Johnson & Johnson Vaccines
The Barbarians Are Not At The Gates
Vaccine Racketeering Charge
Bob Dylan Rescuing Child
Bob Dylan saved a drowning child in 1973.
Summer 1973. Bob Dylan was drowning, not in water, in fame. He was 32 years old and suffocating under the weight of being Bob Dylan, the voice of a generation, the prophet, the poet, the man who supposedly had all the answers. Except Dylan didn't have answers. He had exhaustion. The last three years had been brutal.
constant touring, endless interviews, fans who wanted pieces of him he didn't have left to give. He'd wake up in hotel rooms and forget which city he was in, which state, sometimes which country. His marriage was strained. His children barely knew him. His music felt like obligation instead of joy. And everywhere he went, people wanted something from him.
Bob, what do you think about the war? Bob, will you play at our benefit? Bob, can you sign this? Take this photo. Answer this question. He was becoming a symbol instead of a person. And symbols don't get to be tired. Don't get to be uncertain. Don't get to just stop. But Dylan needed to stop. So in July 1973, he did something he'd never done before.
He disappeared without telling anyone where he was going. No manager, no assistant, no plan. Just Bob, Dylan, and a need to remember what silence felt like. Dylan drove north for 6 hours. No destination, just north, away from New York, away from expectations. He found a small lake in upstate New York.
One of those forgotten places that tourists didn't know existed, where locals kept to themselves and didn't ask questions. There was a cabin for rent, small, wooden, right on the water. The old woman who owned it didn't recognize him. Or maybe she did and didn't care. “$100 for the week”, she said. “No phone, no visitors, no noise.”
“Perfect.” Dylan said. The cabin had one room, a bed, a stove, a table, nothing else. Dylan brought his guitar, some notebooks, clothes. He didn't bring his fame. Didn't bring his obligations. Didn't bring the weight of being Bob Dylan. For the first time in years, he was just a man in a cabin by a lake. The first two days, Dylan slept 14 hours at a time, his body finally releasing years of accumulated exhaustion.
On the third day, he sat on the small dock behind the cabin, feet in the water, guitar in his lap. He didn't play songs, didn't write lyrics, just strummed, felt the wood under his fingers, listened to the water. For the first time in forever, Dylan felt like maybe he could breathe again.
Day six at the cabin. July 28th, 1973. Dylan was sitting on the dock. Afternoon sun warm on his shoulders. The lake was quiet, peaceful. He'd started writing that morning. Not songs, just thoughts, fragments, trying to remember who he was underneath all the noise. Then he heard it, a scream, high-pitched, terrified.
cut through the silence like glass breaking. Dylan's head snapped up. His entire body went alert. The scream came again from somewhere across the lake, maybe 200 yards away. “Help! Somebody help!” A woman's voice, frantic, desperate. Dylan stood, scanned the water. There on the opposite shore, a woman standing at the edge of a dock, waving her arms, screaming.
And in the water, about 20 ft from the dock, a small figure thrashing, going under, a child drowning. Dylan didn't think, didn't calculate, didn't hesitate. He dove into the lake. The water was cold, shockingly cold, despite the summer heat. Dylan started swimming hard, fast. But here's what nobody knew about Bob Dylan.
What he'd never told anyone because it seemed trivial compared to everything else about him. Bob Dylan couldn't swim very well. He'd grown up in Minnesota, land of lakes, but he'd never learn properly, could keep himself afloat, could paddle around, but he wasn't a strong swimmer. And 200 yards across a lake with a current to save a drowning child.
That was beyond his ability. But Dylan didn't stop, didn't turn back. Because that scream, that child going under, that was more important than his limitations. Dylan swam harder than he'd ever swam in his life. His arms burned. His lungs screamed. The distance seemed impossible. The child went under again, stayed under. Dylan pushed harder.
His technique was terrible, splashing, inefficient, wasting energy. But he kept going. Halfway across, Dylan's legs started cramping. His breathing became ragged. He looked up. The child surfaced briefly, coughed, went back under. Dylan couldn't hear the screaming anymore, just his own heartbeat, his own gasping breath.
He thought about turning back, about shouting for someone else, someone stronger. But there was no one else. Just him. Just this moment. Just a child drowning while the world watched. Dylan kept swimming. His vision started blurring. His arms felt like concrete. 3/4 of the way across, Dylan realized something terrifying.
He might not make it. Not to the child. Not back to shore. Not at all. He might drown trying to save someone he didn't even know. And for a brief second, Dylan thought about his own children, about dying in a lake in upstate New York, about them hearing he'd drown trying to be a hero. But then he saw the child's hand breaking the surface, grasping at nothing.
And Dylan swam harder. Dylan reached the spot where the child had gone under. He took a breath. Dove. The water was murky, green. He could barely see. Dylan opened his eyes underwater despite the burn, searched desperately. There, a small body sinking, arms limp, drifting toward the bottom. Dylan dove deeper, his lungs already screaming from the swim across.
