Author: TomsWrite

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The companies making 72 vaccines — Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi (and GSK) — are convicted serial felons

RFK Jr On Vaccines

“The companies making 72 vaccines — Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi (and GSK) — are convicted serial felons.” ~RFK Jr “They’ve paid $35 BILLION in fines in the last decade alone for falsifying science, defrauding regulators & lying to doctors.” Merck’s Vioxx scandal: They knew it caused heart attacks and **calculated** the deaths vs. profit. Result: **120,000–500,000 Americans dead**. Penalty: **$7 billion fine**. No jail time. Yet since 1986, vaccine makers have **total legal immunity** — zero lawsuits allowed, no matter how harmful the product. Why do we give proven criminals absolute protection with our children’s health?

https://x.com/ValerieAnne1970/status/2046197188343287962?s=20

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Gout Gout

Gout Gout

His name is Gout Gout. Remember it.
On April 12, 2026, at the Australian Athletics Championships in Sydney, an 18-year-old son of South Sudanese refugees lined up in lane four for the 200 metre final. He stood among some of the fastest men his country had ever produced. The crowd leaned forward. And when the gun went off, something historic happened.
Gout Gout crossed the finish line in 19.67 seconds.
He became the first Australian in history to break the 20-second barrier under legal conditions. He shattered his own national record of 20.02. He beat the previous world under-20 record of 19.69, set by American Erriyon Knighton just four years ago. And most stunning of all, he ran faster than Usain Bolt ever did before turning 19. Bolt, the greatest sprinter the world has ever seen, ran 19.93 at the same age. Gout ran 0.26 seconds faster.
Let that sink in.
Born in Ipswich, Queensland, Gout is one of seven children. His parents, Bona and Monica, fled South Sudan and built a new life in Australia just two years before he was born. The family name was originally pronounced differently but was misspelled during transliteration from Arabic when they resettled. His father has joked about changing the spelling because of its unintended medical meaning. But Gout has made sure the name now means something very different around the world.
He started turning heads at 14, when he ran 100 metres in 10.57 seconds. At 15, he broke the Australian under-18 200 metre record. At 16, he clocked 20.04 seconds, faster than any 16-year-old in history, beating a record Usain Bolt himself had held. And at 18, he delivered the race that has forever written his name into athletics history.
After the race, Gout stood calmly, almost disbelieving, as the stadium erupted. “This is what I’ve been waiting for,” he said. “I wrote down 19.75 before the race, and for the past week I’ve been telling myself I’m running 19.75. And obviously, 19.67, you’ve got to love it.”
But here is what makes his story even more remarkable. Gout has not yet broken Bolt’s all-time world record of 19.19. That mountain is still there, still waiting. But Bolt himself did not run 19.67 until he was 21 years old, almost three full years older than Gout is now.
When someone starts outperforming legends at the same age, history tells us something extraordinary is coming. That is exactly how Bolt’s own story began. And Tiger Woods. And Michael Phelps. Greatness always announces itself early, usually in a quiet stadium, usually before the world is paying full attention.
Gout’s run will now go to World Athletics for official ratification, a process that can take months. But the stopwatch does not lie. The tailwind was legal. The timing was clean. And the teenager from Ipswich stood on the track in Sydney holding something very few athletes ever touch in their lives. A world record, earned by his own two legs, before his career has even truly begun.
His next big challenge is already waiting. He will face reigning 200 metre Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo at the Oslo Diamond League, his professional debut at that level. The world will be watching.
Because moments like this do not come often. A teenager breaks a world record, beats a legend’s time at the same age, and stands quietly at the starting line as if this is only the beginning.
Because for Gout Gout, it really is.
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Xuanzang

