Category: General Interest

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Michael Coy

Michael Coy

He was on his way to work.

Michael Coy – a 53-year-old UPS over-the-road semi driver from St. Paul Park, Minnesota – was heading to the company’s Eagan facility on the morning of April 18, 2024, when he saw the crash ahead of him on Interstate 94 near Snelling Avenue in St. Paul.

A vehicle had struck a lamppost and a guide rail. It was on fire.

The driver was unconscious behind the wheel.

Michael pulled over and ran to the car. He grabbed the handle of the driver’s door. Blocked by the guide rail. He tried the other driver’s side door. Also blocked.

Flames were licking at his feet and lower legs as he ran around the vehicle.

He opened the front passenger door. He climbed in.

He was now inside a burning car with an unconscious man, flames working their way toward the passenger compartment from beneath the vehicle and along its sides.

He helped the driver – Sam Orbovich, 72 – remove his seatbelt. He helped him shift position, getting him onto the center console with his feet braced against the driver’s door, preparing to pull him backward out through the passenger side.

Then the flames came through.

The passenger compartment – the space where Michael was kneeling – began to fill with fire. Flames pushed through the door opening. Through the dashboard. Through the vents. Through the floorboards.

Blistering heat forced Michael out of the car.

He came out through the passenger door as the compartment behind him became fully engulfed.

He had not gotten Sam out.

He didn’t leave.

A Minnesota Department of Transportation highway helper arrived with a window-punch tool and broke through the windows. Sam Orbovich pushed his legs through the opening. Michael and the other bystanders who had gathered – Kadir Tolla, David Klepaida, Tesfaye Deyasso, Lacie Kramer, and Tessa Sand – grabbed him and pulled.

They carried Sam Orbovich away from the burning car and onto the highway.

Both men were taken to the hospital. Sam for his injuries from the crash. Michael for smoke inhalation and heat burns to his face, his arms, and his legs.

Both men recovered.

The rescue had been captured on a dashcam mounted in one of the bystanders’ cars. The footage spread across the world – millions of people watching as ordinary people on a Minnesota interstate ran toward a burning vehicle and pulled a man from the flames. The Minnesota State Patrol awarded all six rescuers the Meritorious Citizenship Award.

Sam Orbovich went further. He nominated all six of his rescuers for the Carnegie Medal – the highest civilian honor for heroism in North America, awarded by the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission since 1904.

The commission reviewed every account. They looked at what each person had done and how much personal risk they had accepted in doing it.

They selected Michael Coy.

Because he was, in the words of Carnegie Hero Fund director Jewels Phraner, “the only one who entered the car from the passenger door, taking on significantly more risk than the others outside the car.”

He was inside. When the flames came in, he was still inside.

“Mike’s bravery in reaching into my burning car to reposition me was extraordinary,” Orbovich said, “and that heroism posed a great personal risk to himself. I would not be alive today if it weren’t for Mike and the other five people who saved me.”

Michael accepted the honor – and immediately said he wished all six of them had received it.

At the hospital, after the burns had been treated and the smoke had cleared from his lungs, Michael’s wife came to him.

She asked him to promise her he would never do something like that again.

He looked at her and told her the truth.

“I told her I couldn’t make her that promise,” he said. “Because if I had not done anything, I said you would have lost a huge part of who I was that day anyways.”

Read that again.

You would have lost a huge part of who I was.

Not “I had to be brave.” Not “I’m a hero.” Just – this is who I am. And if I had walked past a burning car with an unconscious man inside, I would have come home to you a different person than the one you married.

In the moments inside that car, Michael said he wasn’t thinking about his own safety.

“Not that I don’t love my life and my wife and my family,” he said. “I just had to do it. There were no questions about it.”

He was a UPS driver on his way to work.

He is now a Carnegie Medal recipient – one of 17 people in all of North America recognized this cycle for extraordinary civilian heroism.

He and Sam Orbovich have stayed in contact. Michael describes Sam as kind and genuinely appreciative.

And somewhere in Eagan, Minnesota, there is a UPS facility where a semi driver shows up for work and the people who know what he did on Interstate 94 quietly understand that they are standing near someone extraordinary – who would tell you, without hesitation, that he simply had to do it.

There were no questions about it.

Share Michael’s story – because some people walk past burning cars. And some people climb inside them. The difference between those two people is everything.

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When the Ship Can’t Dock

Three deaths, a vessel turned away, and what a strange outbreak in the South Atlantic tells us about a much older story.

By Robert W. Malone, MD, MS · Chief Medical Officer, Curativa Bay

This week, I want to start where the news started.

A Dutch-flagged expedition cruise ship called the MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina, more than a month ago, made its planned stops in Antarctica, returned briefly to Ushuaia, sailed north past Saint Helena, and on Sunday anchored off Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, an archipelago off the west coast of Africa. By the time it dropped anchor, three of its passengers were dead. Six more were symptomatic. One British national had been airlifted off and was in critical condition in a Johannesburg ICU. Two crew members were in urgent need of evacuation.

Cape Verde refused permission for the ship to dock.

The official reason — and Cape Verde’s reason was the right one — was the protection of public health. The country’s health authorities sent a medical team aboard to assess the symptomatic crew. They are now monitoring the situation from offshore, and the ship may be redirected to Las Palmas or Tenerife in the Canary Islands, where the docking question will be asked again.

The suspected pathogen is hantavirus. One laboratory-confirmed case so far. Five additional suspected cases. The World Health Organization has been clear that the broader risk to the public is low — hantavirus is rare in humans and, for the strains we usually encounter, is not transmitted easily from person to person. It is most often acquired through contact with rodent excreta.

So why am I, as Chief Medical Officer of a hypochlorous acid company, choosing this story to introduce you to the Curativa Bay Substack?

