive from people like Lahey:

They are trying to sterilize and make the new generations infertile. They are trying to distance our children from each other, and disrupt mental health and normal oxygen intake by forcing masks. This is proven to cause and change your face into ‘undesirable’ characteristics, and most children will become ‘mouth-breathers’ because of the mask. All for a 0% chance of dying from the ‘coof’ under 30 years old. The parents that are complacent in this deserve to be smacked senseless.

When will someone stop this Dr Fauci? In past centuries, humankind has prevailed over the Black Death and the Bubonic Plague. Last century, the world kept spinning and people kept working through the Spanish (Fort Riley) flu, several terrible flu epidemics with much higher mortality than Covid-19. We didn’t just give up and sit on the sidelines of life with facemasks on, waiting for dwarven bureaucrats deeply captured by big pharmaceutical to tell us shelter at home with almost no interpersonal contact.

It’s time to vaccinate those who would benefit, re-open countries domestically with reasonable precautions (one third as many tables in restaurants, one quarter as many in theatres, improved ventilation), put the economy back to work and stop stealing the lives and education of children and young people. Those in risk groups, should self-isolate and take the experimental vaccine and take steps to get themselves out of the risk group. For many this means dieting and exercise. Get one with it. As if your life depends on it. Fatties on the cover of Cosmopolitan won’t save you. Nature is a cruel mistress.

Notes

1. Some scientists estimate the [mortality rate is more like 0.04%(https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/) (half a person will die per year). That seems low to me, at least for the West as a whole, hence I’ve used 0.1%

Photo by talented photographer Janko Ferlič.

AFFF contains contaminants known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); exposure to trace amounts of these synthetic chemicals is associated with a variety of detrimental health effects, and some have argued that PFAS are so risky that they not only endanger public health but threaten to undermine human reproduction writ large.

The burn sites were apparently mostly in low income areas. It’s unlikely that Nancy Pelosi would countenance such activities next to her manor or her children’s manors.

Some commenters wanted to suggest that these deadly shenanigans are a recent phenomenon and that in the past the US military would never play with or endanger American lives. mcmlvii points out that such toxic experiments killed his own father:

They have been engaging in unethical practices for nearly a century. My dad participated in poison gas experiments in 1943 at Edgewood Arsenal Maryland. When he died of colon cancer exacerbated by deterioration of the liver and pancreas in 1988, and doctors confirmed that the problems were related to chemical toxins, the VA accused us of lying and claimed that the US Army did not conduct such experiments in WWII because of the furor over the use of poison gas in WWI. My family has the Army documents from Edgewood Arsenal thanking my dad for his participation in the experiments. My mom contacted Porter Goss, who was then a member of Congress, and he helped us force the VA to publicly admit to the experiments. When government agents came to the house to see the documents, we had them under glass so they could not physically touch them. They were openly angry about that, but admitted they were authentic. They left after only about 5 minutes and within a few days issued their public confession. It’s old news to me that the US government can’t be trusted.

I thought only Muslim savages, Iranian barbarians, Iraqi Batthians, Afgan Taliban, Russian bullies, Serbian monsters, Libyan rapists, Syrian civilians and Asian (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.) Communists were subject to the depredations of the US military liked depleted uranium munitions and white phosphor. Silly me. Some of their very best and most expensive toxic waste are reserved for consumption exclusively by a domestic audience.

The cupidity and stupidity of Americans and their institutions continues to astonish. Fracking their own groundwater for oil polluting their agricultural aquifers for hundreds of years to obtains oil which they sell at a loss via companies funded via funny money only exist thanks to an overheated investment environment apparently only scratches the surface of their ability for self-harm.

Photo from US National Archives. Firefighters stand by as aqueous film forming foam is sprayed from a fire truck onto a fire caused by the explosion of a 40,000 gallon JP-4 aviation fuel storage tank. Photographer Tony Lambert.

