Tom's Blog on Life

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(Tom: This is what integrity look like. Extreme integrity.

It also illustrates how international bankers are on par with big pharma and second only to psychiatrists on the list of evil doers.)

A night security guard caught the richest bank in Switzerland shredding the proof that murdered Holocaust families were owed their money. He was nobody. Union Bank of Switzerland was one of the most powerful banks on Earth. He took the files anyway. And it cost him everything.

His name is Christoph Meili. January 8, 1997. Zurich. He was 28. A night guard for an outside firm, walking empty halls at UBS. Steady paycheck. Nothing special.

On his rounds he passed the shredding room and saw two huge bins of documents waiting to be destroyed. He looked closer. The papers were old. German names. Account records. Property lists from the 1930s and 40s.

Then it hit him. These were Holocaust records.

In 1997 the whole world was asking one question. What happened to the fortunes Jewish families hid in Swiss banks before the Nazis murdered them? Survivors’ children had come looking for decades. The banks said the same thing every time. Sorry. No records. Can’t help you.

And Christoph was standing over those exact records. Going into a shredder.

Here’s what made it a crime. Switzerland had banned the destruction of these documents just weeks earlier. The bank was feeding them to the shredder anyway.

Christoph had watched Schindler’s List. The story of one ordinary man who acted when everyone else looked away. He thought about that movie standing in that room.

Then he made his choice.

He grabbed the ledgers. Stuffed them under his coat. And walked the evidence out of one of the most powerful banks in the world.

He handed them to a Jewish organization in Zurich. They took them to the police. Then to the press. January 14, 1997. The story detonated across the planet. A Swiss bank caught shredding Holocaust victims’ records.

UBS fired him that same day.

Then his own country came after him. Not the bank. Him. In Switzerland, handing bank papers to outsiders breaks banking secrecy. It’s a crime. Prosecutors opened a case. They wanted to arrest the guard who saved the proof.

Let that sink in. The man who ordered the shredding kept his job. The man who stopped it was facing prison.

Then came the death threats. Phone calls. Letters. People who wanted him dead. His wife was terrified. His kids weren’t safe. His own country had turned on him.

So Christoph did something no Swiss citizen had ever done. He fled Switzerland. And begged America for asylum.

The US Senate took up his case. A senator stood up and called him a hero — and pointed out that the official who ordered the shredding still had his job while the guard who stopped it was being hunted. In 1997 Congress passed a special law to take him in. He is believed to be the only Swiss national ever granted political asylum in America.

A Swiss man. Fleeing Switzerland. To be safe.

His evidence changed everything. It proved the banks had been lying. It turned the Swiss banking giants into global villains overnight.

August 1998. They broke. The Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to Holocaust survivors and their families. The largest settlement of its kind. Money that should have reached those families fifty years earlier — finally moving. Because one night guard refused to feed the proof into a shredder.

Christoph was owed $750,000 of that settlement. A reward for what he did.

He barely saw it. The money crawled. One lawyer handling Holocaust funds was later disbarred for stealing from survivors. The people who once called him a hero stopped calling. He started over in California. Went to college in his 30s. Became a US citizen. And quietly slid into minimum-wage work, an ocean from home. His marriage didn’t survive it.

In 2009 he went home to Switzerland. Broke. Every cent of the reward gone. And his country still couldn’t decide what he was. Hero? Or traitor?

Now look at where everyone ended up.

The families got their billion. Good. But the bank that shredded the evidence? UBS is still standing. Bigger than ever — today it’s the giant that swallowed Credit Suisse, one of the most powerful banks on the planet. The official who ordered the shredding kept his job. And the night guard who risked everything to stop them came home with nothing.

So ask yourself one thing. You’re alone in that room at 2 AM. Steady job. Two kids asleep at home. A shredder full of stolen history in front of you. Do you walk away? Or do you pick up the files?

Christoph picked up the files. He lost his job, his country, his savings, and his marriage for it. Years later a documentary crew asked if he regretted it.

He said four words.

“I would do it again.”

Christoph Meili. The night guard who beat the richest banks in the world — and the world let him go broke.

At 10 years old, she tried a welding simulator at a museum, thought it was the coolest thing she’d ever seen, and decided right then that she would be a welder. Eleven years later, she’s going to the world stage — and no American woman has ever done what she’s about to do.

Mikala Sposito grew up in Dexter, Michigan.

She wasn’t supposed to find her calling at a museum exhibit. But in 2014, the American Welding Society set up a virtual welding simulator at the Henry Ford Museum — the kind of thing most kids try once and forget. Mikala tried it with her parents and felt something click.

