In the aromatic haze of a Melbourne bar, where the hiss of the espresso machine punctuates the morning rush like a whispered heresy, I sip a cappuccino that tastes of history as much as foam. It's not the over-roasted, milk-drowned sludge peddled by American chains, but a true elixir: bold, unapologetic, with that crema born of a proper Arabica-Robusta blend. This, as the Focal Points essay (linked below) so eloquently laments, is coffee at its pinnacle, a ritual refined by Italians who treat it not as a drug, but as devotion. Yet beneath the crema lies a darker, more revolutionary brew: the story of how this humble bean from Ethiopian highlands didn't just wake the world, but built it. Mark Pendergrast's Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World argues precisely that coffee as the unsung architect of modernity, fuelling enlightenment, empire, and the very rhythm of capitalist dawn. And Michael Pollan, in his provocative Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World, doubles down: caffeine, that "most-used drug in the world," didn't merely perk us up; it rewired society from ale-soaked stupor to caffeinated clarity, birthing the Scientific Revolution and the industrial grind we call progress. If we're not careful, though, this elixir risks becoming our undoing, addictive, exploitative, and now threatened by the very climate it helped accelerate.

Picture the year 850 AD, in the misty highlands of Kaffa, Ethiopia. A goatherd named Kaldi notices his flock frolicking after nibbling crimson cherries from a wild Coffea shrub. What starts as a pastoral curiosity spreads like wildfire through Sufi monasteries, where monks chew the beans to fuel all-night prayers. By the 15th century, it's qahwah — the Arabic for "wine" — roasted, ground, and boiled into the black nectar that sustains Ottoman scholars through Ramadan vigils. Enter Europe: Venetian traders, those mercantile magpies, smuggle it from Istanbul ports in the early 1600s. But suspicion brews; it's branded a "Satanic" brew, fit only for infidels. Enter Pope Clement VIII, who — legend has it — takes a sip and declares, "This devil's drink is so delicious, we should cheat the devil by baptising it." Absolved, coffee floods Christendom. England's inaugural house opens in Oxford, 1650, run by a Jewish émigré named Jacob; London's follows in 1652, helmed by Pasqua Rosée, a Greek servant. Samuel Pepys, ever the diarist, captures the magic on December 10, 1660: "He [Col. Slingsby] and I in the evening to the Coffee House in Cornhill... and I found much pleasure in it, through the diversity of company and discourse." These weren't mere cafes; they were crucibles of ideas, penny universities where a cup bought entry to the republic of letters.

Pendergrast charts how these "penny universities" became the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, hubs where Newton and Halley hashed out comet trajectories, precursors to the Royal Society itself. Why? Science demands sobriety, and coffee delivered. Pre-coffee Europe ran on small beer, weak ale safer than cholera-laced water in a pre-sewage age. But beer blunts the mind; caffeine blocks adenosine, spiking dopamine and norepinephrine for laser focus. Pollan nails it: "Caffeine helps us to cope with the world caffeine helped us to create." Consider Newton in 1665, fleeing the Great Plague to his family farm. No ale-fuelled haze here; isolation and (presumably) smuggled coffee birthed calculus, optics, and gravity's apple. Absent that buzz, might we still believe in phlogiston? Coffee didn't just enlighten; it industrialised. As work shifted from plow to ledger, from brawn to brain, caffeine became the factory floor's lifeblood. Workers swapped beer breaks for coffee jolts, boosting productivity in the mills of Manchester and the counting houses of Amsterdam. Pendergrast details the dark underbelly: coffee as cash crop, sparking Latin American revolutions (Brazil's 1888 abolition tied to coffee wealth) and colonial carve-ups, where enslaved hands harvested beans for European salons. By the 19th century, it's the world's second-most traded commodity after oil, a global vein pumping wealth from Ethiopian slopes to Wall Street.

Fast-forward to our caffeinated now, and the Focal Points piece sings praises of the ritual amid the ruin. Italian mastery, espresso as high art, with macchiato for the bold and corretto (spiked with grappa) for the weary, elevates coffee beyond commodity. Yet modernity mocks it: American "specialty" roasts, all fragile Arabica purity, lack the robusta's bite, yielding flat lattes that drown heritage in oat milk. Pendergrast and Pollan warn of the addiction's toll, two billion cups daily, a habit as insidious as it is indispensable. Health perks abound (lower risks of Parkinson's, diabetes, certain cancers), but excess breeds jitters, insomnia, and equity's erosion: smallholders in Vietnam or Colombia squeezed by Nestlé's behemoths.

So, raise your mug to coffee's strange alchemy: from goatherd's prank to global engine. It didn't create the modern world alone, but without its kick, we'd still be nursing ales in the dark. As Pendergrast quips, its fomented revolutions, felled forests, and addicted millions, yet in that black mirror, we glimpse our own restless genius. Brew wisely, friends: seek the true stuff, honour its growers, and remember, every sip is a nod to the bean that woke us all.

https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/in-praise-of-truly-good-coffee

The Bitter Pill: When "Safe and Effective" Became a Lethal Lie By Brian Simpson

November 30, 2025 — another gray dawn in the post-pandemic hangover, where the air still carries the faint, acrid whiff of institutional betrayal. A memo from the FDA's vaccine chief lands like a chin punch: at least 10 American children, aged 7 to 16, died "after and because of" mRNA COVID-19 shots. Not maybe, not possibly, because of. Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency's unflinching new guardian of biologics, didn't mince words in his six-page missive to staffers. Reviewing 96 reported paediatric deaths from 2021 to 2024, his team's conservative analysis pinned 10 directly on the vaccines, likely tied to myocarditis, the heart-scorching inflammation that struck young, healthy boys hardest. And that's the floor, not the ceiling: voluntary reporting to VAERS is a leaky sieve, riddled with underreporting and bias toward exculpation. The real toll? "Certainly an underestimate," Prasad wrote, echoing the grim maths that's haunted sceptics since the jabs rolled out.