Because of what the story is actually about — which is not hantavirus.
What the Cruise Ship Is

A cruise ship is a fascinating epidemiological object. It is, in essence, a small floating city — a few hundred or a few thousand people living in close quarters for weeks at a time, eating from shared kitchens, breathing recirculated air, sharing surfaces in narrow corridors, sleeping behind thin walls. When something biological boards that ship, whether it walked on two legs through a customs checkpoint or scurried in on four through a cargo hold, the entire vessel becomes the host environment.

This is why cruise ships have been the location, over the years, of some of the most instructive outbreaks in modern public health. Norovirus on the Diamond Princess. Legionella outbreaks in onboard water systems. Influenza, repeatedly. SARS-CoV-2 famously, on multiple vessels, including the same Diamond Princess that has by now contributed more to our understanding of respiratory pathogen transmission than most universities. The ship turns the population into an unblinded study cohort whether the operators intend it or not.

I want to be careful here. The hantavirus suspected on the Hondius is not, in the ordinary sense, the kind of pathogen we worry about in cruise-ship transmission models. The strains that infect humans most often are acquired through environmental exposure to rodent waste, not by inhaling someone else’s cough. So if you are imagining the Hondius as another Diamond Princess — passengers infecting each other in dining rooms — the analogy is wrong, and Cape Verde’s quarantine decision was about caution and burden of proof rather than about a clear human-to-human chain.

But the Hondius matters for the same reason the Diamond Princess mattered. The ship is the laboratory the world keeps building for itself.

And the fact that we keep building it should make us think hard about what is on board, and what could be on board the next time.
The Pathogens We Actually Worry About

Here is what your epidemiologist friends spend their lunches arguing about. Not the hantavirus on this particular ship. The next outbreak. The one that does spread efficiently, person to person, in close quarters. The one that gets onto a vessel because someone touched a doorknob, or a serving spoon, or a bathroom faucet, and then someone else touched it twenty seconds later.

Norovirus is the classic example. The infectious dose for norovirus is somewhere between ten and a hundred viral particles. Ten. That is a number so small that essentially any contaminated surface in a high-traffic area becomes a transmission vector. Norovirus survives on surfaces for days. It resists most household disinfectants at the concentrations commonly used. It fells cruise ships routinely — every winter, you will read another headline.

Influenza, on a ship, can move through a closed population in days. Respiratory syncytial virus the same. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — MRSA — colonizes surfaces and hands, and on a cruise ship full of older passengers (the demographic skews older for expedition cruises like the Hondius), MRSA infections in wounds or surgical sites can become serious quickly.

And then there is the broader category of communicable disease the public health community calls emerging — the pathogens we do not yet know about, or the ones we know about but have not seen at scale. The next coronavirus. The next H5N1 spillover. The next thing that boards a ship in a port and gets discovered three thousand nautical miles later, when there is no port that will take you.

When a cruise ship ties up at the dock and a passenger steps off, that passenger walks into an airport, into a city, onto a connecting flight to somewhere on the other side of the world. The ship is a node in a much larger network. What gets onboard becomes what gets ashore, and from there, becomes what arrives in your city six weeks later.

This is not catastrophizing. This is just what infectious disease specialists call routine.
Four Conditions, Three Centuries of Unbroken Logic

In every introductory epidemiology course, students learn that for a communicable disease to transmit from one person to another, four things must be true. There must be a pathogen present. The pathogen must be present in sufficient quantity to cause infection — what we call the infectious dose. There must be a route of entry into the new host. And the new host must be susceptible, meaning they do not already have immunity.

If any one of these four conditions fails, transmission fails.

The four-condition model is more than a hundred years old. It has not been overturned. It has not been replaced. It has been refined and quantified, but the underlying logic is the same logic John Snow used in 1854 to take the handle off the Broad Street pump and stop a cholera outbreak in central London. Break one of the four conditions, and the chain collapses.

Disinfection — environmental disinfection, the kind done on doorknobs and dining surfaces and bathroom fixtures and HVAC ductwork — is the most direct intervention against the first two conditions. Reduce the pathogen present. Reduce the quantity below the infectious dose. Break the chain on the surfaces and in the air, before the chain ever reaches a human host.

This is where the rest of the conversation gets interesting. Because for most of the last century, the disinfectants we have used to break that chain have come with their own costs.
The Trouble With Most Disinfectants

Bleach kills almost everything. It also damages tissue, off-gasses chlorine fumes, requires PPE for safe use at concentrations high enough to kill resistant pathogens like norovirus (which requires bleach concentrations as high as 5,000 parts per million to inactivate), and is dangerous to use in occupied spaces.

Quaternary ammonium compounds — the active ingredients in most institutional disinfectant sprays — are positively charged molecules that struggle to penetrate the negatively charged matrix of bacterial biofilms. They are ineffective against non-enveloped viruses like norovirus and parvovirus. They have been associated with occupational asthma in cleaning staff. They leave persistent residue on surfaces. And resistant strains of bacteria have been documented.

Hydrogen peroxide vapor works, but it is a respiratory irritant and requires evacuation of the space being treated.

Alcohol kills most enveloped viruses but evaporates quickly, is flammable, and is largely ineffective against spores and non-enveloped viruses.

Each of these chemistries is useful. None of them is good enough alone. And none of them — none of them — can be safely deployed in occupied spaces while passengers and crew continue going about their business.

This is the gap I want to close.
The Molecule the Body Has Been Using for Six Hundred Million Years

The Curativa Bay Substack is the editorial home of a company built around a single biochemical insight. The molecule the human immune system itself produces to destroy pathogens — hypochlorous acid, or HOCl — is also one of the most powerful broad-spectrum antimicrobial agents we have ever identified. It is produced by your white blood cells, every minute of every day, when those cells encounter a bacterium or a virus or a fungus. The reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme called myeloperoxidase, and the resulting HOCl molecule attacks pathogens through four simultaneous oxidative mechanisms — membrane disruption, enzyme inactivation, nucleic acid oxidation, and biofilm degradation. There is no documented resistance to HOCl in over a century of clinical and industrial study, because there is no single target for evolution to find.