“I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” she said. “I soon made it my thing. Whenever an adult would ask, ’What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would say with excitement: A welder.”

Most kids say things like that. Mikala meant it.

Welding camps followed. Then high school classes. Then competitions — and with each one, it became clearer that this wasn’t just enthusiasm. It was talent, backed by the kind of work ethic that most adults never develop.

She arrived at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor and met her coach, Alex Pazkowski — a former WorldSkills silver medalist who had walked the exact same path from that same program. He didn’t sugarcoat what the road ahead looked like.

“He explained to me that it was going to be far from easy, and arguably the hardest thing I’d ever go through,” Mikala said. “But I was up for the challenge.”

For two years, she trained 60 to 80 hours a week. Not 60 to 80 hours a month. A week. Friends, family time, ordinary life — she set it all aside and poured everything into the welding booth.

“I’ve had to sacrifice a lot to be here,” she said. “I’ve sacrificed time with friends, time with family. This is my second family.”

In March 2026, she flew to Huntsville, Alabama, for the USA Weld Trials — three grueling qualifying rounds against the best young welders in the country. When it was over, one name sat at the top of the standings.

Mikala Sposito. First overall.

This September, she will represent the United States at the WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai, China — the event known as the Olympics of the skilled trades, where the world’s best young technical professionals compete across dozens of disciplines. She will be the first woman in American history to compete in welding at WorldSkills.

When people bring up the history-making part, Mikala keeps it in perspective.

“I don’t see the gender aspect of it,” she said. “Welding doesn’t take any brute strength or anything. It’s actually very fine and precise.”

She’s right. And that’s exactly the point.

The trades have long been seen as a man’s world not because of what the work demands — but because of who was told to stay away. Mikala never got that message, or if she did, she ignored it at age ten when she picked up a virtual torch in a museum and refused to put it down.

Pazkowski has watched elite competitors come through that program for years. He knows what sets Mikala apart.

“The most impressive thing about her is her work ethic and her ability to overcome the obstacles that you encounter when you’re training at this level,” he said. “That’s inspirational to anybody trying to get into this industry — or any industry, for that matter.”

After Shanghai, Mikala plans to earn a degree in welding engineering. And someday, she says, she’d love to come back and teach — to be the coach for the next Mikala, whoever she turns out to be.

She was ten years old when she found her path. Twenty-one when she reached the world stage.

She just wanted to weld.

And she became a trailblazer anyway.

He designed the engine system that changed motorsport forever while sitting on a military base with no way to test it. Just paper, a chemistry background, and calculations done entirely by hand.

Stu Hilborn was born in Calgary in 1917 and grew up in Southern California, a speed-obsessed kid who found his way to the dry lake beds of the Mojave Desert in the late 1930s where hot rodders pushed their cars as fast as they could go. He bought a used Model A with no engine, found a Ford flathead, and started building something fast.

He met Eddie Miller, a former Indianapolis driver who taught him the fundamentals — including how to grind custom camshafts with nothing but a bench grinder and a steady hand. No computers. No CNC machines. Skill and patience.

The car was fast. Hilborn wanted faster.

He found a streamliner and bought it on December 7, 1941. Then heard the news from Pearl Harbor. He stored the car, joined the Army Air Forces, and served as an aerial gunner. And while stationed on a military base with no test equipment and no machine shop, he began designing something no one had yet managed to make work on a racing engine.

A mechanical fuel injection system. On paper. Entirely by hand.

He used his chemistry background to calculate nozzle sizes, fuel pressure, and mixture ratios — everything a dyno and fuel flow measuring equipment would normally tell you — worked out in equations in his spare time between duties.

After discharge, he went back to the streamliner. He ran carburetors first while he refined the injection system. His peers were skeptical. Most told him the concept would never work for a race car. He tested anyway — careful, methodical, fixing what failed and trying again.

In 1948, Howie Wilson drove the Hilborn streamliner through 150 miles per hour at the dry lakes. The first hot rod ever to break that barrier. The superiority over carburetors was undeniable. The streamliner made the cover of Hot Rod Magazine.

Word spread fast.

Hilborn designed an injection system for the Offenhauser engine — the dominant powerplant in midget racing. A dyno test by the Offy makers showed injection boosted power by ten percent. The results in competition were immediate. Starting in 1949, Hilborn-equipped cars began winning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Within a few years, Hilborn injectors were standard at Indy.

Then drag racing. Then land speed records. Then circle track. Then every form of motorsport that cared about winning.

