Author: TomsWrite

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US Consumer Sentiment and Shares vs Gold

The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is one of the clearest windows into how the average American actually feels about the economy.

Each month, the university surveys households across the country, asking straightforward questions about personal finances, job prospects, inflation, and expectations for the future. Those responses are distilled into a single number that captures the public’s economic mood. Because it has been tracked for decades, the index offers a long-running reality check on confidence at the household level.

Today, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is sitting near record lows — decisively below levels seen during the 2008 financial crisis, the dot-com bust, and even the deep recessions of the early 1990s and 1980s.

How can stock market valuations be at or near historical highs while the average American is about as pessimistic as they’ve ever been?

This contradiction is a perfect illustration of the financial fun house — and the extreme distortions that relentless money printing has pumped into the system.

If fiat currency is a dishonest measuring stick — and it is — then how do we accurately measure the stock market?

The best option is to measure value in gold, honest money that no politician can arbitrarily debase.

If measuring in fiat is like looking into a fun house mirror, then gold is a mirror of truth. And when we measure the stock market in gold, that truth becomes clear. Below is a chart of the S&P 500 measured in gold going back to 1950.

Shares Priced In Gold

Viewed through the lens of gold, the stock market tells a very different story than it does in fiat terms — and this chart makes that unmistakably clear.

The most striking feature of the chart is what isn’t there: a sustained upward trend. The S&P 500 today is worth the same amount of gold it was in 1995.

Despite decades of nominal gains, the stock market has repeatedly given back those gains when measured against gold. In other words, the rising stock market was more a reflection of currency debasement than of real wealth creation.

This helps explain the disconnect at the heart of today’s market. In fiat terms, stock prices appear to be at record highs. But in gold terms — a unit that cannot be printed — the market looks far less extraordinary.

Measured in gold, US stocks peaked in 1999, when the S&P 500 was worth just over 164 grams of gold. Today, the index is worth 43 grams — a decline of more than 73% from its 1999 peak.

More recently, the S&P 500 peaked at about 82 grams of gold in late 2021. Today, it’s worth roughly 43 grams. In other words, despite the recent melt-up and the stock market ripping to new nominal all-time highs, when measured in gold, the S&P 500 is down more than 47% since late 2021 and sitting at roughly the same level it was in 1995.

In other words, when we look at the stock market through a mirror of truth rather than a fun house mirror, it becomes clear that it is in a deep bear market. It’s no wonder consumer sentiment is near an all-time low.

Despite the nominal melt-up in stocks, most Americans are becoming poorer when measured in real, honest money — not fake government confetti.

I expect this dynamic — a nominal stock market melt-up alongside Americans becoming poorer — to accelerate in 2026. I expect the stock market to go higher and valuations to become even more insane — but I expect gold to rise even faster.

Currency debasement is driving this trend, and unfortunately, all signs point to much more of it in 2026.

This is exactly why positioning matters far more than headlines in the years ahead. If stocks continue rising only because the dollar is being sacrificed, then real gains will increasingly come from assets that benefit from that debasement rather than from it being disguised.

Gold has already been signaling this shift — and within the gold space, select opportunities stand to outperform dramatically as this trend accelerates into 2026.

Source: https://internationalman.com/articles/the-melt-up-trap-why-stocks-must-rise-until-the-dollar-breaks/

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Ellen McKenzie

Ellen McKenzie

Four armed men came to take her home while her husband was gone. She gave them one warning, then reached for the rifle.

Montana Territory, October 1889.

The sound of approaching horses made Ellen McKenzie’s hands pause mid-stir over the stew pot. Her husband, James, had left two days earlier, driving their small herd to market. Their nearest neighbor lived four miles away through dense pine forest. And she was alone with their eight-month-old daughter, sleeping peacefully in a wooden cradle beside the stone fireplace.

Through the cabin’s single window, Ellen watched four riders emerge from the tree line.

No territorial badges. No official authority. Just the kind of men who knew exactly when homestead husbands left their claims unguarded.

Land grabbers.

They moved through the territory with ruthless efficiency—filing fraudulent claims while owners were away, counting on isolated wives to flee rather than fight. Most families couldn’t afford lawyers. The nearest marshal was three days’ ride. By the time disputes reached court, the land was usually sold and the men long gone.

They’d made a calculation about Ellen McKenzie.

They were wrong.

She lifted her daughter from the cradle, breathing in the soft scent of her hair, feeling the tiny heartbeat against her chest. Then she carried her down to the root cellar, wrapped her in quilts, and laid her gently on grain sacks among the potatoes and preserves.