A New Congressional Budget Office Study Shows That Medicare for All Would Save Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Annually – Jacobin In USA, healthcare sector has the total revenue at least triple of Military Industrial Complex, and it is extremely rapacious. Regulatory capture is rampant and costs are bloated, often beyond imagination of Americans, including those “well informed”. One should note that Australia makes it will less than half of USAian expenditures per capita with better outcomes. “Of course”, this happens with a single payer system that severely dampens regulatory capture etc., government has to balance the budget to some degree while getting pressure from the voters to actually provide quality care. By the way of contrast, market mechanisms cannot deliver any cost reductions except by reducing the “consumption” in response to “price signals”, that partly explains rather meager health outcomes in USA — when we compare with countries like Australia, Greece, Japan etc. Recently I encountered an example how costs are blown up beyond imagination. I belong to at least half of adults with herpes simplex infection and roughly annual annoying outbreaks that may be occasionally dangerous (in my case, once in 40 years). There is a good reliable cure, acyclovir, and a minor but annoying (and ugly looking) outbreak can be treated quickly with an ointment or cream. As my tube of ointment got severely out of date, I got another one. Currently I have no coverage assisting with medication costs. And I got a needed prescription quickly, called to my pharmacy. First price check (it takes time in American pharmacy! apparently somewhat bewildering computer queries), 300+ dollars for 30 g tube. Few years ago I got such a tube for 200+, in part because I wanted to use it quickly and there were no other sizes in town. More checks: 15 g tube, with a store discount, 50 dollars. But there is no way to use that much in few years — the skin area that you treat is typically very small. What about smaller sizes? Yep, there is a cream in 5 g tube. I got another prescription, for the cream (took three days while the old tube helped me with the outbreak, so I was patient, physician office was apparently quite confused why I am switching from ointment to cream). Now how much is 5 g tube of cream? 600+ dollars. How about a generic? THIS IS A GENERIC!!! Zovirax, brand medicine, is 900+. I got 15 g for 50 dollars and made an online check how is it in Poland (I still remember the language). Take a deep breath. Around 2 dollars, without prescription (can be less and can be more, highest seemed to be 2.50 USD = 10 PLZ. Mind you, the expiration date on my ointment is in 2 years, so I good a deal (50 rather than 300 or 600) that costs 25 times more than in Poland. There it is produced by a local company with cosmetics as the main line of business. As far as health outcome is concerned, it is a medicine that is good to have at home just in case to treat the outbreak instantly, reducing the ugly look within 1-2 days and also the risk of getting the infection of cornea that once happened to me. And many people would do it, especially for 2 dollars and no doctor appointment (or 30-60 minutes on the phone). There are several examples like that that I encountered personally, having a reasonably good health so few medical experiences. Consider: the intricate regulation of generic medicines in USA increased the cost 25 times. A similar ratio also affects another medicine that is worth to keep just in case, injectable epinephrin, good to have if you are at risk to anaphylactic shock, people with an allergy can get it from a wasp bite etc. 16 dollars in Poland (80% covered by insurance), more than 300 in USA (covered or not covered). For full benefit, you should carry the syringes when you go out, and in six months the doses are out of date. Bloated costs reduce the number of people who take the precaution against occasionally lethal shock, and offer no benefits whatsoever. BTW, a dose of epinephrin costs about 1 USD, the extra cost in USA and Poland is to make it easy for the affected person to inject it without help. Thus we have many billions intercepted by rapacious companies on two simple medicine. Rationally managed single payer system should be able to reduce the costs by 1-2 trillions per year and improve the health in the process.

I don’t have much direct experience with US health care system but I know for certain that the pricing in Europe for generic medicine matches Mr. Berman’s figures. It’s amazing that American are so fixated on their “free market” that they would rather live their lives in dread of what happens if they ever get sick. US insurers will dump you as soon as they think you might be ill. The only people in the US with genuinely good health coverage are the crocodiles in Congress and mummies in the Senate denying other Americans high quality single-payer health insurance.

Perhaps the US authorities are right – single payer could not work in the USA as there is not a strong ethical core any more. Most doctors and nurses in Europe and Canada do their work not for the money but to help people and to save lives. American pundits argue that no one ever does anything except out self-interest: what an spiritually-impoverished wasteland. No wonder opiod deaths are on the rise. Forced to abide in a den of self-devouring vipers would be enough to drive all but the strongest to substance abuse or suicide.

Photo by Bermix Studio.

Bad Pharma, a new book by Ben Goldacre, looks into the research practices of big pharmacy. Apparently any negative information about new drugs is systematically suppressed even in the academic environment:

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug…: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin….This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

…In 2003, two [systematic reviews] were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results….