Over four decades, Hilborn fuel injection powered cars in virtually every major racing discipline. From naturally aspirated gas engines to supercharged fuel dragsters. From dry lake beds to the Brickyard.

The iconic “stacks” — flared tubes rising directly out of each cylinder — became one of the most recognizable sights in American motorsport. You knew a Hilborn car when you saw one.

Many companies eventually entered the fuel injection market. But Stu Hilborn was first. He designed it in the military. Built it in a garage. Proved it on a salt flat. And made carburetors obsolete for anyone serious about speed.

Stu Hilborn died on December 16, 2013, at age 96. He was inducted into the SEMA Hall of Fame and the Hot Rod Magazine Speed Parts Hall of Fame. His systems are still manufactured and raced today.

He started with a Model A that had no engine and a mentor who ground camshafts on a bench grinder.

He ended as the man who changed how engines breathe.

Are you stuck in a cycle of applying lotions and serums nightly, only to wake up with dry skin again?

Most conventional skincare products aren’t actually absorbed into the deep layers of your skin. Instead, they sit on your skin’s outer layer until they evaporate or are washed away.

Not only that, but many contain alcohol, which actually dries and dehydrates your skin further.

Castor oil, on the other hand, has the power to penetrate all three layers of your skin.

It has been used for generations in wellness and beauty routines, and for good reason!

Castor oil is rich in ricinoleic acid, a unique fatty acid linked to moisturizing, soothing, and protective properties.

It can help eliminate dark spots and wrinkles and is very hydrating for your skin. It also contains vitamin E, which is crucial for maintaining skin barrier function.

When applied regularly, castor oil can leave your skin feeling smooth, nourished, and moisturized.

Find out how to 10x the results of using castor oil:

Most people know the songs. Very few know the man who made them. And almost nobody knows just how close the world came to never hearing any of them at all.

His name is Nile Rodgers.

He was born on September 19, 1952, in New York City — into a world that was difficult from the very beginning. His mother was just 14 years old when he was born. His stepfather and mother were heroin users, though by all accounts loving in their own chaotic way. His biological father, a travelling percussionist, was rarely present. Nile grew up moving between New York and Los Angeles, between relatives and neighbourhoods, learning how to observe the world around him long before he fully understood it.

Then, somewhere along the way, he picked up a guitar.

Music became everything. As a teenager, he was already playing professionally. He performed with the Sesame Street band on PBS. He joined the legendary house band at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, where he backed Aretha Franklin and Parliament-Funkadelic. These were not small stages — they were masterclasses in rhythm, timing, and how to make an audience feel something.

In 1970, Nile met a young bassist named Bernard Edwards. They connected immediately over a shared obsession with precision, groove, and the idea that music could be both intelligent and irresistible. They played together for years, building something new. By 1977, they had finally shaped it into a band. They called it Chic. Their first single, Dance, Dance, Dance, became a hit. Then came Everybody Dance. People were starting to pay attention.

Which brings us to that New Year’s Eve.

Studio 54 in New York was the most famous nightclub on the planet. Celebrities, artists, and icons danced there every night under glittering lights. Singer Grace Jones had invited Nile and Bernard to come watch her perform. They dressed in their finest clothes and walked through the freezing New York night to the back door of the club. They told the doorman they were personal friends of Grace Jones.

The doorman slammed the door in their faces.

Grace had forgotten to put their names on the list. They knocked again. The doorman told them, in the rudest possible way, to go away. And that was that.

Nile and Bernard walked back to Nile’s nearby apartment — cold, embarrassed, and furious. They opened two bottles of Dom Pérignon champagne, which Nile has always jokingly called “rock and roll mouthwash.” They started drinking. And then, because they were musicians and musicians cannot stop being musicians even when they are angry, they started playing.

Out of their frustration came a groove. A furious, irresistible, brilliant groove.

The chorus they sang first was, in Nile’s own words, not exactly suitable for radio. It was a direct message aimed at the doorman. But as the song grew, they realised they needed to clean it up. “Freak off” didn’t work. Then, finally, they landed on it.

“Freak out.”

Le Freak was born.

Released in September 1978, the song became an absolute phenomenon. It hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It sold more than 7 million copies. It became the biggest-selling single in the entire history of Atlantic Records — a title it still holds to this day. The very club that had slammed a door in their faces was now playing their song all night long, every night.

But Nile Rodgers was nowhere near finished.