“ Mama’s right upstairs, sweetheart,” she whispered. “I won’t let them take what’s ours.”

She bolted the cellar door from above.

Then she reached for her husband’s Winchester rifle and checked the chamber.

Six rounds loaded. A full box of ammunition on the shelf.

Her father had fought at Antietam as a Union sharpshooter. When she was seven, he’d handed her a rifle and said, “The frontier doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It asks if you can shoot straight when it matters.”

She could.

The first knock came—almost polite.

“Ma’am, we’re from the Territorial Land Office. There’s been a filing error on your claim—”

Ellen’s voice carried through the thick log door, steady as iron.

“The only error is you thinking I’ll open this door.”

Low laughter followed. The sound of men who had done this many times and never been challenged.

“Now, Mrs. McKenzie, there’s no need for trouble—”

The Winchester cracked once.

The bullet tore into the doorframe six inches from the speaker’s head, close enough for him to feel the air rush past.

The laughter stopped.

“That was your warning,” Ellen called. “Next man who steps on my property gets the bullet. And I don’t miss when I’m aiming to hit.”

For five hours, Ellen McKenzie held the cabin alone.

Every shadow crossing a window, the rifle tracked it.

Every boot on the porch, she drove them back.

Every attempt to circle behind the house, she was already there, having memorized every sightline around her home.

They tried bargaining. Threats. Waiting her out.

Nothing worked.

When her baby’s cries rose through the floorboards, Ellen knelt and whispered through the cracks in the planks:

“I hear you, my love. I know you’re scared. But we’re McKenzies. We don’t abandon what’s ours.”

The crying softened, as if her daughter understood.

As the Montana sky darkened to purple with approaching dusk, the men began to grasp something that defied everything they believed:

This woman wasn’t stalling for rescue.

She was the fortress.

Then—distant thunder rolled across the valley.

James appeared over the ridge with three neighboring ranchers he’d wired from town, a sudden unease having sent him racing home.

The land grabbers scattered like startled crows.

When James burst through the door, he found Ellen calm and steady, rifle still ready, their daughter on her hip, nursing peacefully as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

Ellen didn’t collapse in relief.

She simply met his eyes and said, “They thought I’d be easy.”

The story spread across Montana Territory faster than telegraph wire.

Within three weeks, two other homestead women successfully defended their claims while their husbands were away—both citing Ellen McKenzie’s stand as proof that being alone didn’t mean being helpless.

Territorial newspapers picked it up. Women’s groups in Helena and Butte referenced it in their organizing. The four would-be claim jumpers were quietly identified and encouraged to leave the territory.

Years later, when their daughter traced her fingers over the bullet scar still visible in the doorframe, James placed his weathered hand over the mark and said:

“Your mother taught grown men something they’d forgotten: kindness isn’t weakness. Mercy isn’t surrender. And a woman protecting her family is the most dangerous force on the frontier.”

Ellen didn’t answer. She simply smiled—the smile of someone who knows exactly who she is and what she’s capable of.

Because the frontier had its own lessons, harsh and unforgiving:

You could wait for someone to save you.

Or you could load the rifle, secure the door, and become your own salvation.

When frontier women faced that choice, they chose the rifle.

And the frontier learned to respect them for it.

(Tom: As a rule, the only thing that has ever stopped an armed, bad intentioned person is an armed, well intentioned person. Don’t ever forget that.)

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The Curious Bohrs

In 1922, a Danish physicist named Niels Bohr stood before the world’s greatest scientific minds and accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics.

His discovery had changed how we see the universe itself.

He revealed that atoms weren’t tiny solid balls, but miniature solar systems—with electrons spinning around a nucleus, jumping between invisible energy levels like climbers ascending rungs on a cosmic ladder.

This single insight cracked open the door to quantum physics.

But here’s what makes this story extraordinary.

Fifty-three years later, in 1975, another Bohr walked onto that very same Nobel stage.

His name was Aage Bohr—Niels’ son.

Where his father had mapped the architecture of the atom, Aage went deeper. He peered into the nucleus itself, that impossibly tiny heart of matter that holds an atom together.

And what he found astonished the scientific world.

The nucleus wasn’t just a static clump of particles. Protons and neutrons didn’t simply sit still. They moved together in waves and ripples, almost like a living thing breathing at the center of all matter.

His discovery, made alongside colleagues Ben Mottelson and James Rainwater, reshaped nuclear physics forever.

Two generations.

Two Nobel Prizes.

One family’s quest to understand the smallest building blocks of existence.