Xuanzang

The gates of Chang’an closed behind him with a soft, final thud.
It was 629 AD.
The young monk, Xuanzang, was now an outlaw.
He had just violated a direct imperial decree. The Tang Emperor Taizong had forbidden all travel beyond the western frontiers.
The punishment for disobedience was severe.
But Xuanzang had made his choice. He walked west, alone, into the gathering dusk.
His goal was not gold or glory.
It was paper.
Specifically, the original words of the Buddha, written on palm leaves in a language he had never fully mastered.
The Buddhist scriptures available in China were a mess. They were incomplete, translated by different hands over centuries, and full of contradictions.
Monks argued over the true meaning of the teachings. Xuanzang’s soul burned with a single question: what did the Buddha actually say?
He believed the answer lay 10,000 miles away.
In India.
His journey would become one of the most epic solo treks in human history.
He faced the Gobi Desert first.
It was a sea of bleached bones and shifting dunes. The sun was a hammer.
The wind was a blade. He nearly died of thirst when he spilled his entire water skin.
For five days and four nights, he stumbled forward without a single drop.
He began to see mirages of armies and oases. He prayed to the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
A sudden cool breeze revived him, guiding him to a patch of grass with a hidden spring.
He survived.
Next were the Pamir Mountains, the roof of the world.
Paths were mere goat trails carved into cliffs of ice. He inched across rope bridges that swung wildly over thousand-foot gorges.
The cold bit through his robes. He slept in caves, surrounded by the groans of glaciers.
He passed through warring kingdoms and bandit-infested valleys.
He was captured more than once. Robbers held knives to his throat, demanding his meager possessions.
He would sit calmly and begin to lecture them on karma and compassion. Astonished, they often let him go.
After four grueling years, he finally crossed into India.
He had reached the land of the Buddha.
But his quest was only half complete.
He spent the next decade traveling across the subcontinent. He visited every sacred site.
He debated the greatest scholars in their own tongue. He mastered Sanskrit until he spoke it better than many native priests.
His ultimate destination was Nalanda University.
It was the Oxford of the ancient world.
A sprawling monastic city of 10,000 students and 2,000 teachers. Libraries stretched to the horizon.
The debates were legendary, intellectual combat where the defeated could be forced to convert.
Xuanzang did not just study there.
He conquered.
He engaged in weeks-long philosophical duels with the masters of eighteen different schools of thought. He defended his interpretations with such flawless logic and scriptural knowledge that he was declared a *mahapandita*—a great scholar.
The head of Nalanda, the venerable Silabhadra, personally tutored him.
Xuanzang’s reputation soared. Indian kings showered him with gold, elephants, and titles.
He refused them all.
He had only one treasure in mind.
Original texts.
He spent years meticulously copying them. Sutras, commentaries, treatises.
He filled crate after crate. He also collected precious relics and hundreds of statues.
In 643 AD, laden with knowledge, he knew it was time to go home.
The journey back was just as perilous.
Bandits attacked his caravan on the Indus River. The boat capsized.
Dozens of manuscripts were lost to the muddy waters. Xuanzang wept on the riverbank, but he pressed on.
He chose a different, even more treacherous route back through the southern deserts to avoid the northern passes he’d already conquered.
He was testing fate one last time.
Seventeen years after he had slipped out of Chang’an, a weathered figure approached the city walls.
It was 645 AD.
He was 43 years old.
He was leading a train of twenty-two horses, all staggering under the weight of his cargo.
The news raced through the capital.
The outlaw monk had returned.
And he had brought back 657 bundles of sacred texts.
Emperor Taizong, the same emperor who had forbidden his departure, now sent a royal escort to greet him. The city erupted in celebration.
Thousands lined the streets to see the man who had walked to the edge of the world and back.
The Emperor asked him to write an account of everything he had seen.
Xuanzang produced the ‘Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty.’ It was a masterpiece of geography, ethnography, and politics. For centuries, it would be the most accurate map the Chinese had of India and Central Asia.
Then, he turned to his life’s work.
Translation.
He assembled a team of the brightest scholars in the empire. He worked day and night for nineteen years.
He translated over 1,300 chapters of scripture, bringing clarity to Chinese Buddhism for generations to come.
He worked until his brush fell from his fingers.
He died in 664 AD, surrounded by the towering stacks of paper that were his true legacy.
He had defied an empire, crossed deserts of death, scaled mountains of ice, out-debated the greatest minds of his age, and carried a continent’s wisdom home on his back.
All because he needed to know the truth.
He walked so that millions could read.
Sources: The British Museum / Dunhuang Research Academy / Records of the Tang Dynasty (舊唐書)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Henry Babbage