This isn't some fringe fever dream; it's the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, once the unassailable oracle of public health, admitting, in black and white, that the emperor's new clothes were a shroud. For four years, we've been force-fed the mantra: "Safe and effective." Safe for whom? Effective against what? The proof of failure stares back from those 10 graves, a stark indictment of a system that prioritised speed and submission over scrutiny. These weren't high-risk grannies in nursing homes, gasping for ventilators; these were kids, vibrant, low-risk souls whose greatest threat from COVID was a sniffle, not a sarcophagus. Coerced by Biden-era school and work mandates, they lined up for Pfizer or Moderna, only to collapse from hearts turned traitor. Prasad doesn't sugarcoat it: "Healthy young children who faced tremendously low risk of death were coerced... to receive a vaccine that could result in death." The logical rupture here is seismic: if "safe" means trading a 0.0001% viral fatality rate for a myocarditis risk of 1 in 37,000 doses in teen boys, per the FDA's own inserts, then the word has lost all meaning.

Let's dissect the deception, because history demands it. Back in 2021, as Operation Warp Speed's vials shipped nationwide, the signals were flashing red. Israel spotted the myocarditis spike first, young men dropping like flies post-jab, yet CDC Director Rochelle Walensky gaslit the public: "We have not seen a signal" after 200 million doses. Dishonest? Manipulative? Prasad calls it exactly that, and he's got the receipts: peer-reviewed papers from himself, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, and advisor Tracy Beth Hoeg showing boosters were net harm for young men, mandates a moral abomination. The agency didn't just drag its feet; it sprinted backward, delaying warnings until after greenlighting shots for 12-15-year-olds. Why? To keep the mandate machine humming, that's why, colleges, schools, jobs dangling compliance like a noose. Simone Scott, the Northwestern freshman who perished from Moderna-induced heart failure, wasn't an outlier; she was a canary, her story buried under the avalanche of "mostly mild" side-effect spin. And the data? Randomised trials in kids were "deeply limited and broadly negative," per Prasad, no slam-dunk proof the jabs slashed severe outcomes, just antibody proxies that fooled no one with a pulse.

The "safe" facade crumbles further when you zoom out. CDC tallies over 1,000 kid COVID deaths from 2020-2023, a tragedy, but vaccines? We lack the hard numbers on lives saved in healthy youth, because no one demanded the trials to prove it. Prasad's gut-wrench: "We do not know if we saved lives on balance... [we] may have harmed more children than we saved." That's not caution; that's confession. Critics like Dr. Paul Offit decry the lack of shared data, calling it a "profound revelation" without the footnotes. Fair enough, transparency's been the casualty since Day One. But the memo's ideological fire? "Coercive mandates," "dishonest" delays, it's the reckoning long overdue, courtesy of a Trump-appointed duo (Makary and Prasad) unafraid to wield the scalpel on sacred cows. X erupts with the raw fury: "Nuremberg 2.0," one user thunders, pegging a 10% child death attribution rate from the sample as "crimes against humanity." Hyperbole? Perhaps. But when Pfizer's own 2023 presser admitted "increased risks" for adolescent myocarditis, yet mandates rolled on, it's not hard to see why trust is in triage.

Prasad's not stopping at mea culpa; he's rewriting the rulebook. No more surrogate endpoints, antibodies won't cut it. New vaccines must prove they slash actual disease and death, not just lab tricks. Flu shots? That "evidence-based catastrophe" gets a gut-check: revise the framework, or watch it wither. Pregnant women? No more rubber-stamps without RCTs. Multiple jabs at once? Time to study if the cocktail's toxic. And leakers? Resign, or zip it, the memo's a velvet-gloved ultimatum to a bureaucracy bloated with yes-men. Public health poobahs howl: "Dangerous and irresponsible," per the Guardian, a "chilling effect" on innovation. Spare me. This isn't Luddism; it's leveling up to evidence-based medicine, treating vaccines like any drug, worthy of glory when they deliver, but not divine right. The old guard's panic reeks of protecting the guild, not the public.

So where does this leave us, four years after the great needle rush? Grieving, yes, for those 10 kids, and the untold more veiled in VAERS shadows. Wary, absolutely, of a system that sanctified "safe" while stacking kid-sized coffins. But hopeful, too: Prasad's purge signals a pivot from propaganda to prudence. The mantra's dead; long live rigorous reality. Demand the data, autopsy the failures, and vaccinate wisely, not blindly. Because if "safe and effective" was the lie that lured us here, truth is the only antidote. And today, for the first time, it's seeping through the cracks.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/breakingurgent-mrna-covid-vaccines