In general, the results section of an academic paper is extensive: the raw numbers are given for each outcome, and for each possible causal factor, but not just as raw figures….In Fries and Krishnan (2004), this level of detail was unnecessary. The results section is a single, simple and – I like to imagine – fairly passive-aggressive sentence:

“The results from every randomised controlled trial (45 out of 45) favoured the drug of the sponsor.”

How does this happen? How do industry-sponsored trials almost always manage to get a positive result? Sometimes trials are flawed by design. You can compare your new drug with something you know to be rubbish – an existing drug at an inadequate dose, perhaps, or a placebo sugar pill that does almost nothing. You can choose your patients very carefully, so they are more likely to get better on your treatment. You can peek at the results halfway through, and stop your trial early if they look good. But after all these methodological quirks comes one very simple insult to the integrity of the data. Sometimes, drug companies conduct lots of trials, and when they see that the results are unflattering, they simply fail to publish them.

Still feeling confident about your industry sponsored cell phone radiation tests?

Here’s what happens if someone speaks up about negative results:

Rosiglitazone was first marketed in 1999. In that first year, Dr John Buse from the University of North Carolina discussed an increased risk of heart problems at a pair of academic meetings. The drug’s manufacturer, GSK, made direct contact in an attempt to silence him, then moved on to his head of department. Buse felt pressured to sign various legal documents….

In 2003 the Uppsala drug monitoring group of the World Health Organisation contacted GSK about an unusually large number of spontaneous reports associating rosiglitazone with heart problems. GSK conducted two internal meta-analyses of its own data on this, in 2005 and 2006. These showed that the risk was real, but although both GSK and the FDA had these results, neither made any public statement about them, and they were not published until 2008.

During this delay, vast numbers of patients were exposed to the drug, but doctors and patients learned about this serious problem only in 2007, when cardiologist Professor Steve Nissen and colleagues published a landmark meta-analysis. This showed a 43% increase in the risk of heart problems in patients on rosiglitazone. Since people with diabetes are already at increased risk of heart problems, and the whole point of treating diabetes is to reduce this risk, that finding was big potatoes. Nissen’s findings were confirmed in later work, and in 2010 the drug was either taken off the market or restricted, all around the world.

Still feeling that independent scientists would be able to get the word out over the billions of dollars of industry sponsored research?

When the paper describing this situation was published in Jama, Lif, the Danish pharmaceutical industry association, responded by announcing, in the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, that it was “both shaken and enraged about the criticism, that could not be recognised”. It demanded an investigation of the scientists, though it failed to say by whom or of what. Lif then wrote to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty, accusing the Cochrane researchers of scientific misconduct…

The investigation went on for a year. Peter Gøtzsche, director of the Cochrane Centre, told the British Medical Journal that only Lif’s third letter, 10 months into this process, made specific allegations that could be investigated by the committee. Two months after that, the charges were dismissed. The Cochrane researchers had done nothing wrong. But before they were cleared, Lif copied the letters alleging scientific dishonesty to the hospital where four of them worked, and to the management organisation running that hospital, and sent similar letters to the Danish medical association, the ministry of health, the ministry of science and so on. Gøtzsche and his colleagues felt “intimidated and harassed” by Lif’s behaviour. Lif continued to insist that the researchers were guilty of misconduct even after the investigation was completed.

If the Romney presidential campaign were not illustration enough, some people are prepared to say and write anything for money. And that includes the pharmaceutical companies which are supposed to be looking out for our health.

Why is this article focused on cellphone radiation? We can decide to take pills or not, or accept a certain medical treatment. We have little control over cellphone radiation, just as for decades we had little control over second hand smoke.

Goldacre’s book looks fabulous, peeking behind the curtains of pharmaceutical companies practices. Well researched but popular works like Bad Pharma are essential to reforming out of control industries, like tobacco, oil or pharmacy.

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients will be released on January 3, 2013 by Faber and Faber. A pity that it won’t be out in time for Christmas. In the meantime, Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks starts down this road. In an interview in 2008, Goldacre stated that “one of the central themes of my book [Bad Science] is that there are no real differences between the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry and the $50 billion food supplement pill industry”. Goldacre has been sued several times for exposing medical shams and won damages and/or court costs up to €220,000 from the plaintiffs.