What makes the molecule operationally interesting — and the reason a company exists around it — is that it can now be stabilized outside the body, in solution, at controlled concentrations. It can be sprayed on a wound. It can be fogged into a room. It can be applied to food-contact surfaces, to children’s toys, to door handles in a passenger corridor, to the air handling system of a vessel — all without evacuating the space, without PPE, without leaving toxic residue. After it reacts, it degrades into water and a trace of saline. That is its full byproduct profile.

Norovirus, which requires 5,000 ppm of bleach to kill, is killed by HOCl at concentrations between 160 and 200 ppm. That is a 25- to 31-fold concentration advantage, achieved with a molecule the human body itself produces. The applications across cruise ships, schools, hospitals, food processing, and public-health stockpiles are, in my professional opinion, substantial — and they are precisely the kind of applications where conventional chemistry has fallen short.
Why I’m Writing Here

I came on as Chief Medical Officer of Curativa Bay because, after a long career thinking about countermeasures, I have not encountered another antimicrobial platform that combines this kind of broad-spectrum lethality with this kind of human-tissue safety. The combination is rare in chemistry and common in biology — for good reason. The body has been engineering it for hundreds of millions of years.

The Curativa Bay Substack will be the place where I, and the team here, write regularly about what this molecule means for medicine, public health, biodefense, and the everyday questions of how we protect ourselves and our families from communicable disease. We will cover the science. We will cover the history of antimicrobial chemistry and the failures that brought us to where we are. We will write about wound care, about chronic non-healing infections, about hospital-acquired infections, about pandemic preparedness, about federal stockpiles, about humanitarian deployments. We will write about the institutional and political conversations that shape what countermeasures are available to whom, and at what cost.

We will not catastrophize. The hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius is, in all likelihood, a contained tragedy with a small number of victims and a manageable public-health response. WHO is correct that the broader risk is low. Cape Verde made the right call. The cruise will be redirected. The investigation will continue.

But the Hondius is also, in a smaller way, a flare in the sky. A reminder that ships can carry things across oceans. That ports have the right to say no. That public-health infrastructure depends on the ability to break the chain of transmission before it reaches the next person. And that the chemistry we use to break that chain matters enormously — to the safety of the workers wielding it, to the patients sleeping near it, to the children playing on the surfaces it has touched.

There is a better chemistry for this. Your body has been using it since long before any of us learned to build ships.

I am glad you are here. Subscribe, and stay with us. The next pieces will go deeper — into the four mechanisms HOCl uses to destroy pathogens, into the unsolved problem of biofilm-driven chronic wounds, and into what a serious national biodefense posture would actually look like in 2026.

Thank you for reading.

— Robert W. Malone, MD, MS

Dr. Robert W. Malone is the Chief Medical Officer of Curativa Bay (CuraClean Technologies). He is a physician, scientist, and the inventor of foundational mRNA vaccine technology. He has served on multiple biotechnology and biodefense advisory bodies and writes regularly on pandemic preparedness, medical countermeasures, and public-health policy.

https://open.substack.com/pub/curativabay/p/when-the-ship-cant-dock

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Dr Irving Finkel

Dr Irving Finkel

Dr. Irving Finkel is a curator at the British Museum and one of the leading living experts in cuneiform — the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. He has translated thousands of clay tablets: contracts, prayers, grocery lists, lullabies, magic spells. He is, by all accounts, a man who has earned the right to be hard to surprise.

The tablet returned to him for full study in 2009. He spent four years translating it.

What he found was not a story.

It was a manual.

A how-to guide. The Babylonian god Enki, sympathetic to humanity, was telling a man named Atra-hasis exactly how to build an ark. Materials. Quantities. Dimensions. Methods. Sixty lines of practical Bronze Age shipbuilding instructions, written down somewhere between 1900 and 1700 BCE.

But here was the part that stopped Finkel cold.

The ark was round.

It was a giant Mesopotamian coracle — a basket-shaped river boat, the kind people in southern Iraq still used until the mid-twentieth century. The instructions called for palm-fiber rope, a wooden frame, and hot bitumen to seal it. The tablet specified a base area roughly two-thirds the size of a soccer field, with twenty-foot-high walls.

Then, near the bottom of the tablet, came the line that genuinely shocked the field.

The instruction for what to do with the animals:

“Two by two.”

For centuries, those three words had been considered a unique signature of the Book of Genesis — a phrase imprinted on every Sunday school illustration, every children’s toy, every Hollywood film about Noah.

They turned out to be a thousand years older than the Bible.

Already a fixed phrase in Babylonian when the Hebrew scribes who wrote Genesis were not yet a people.

When Finkel published his translation in 2014 in a book called ’The Ark Before Noah’, the response was immediate and enormous.

But he didn’t stop at the translation.

He wanted to know if the Babylonian instructions actually worked.

So he built the boat.

He brought the tablet’s specifications to a team of traditional shipbuilders in Kerala, India — a place where coracle construction is still practiced — and helped them construct a one-third scale replica. They followed the recipe in the clay. Palm-fiber rope. Wooden ribs. Hot bitumen.

When they put it in the water, it floated.

The Bronze Age engineering held.

Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Hindu — civilizations across thousands of miles and thousands of years all carried different versions of the same memory: that the rains came, that the rivers rose, and that someone built something that floated.

The Ark Tablet is small. It fits in a hand. It is privately owned and rarely on public display. Most people will never see it.

But for four thousand years, in a piece of dried Iraqi clay, the answer to one of the oldest questions we know how to ask sat quietly waiting:

“How do we survive when everything is lost?”

We make something that floats. We bring what we love.

And we tell the story afterward, so the next time, somebody else will know.

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Monet

Monet

A 15-year-old boy in Le Havre, France, was getting rich.

Not from painting. From mockery.

