Maria_van_Reigersberch.jpg
Loevestein Castle. March 22, 1621. A wooden chest came down out of the fortress, and it appeared to contain nothing more than scholarly books and laundry.
Hugo Grotius was inside it.
He had sided with the Remonstrants against the orthodox Calvinists. The state answered with the fortress of Loevestein and a sentence with no end in it.
For two years his wife Maria van Reigersberch had been bringing him books and taking away his laundry in a large chest. Books in, laundry out. Week after week. The guards, grown accustomed to the routine, rarely inspected it thoroughly.
But Maria had counted on exactly that. On March 22 the chest came out as it always did, and this time it did not hold what it appeared to hold.
Grotius lay hidden inside, barely able to breathe. He fled immediately to Paris.
In exile he wrote. In 1625 he published ‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis’. On the Law of War and Peace. He drew on Roman law, Christian theology, and natural philosophy.
His argument was that certain laws transcended national boundaries and religious differences. That nations were bound by universal principles of justice, even in warfare.
That the seas belonged to no single nation.
That prisoners of war deserved humane treatment. That even enemies retained certain inviolable rights.
He built the concept of natural law into the intellectual foundation for what would eventually become international law. His ideas would influence the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Geneva Conventions, and ultimately the establishment of international courts. From the Hague to the United Nations, his fingerprints remain on every major international legal institution.
The guards checked the laundry. They never checked the lawyer.
A chest of books left the castle. A body of law came out of it.
Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica / Peace Palace Library, The Hague
David Franklin and Parke Davis
David Franklin had spent months watching his company sell a drug to patients it was never approved to treat. He had the files. He had the proof. Now he had a decision to make.
The drug was Neurontin, a brand name for gabapentin. The FDA had approved it in 1993 for one narrow purpose: controlling seizures in epilepsy patients.
That was not how Parke-Davis was selling it.
Franklin worked as a medical liaison, a scientist paid to brief doctors on the evidence behind the company’s products. Beginning in 1996, he watched colleagues and supervisors instruct sales representatives to pitch Neurontin for conditions it had never been proven to treat: chronic pain, migraines, bipolar disorder, attention disorders, and more.
This was off-label promotion. It was illegal. And it was happening systematically.
Worse, Franklin discovered the company had buried the results of clinical trials that had failed to show Neurontin worked for these conditions. Doctors making prescribing decisions were not seeing the full picture. Patients were taking a drug based on hidden science.
In 1996, Franklin filed suit under the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law that allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf when federal funds are defrauded. Medicaid and other federal programs were reimbursing millions of prescriptions written on the basis of the company’s misleading claims.
The legal battle ran for eight years.
Parke-Davis was acquired by Warner-Lambert. Warner-Lambert was acquired by Pfizer in 2000, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The lawsuit followed the merger through every corporate transformation.
On May 13, 2004, Pfizer agreed to a settlement of $430 million. It included a $240 million criminal fine, the largest ever levied against a pharmaceutical company at that time for off-label marketing. Warner-Lambert entered a guilty plea.
Franklin received a portion of the civil recovery as the original whistleblower.
Neurontin remained on the market. Gabapentin is still widely prescribed. The case did not end off-label promotion in the pharmaceutical industry. But it established a legal template: individual scientists with evidence could file, survive, and win against companies many times their size.
A microbiologist. A courthouse. Eight years of waiting.
Sometimes one person with a file cabinet and a lawyer is enough.
A Healthier Ice Cream
1. Whisk 300 ml (double) cream
2. Add and whisk 2 egg yolks
3. Add vanilla and a pinch of salt
4. Add honey or other natural sweetener
Freeze and stir every hour for two or 3 hours.
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOI8wh8qxYs
The calories on your food label aren’t the whole story
Hi Tom,
When you read the calorie count on a food label, do you assume that’s exactly what your body takes in?
I did, for years.
A new study suggests that isn’t quite true.
Researchers at Arizona State University have built a mathematical model, called DAMM, that follows food all the way through the highways and byways of your digestive tract. It estimates how much energy your body absorbs early on. And how much your gut bacteria add from whatever is left over.
That second part never makes it onto the label.
The calorie numbers on packaging come from a system more than 100 years old. Each gram of fat, carbohydrate, and protein gets an average calorie value, and the total is added up. It’s simple, and it’s useful. But it doesn’t ask what happens to the food that reaches your colon, or what your gut bacteria do with it.
And they do quite a lot.
Fiber and resistant starch that your own digestion can’t break down get fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids. Some of those are absorbed into your bloodstream and used as energy.
According to the model, that adds up to about 140 calories a day. Roughly 7% of the usable energy in the diet came from what your gut bacteria made out of the food you couldn’t digest yourself.
When the researchers tested the model against real measurements from a controlled feeding study, it came closer than the traditional calorie method.
This is the part I found most interesting.
In that earlier study, healthy adults ate either a high-fiber, less processed diet or a typical Western-style diet. The people on the Western diet absorbed about 116 more calories a day.
And the people eating all that extra fiber didn’t report feeling any hungrier.
Which seems backwards at first.
The high-fiber diet gave their gut bacteria far more to work with, and they made more short-chain fatty acids. Yet overall, those people absorbed fewer calories. The upper gut took in less, and the microbes didn’t fully make up the difference.
A few caveats are worth knowing. DAMM is a research model, not a diet plan. It was tested against one small study of 17 healthy adults, and the authors say it needs testing in more people, including those with metabolic conditions, before anyone uses it to tailor diets. And, I will add, 116 calories a day isn’t a weight-loss strategy I know!
