Tom's Blog on Life and Livingness
Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, has 30+ years of clinical experience and sees imbalanced blood sugar and disordered insulin regulation as the underlying cause of so many people’s problems. Her bottom line is that to get fuel into your mitochondria, good insulin and blood sugar control is a non-negotiable.
Stress, lack of good sleep, inadequate movement, toxin exposure, poor diet lead to insulin resistance.
Wrong exposure, halved harvest. Most gardeners plant wherever there is space — not wherever there is the right light — and then blame the compost.
Every crop has a precise light requirement. Too much sun scorches delicate leaves. Too little and fruit never ripens.
2 to 3 hours of sun is enough for lettuce, spinach, lamb’s lettuce, and parsley. The shade actually protects them from bolting in warm weather.
4 to 5 hours suits chard, brassicas, peas, and leafy herbs. These grow well with morning sun and afternoon shade — the classic pole-facing or partially shaded bed is often better for these crops than a full equator-facing position.
6 to 8 hours unlocks tomatoes, peppers, and courgettes. Without full sun, British-grown tomatoes stay green and flavourless, and peppers remain thin-walled. An equator-facing raised bed or a warm sheltered wall is essential for these crops in most of the UK.
8+ hours of direct sun is the requirement for pumpkins and squash, Mediterranean herbs such as rosemary, thyme, and sage, and sweet corn. These are the plants that genuinely need the most open, unshaded, sun-facing position available. Rosemary especially thrives in a hot dry sun-facing spot and resents shade.
Map the sun hours on your bed before deciding what to plant in it.
Each climbing vegetable needs a different support structure. The wrong match means broken stems, poor airflow, and fruit rotting on the ground.
Flat string trellises give tomatoes the vertical plane they need to spread heavy branches evenly.
A-frame designs let cucumbers hang freely underneath — the fruit grows straight and clean instead of curling on the soil.
Wire arches suit beans and peas perfectly. Their tendrils wrap thin wire far better than thick wood.
Heavy producers like squash or melons demand reinforced arches with fabric slings under each fruit. Without support, the weight tears the vine down mid-season.
The setup rule that saves your roots:
– Install your trellis before transplanting, not after — driving stakes near established roots damages the plant you’re trying to help
– Set the structure first, then plant about six inches from the base
– Anchor trellises on the north side of the bed so vertical crops don’t shade shorter plants to the south. (In the Northern Hemisphere. Reverse that in the Southern Hemisphere.)
One trellis per crop type. Get that right and vertical gardening stops being a gamble.
In 1942, a British author sat down and wrote a book from the devil’s point of view.
Not a horror story. Not a fantasy. A quiet, deeply unsettling instruction manual — written as a series of letters from a senior demon named Screwtape to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood, who has been assigned one task: lead a human soul toward ruin.
The book is called The Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis wrote it during World War II, in a world without television, without smartphones, without the internet. And somehow, he described the 21st century with a precision that should stop us cold.
Here’s the remarkable part.
Screwtape doesn’t instruct Wormwood to make his target commit terrible crimes. He doesn’t tell him to fill the man’s heart with hatred or drag him toward dramatic, obvious evil.
He tells him something far simpler, and far more effective:
Keep him distracted.
“It doesn’t matter how small the sins are,“ Screwtape explains, “provided that their cumulative effect is to keep the man from… his real end.“
You don’t need to destroy a person. You just need to keep them busy enough that they never get around to becoming who they were meant to be.
Lewis identified two specific weapons Screwtape uses to do this.
The first: jargon instead of thought.
Screwtape advises his nephew not to let the patient evaluate ideas on their merits — whether they’re actually true or false, wise or foolish. Instead, train him to react to labels. To sort every idea instantly into a category and respond accordingly — without ever really thinking.
Reading that in 2025, it’s hard not to feel the recognition land like a stone.
How many ideas do we actually think through anymore? How often do we hear a word — one loaded word — and know immediately, reflexively, whether we’re supposed to agree or dismiss? The label arrives before the argument does, and for most of us, the label is enough. The thinking never begins.
Screwtape would consider that a victory.
But his second weapon is even more powerful, and even more familiar.
He calls it the stream of immediate sense experiences.
Keep the patient’s attention fixed on the immediate. The surface. The constantly moving, constantly refreshing flow of new stimulation. What’s happening right now. What people are outraged about today. The latest news, the newest controversy, the thing that just broke ten minutes ago.
Keep him in the stream — and he’ll never step back far enough to ask the questions that actually matter.
What is true? What is good? What does my life mean? How should I live it?