In 1979, Chic released Good Times. Its bass line was so perfectly constructed, so hypnotically groovy, that a group of young musicians in the Bronx building something brand new heard it and knew immediately what they needed to do. The Sugarhill Gang built Rapper’s Delight on top of it. That song became one of the first hip-hop records to achieve mainstream success. The DNA of an entirely new genre of music ran directly through Nile Rodgers’ guitar playing.

Then the disco backlash came. Clubs burned disco records. Radio stations turned against the sound. Chic, one of the most musically sophisticated bands of the era, was swept aside along with everything else labelled disco. It could have ended Nile Rodgers’ career.

Instead, it launched a second one.

In 1983, David Bowie approached him. They worked together at the Power Station studio in New York. Bowie told Nile simply, “I want you to make hits.” Nile did exactly that. The Let’s Dance album went on to sell 11 million copies and became Bowie’s biggest commercial success. Let’s Dance was the only Bowie single to hit number 1 in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

The following year, a young Madonna came to him. Together they made Like a Virgin — the album that launched her into global superstardom. He produced Diana Ross. He worked with Duran Duran, Mick Jagger, Sister Sledge, and the B-52s. He kept going, year after year, with barely a pause.

Then, in 2013, he did something remarkable.

He returned to the very top of the charts — by producing Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, from their album Random Access Memories. That same year, he announced publicly that he had beaten cancer. He was 60 years old, standing at the peak of the music world again, healthier and more creative than ever.

Here is the number that still does not feel quite real. Nile Rodgers has written, produced, or performed on records that have sold more than 750 million albums and 100 million singles worldwide. There are very, very few musicians in the entire history of recorded music who can say anything close to that.

But here is what makes the story truly remarkable.

Through all of it, Nile Rodgers has never demanded to be seen. He does not swagger. He does not dominate. His guitar style, which he calls “chucking,” is built on tiny, precise, almost invisible movements. You can barely see his right hand when he plays. But the sound that comes out of it has shaped disco, funk, rock, hip-hop, and pop music across five decades — in a way that almost no single human being ever has.

He lost Bernard Edwards to pneumonia in 1996, while the two were on tour together in Japan. It was one of the worst moments of his life. He still tours under the name Nile Rodgers and Chic. He still picks up his beloved Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed “The Hitmaker,” and plays like a man who cannot quite believe how lucky he is to still be doing what he loves.

Here is the lesson buried inside his extraordinary story.

You do not have to be the loudest person in the room to leave the biggest mark on the world. Nile Rodgers took a cold, humiliating New Year’s Eve, a slammed door, two bottles of champagne, and an old guitar — and turned all of it into pure joy that has now been heard by hundreds of millions of people across five decades.

He never tried to be the star. He tried to make everyone around him sound like stars. And in doing so, he became one of the most important musicians who ever lived.

So the next time you hear that bright, chopped, chiming guitar riff somewhere in the background — and you feel your body start to move before your brain even notices — remember.

That is probably Nile Rodgers. Quietly doing what he has always done.

Making the whole world dance. One perfect note at a time.

A French ship wrecked on a sandbank in the Indian Ocean in 1761. The crew spent 2 months building a rescue raft. Then they sailed away and left 80 enslaved people behind. They promised to come back. They never did. For 15 years, those people waited. What they built while they waited is one of the most extraordinary stories in human history.

The ship was called L’Utile. The word means “useful” in French.

It belonged to the French East India Company. It had departed from the port of Bayonne in November 1760, and by July 1761 it was sailing through the Indian Ocean, loaded with a hidden and illegal cargo.

160 Malagasy men, women, and children. Enslaved people purchased in Madagascar just days earlier, packed into the ship’s hold, bound for the French colony of Île de France — the island now known as Mauritius — where they would be sold to work on plantations.

The slave trade was officially prohibited in that region at the time. The captain, Jean de Lafargue, was trafficking human beings in secret, for profit.

On the night of July 31, 1761, L’Utile struck a reef.

The water rushed in fast. The enslaved people were below deck. The hatches had been locked. Approximately 70 of them drowned before they could get out.

The survivors — French crew and approximately 80 Malagasy captives — made it to a tiny sandbank nearby. A place so small and so barren that almost no one knew it existed.

No trees. No fresh water. Barely 1 square kilometer of coral sand, battered constantly by the winds of the Indian Ocean.

The nearest land was 300 miles away.

For 2 months, the French crew and the enslaved survivors worked side by side, salvaging timber from the wreck, building a small vessel they named La Providence. By September 27, 1761, it was ready.

It could not carry everyone.

The French crew climbed aboard La Providence.

The 80 Malagasy survivors were left on the sand.