Henry Babbage

In 1910, the floor of a London workshop finally stopped shaking. After thirty years of grinding metal and late nights, the machine was done.
It stood over nearly three feet high and weighed huge amounts of brass and iron. It looked less like a calculator and more like a steam engine designed to crush rocks.
This was not a hobby project. This was a matter of family honor.
Decades earlier, in London, a genius named Charles Babbage had a vision. He designed the “Analytical Engine,” a device that would use punch cards to solve math problems.
He secured government funding, which is usually where the trouble starts. The project burned through cash, the engineers argued over specifications, and the government eventually pulled the plug in 1842.
Charles died in 1871, a bitter man. The world saw him as a failure who wasted public money on a pipe dream. His blueprints were gathering dust, dismissed as the ramblings of a mad scientist.
But his son, Henry Prevost Babbage, refused to let the story end there.
Henry wasn’t just a dutiful son; he was a skilled man who understood the value of hard work and construction. He knew the designs were sound.
In the 1880s, Henry went into retirement, but he didn’t go fishing. He went to work.
He took his father’s chaotic drawings and started building. He focused on the “Mill”—the processing unit—and a printing mechanism.
This was serious heavy industry. He had to machine thouands of custom brass gears. There were no computer-aided designs, just hand tools and patience.
For thirty years, he labored in obscurity. He funded the construction himself, investing his own time and resources when the experts said it was impossible.
Finally, in 1910, he fired it up. The gears turned. The pistons pumped. The immense machine calculated multiples of Pi and printed them out on paper coils.
It wasn’t perfect. There were mistakes in the math. It wasn’t fully programmable like the computers we have today.
But it worked.
He proved the theory was solid. He proved the mechanics were viable. He proved his father was right.
It was a vindication of a lifetime of struggle. Henry didn’t build it to get rich or famous. He built it to clear his family name and show that the investment of intellect wasn’t in vain.
Today, that brass beast sits in a museum. It reminds us that sometimes the most advanced technology starts with a wrench, a blueprint, and a son who won’t quit.
When Henry finished the machine, he didn’t try to hide its flaws. The device calculated multiples of Pi, but it made errors along the way. It was a mechanical beast, subject to friction and wear, just like any engine.
Henry candidly noted the mistakes in the printed results. He wasn’t trying to sell a perfect product; he was offering a proof of concept. Even with the errors, the fact that a pile of brass gears could perform complex algebra in 1910 was nothing short of miraculous. It remains a testament to Victorian engineering and sheer stubbornness.
Sources: Science Museum London / The Babbage Papers
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Wolverine Guarding Den

Wolverine Guarding Den

“In March 1972, during a blizzard that killed eleven people in interior Alaska, a trapper found a wolverine den that contained something impossible: a wolverine, a mother cat, and three kittens. Alive. Together. The wolverine — the most aggressive pound-for-pound predator in North America — had dug a snow cave large enough for all five of them. The cat was nursing. The wolverine was lying two feet away, facing the entrance, blocking the wind with its body.”
Walt Buchanan, fifty-seven, had been trapping in the Brooks Range of interior Alaska for thirty-one years. He had caught wolverines, skinned wolverines, and respected wolverines more than any other animal in the north. A wolverine will face down a grizzly bear over a carcass. It will travel forty miles in a day through waist-deep snow. It has jaws that can crush frozen bone. It fears nothing.
In March 1972, a blizzard dropped four feet of snow in thirty-six hours across the interior. Temperatures hit -52°F with wind chill. Eleven people died.
On March 14, two days after the blizzard ended, Walt was checking his trap line along a frozen creek north of Wiseman when he noticed a hole in a snowbank — not a natural formation, but a dug opening. The entrance was approximately eighteen inches wide, angled downward. The snow around it was packed hard. Claw marks were visible on the inner surface — large, deep, spaced wide. Wolverine.
Walt had found wolverine dens before. He approached with caution — a cornered wolverine is one of the most dangerous encounters in the north. He shone his flashlight into the entrance.
What he saw made him back away, sit down in the snow, and — as he told the story for the rest of his life — “try to figure out if the cold had finally gotten to my brain.”
The den was approximately five feet deep and three feet wide — a classic wolverine snow cave, dug with precision into a packed drift. The floor was lined with spruce boughs — wolverines sometimes drag vegetation into their dens for insulation.
Against the back wall, on a bed of spruce boughs, was a grey tabby cat. On her side. Nursing three kittens. Approximately two weeks old. All alive. All warm.
Two feet from the cat, between her and the den entrance, a wolverine lay flat on its belly. A large male, maybe thirty-five pounds. It was facing the entrance. Its body was positioned to completely block the eighteen-inch opening — no wind could reach past it. Its fur was frosted. Snow had accumulated on its back. It had been lying there, motionless, as a living door.
The wolverine looked at Walt. Walt looked at the wolverine. The wolverine did not growl. It did not charge. It looked at him with small dark eyes and then looked back at the entrance. Guarding.
Walt backed away. He returned the next day with a camera — a Kodak Instamatic that produced small, square photographs. He took four pictures from the den entrance before the wolverine’s posture shifted and he decided discretion was the better part of wildlife photography.
The photographs — grainy, flash-lit, slightly blurred — show the interior of a snow cave. In the back: a cat and kittens on spruce boughs. In the foreground: the dark bulk of a wolverine, facing the camera, eyes reflecting the flash.
Walt monitored the den for nine days. On the ninth day, the cat and kittens were gone — their tracks led south, toward a mining camp three miles away where feral cats were known to live. The wolverine was gone too — its tracks led north, into the Range.
The cat had used the wolverine’s den for shelter during the blizzard. Or the wolverine had dug the den and allowed the cat to stay. Or something else entirely had occurred that neither Walt nor anyone who heard the story could explain.
Dr. Audrey Magoun, a wolverine researcher who spent twenty years studying the species in Alaska, heard Walt’s account in 1988. She examined his photographs and confirmed the den structure was consistent with wolverine construction. She wrote in a personal note: “Wolverines are solitary, aggressive, and territorial. They do not share dens. They certainly do not share dens with potential prey. Walt’s photographs appear to show a wolverine acting as a windbreak for a nursing cat in a den it constructed. I have no behavioral explanation for this. The only framework that approaches it is the denning behavior wolverines exhibit with their own kits — in which the male sometimes guards the den entrance while the female nurses inside. If this wolverine was exhibiting paternal guarding behavior toward a non-wolverine family, then we need to significantly expand our understanding of wolverine social cognition.”
Walt died in 1994. His four photographs are in a shoebox in his nephew’s house in Fairbanks. They have never been published.
His nephew says Walt told the story the same way every time, and always ended with the same line:
“That wolverine was the meanest animal in Alaska. I’ve seen them fight wolves, fight bears, fight everything. But that night, in that hole in the snow, he wasn’t fighting anything. He was keeping a door closed so three kittens could stay warm. You tell me what that means. Because I’ve had fifty years to think about it and I still don’t know.”
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Billy Joel – Piano Man