But perhaps the most beautiful part of this story isn’t about physics at all.

Those who knew the Bohrs said Niels never pressured his son to follow in his footsteps. He didn’t push Aage toward science or steer him toward greatness.

Instead, he simply lived his own life with wonder—asking questions, chasing mysteries, marveling at the unknown.

And somehow, that wonder became contagious.

Aage grew up surrounded not by expectations, but by curiosity itself. He watched his father puzzle over the universe with childlike fascination. And that fascination, it seems, was the only inheritance that truly mattered.

Some things cannot be taught. They can only be caught.

Curiosity is one of them.

And when it passes from one generation to the next—not through pressure, but through the quiet example of a life lived in wonder—it can change the world.

Twice.

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Graphene

Graphene

Electrons in graphene have done something physicists thought was impossible. They were seen flowing like a nearly perfect quantum liquid; one so strange, it defies the rules taught in physics textbooks for over a century.

This happened at a critical point in graphene called the Dirac point. At that moment, the material isn’t quite a metal, nor an insulator; and inside it, electrons stop acting like individual particles. They move together, like water. Only smoother.

Researchers measured a viscosity so low, it’s closer to the early-universe plasma created in particle colliders than anything we see in solid matter.

But the real shock? Heat and electric charge went their separate ways.

In every ordinary metal, heat and electricity flow together, following a rule known as the Wiedemann-Franz law. But in graphene’s quantum fluid, that law completely breaks down. The researchers saw the biggest violation ever measured: more than 200 times off the expected value.

That makes graphene more than a material. It’s a window into the quantum universe. A single sheet of carbon atoms, one layer thick, behaving like a testbed for black hole physics, quark-gluon plasma, and quantum entanglement. Things once thought untouchable outside particle accelerators or astrophysics.

And there may be practical uses, too. This kind of ultra-clean, ultra-responsive quantum behavior could power a new generation of sensors that detect vanishingly small electrical or magnetic signals.

Read the study:
“Universality in quantum critical flow of charge and heat in ultraclean graphene.” Nature Physics, 13 August 2025

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Pasteurized vs Raw Milk

Pasteurized vs Raw Milk

For decades, the “Food Police” told us that raw milk was dangerous and that skim milk was healthy. In 2026, the script has flipped.

With the new “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” signed this month, the war on dairy fat is ending. But the real revolution is happening underground: the deregulation of Raw Milk.

Why does this matter? It’s about Lactase.

When you pasteurize milk (heat it to 161°F), you kill bacteria, yes. But you also destroy the enzyme Lactase, which is naturally present in milk to help you digest lactose. This is why millions of people think they are “lactose intolerant.” They aren’t intolerant to milk; they are intolerant to dead milk.

Raw milk is a bioactive food. It contains:

Bioavailable Calcium: Not the chalky stuff added to almond milk.

Immunoglobulins: Antibodies that support your immune system.

Butterfat: Essential for absorbing Vitamin A and D.

The establishment called it “risky.” Biohackers call it “liquid gold.” The freedom to choose what you put in your body is the ultimate health metric.

Vital Advice: If you can’t access raw milk (check local laws), do the next best thing: Grass-Fed, Vat-Pasteurized, Non-Homogenized milk. If the cream doesn’t rise to the top, it’s not real food.

Source: “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” (2026 Policy Update) /McAfee, M. “The Safety of Raw Milk”.

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Peter Rost

Peter Rost

The pharmaceutical industry has long been criticized for its approach to chronic disease management. Peter Rost, a former Pfizer executive, revealed that the real focus is not on curing diseases, but on creating lifelong markets for drugs. The truth is that chronic diseases, which require ongoing medication, are far more profitable for drug companies than curing the condition.
Many chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, are largely preventable with lifestyle changes, yet the healthcare system often focuses on symptom management rather than finding cures. This has led to a pharmaceutical monopoly, where companies profit from keeping patients dependent on their medications.
Understanding this truth about big pharma can help us make better health decisions. Prevention, rather than long-term medication, should be a priority for healthcare. It’s time to take control of our health and make informed choices.
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The secret to living to 100? HIGH CHOLESTEROL!

A massive Swedish study tracking over 800,000 people for 35 years just revealed: Every single centenarian had HIGH total cholesterol. The higher your LDL, the longer you live.