The captain made a promise before he sailed. He said a rescue ship would come. He said they would not be forgotten.

Then the sails disappeared over the horizon.

And the world forgot them completely.

Here is what nobody ever talks about.

When the French crew arrived back at Madagascar, they reported the shipwreck. They reported that enslaved people had been left behind. A naval officer named Castellan du Vernet began pushing for a rescue mission almost immediately. He wrote letters. He made requests. He spent years begging the colonial administration to send a ship.

The administration ignored him. The enslaved people left on the sandbank had been smuggled cargo — illegal property. There was no legal obligation. There was no political will. There was no profit motive in saving them.

So du Vernet kept writing.

And on the sandbank — which had no name yet, no place on any map that mattered — 80 people looked at the horizon and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They had almost nothing.

No trees meant no wood for building. No freshwater meant they had to survive on what fell from the sky. The island was regularly swept by cyclones that flattened everything in their path.

But they did not simply sit in the sand and wait to die.

They organized.

They built shelters from the debris of the wrecked ship — timber beams, broken planks, salvaged iron. When the timber rotted away, they used what the island had in abundance: coral. They stacked coral blocks into low walls, creating small, wind-resistant structures that archaeologists would find 230 years later, still standing in the sand.

They built a communal oven from coral and metal salvaged from the wreck. They repaired copper cooking utensils. They learned to eat what the island gave them — sea turtles, bird eggs, fish pulled from the reef.

They wove clothing from the feathers of seabirds because their own garments had long since disintegrated in the salt and the heat.

They kept a fire burning.

For 15 years, on a tiny sandbank in the middle of the Indian Ocean with no trees and no resources and no reason given to them by the outside world to believe anyone was coming, they kept a signal fire burning day and night.

In 1772 — 11 years after the abandonment — a rescue ship called La Sauterelle finally arrived within sight of the island. A small boat carrying 2 men was sent toward the shore.

It was smashed apart on the reef.

1 man swam back to the ship. The other swam to the island.

Because of the violent surf and the dangerous coral reef, the rescue ship could not land. It turned around and sailed away.

The survivors on the island watched it go.

2 more ships came in the years that followed. Neither could navigate the reef safely enough to make landfall. Both turned back.

The fire kept burning.

Then, on November 29, 1776 — exactly 15 years, 3 months, and 29 days after L’Utile had wrecked — a French corvette called La Dauphine appeared on the horizon. Its captain was a naval officer named Jacques Marie Boudin de Tromelin.

He found a way through the reef.

He sent his men ashore.

Of the 80 people left on that sandbank in 1761, only 8 remained.

7 women.

And 1 eight-month-old baby boy — born on the island, who had never in his entire short life seen another piece of land.

Among the survivors were a grandmother, her daughter, and the baby — 3 generations of a family that had held together across 15 years of abandonment and loss on a sandbank in the middle of the ocean.

Archaeologists who excavated Tromelin Island beginning in 2006, sponsored by UNESCO, found the coral shelters still standing. They found the communal oven. They found the repaired copper utensils. They found the traces of a community that had organized itself with extraordinary discipline and ingenuity across 15 years of impossible conditions.

They found evidence of a society. Not simply survivors clinging to life, but people who had built something — cooking systems, shelter systems, community organization — out of coral and wreckage and sheer refusal to give up.

What they did not find was any indication of who the survivors were.

The Malagasy people left on Tromelin Island left no written records. They had no way to write. They had no paper. No ink. No way to tell the world who they were, where they came from, what they had lost, or what they had built.

Their names are unknown.

The 7 women rescued in 1776 were taken to Mauritius. The governor at the time — more progressive than his predecessors — declared that because they had been trafficked illegally, they could not legally be considered enslaved. He granted them their freedom.

They had survived 15 years of abandonment and were then told they were free.

The island was eventually named Tromelin Island, after the captain who finally came.

Not after the 80 people who survived there. Not after the 7 women who kept the fire burning for 15 years. Not after the grandmother who held her family together across an ocean of silence.

After the man who arrived in a ship.

That detail sits uncomfortably, and it should.

Because the real story of Tromelin Island is not about the rescue.

It is about the 15 years before the rescue. It is about people who were stolen from their homeland, trafficked across an ocean, survived a shipwreck, and were then abandoned on a sandbank by the people who had enslaved them — and who responded not with despair, but with ingenuity, organization, community, and an unbroken signal fire that said to the empty horizon, every single day for 15 years:

We are still here.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded — that the most extraordinary acts of human courage and resilience in history were often performed by people whose names we will never know.