Lewis was writing about newspapers, radio, and the busyness of modern life when he described that stream.
But think about that phrase again.
The stream of immediate sense experiences.
We literally named it the feed.
The social media feed. The news feed. The infinite scroll that never runs out, never pauses, never asks you to stop and reflect. Just the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, each one engineered to hold your eyes for exactly long enough to pull you to the one after it.
Lewis didn’t predict the technology. He predicted the principle behind it.
And then he wrote something even harder to shake:
“The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.“
That’s what distraction is. A gentle slope.
Not a dramatic fall. Not a sudden choice to abandon everything good. Just an hour on the phone instead of a real conversation. Just one more scroll instead of the book on the nightstand. Just another evening absorbed in the feed instead of being present with the people sitting next to you.
The tragedy isn’t that distraction feels bad. It’s that it feels like nothing at all.
That’s the slope. Soft underfoot. No warning signs.
And here is the truth Lewis was circling, the one that makes this more than just a clever literary connection:
Distraction is never neutral.
Every hour given to the stream is an hour not given to something real. A conversation you didn’t have. A person you didn’t help. A thought you never finished. A version of yourself you never got around to becoming.
We aren’t just “wasting time“ when we disappear into the feed for hours.
We are choosing — passively, habitually, almost without noticing — not to do the good we could be doing.
Screwtape understood that completely.
And Lewis, writing eighty years ago in the middle of a world war, understood it too.
So the question he leaves us with — the one worth sitting with, away from the screen, in actual quiet — is this:
What are you being distracted from?
Not in a vague sense. Specifically. What conversation, what relationship, what meaningful work, what deeper version of yourself is waiting on the other side of the habit of constant scrolling?
Because Screwtape’s strategy only works with our cooperation.
We can close the feed. We can put the phone in a drawer. We can choose, even for one hour, to let our attention belong to us again — and point it toward something that actually lasts.
Lewis believed that where your attention goes, your life follows.
He wrote that in 1942.
We’re still learning whether we believe it in 2025.
Legendary investor Stanley Druckenmiller reveals a critical financial warning about the banking system and why many investors may need to reconsider how much money they keep in banks before April 2026.
In this video, we break down the risks facing the financial system including unrealized bank losses, commercial real estate debt, and rising government borrowing. Learn the strategy Druckenmiller suggests to protect your savings, diversify bank deposits, and prepare for potential financial stress in the coming months.
Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iRoQ5miFBY
International Man: Whether it’s at the grocery store, the mall, restaurants, or airports—anywhere you turn—people are finding inferior goods and services at higher prices.
Living standards have taken a big step backward recently and are trending even worse.
What is really going on?
Doug Casey: People have a natural inclination to blame the producers—the butcher, the baker, and the gasoline maker—for higher prices. But that’s a huge mistake. Higher prices (barring a natural catastrophe that destroys real wealth) are 100% caused by increases in the money supply. It’s perverse that producers are blamed for price inflation while the Fed and the government are lauded for fighting inflation. The public’s perception is the exact opposite of reality.
Producers fight the effects of government currency debasement. Surprisingly, few people confront the fact that the government doesn’t create anything of real value; it doesn’t weave, spin, or sew. It only produces regulations, taxes, fiat currency, and fiat credit. These things take prices higher. Inflation of the currency, which is to say increasing the amount of purchasing media above the increase in real wealth, amounts to the State subtly stealing capital and wealth from its subjects.
But reality be damned. The average citizen sees his government not as a predator, but a protector. He’s been taught that in “our democracy,” the government is “We the People.” Producers are blamed as exploiters. The real enemy, however, is the State and its central bank, the Fed.
There are only two ways to survive: By producing and trading, or by stealing what others have produced. Currency inflation doesn’t “stimulate” the economy; it’s a fraud permeating society. It works to overturn trust and standards of morality. It’s a poison that creates a class of parasites and eats away at the middle-class citizen’s standard of living.
In a truly free market society, prices would drop constantly, and the standard of living would rise. The Fed’s target of 2% inflation is not only crazy but evil.
International Man: How does inflation erode ethical standards? You mean it leads people to cut corners, lie, cheat, or even steal as they try to maintain their living standards?
Doug Casey: Absolutely. The prime directive of all living things is: survive! That’s true whether we’re talking about governments, corporations, individuals, or amoebas. They’ll do whatever necessary to survive. In the case of individuals and corporations, survival is about producing.
