The deadly, fraudulent, heparin sold by a Chinese manufacturer to Baxter shares much with the deadly, fraudulent, wheat gluten and gluttonous, fraudulent, financial crisis.

These frauds are not accidents, slips of care, but rather deliberate attempts to game tests of quality, to turn garbage into gold.

The toxic wheat gluten was doped with melamine, in a brilliant gambit to fix the protein content tests and make filler look like high quality protein. Overcompensated financial wizards, thanks to deregulation, managed to sell aggregates of dubious mortgages as high quality investments, cleverly bypassing all of the financial tests.

In the case of the fake Heparin, the actual drug was replaced with cheaper Chondroitin sulfate, aggressively modified chemically to fake quality control tests. At least nineteen people have died from this clever gambit, thousands made ill.

Such trickery requires canny chemistry or shrewed accounting–deft minds deriving novel solutions to their problems, rather than the actual, deeper and more pervasive problems leading to shortages of protein, of drug or worthy investments.

In a world that can sustain, at most, about two billion people in the voracious Western lifestyle–in a world of nearly eight billion, all of whom promised the Western middle class lifestyle–a thin veneer of success, of false protein and medicine, of false wealth and material growth, must obligately coat a massive, deep and dark well of exaggerations, lies and despairing intelligence.