Oscar-Claude Monet sat in cafés sketching brutal caricatures of local bigwigs—exaggerated noses, bloated bellies, pompous expressions. He charged 10 to 20 francs per portrait (about $200 in today’s money) and couldn’t keep up with demand.

“If I’d continued,” he said later, “I’d be a millionaire today.”

He displayed his work in the window of Gravier’s frame shop, where crowds gathered to laugh at the drawings. “Why, that’s so-and-so!” they’d shout, pointing.

Young Monet was bursting with pride. He was somebody. A local celebrity at fifteen.

Then a landscape painter named Eugène Boudin saw the caricatures in that same shop window.

Boudin asked to meet the talented teenager.

Monet blew him off. Repeatedly. The kid had zero interest in landscapes. Caricatures were profitable. Why waste time painting trees?

But Boudin persisted. Finally wore him down.

One summer day in 1858, Boudin dragged the reluctant teenager to Rouelles, a village outside Le Havre, and set up his easel.

Monet watched Boudin paint the sky. Actually paint it—not as a flat blue backdrop, but as a living, breathing, constantly shifting thing.

“Everything painted on the spot,” Boudin told him, “has a strength, a power, a vividness you’ll never find in the studio.”

Monet bought his first paint box that day.

“The next day,” he recalled, “I brought a canvas. I was a painter.”

By 1868, Monet had a problem.

He’d moved to Paris to become a serious artist. He’d fallen in love with Camille Doncieux, a model seven years younger. They’d had a son, Jean.

And Monet was drowning in debt.

The French Academy—the gatekeepers who decided which art mattered—kept rejecting his work. Called it “unfinished.” “Blurry.” Amateurish.

His father refused to support him financially unless he abandoned Camille and their baby.

Monet chose his family. And starved for it.

Creditors seized his paintings. His landlord evicted them. Camille and baby Jean moved to the countryside to stay with friends because Monet couldn’t afford to house them.

June 1868. Monet stood on a bridge over the Seine.

Overwhelmed. Humiliated. Unable to feed his family or sell his work.

He jumped.

The water was cold. His body sank. Then his swimming skills—automatic, involuntary—kicked in.

He surfaced. Survived.

The next day, he wrote to his friend Frédéric Bazille: “I was so upset yesterday that I was stupid enough to hurl myself into the water.“

Stupid. That’s how he described his own suicide attempt. Not tragic. Stupid.

Because nothing had changed. He was still broke. Still rejected. Still failing.

But he kept painting.

Camille became his muse. His ghost in green silk. His lady with a parasol. She appeared in dozens of paintings—elegant, ethereal, impossibly patient with a man who could barely afford canvas.

They married in 1870. Had a second son, Michel, in 1878.

Then Camille got sick.

She was 32 years old. Dying of what doctors suspected was tuberculosis or pelvic cancer. Wasting away in their home in Vétheuil.

Monet sat by her deathbed, watching her fade.

And something horrifying happened.

He started analyzing the colors.

Not consciously. Not deliberately. His artist’s eye—trained through two decades of obsessive observation—wouldn’t turn off.

Blue shadows on her temples. Yellow undertones in her skin. Gray settling into her lips. Purple where blood pooled beneath translucent flesh.

He painted her. Right there. As she died.

Forty years later, he told his friend Georges Clemenceau—former Prime Minister of France—what that moment had been like:

“I found myself staring at her tragic countenance, automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportion of light and shade in the colors that death had imposed on the immobile face. Shades of blue, yellow, gray… Even before the thought occurred to memorize the face that meant so much to me, my first involuntary reflex was to tremble at the shock of the colors. In spite of myself, my reflexes drew me into the unconscious operation that is the daily order of my life.”

He was horrified by his own reflexes. His wife was dying, and he was studying her. Cataloging hues. Recording the way death changed light on skin.

He kept the painting for the rest of his life. Hung it in his bedroom. Never sold it. Never exhibited it.

It was too personal. Too raw. Too honest about what it meant to be an artist who couldn’t turn off the part of his brain that saw everything as color and light.

Seven years earlier—1872—Monet had painted something that would accidentally name an entire movement.

He was in Le Havre, the port town where he’d grown up mocking locals with caricatures. He looked at the harbor at sunrise.

Orange sun bleeding into hazy blue water. Ships barely visible through morning fog.

He painted it fast. Loose brushstrokes. Atmospheric. Unfinished-looking by Academy standards.

When he exhibited it in 1874, he needed a title. He called it Impression, Sunrise.

Art critic Louis Leroy saw it and laughed. Wrote a scathing review mocking the “unfinished” quality. Called Monet and his friends—Renoir, Pissarro, Degas—“Impressionists” as an insult.

The painters loved it. Wore the insult like armor.

They were Impressionists. They weren’t interested in photographic precision. They wanted to capture the “envelope”—the atmosphere, the light between the eye and the object.

A cathedral wasn’t made of stone. It was made of light hitting stone. And the light at 10 AM was fundamentally different from the light at 4 PM.

By the 1880s, Monet’s financial situation stabilized. He moved to Giverny, a village where he could finally afford space.

He became as much gardener as painter. Diverted a river branch to create a water garden. His neighbors complained—thought his “exotic” plants would poison the water supply.

Monet didn’t care. Built a Japanese bridge. Planted water lilies. White and pink blooms floating on reflective water.

For thirty years, he painted those lilies. Obsessively.

He’d set up multiple easels in a row. Paint one canvas for ten minutes. Move to the next as the sun shifted. Back to the first. The light had changed. Everything had changed.

He wasn’t painting flowers. He was painting time.

Then his biology betrayed him.

Late 60s. Monet developed cataracts in both eyes.

The vibrant world he’d spent his entire life capturing started to muddy. Whites turned yellow. Blues became murky green. Reds dulled to brown.

For a man whose entire existence was predicated on seeing color precisely, this was worse than death.

He destroyed canvases in rage. Couldn’t trust what he saw. Couldn’t paint what he couldn’t accurately perceive.