Inflation is about theft—not production. It’s a subtle form of theft, like embezzlement, that’s hard to diagnose. Theft discourages production. If there’s less and less production, more and more people resort to theft in order to survive. Theft breeds more theft.
Economics is the study of how men produce and consume in order to survive. The average person may not understand much about economics, but they have an intuitive understanding of morality. When the currency loses value they sense a theft. Especially if they see the “elite”, the heads of governments and large corporations, becoming wealthy. The elite set a country’s moral tone. They’re also in a position to profit from inflation. It’s said that a fish rots from the head down; the same is true of a country.
Currency inflation leads to violence, revolution, and overturning of civil society itself.
International Man: How does inflation contribute to a more litigious society, with people increasingly looking to take money from others through the legal system?
Doug Casey: Although the average person doesn’t understand economics very well, he does understand that some people are getting rich without producing anything. In today’s US, a certain class of people have gotten rich because of inflation (theft), not production. How so? They’re wired to the government and the Fed. When fiat money is created, it goes to them first and in the largest amounts. The average guy doesn’t benefit from trillions of government spending. The “elite” and members of the Deep State, however, benefit immediately and directly from fiat currency creation.
The broad public suspects a theft is going on. They just can’t quite figure out who the thieves are. So they blame the producers. Which suits the government perfectly; they can “step in” and pretend to be the hero.
A society based less and less on production and more and more on the theft of pre-existing wealth inevitably becomes a Hobbesian warzone of all against all. The legal system is supposed to protect society from theft by offering an alternative to physical violence. However, as society is increasingly captured by non-producers, they corrupt the legal system. Millions of laws and regulations have made the US legal system a vehicle of theft and a playground for parasites.
Let me paraphrase Al Capone. “One thug with a gun can steal $100 from a store. If he’s caught, he’ll go to jail for years. But a lawyer with a pen can rob a country of millions, never get caught, and become a leading citizen.” That’s what’s going on.
The US legal and monetary systems have become corrupt. The fact that the US has almost 1.4 million practicing lawyers is a symptom of corruption. They’re used as weapons to steal from producers. The law has become so complex and degraded that its extreme costs and slowness throws sand in the gears of the economy.
International Man: What are some historical examples of inflation leading to significant social and cultural degradation, and what lessons can we learn from them?
Doug Casey: The destruction of the currency always leads to a social upset. That’s because people who produce typically hold their savings in the national currency. But if the national currency is destroyed, a huge portion of what they’ve worked for throughout their lives is also destroyed.
Inflation upsets the entire basis of civilized society. It was a major reason why Chiang Kai-shek’s regime collapsed in China after World War II. That’s a major reason why the Communists—whatever else they’ve done to China—have been reasonably competent managers of their currency.
The Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I completely destroyed the Mark, and the social upset that inflation caused led to rioting in the streets between the Nazis and the Communists throughout the 20s, followed by a Nazi victory in 1933 via a democratic election.
Some countries suffer from perennial inflation, which results in constant attempts to take over the government. Why? The same reason Willy Sutton robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.”
When real wealth becomes hard to produce, a certain type of person is drawn into politics. They realize they can become wealthy through political power, as opposed to producing things. It’s why countries with unstable currencies become unstable socially, economically, and politically as well.
International Man: You have frequently discussed how to protect yourself from inflation’s financial and economic effects with gold and other hard assets.
However, aside from the financial effects, how do people protect themselves from inflation’s negative social, cultural, and political effects we’ve discussed today?
Doug Casey: The most important thing you can do is gain skills. Lots of skills, both in breadth and in depth, so that no matter how things sort out, you’ll always be in a position to produce things that people want.
Let me share my favorite Robert Heinlein quote about this.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
For many years, I’ve considered college to be a complete misallocation—even worse, a counterproductive waste—of four of the best years of your life and a lot of money. Why pay to have your head filled with incorrect ideas? Once planted, they’re corrosive and hard to wash away.
So the answer to the question: What should one do right now? Prepare yourself intellectually, psychologically, physically, financially, and skill-wise for tough times.
Put yourself in a position to produce more than you consume. Save the excess in precious metals, and learn to invest and speculate with that capital. Keep your wealth from being inflated away by your government.
Editor’s Note: As inflation continues to chip away at purchasing power, it will steadily undermine savings, create distortions, and punish the people who worked hardest to build real wealth.
But it’s not all bad news…
For those who see the danger coming and want to position themselves before the next wave of turmoil hits, Doug Casey and Father of Reaganomics, David Stockman just released a report which reveals how to take prudent steps to defend purchasing power, protect your capital, and potentially come out far ahead as the economic reset unfolds.