He grabbed the child's arm, pulled. The child was heavier than Dylan expected. Dead weight, unconscious or worse. Dylan's lungs were on fire. He kicked toward the surface, but he was exhausted. The child's weight dragged them both down. Dylan kicked harder. His vision started spotting. Black edges creeping in.
They weren't moving up fast enough. Dylan thought, “This is how I die. Saving a stranger's child in a forgotten lake.” Then something inside him refused. Refused to let this child die. Refused to let this be the end. Dylan found strength he didn't know he had. Kicked with everything left. They broke the surface. Dylan gasped, coughed, pulled the child's head above water. The child wasn't breathing.
Dylan's mind raced. CPR. He knew CPR, but not in the water. Not like this. He started swimming back. One arm holding the child. One arm pulling water. It was impossible. the distance, the exhaustion, the weight. But Dylan swam anyway. Somehow, impossibly, he swam. Dylan didn't remember most of the swim back.
Later, he'd have fragments, the child's wet hair against his shoulder, the burning in his muscles, the certainty that he wouldn't make it, but somehow he did. Dylan's feet touched bottom. He stumbled forward, fell, got up, carried the child onto the shore. The mother was there screaming, crying. My baby. Oh god, my baby. Dylan laid the child on the dock.
A girl maybe 7 years old. Lips blew, not breathing. Dylan's hands were shaking, but he started CPR. Chest compressions. Counting. Breathing into her small mouth. Nothing. Again. Compressions. Breath. Still nothing. The mother was sobbing. “Please, please, please,” Dylan pressed again, harder. The child's body convulsed. Water erupted from her mouth.
She coughed, gasped, started breathing, her eyes opened, confused, terrified. “Mama!” The mother grabbed her daughter, held her, sobbed into her hair. Dylan sat back, his entire body shaking, adrenaline crashing. He'd done it somehow against every limitation. He'd done it. A man appeared. The father running from a car. “What happened? I was gone for 10 minutes.”
The mother looked up, tears streaming. This man, he saved her. He jumped in. He saved Emily.” The father turned to Dylan, face white with shock and gratitude. “I don't know how to thank you. You saved my daughter's life.” Dylan stood, swayed slightly, still catching his breath. “Is she okay? Does she need a hospital?” “Yes, hospital right now.”
They started moving, wrapping the child in towels, loading her into the car. The mother turned back to Dylan. “Please, what's your name? How can we find you? We want to thank you properly.” Dylan hesitated. This moment, this is where he could tell them, could reveal who he was. But he looked at the child. Emily breathing alive, looking at him with wide eyes. And Dylan realized something.
For the first time in years, he'd done something that had nothing to do with being Bob Dylan the musician. He'd just been a man who saw someone drowning and refused to let them die. That mattered more than fame, more than recognition. “It's okay,” Dylan said quietly. “Just take care of her.” “But really, it's okay.”
Dylan walked away before they could ask again. Back to his cabin, back to anonymity. He stood in the shower for an hour, letting the warm water wash away the lake. The fear, the exhaustion. He didn't tell anyone what happened. Not his manager, not his wife, not anyone. It was just a moment, just a life, just something that mattered in a way music never quite could.
Two days later, Dylan packed up, went back to New York, back to being Bob Dylan. But something had changed, something he couldn't name yet. He'd learned what it felt like to save someone. And 20 years later, he'd learned what it felt like to be saved back. Emily Carter survived. No brain damage, no permanent injury, just a 7-year-old girl who'd almost died and didn't.
Her parents never found out who saved her. The man had disappeared before they could get his name, before they could take a photo or get contact information. Just a stranger with curly wet hair and exhausted eyes who jumped into a lake and pulled their daughter back from death. For years, Emily's father tried to find him, asked around the lake, checked with the cabin owners.
No one knew anything. The man had paid cash, used a fake name, vanished. He was an angel, Emily's mother would say. God sent us an angel. But Emily didn't think he was an angel. She remembered his face, the way he'd looked at her before walking away. He wasn't otherworldly, wasn't perfect.
Twenty years after that unforgettable day, the little girl Bob Dylan saved finally found him — and the words she spoke made the legendary singer break down in tears.
s.
Quote of the Day
“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
Simone de Beauvoir – Writer, Philosopher (1908 to 1986)
A Better Framework To Build On
“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better!”
I Tried Every Longevity Supplement So You Don’t Have To – Zac Armstrong
Zac’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N4kDHhqG0I
In it he makes the point that unless a supplement “moved the marker” that it was supposed to affect it was not worth spending money on it.
He had blood tests done over the course of a year and had them interpreted by a doctor to determine if the supplements he was taking affected the tested markers.
Trouble is, there might be less than 20 vitamins and less than 100 minerals but there are over 40,000 phytonutrients, only 10,000 of whiuch have been identified. And we have identified many health benefits that acrue from those phytonutrients. They were not on Zac’s list of markers to test.
And we still have no widely use test for mitochondrial function. (Mitochondria are the engines in our cells that produce energy. One of the problems people are suffering from post-Covid gene therapy shots is low energy.)