Cholesterol is needed for life.
Mitochondria depend on cholesterol.
Sex hormones depend on cholesterol.
Cholesterol helps boost immunity.

https://x.com/thehealthb0t/status/2015611639891103884?s=20

When queried, Grok supplied the following data:

The X post you’re referencing is from @thehealthb0t and discusses a Swedish study on cholesterol levels in relation to longevity, based on a video clip of an interview emphasizing cholesterol’s benefits for mitochondria, sex hormones, and immunity. While I don’t have direct access to raw, unpublished datasets from research studies (those are typically held by institutions like Karolinska Institutet for the AMORIS cohort), I can retrieve and analyze the published source material the post draws from using web tools.

The study in question is titled “Blood biomarker profiles and exceptional longevity: comparison of centenarians and non-centenarians in a 35-year follow-up of the Swedish AMORIS cohort,” published in GeroScience in 2023. It draws from the larger AMORIS (Apolipoprotein-related Mortality Risk) cohort, which originally included over 800,000 Swedish participants who had blood tests between 1985 and 1996. However, this specific analysis focused on a subset of 44,636 individuals (born 1893–1932) who were aged 64–99 at the time of their blood draws, tracking them via national registers until 2020 or death. Of these, 1,224 (mostly women) reached age 100.

Key Findings from the Study

  • Biomarkers Associated with Longevity: Centenarians tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid, liver enzymes (like aspartate aminotransferase, gamma-glutamyl transferase, alkaline phosphatase, and lactate dehydrogenase), and total iron-binding capacity. They also had higher levels of iron and total cholesterol compared to those who didn’t reach 100.
  • Cholesterol Specifically: The study measured total cholesterol (not LDL or HDL separately). Belonging to the lowest quintile of total cholesterol was linked to a lower chance of becoming a centenarian, suggesting very low cholesterol may reduce longevity odds. However, high cholesterol didn’t directly increase the odds—it’s more that low levels were detrimental. A correction to the paper clarifies this nuance, noting the original phrasing overstated the benefits of higher levels. Differences in favorable biomarker profiles (including cholesterol) were observable from age 65 onward, potentially reflecting genetics or lifestyle factors.
  • Homogeneity Among Centenarians: Centenarians showed relatively consistent biomarker profiles overall, with two subgroups identified via cluster analysis: one with slightly higher nutrition-related markers (like total cholesterol and albumin) and another with lower but still adequate levels.

How This Relates to the X Post

The post’s claims—like “every single centenarian had HIGH total cholesterol” and “the higher your LDL, the longer you live”—aren’t fully supported. The study didn’t find universal high cholesterol among centenarians (just higher on average in some contexts), and it didn’t assess LDL at all. The video in the post aligns with broader discussions on cholesterol’s role in health but extrapolates beyond the data.

Broader Context and Critiques

This topic is debated in health circles, with some viewing high cholesterol as protective in old age (e.g., aiding immunity or as a marker of metabolic stability). Others point out limitations like survivorship bias (the study only includes people who survived to have blood tests in mid-to-late life) or that correlation doesn’t mean causation—higher cholesterol might just reflect people predisposed to longevity rather than causing it. For instance, cross-sectional studies on centenarians sometimes show lower cholesterol overall, and clinical guidelines still warn against high levels due to cardiovascular risks in younger adults. One analysis notes the findings contradict some prior research but could highlight age-specific effects.

If you’re after more details on the full AMORIS dataset or related studies, let me know—I can dig deeper. Always chat with a doc for personal health advice, as this is observational data, not prescriptive.

 

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A Deep Dive Into Butyrate — Your Gut’s Powerhouse Molecule

Butyrate Strengthens Gut

  • Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) produced by gut bacteria that ferment dietary fiber. It serves as essential fuel for colon cells and maintaining overall systemic health
  • Adequate fiber intake — around 30 grams daily — is crucial for butyrate production. Without it, your body burns stored fat and protein, creating disease-causing byproducts
  • Butyrate strengthens your gut barrier, preventing intestinal permeability that allows harmful substances to enter the bloodstream and trigger autoimmune responses
  • Research shows butyrate improves insulin sensitivity, reduces diabetes risk, lowers bad cholesterol, prevents colorectal cancer, and supports brain health
  • Boost butyrate by eating fiber-rich foods, resistant starches, fermented foods and probiotics, while avoiding processed foods, managing stress, and limiting unnecessary antibiotics

Source: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2026/01/19/deep-dive-into-butyrate-guts-powerhouse-molecule.aspx

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Carlin and Russell

Carlin and Russell

This is why we need to raise the intelligence of each and every person.
Intelligent people come up with better solutions to problems.
Better solutions than war, crime, undermining national sovereignty, curtailing free speech, chemtrails, population reduction, poisoning the environment, frankenfoods, systems that preserve the status quo rather than improving the lot of all…