But what it does show is something I keep coming back to: Your food provides the raw materials. Your gut bacteria decide what happens next.
Which means fiber-rich, less processed foods aren’t just “good for you” in some vague way. They’re feeding a community of microbes that is doing real work on your behalf.
So, the next time you glance at a calorie label, remember it’s only half the story. The other half is happening in your gut.
Yours for better health, naturally,
Sarah Otto
Nutritionist (Master of Human Nutrition)
Goodness Lover Co-Founder
Scientific Reference:
Davis, T.L. et al. “Modeling the microbial contribution to human energy balance using the Digestion, Absorption, and Microbial Metabolism (DAMM) model.” PLOS ONE, May 2026. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0347668
Tomato Growth Elixir
Ingredients
1 gallon chemical free water
2 tablespoons molasses
1 tablespoon active dry yeast
1 cup of buttermilk
1 tablespoon baking soda
Optional
1 teaspoon wood ash
or
1 teaspoon Epsom Salts
Mixing Method
To one cup of 33 degree C water and 2 tablespoons molasses
Sprinkle tablespoon of yeast to top of molasses and water (do not stir)
Wait overnight till yeast activates
Add remainder of water
Add buttermilk
Add baking soda
Application Method
Lightly water soil first
Do not apply mix to leaves or stem of plant, leave some space between stem and where you add the mix.
Best to apply first thing in morning.
For plants that are in ground and growing, apply a cup per plant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB43hTIjHpM
Some other options:
Fermented Rice Water
Take the water in which you have rinsed the rice prior to cooking.
Pour into a jar.
Cover and leave for a few days. Should smell sour.
Mix one part ferment to 10 parts water.
Apply to root soil.
Nitrogen Mineralisation via Soaked Vegetable Scraps
Soak vegetable scraps in water for two weeks.
Dilute one part scrap water to 30 parts water.
Apply diluted mix to soil, not leaves.
General Purpose Nutrient Mix
Banana peels (potassium)
Crushed Egg Shells (calcium)
Used Coffee Grounds
1 tablespoon of Epsom Salts (magnesium)
Lawrence Anthony
There was no signal. No command. No human explanation for what happened next.
Two days after Lawrence Anthony died suddenly from a heart attack in 2012, twenty-one elephants left the wild landscape of Thula Thula Game Reserve and began a journey toward the home of the man who had once refused to give up on them.
They walked for twelve hours.
The elephants were not wandering. They were not searching for food. They moved together with a quiet purpose, crossing the same land where Lawrence had spent years earning something far more valuable than obedience.
Trust.
Thirteen years earlier, these elephants had not been considered worth saving.
In 1999, a traumatized herd labeled as “problem elephants” was facing destruction after repeated escapes from other reserves. Most people saw danger. Lawrence Anthony saw fear.
He opened the gates of Thula Thula and gave them a place to survive.
The hardest part was not building a sanctuary.
It was convincing the elephants they were finally safe.
The herd’s matriarch Nana tested him immediately. She charged fences. She pushed against boundaries. She had every reason to believe humans could not be trusted.
Lawrence never answered fear with force.
He stayed.
Morning after morning. Day after day.
He showed them through patience that he was not another threat entering their world. Slowly, the elephants changed. The fences stopped being broken. The anger faded. A relationship formed between a conservationist and animals who had every reason to keep their distance.
For thirteen years, Lawrence lived alongside them.
He learned their personalities. Protected them from danger. Wrote about their intelligence, memory, and the deep social bonds that hold elephant families together.
Then he was gone.
And somehow, the elephants noticed.
When they reached his home, they stood quietly near the property for two days. No destruction. No panic. Just a silent gathering beside the place where Lawrence had lived.
Scientists are careful not to say elephants understand death exactly as humans do. But they do know elephants recognize individuals, remember important experiences, and return to places connected with powerful moments.
The next year, on the anniversary of Lawrence’s death, Nana led the herd back again.
And the year after that, they returned once more.
Lawrence Anthony never believed saving animals was about controlling them. He believed it was about listening long enough to understand them.
In the end, the elephants answered him in the only language they knew.
They did not send a message.
They did not make a sound humans could interpret.
They simply showed up.
And sometimes, the strongest proof that someone mattered is not found in words.
It is found in who still remembers the way home.
What Medical Ethics?
These are the ethics of the people developing medications, including vaccines.
Think carefully, would you trust the outcome of anything these people produced while committing crimes against humanity?
When RFK Jr was discussing the countless people killed due to pharmaceutical company criminal behavious or the billions they have paid in fines for various offences he found it incredible that people think those companies had suddenly “found Jesus” when it came to vaccines.
Defacto acceptance of medical advancements drawn from immoral work happened due to lack of publicity. Feel free to share and shine the light on their unethical behaviour.
Click to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/19bKxieDk5/
Quote of the Day
“If life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten! And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing…”
Monty Python – “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”
Fruit and sugary drinks stood out in a three-year study of teenage mental health
Could the foods teenagers eat and the drinks they choose offer clues to their mental health? Researchers followed thousands of Australian students over three years to investigate the connection.1
In a recent study published in the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health, researchers investigated whether greater fruit and vegetable intake and lower sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption were linked to common mental disorder (CMD) risk among adolescents in Australia. While greater fruit intake was linked to lower risks of meeting screening thresholds for depression and anxiety, higher SSB intake was associated with greater risk, with a numerically stronger association for anxiety among males. Fruit intake had an inverse relationship with both outcomes, with depression risk 13% lower and anxiety risk 7% lower for each additional daily serving. Based on the findings, everyday dietary choices may be relevant to adolescent mental health and inform early prevention strategies.