Eventually—terrified—he agreed to surgery. Early 1920s. Primitive by modern standards.

They removed the lens from his right eye entirely. Left him with aphakia—no lens to filter light.

Strange side effect: without that biological filter, Monet started seeing ultraviolet light. Colors humans aren’t supposed to see.

His late water lily paintings shifted into deep violets and spectral blues. He was literally painting a world most people couldn’t perceive.

During World War I, German guns thundering in the distance, Monet began his final masterpiece: the Grandes Décorations.

Massive wraparound canvases of his lily pond. A gift to France to celebrate the war’s end.

He wanted to create “an illusion of an endless whole, of water without horizon or shore.”

Despite failing health—despite losing his second wife Alice and his eldest son Jean—he worked on these enormous paintings until his death in 1926.

Refused to release them until they were perfect. Kept retouching. Layering paint. Never satisfied.

December 5, 1926. Claude Monet died at 86.

His old friend Georges Clemenceau arrived for the funeral. Saw a black shroud draped over the coffin.

Ripped it away. Replaced it with colorful floral cloth.

“No black for Monet!“ he shouted. “Black is not a color!“

Because Monet had spent his entire life proving that even the darkest shadows were actually deep purples, emerald greens, burnt sienna. Nothing was truly black. Everything was light.

Today, the Orangerie in Paris houses his final water lily cycles in oval rooms designed to his specifications.

Walking into those rooms feels like stepping inside someone’s mind. Like experiencing how Monet saw time itself—not as moments, but as flowing, shifting light that never stops changing.

His legacy isn’t just beautiful paintings.

It’s the liberation of the artist’s hand from photographic accuracy.

He proved that how a painter feels about light is just as real as the object itself. Maybe more real.

He paved the way for abstraction. For modernism. For the idea that art doesn’t have to represent reality—it can represent experience.

The boy who started by mocking pompous locals with cruel caricatures ended by teaching the world that the most important thing isn’t what we look at.

It’s the light that allows us to see it.

And that light is always changing. Every second. Every breath.

Monet didn’t just paint water lilies for thirty years because he liked flowers.

He painted them because they gave him an excuse to paint time. Reflection. The way morning light is completely different from afternoon light, which is nothing like evening light.

The same pond. The same lilies. The same bridge.

But never—ever—the same painting.

Because light never stops moving.

And Monet spent 86 years chasing it.

In the late 1980s, a man walked into the British Museum carrying a small piece of brown clay his father had brought home from the Middle East after the war. He didn’t know what it said. One of the world’s leading experts in ancient writing read the first few lines — and felt the room go quiet. It would be twenty years before he got it back long enough to finish reading it. What he found changed everything we thought we knew about the oldest story ever told.

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Saskatchewan, 20 Neighbours – 3 Hours

Saskatchewan, 20 Neighbours - 3 Hours

In a town of 700 people, the mayor knows your name.

He probably knows your phone number too – and in Milestone, Saskatchewan, that turns out to matter enormously.

On August 18, Mayor Jeff Brown received word that one of his constituents – a farmer named Brian Williams – had died after a brief illness. Brian had left behind a wife, three sons, and approximately 640 acres of unharvested durum wheat sitting in the fields.

Jeff Brown is also a farmer. He understood immediately what that meant.

“Mid-August is go time for crops,” he said. “And if a family is in need, the community pulls together.”

He pulled out his phone and sent a text to about ten locals – asking if anyone could help. He didn’t organize a committee. He didn’t wait for a meeting. He sent a message to people he knew, in the direct, practical way of someone who understands that grief doesn’t pause for logistics and wheat doesn’t wait for grief.

Word spread from those ten to everyone who needed to know.

The next morning – the day after Brian Williams died – 20 farmers arrived at the Williams’ farm with their combines.

They didn’t need to be briefed or organized or assigned rows. They knew what needed doing and they did it.

In approximately three hours, they completed a harvest that would have taken the Williams family’s three sons several days to finish on their own. Rows that had been waiting – heavy with the season’s work, representing a year of planting and tending and hoping – were brought in. The grain was secured. The fields were cleared.

And then the farmers went home.

No ceremony. No press release. No expectation of recognition. Just twenty combines on a Saskatchewan morning, doing the work that needed doing for a family that was too broken by grief to do it themselves.

Mayor Brown, reflecting on it afterward, reached for the most honest explanation he had.

“Years ago, when the farming machines weren’t so big, families would get together more to help out like this,” he said. “It’s in our DNA.”

That phrase – it’s in our DNA – is worth sitting with.

Because what he was describing is not a trend or a movement or a viral moment. It is something older and quieter than any of those things. It is the accumulated habit of communities that have always understood, on a practical and physical level, that survival is collective. That a neighbour’s crisis is everyone’s problem. That when the season turns and the work is urgent and a family is too devastated to function, you don’t wait to be asked.

You show up with your equipment and you get the crop in.

Milestone, Saskatchewan has fewer than 700 people. There is no anonymity there. No passing by on the other side of the street and telling yourself someone else will handle it. Everyone is someone’s neighbour. Everyone’s grief is visible. Everyone’s fields are known.

And when a mayor texts ten people and twenty show up – that is not a surprise. That is a community working exactly as it was always designed to work.

The Williams family lost their husband and father in August.

They did not lose their harvest.

Because twenty people in Milestone, Saskatchewan remembered that love, in farming communities, has always been a practical thing – something you do with your hands, something that shows up before breakfast, something measured not in words but in acres completed and hours given and grain safely in.

“It’s in our DNA.”

It always has been. It always should be.

And somewhere in rural Saskatchewan, on a farm that could have been left to struggle through the worst kind of season, three sons and a mother came home to fields that had been tended – by neighbours who never asked for thanks and didn’t wait to be thanked.

That is the whole story.

It is also, somehow, everything a community is supposed to be.

Share this story – because twenty combines on a Saskatchewan morning remind us what it means to actually show up for each other. Not with thoughts. Not with prayers. With combines.