All in all Zac’s video may or may not have some data valid to his circumstances but it leaves a lot of data out of the equation.
I was reminded of this most stronly two hours after watching his video when I read this:
“Overall, most of these organizations recommend a minimum of 250–500 mg combined EPA and DHA each day for healthy adults. This can be obtained from about 8 ounces of fatty fish per week.
One study followed 11,000 people who took an 850-mg dose of combined EPA and DHA every day for 3.5 years. They experienced a 25% reduction in heart attacks and a 45% reduction in sudden death .”(https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-much-omega-3).
Heart attacks are a downstream effect (one of a great many) not catered for in Zac’s simplistic assessment of supplements.
Quote of the Day
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”
Socrates – Philosopher (469 – 399 BC)
Peg Bracken – I Hate To Cook Book
Ruth Eleanor Bracken was born on February 25, 1918, in Filer, Idaho — a small agricultural town that she left as a child when the family moved to Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. She was bright, dry, and not particularly interested in being decorative. She graduated from Antioch College in Ohio in 1940 with a degree in English, changed her name to Peg because it suited her better than Ruth, and went looking for work.
She found it in advertising. Portland, Oregon, where she eventually settled, had agencies that needed copywriters, and copywriting rewarded exactly the skills she had: economy of language, speed of wit, the ability to make a reader feel something in the space of a sentence. She wrote fashion copy for accounts including Jantzen swimwear and Pendleton shirts. She sat across the office from a man named Homer Groening, whose son Matt would later create The Simpsons, which tells you something about the particular quality of imagination that that Portland advertising world contained. She and Groening also produced a comic strip together called Phoebe, Get Your Man, which did not outlast the decade but proved she could sustain a narrative voice across multiple installments.
She also wrote freelance pieces for magazines — light verse, humor columns, the occasional essay. One piece for the Saturday Evening Post, titled “My Husband Ought to Fire Me,” laid out in comic detail the argument that women homemakers were essentially employed in a job for which they’d never been hired, trained, or compensated, and at which many of them performed — at best — adequately. It was funny. It was also, under the comedy, a precise description of what the domestic ideal of postwar America actually required of women and what it gave them in return.
The book came from lunch.
Bracken and a group of working women friends she called “the Hags” had fallen into the habit of meeting regularly and talking about, among other things, the specific boredom of cooking. Not the act of eating — that was fine. The obligation to produce meals three times a day, seven days a week, indefinitely, for households that expected them and rarely acknowledged them. The friends traded what Bracken called “shabby little secrets”: recipes built on canned soup and frozen vegetables and boxed mixes, shortcuts that got the family fed with the minimum expenditure of time and energy, leaving more of both for the things they actually wanted to do.
She wrote it up. Her then-husband read the manuscript and told her it stank. Six male editors at publishing houses concurred, insisting that women regarded cooking as something close to sacred and would not respond well to seeing it treated as a tedious obligation to be dispatched as efficiently as possible. The sixth rejection delivered the insight she needed: she brought the manuscript to a female editor at Harcourt Brace. The editor read it and understood immediately what the men had missed. This was not a book that insulted cooking. It was a book that told the truth about how a significant number of women experienced it — and offered them, for the first time, permission to feel that way without shame.
The I Hate to Cook Book was published in 1960 and sold approximately three million copies. It did this by being, page for page, more honest about the domestic experience of American women than almost anything else being published at the time. The recipes were real — genuinely usable, built around canned cream of mushroom soup and frozen peas and cooking wine added to the cook rather than the dish — but the voice was the point. Instructions told readers to let a dish simmer “while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.” Another recipe opened with a suggestion that the cook take a small measure of whiskey before proceeding. The chapter introductions made the running argument that getting from cooking hour to cocktail hour was a legitimate life goal, and that anyone who disagreed was welcome to invite her over for dinner.
The New York Times, in its obituary, would eventually describe the book as having offered women “at least a taste of liberation — from the oven, the broiler and the stove” — three years before Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and named the problem that Bracken had already been describing, funnier and more precisely, in a cookbook.
That comparison is worth sitting with. Friedan wrote sociology. Bracken wrote recipes. Friedan analyzed the structure that trapped women in the domestic role. Bracken handed women the tools to perform that role in twenty minutes and get out of the kitchen. They were working on the same problem from different directions, and Bracken’s version sold at least as many copies.
She became a spokesperson for Birds Eye frozen foods, which was either deeply ironic or entirely appropriate depending on how you read the endorsement. She appeared on television and radio. She followed the original with The I Hate to Housekeep Book, an etiquette guide, an appendix, a sequel. She continued writing into her seventies, her last book appearing in 1997. She died on October 20, 2007, in Portland, at the age of eighty-nine.
She is survived by her daughter Johanna, who wrote the foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book. In it, Johanna described the book’s origins as “a group of professional women who would have been much happier sipping martinis with their husbands than spending the cocktail hour in the kitchen slaving away over a hot stove.”
Her mother would have approved of the summary. It was precise, it was dry, and it contained exactly as many words as the situation required.