Excerpts above from Bad Pharma are from an extract published in the The Guardian.

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Brennan-Jobs writing is splendid. Her treatment of the complexities of the Ivy League and fraternities in a story about date rape is spot on. Brennan-Jobs describes eventual acceptance into the special circles of the Ivy League and how it seems like another, better world to an outsider:

One weekend that summer the four of us went to Avery’s summerhouse in New Hampshire. She drove her father’s red MG with the top down and it was just right, just how it should be, I thought, on the East Coast during college in the summer with friends. The house was small, clean and furnished beautifully, expensively. The walls were thick. Vintage quilts spilled over antique four-posters.  The house was two stories, rectangular, with a patio and a lawn in back that sloped down and ended at an inlet of the Atlantic ocean. There was no beach, just a little drop down. I didn’t understand that the water was ocean, and not lake, until we jumped in and I tasted the salt and felt the sharp cold. It had a power that a lake didn’t have, too, even though it was calm on the top. Lake water seemed thinner. I had never seen this kind of ocean before, this domesticated version of the Pacific. Later we made dinner together and ate on the patio as the sky darkened. I extrapolated, watching the ocean from the porch, sitting with my friends, eating: here with these people, even wild and violent things were calm.

I began to wonder whether I’d been wading too deeply through my life, hampered by unnecessary seriousness. Maybe life could be lived more on the surface layer, where the sheen is.

Later Brennan-Jobs reveals the friend who introduced her to these perfect circles had a dark streak and had destroyed the life of the young woman she had just met in London:

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said softly. Then she hesitated. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all.”

I had a feeling this was about Cole. “Cole and I are just friends,” I said. “You don’t have to worry. We’re not a couple or anything.”

She began to tell me her story.

It was not, I learned, a crush at all. She had met Cole at a party at one of Harvard’s final clubs. She had a few drinks there, but didn’t remember anything after that. She woke up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, knowing that she’d had sex, missing her underwear. She went to the hospital and tested positive for the presence of Rohypnol—the “date rape drug”—in her blood.

I’d never heard of Rohypnol before. Emily said it made you cognizant, even excited or blissful, in the moment, and then you forget everything the next day. She didn’t know who had slipped the drug into her drink or who had had sex with her. Several people told her later that she and Cole had sex that night in the club in front of a group of people.

At the time, I learned, she was training to be a doctor at Harvard and had almost completed her course.  She dropped out after the incident with Cole and returned to her native London.

Here the banality of evil resonates quietly. This is what the Ivy League is about. The propriety is all surfaces, underneath which a morass of Kennedy ravishments and careless murder. The same dangers F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

In another essay about abandoning vegetarianism, Brennan-Jobs nails the paradox perfectly in describing her first baked chicken. The human body is very unhappy without meat over time. All the frustration at the murder of animals for food does not change the underlying cravings of the body for flesh.

I felt unfastened, too, roasting the chicken today, eating it at night with my boyfriend. It wasn’t my first time eating meat – but it was my first time eating meat as a meat-eater. It was moist with crispy skin and there were vegetables, too, cooked in the juices in the same pan: beautiful white beets with red veins, shallots with burnt and twisting stems, sweet potatoes – all upstaged, though, by the flavorful meat that sat between us, glistening. It collapsed the space between us, brought us closer, I think, with comfort and normality; it also collapsed time, made the vegetarian years fade.

The very word vegetarian has so many different meanings, one can never be sure what someone else means or even what one means oneself.

I grew up, left home and traveled farther and farther from California to the East Coast, then to England, then to Italy. I slipped through holes in understanding and language: in Boston one can be vegetarian and eat fish; in England a vegetarian may also eat fish, and rarely objects to the meat that flavors a dish; in Italy una vegetariana may sample everything, as the population is perplexed by the concept of meatlessness; little exceptions seem unavoidable.

I absorbed the excuses and ate. I strayed as far as I could safely stray into the universe of flesh, emboldened by anonymity, right up to the point when I would be questioned, and then stopped.  And if I was troubled by the difference between what I said I was, and what I ate, the taste of the tender, flavorful meat seemed absolution enough, as if the spiritual problem was mitigated, the animal suffering alleviated, the question of my identity (a vegetarian? who eats meat?) obfuscated by my pleasure.