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Cliff Stoll

Cliff Stoll

On his second day at a new position in 1986, an unemployed astronomer was asked to account for a 75-cent bookkeeping discrepancy. Ten months later, he had uncovered a Cold War KGB spy network.
His name was Cliff Stoll. Trained as an astronomer with wild Einstein-style hair and a doctorate in planetary science, he had been working on telescope optics for the future Keck Observatory in Hawaii. When his grant ended, he ran out of astronomy funding. With no research money left, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California — a major U.S. Department of Energy facility — reassigned him to the computer center to keep him employed. Stoll, who barely knew Unix at the time, became a sysadmin there.
On his second day in the new role, his supervisor Dave Cleveland came into his office mentioning a small glitch in the lab’s billing system. The lab charged researchers for every second of computing time. The previous month’s accounts were 75 cents short on a total bill of $2,387. Cleveland casually asked Stoll to determine where the missing 75 cents went from the records of that month system ledger.
Anyone else would have dismissed it as a simple rounding issue. Stoll calculated by hand and discovered the lab’s accounting system did not round numbers properly.
So someone had used nine seconds of computing time without payment. This meant someone somewhere was accessing the lab’s system who was not supposed to be.
The intruder used a username Stoll had never encountered before, only one word.
Hunter.
What followed became one of the strangest solo manhunts in computing history ever recorded.
Stoll soon realized within days that Hunter was not a confused student or a curious acquaintance of an employee. Hunter had superuser privileges — full administrative access to the entire system — gained by exploiting a flaw in GNU Emacs that almost no one on Earth yet knew about. From inside Berkeley’s machine, Hunter used the system as a stepping stone to infiltrate other networks: Air Force bases, Army installations, defense contractors, NASA, MIT, and military command systems across the United States nation.
Stoll, more curious than worried at first, began watching.
He spent one well-known weekend gathering fifty borrowed teleprinters and terminals from co-workers’ empty desks, dragging them into the lab on hand trucks, and physically connecting them to fifty modem lines feeding Berkeley’s computer center, so that when Hunter logged in, Stoll could record every keystroke on paper in real time. He kept the setup running. When printers clattered, he rushed in from across the lab every single time it happened.
He bought a pager. He attached it to his belt. He shared the number with no one except the lab. Whenever the pager rang in the middle of the night, it signaled Hunter was online — and Stoll would jump onto his bicycle and ride at full speed across Berkeley to the lab to observe live as a stranger half a world away moved through American defense systems. He often slept under his desk for nights at a time. His girlfriend, Martha Matthews, brought him sandwiches and hand-knitted sweaters. The unofficial joke in the lab was that Cliff Stoll had become part of furniture.
He went to the FBI. They essentially dismissed him — no significant money was missing, and the lab handled no classified material. He went to the CIA, who were polite but uninterested. He approached the NSA. He contacted the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He spoke to anyone willing to listen. For months, almost no one in the U.S. intelligence community considered a 75-cent discrepancy important enough to act on in any serious investigation at the time then period.
So Stoll continued investigating himself alone.
He noticed the intruder logged in at the same time each day, in patterns suggesting he operated from somewhere in central Europe. He observed a 1200-baud modem connection, slow and unstable. With engineers from the long-distance carrier Tymnet, he traced the connection across the United States — to a defense contractor in Virginia, back across the Atlantic, then through a satellite to West Germany, and finally — astonishingly — to an apartment in Hanover on the edge of the network trace path.
But West German authorities needed him to keep the intruder connected for at least 45 minutes to complete a trace. Hunter usually logged in for only ten or fifteen minutes at any given time period.
So Stoll and his girlfriend Martha devised a solution. One morning in the shower, while discussing ideas, they created a plan they jokingly named “Operation Showerhead.” Stoll built a fake department on the Berkeley network — a fictional office working on Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) — and filled its files with detailed but useless bureaucratic material. He invented an imaginary secretary called “Barbara Sherwin” and stocked her files with hundreds of pages of fabricated reports designed to impress a Cold War spy at the time period.
By most accounts, what he built became the first honeypot in cybersecurity history ever created.
The trap worked. Hunter, eager, stayed on Berkeley’s computer for hour after hour downloading fake SDI files. West German police completed the trace. They knocked on the door of an apartment in Hanover and arrested its occupant — a young West German hacker named Markus Hess, who, along with accomplices Dirk Brzezinski and Peter Carl, had been breaking into roughly 400 U.S. military computers over several years during the Cold War period era then, copying everything they found onto floppy disks, and selling it to a KGB officer code-named “Sergei” through a Soviet trade office in East Berlin.
The total payment they received from the KGB across the entire operation? About $54,000 in cash — and, according to records, some cocaine was involved too.
Hess and his group went to trial in 1990. The Berlin Wall had recently fallen. The Cold War was ending. The judge ruled that the damage to West Germany was minimal. They received suspended sentences of about two years. They smiled when the verdicts were announced. None of them served prison time at that point then.
Cliff Stoll traveled to Germany to testify against them. He returned to Berkeley. He wrote it all up — first as an academic paper titled “Stalking the Wily Hacker” in Communications of the ACM, and later in 1989 as a New York Times bestselling book called The Cuckoo’s Egg, which remains, more than thirty-five years later, required reading in nearly every major cybersecurity course around the world in modern security education today still.
Stoll never stopped being amazed by it all. He returned to making unusual things — most famously, he started a small basement business producing hand-blown Klein bottles, strange mathematically impossible glass shapes with only one surface. He gave lively, slightly chaotic TED talks. He wrote books. He kept his Einstein-style hair. By all accounts from people who met him, he was one of the kindest, gentlest, strangest, most intelligent figures in the early internet era according to those who knew him personally well documented.
He passed away in May 2024, aged 73 years old.
But the lesson he left behind has outlived him will likely always remain.
History does not always pivot on dramatic events. Sometimes it turns on a 75-cent error in a billing report that any ordinary sysadmin, on any normal day, would have ignored instead entirely.
The world’s first cyber-espionage ring was uncovered because one curious astronomer, on his second day at a new job, refused to ignore it.
Pay attention to the small details.
Sometimes they are the only signals anyone ever sends you.
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Failure? A Destination or a Benchmark?