It also includes a specific, actionable speculation designed to help investors potentially profit as governments continue inflating away the value of paper wealth.
Click here to see it now.
Before the loud modern debates about
“Why is that sista with a White man?”
Before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)…
Before “race” became the loudest lens we use…
Pause.
Because history tells a quieter, more uncomfortable truth.
If you go back far enough…
someone in your bloodline did not look like you.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
In the 1400s, Portuguese ships reached the coasts of West and Central Africa.
If you think they were only trading…
your history teacher left something out.
Look at Cape Verde (1462) — a society built from African women and European men.
Look at Brazil (1500s onward) — one of the most mixed populations on earth.
Look at parts of Angola (1500s–1600s) — where cultures and families blended over generations.
That’s not opinion.
That’s record.
Now pause here:
What does it mean… if mixing isn’t new?
What if it’s actually one of the oldest human patterns?
Long before modern categories, people moved.
Traders. Sailors. Soldiers. Families.
Across the Mediterranean.
Across the Atlantic.
Across deserts and oceans.
And wherever people met…
They didn’t just exchange goods.
They formed relationships.
They built families.
They created you.
So if we’re still arguing about love today…
What else have we misunderstood?
Because here’s the part that humbles all of us:
That man you judge…
That woman you question…
Could carry the same bloodline you do.
Just further back.
Hidden in time.
History is not as divided as we were taught.
It is layered.
Connected.
Intertwined.
And maybe the real truth is this:
We’ve always been closer than we think.
So the question isn’t just “Who should love who?”
It’s this:
What would change… if we understood how deeply connected we already are?
If this made you pause, pass it on.
Because someone out there is still seeing the world in lines…when history has always moved in circles.
April 8th, 1982. A materials scientist hunched over his electron microscope in the National Bureau of Standards, staring at something that shouldn’t exist.
Dan Shechtman had just fired electrons at a metallic alloy, a routine test he’d done hundreds of times. But when the image appeared, his stomach dropped. Ten bright dots arranged in perfect circles, each equidistant from the next. A tenfold symmetry.
His hands trembled slightly as he scribbled in his notebook. He knew what this pattern meant, and he knew it was impossible. Every crystallographer since the dawn of modern science understood one fundamental law: crystals repeat. Their atoms arrange in patterns that tile infinitely, like bathroom floors. Three-fold symmetry? Fine. Four-fold? Sure. Six-fold? Absolutely.
But tenfold symmetry? That was mathematical heresy.
Shechtman checked his calculations three times. He prepared new samples. He looked again. The pattern stared back at him, defiant and impossible. He had discovered what would later be called a quasicrystal, a material that breaks the most basic rule in the crystallography textbook.
The reaction from his colleagues wasn’t curiosity. It was fury.
His research group kicked him out. Fellow scientists dismissed him as incompetent or delusional. Linus Pauling, the giant of chemistry who had won not one but two Nobel Prizes, became Shechtman’s most vocal critic. At conferences, Pauling would stand up and declare with absolute certainty: “There are no quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
Quasicrystals weren’t just a laboratory curiosity. Once scientists accepted they existed, they found them everywhere. They’re now used in specialized applications like surgical instruments, LED lights, and experimental non-stick coatings. The atomic structure that was “impossible” in 1982 has found its way into advanced technologies.
Even more remarkable: in 2009, researchers discovered natural quasicrystals in a meteorite from the Khatyrka region of Russia. This material had been floating through space for billions of years, proving that quasicrystals aren’t just possible, they formed in the early universe. Nature had been making them long before humans decided they couldn’t exist.
Pauling, despite his brilliance in other areas, never accepted quasicrystals. He died in 1994, still convinced Shechtman was wrong. It’s a humbling reminder that even genius has blind spots, and that scientific progress sometimes requires the old guard to step aside.
Imagine dedicating your life to a field, making a groundbreaking discovery, and having your heroes call you a fraud.
But Shechtman didn’t back down. For years, he defended his work, repeated his experiments, and invited skeptics to see for themselves. Slowly, grudgingly, the scientific community began to accept what their textbooks said was impossible. Nature, it turned out, was far more creative than human assumptions.
In 2011, twenty-nine years after that April morning, Dan Shechtman stood in Stockholm and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The ceremony’s speech captured it perfectly: his discovery had reminded the world “how little we really know” and “perhaps even taught us some humility.”
Sometimes the most important thing a scientist can do isn’t follow the rules. It’s have the courage to trust what they see, even when everyone else says they’re wrong.