I deeply sympathise with Brennan-Jobs. I loathe the idea of eating meat, consuming flesh. I wonder about the health of the activity given the tortured flesh from modern day factory farms, pumped up with fatteners and hormones. Or even the terror of transported animals forced into slaughter houses. Consuming their death throes cannot be good for us.

Most people in the West eat far too much meat. The human body needs meat about one meal every two days. I try to restrict myself to that rhythm and make fish one out of every second meal. But abolishing meat altogether creates a slow decline to weakness. I know, I’ve been vegetarian for as long as a year at a time.

It could be worse. Fijans ate other humans like we eat beef. And when one sees what Westerners have done to Fiji or to the Philippines one can hardly blame their blood thirstiness.

Brennan-Jobs essay takes us deep into the riddle of flesh eating in delicious prose. Alas, it would be wonderful if she would post more prolifically to her weblog. There are only four or five posts for the last two years.

While I am far from convinced that Steve Jobs and Apple have done any good in the world of technology in the last five years (I share Stallman’s walled garden and privacy concerns), Brennan-Jobs fine writing is enough to take the sheen off my dismay.

Lately, a dear friend of mine has been trying to persuade me that too much tea is unhealthy, especially overly steeped tea. During nearly a decade in Moscow, I became accustomed to good Indian tea Russian style: that is to say, you create a tea concentrate which you drink all day long. Each cup you dilute to taste.

In short, over my life, I’ve drunk a lot of tea, much of it strong and filled with tannins. I’ve also always liked red wine especially cabernets (full of tannins) and natural apple juice (filled with tannin). I think it was my way of my body protecting itself.

My friend has gone so far as to say that tea drunk does not count as liquid, as it is a diuretic and actually dehydrates. To my relief, the British Nutritional Foundation insists tea is not:

"In terms of fluid intake, we recommend 1.5-2 litres per day and that can include tea. Tea is not dehydrating. It is a healthy drink."

Indeed, tea might have played a principal role in keeping me healthy and wealthy. Well at least healthy.

One shouldn’t cite Wikipedia too often in regards to health, but here we go this once on the subject of tannins:

Tannins may be employed medicinally in antidiarrheal, hemostatic, and antihemorrhoidal compounds

The anti-inflammatory effect of tannins help control all indications of gastritis, esophagitis, enteritis, and irritating bowel disorders. Diarrhea is also treated with an effective astringent medicine that does not stop the flow of the disturbing substance in the stomach; rather, it controls the irritation in the small intestine.

Tannins not only heal burns and stop bleeding, but they also stop infection while they continue to heal the wound internally. The ability of tannins to form a protective layer over the exposed tissue keeps the wound from being infected even more….

Tannins can also be effective in protecting the kidneys. Tannins have been used for immediate relief of sore throats, diarrhea, dysentery, hemorrhaging, fatigue, skin ulcers and as a cicatrizant on gangrenous wounds. Tannins can cause regression of tumors that are already present in tissue, but if used exessively over time, they can cause tumors in healthy tissue.

They have also been reported to have anti-viral effects. When incubated with red grape juice and red wines with a high content of condensed tannins, the poliovirus, herpes simplex virus, and various enteric viruses are inactivated.[36]

Tannins can also be used to pull out poisons from poison oak or from bee stings, causing instant relief. The tannins help draw out all irritants from the skin because tannin is an astringent that tightens pores and pulls out liquids.

Tea gets even more credit, with lowering stress levels, reducing cognitive impairment, inflammatory bowel disease, bactrial and fungal infections, anongenital warts, stroke, depression and even bad breath. I want some of that.

Apparently green and white tea have a lot more of the good effects of tea with fewer of the side effects. So I will try to stick to a cup or two of black per day but as many cups of white and green as I please.

What is true is that as tasty as coffee is, it’s more or less an amphetamine, with very few long term beneficial side effects. I will start to avoid coffee again (I’ve only given in to coffee in the last few years as the coffee is so good here in Vienna, but it will be considered an unnecessary and occasional luxury again, while tea will take the place of beverage of honour.)

So I’m going to enjoy not having a heart attack, reduced stress levels and lots of good cups of tea and great glasses of wine. It’s wonderful when it turns out the things you enjoy are things which keep you well.