The dictionary has multiple definitions of failure:

1. lack of success.
2. an unsuccessful person or thing.
3. the neglect or omission of expected or required action.
4. a lack or deficiency of a desirable quality.
5. the action or state of not functioning.
6. a sudden cessation of power.
7. the collapse of a business.

The definitions all deliver the impression of a finite conclusion rather than a step in a process. Failure equals being wrong. Being wrong equals death. As a result, failure has an obvious and deeply negative stigma associated with it. Hence most people fear failing.

In fact many people do not even attempt worthwhile projects for fear of failure. This has been commented upon by various motivational speakers as sad and lamentable but is a natural outcome of the way we are taught to think about failure – it is bad and to be avoided.

And it is a lot easier and very simple to say don’t fear failure than it is to spend the time necessary to change our thinking about it. So what is a better way to think of failure and how do we change our thinking about it?

I don’t know how true it is but I have heard that Edison failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb before his success. Imagine if he took his first failure as an end point rather than a new starting point. In fact each failure could otherwise be described as a successful experiment to find out that a particular hypothesis did not work.

I was struck by this when I was doing some pullups in the park with 13 kg of weights on my back. I was doing my third set of 5 repetitions and on the last repetition I could not pull myself up more than 85% of my top range of motion. That was my point of failure. Despite my best effort, I could not pull my body up to get my nose over the bar. I “failed”.

Now, when you are exercising, this is something to aim for. Exercising with good form till you are close to failure (with some capacity left in reserve) builds strength and muscle mass.

At this point I realised every person doing resistance training “fails”. We all hit a point where we are at or close to where we can do no more. We are all “failures”, at different points. Some of us fail after 4 repetitions at 13 kg, as did I. Some of fail after 44 repetitions or with 50 kg. None of us stop training “because we failed”. We recognise it as a benchmark or a measure of progress rather than a destination. A “That’s where I am up to.” viewpoint rather than a “That is my end result.” viewpoint.

Which reminded me of a quote I heard about people who are successful marketers, “They fail fast and they fail often.” They try a lot of things, knowing that many ideas they try will fail and need to be abandoned quickly before wasting too much money on them. By doing that many times and quickly, they sooner or later and without too much wasted money, find that which works and can then do lots of that to huge success.

These top marketers know full well that a fear of failure will not lead to success.

They know that in marketing, as in exercising, it is very easy and natural to view failure as a marker, a peg in the board. A “This is where I am up to”.

What if we started doing that in other spheres of activity? What if every time we thought of something and got the negative thought come in about failing, we just looked at it and thought, “That’s only to be expected. Nothing unusual here. Any time I fail it is just another step toward the ultimate success.”

 

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They Tortured Thousands

(Tom: If you ever wonder why I am SO against psychiatry, this will give you just a fraction of the reason. Not even a big fraction. Maybe one percent of the data I have seen on it over the years.

Psychiatry was behind Hitler’s genocide of the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, behind the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, behind the drugging of children with ‘speed’ for a fictitious ADHD diagnosis, the list is long and odious.)

They Tortured Thousands

1953. The Cold War was hot. The CIA was paranoid. American POWs had come back from Korea praising communism. Confessing to crimes they didn’t commit.
The CIA believed the Soviets had cracked it. Mind control. Brainwashing. A way to rewrite a human being.
America needed it too. Or they’d lose the war before it started.
Allen Dulles gave a speech at Princeton. Called it “brain warfare.” Said the Soviets were doing it. Never mentioned America was about to do it first.
On April 13, 1953, Dulles approved Project MKUltra.
In charge: Sidney Gottlieb. Chemist. PhD from Caltech. Club foot. Stutterer. Drank goat’s milk. Grew Christmas trees on his farm.
Looked like a gentle eccentric. Was the most dangerous man in American intelligence.
They called him the Black Sorcerer. He designed poisoned cigars for Castro. Poisoned handkerchiefs. Exploding seashells. Toothpaste laced with toxins.
MKUltra was his project. His vision. His playground.
The goal was simple. Find a drug that could control minds. Erase memories. Force confessions. Create the perfect spy. The perfect assassin.
They tried everything.
LSD. Mescaline. Heroin. Barbiturates. Scopolamine. Electroshock. Sensory deprivation. Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation for weeks. Verbal abuse. Sexual abuse. Isolation chambers.
149 subprojects. Funneled through fake foundations. Front companies. So universities wouldn’t know they were taking CIA money.
Over 80 institutions. 185 researchers. Harvard. Stanford. Columbia. Johns Hopkins.
None of them told the subjects what was happening. Most subjects didn’t know they were subjects.
Here’s what they did.
They dosed prisoners. Drug addicts in a federal facility in Kentucky got LSD for 77 straight days. Black inmates. Given LSD continuously for over two months.
Just to see what would happen.
They dosed mental patients. Terminal cancer patients. Soldiers. Students who signed up for “paid research.”
They dosed each other. CIA agents at a 1953 work retreat had their drinks spiked. No warning. Just dosed.
One of them was Frank Olson. 43 years old. Army scientist. Biological weapons expert.
The LSD broke him. He couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t concentrate. Told his wife: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Nine days after being dosed, Frank Olson went through a 10th-floor hotel window. November 28, 1953.
The CIA said suicide. Said the drugs made him do it.
In 1994, his son had the body exhumed. Forensic pathologist found a hematoma above the left eye. No glass in his hair. Injuries inconsistent with falling through a window.
The medical examiner changed the ruling. Homicide.
Frank Olson didn’t jump. Someone hit him. Then threw him out the window.
Because he knew too much. And was about to talk.
But Olson was just the famous one.
Operation Midnight Climax. Subproject 3.
The CIA rented apartments in San Francisco and New York. Set them up as safehouses. Hired prostitutes. Paid them $100 a night.
The prostitutes brought men back to the apartments. Dosed their drinks with LSD. Random targets. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. Anyone they could get.
Behind a two-way mirror sat CIA agents. Drinking martinis. Watching. Taking notes.
The operation ran ten years. Hundreds of victims. All dosed without consent. All watched like animals.
The man in charge was George Hunter White. Federal narcotics agent. Installed a portable toilet behind the mirror so he never had to leave.
He wrote a letter to Gottlieb years later:
“I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”
That’s what this was. Fun. For the people running it.
Meanwhile, in Montreal.
Dr. Ewen Cameron ran the Allan Memorial Institute. Former president of the World Psychiatric Association.
The CIA funded him. Funneled money through a front foundation.
Cameron called his experiments “psychic driving.” He put patients in drug-induced comas. Up to 86 days at a time.
While they slept, he played tape loops. Phrases repeated tens of thousands of times. Designed to break their minds.
Then “depatterning.” Massive doses of electroshock. 30 to 40 times the normal amount. Combined with LSD. PCP. Barbiturates.
The goal: erase the personality completely. Rebuild it from scratch.
It didn’t work. He destroyed them instead.
Patients came out unable to read. Unable to remember their children. Unable to control basic bodily functions. Adults reduced to infant states.
These were people who’d gone to him for anxiety. Mild depression. Normal disorders.
They left broken. Many never recovered.
Cameron died in 1967. Never prosecuted. Obituary praised his contributions to psychiatry.
The program kept going. Year after year. Victim after victim.
Some survivors figured out what had happened. Most didn’t. Most went to their graves thinking they’d gone crazy on their own.
Not knowing a government chemist had broken their minds for an experiment that never worked.
Because it didn’t work.
After 20 years and millions of dollars, the CIA never created a Manchurian Candidate. Never found a truth serum. Never figured out mind control.
All they did was torture people for nothing.
In 1973, Richard Helms knew the scandal was coming. Watergate had broken. Congress was starting to look.
Helms was CIA Director. He ordered Gottlieb to destroy every MKUltra file.
They shredded everything. Every experiment. Every subject. Every name. Gone.
They thought they’d gotten away with it.
Then in 1977, a CIA clerk found 20,000 pages. Misfiled under financial records. Missed the shredder.
Those pages became the Church Committee hearings. America learned about MKUltra for the first time.
Over 30 universities involved. Covert drug tests on unwitting citizens. At every social level. High and low.
Sidney Gottlieb was called to testify. Claimed he didn’t remember. Couldn’t recall specifics.
No one went to prison. Not Gottlieb. Not Helms. Not Dulles. Not Cameron. Not White.
Gottlieb retired to Virginia. Grew organic vegetables. Volunteered at a hospice. Practiced folk dancing.
Died in 1999. Age 80. In his own bed. Peacefully.
The victims didn’t get that.
Thousands of Americans and Canadians used as test subjects. Without consent. Without knowledge. Without follow-up care.
Many were poor. Many were incarcerated. Many were mentally ill. Many were minorities.
Chosen because no one would believe them. No one would defend them. No one would miss them.
Some killed themselves. Some spent years in mental hospitals. Some never recovered.
We will never know how many. The files are gone. Gottlieb burned them.
Here’s what makes this unforgivable.
This wasn’t a foreign enemy. Wasn’t a rogue agent. This was official US policy. Approved at the highest levels. Funded with taxpayer money.
American citizens. Drugged. Raped. Tortured. Driven mad. By their own government. For nothing.
And the men who did it faced no consequences. No prison. No disgrace. Died rich. Died respected.
The victims died screaming. In bedrooms and mental wards and hotel windows. Their names never said out loud.
MKUltra wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was real. It happened. Proven in Senate hearings. The CIA admitted it. The President apologized.
And almost no one was punished.
The United States government ran a torture program against its own people for 20 years.
Destroyed the evidence.
Got away with it.
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If You Fail To Plan You Are Planning To Fail II

I heard the title of this article many moons ago now. In fact, about 50 years ago. That’s a half a century! Sheesh! Time flies when you’re having fun!

And that’s the trouble. We start out life thinking we have plenty of time. Which we do. But life is chock-a-block full of distractions and we get busy working to buy groceries and pay rent, going out socialising to have fun and to find a mate, then saving for a home, raising a family and before we know it, life is lived and we are looking at grown up grand children wondering, “Where did the time go?”

Well, it went on living. But was it the life we would have chosen if we knew then what we know now? Would we have done things differently if we could have known what was coming?

One way to know what will be the result of our actions is to be widely read, especially of people who research causes and effects, what causes generate what effects.

You may have heard the quote from Will Rogers, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

IMHO you and I cannot live long enough to learn all we need to by our own observation and experience. School is supposed to be a shortcut so we can acquire the wisdom and good judgement from a lot of other people’s experience without having to go through a lot of pain from our own inexperienced poor judgement.

All too often, when school stops, so does many people’s intensive learning. Truthfully, many people’s intensive learning stops even prior to leaving school but the failings of the education system are a story for another post.

Probably the first skill that needs to be acquired in order to learn is the ability to face the subject without flinching away from it. In one subject I have studied extensively that ability is called the ability to confront – to face without flinching.

Most people do not want to be uncomfortable. I have read that most people would rather live a comfortable lie than live an uncomfortable truth.

I have also read people say, “Once you see something you cannot unsee it.”

So if seeing something makes a person uncomfortable then the fear of what one might see and learn has the effect of reducing their willingness to look.

Obviously the answer is to gradiently increase a person’s ability to comfortably confront what is really there until they arrive at a point where they can confront anything without flinching away from it. This is a high ability indeed!

If that interests you, contact me!