Billy Joel - Piano Man

(Tom: I find it of immense interest how much success comes back to being present and being able to observe.)
The year was 1972 and a young musician found himself trapped in a golden cage. Billy Joel did not exist in the real world. He was a ghost behind a grand piano in a dim Los Angeles lounge called the Executive Room. Beneath the stage lights he looked like just another journeyman piano player but the man behind the keys was actually a burgeoning superstar named Billy Joel.
His debut album had suffered from a mastering error that made him sound like a chipmunk. Even worse he had signed a predatory contract that effectively owned his life. To escape the legal sharks he fled New York for the West Coast. Because of a massive lawsuit he was legally forbidden from recording or performing under his own name. He was trapped hiding in plain sight at a cocktail bar.
The air in the Executive Room smelled of stale cigarettes and cheap gin. For six months he sat on that stool and watched the human parade pass by. He was not just playing for tips. He was observing. He watched the lonely businessmen and the broken dreamers who used the bar as a sanctuary from their own failures. He realized that everyone there was searching for a way to forget the weight of the world.
He began to mentally document the regulars. There was the bartender who claimed he could have been a movie star if he just had the right break. There was the real estate novelist who couldn’t finish a page and the lonely sailor who was just passing through. They were all real people trapped in their own mundane rhythms and they had no idea they were sitting next to a future icon.
When the legal dust finally settled he took those sketches of human desperation and turned them into a masterpiece. He realized that while he couldn’t record he had accidentally written the ultimate anthem for the working class. That smoke filled room became the birthplace of a legend. This is how a legal nightmare gave us the greatest singalong in music history.
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Pamela and Anil Malhotra

Pamela and Anil Malhotra

The land broker didn’t sugarcoat it.
“If you’re looking for returns,” he said, gesturing across 55 acres of eroded, tree-stripped earth in the hills of Karnataka, “this won’t give you any.”
Pamela and Anil Malhotra looked at each other and smiled.
Returns weren’t what they were after.
They had given up a lot to stand on that exhausted piece of land in 1991. A comfortable home in Hawaii. A life many people spend their entire careers dreaming of. Friends thought they had lost their minds. Maybe they had. But if so, it was the most deliberate, purposeful madness imaginable.
They had been saving for this moment for years — literally living off one salary while banking the other, commission by commission, with one goal in mind. Not retirement. Not investment property.
A forest.
Their own forest.
Pamela had grown up on a small American farm, spending her childhood barefoot in the woods, talking to animals before she knew it wasn’t practical. Anil had run an Indian restaurant in New Jersey — not the obvious profile of a man who would one day dedicate his life to rewilding rainforest. But when they met, they discovered they shared the same seemingly impossible dream.
They wanted to give the Earth something back.
Their honeymoon in Hawaii deepened that conviction. The islands were breathtaking — until they returned from one trip to find beloved mountain landscapes stripped away by mining operations. Something shifted permanently in both of them that day. Beauty, they understood, was fragile. And no one was protecting it seriously enough.
When Anil’s father passed away and they traveled to India for the funeral, the scale of deforestation they witnessed cemented their decision. They would find damaged land. And they would bring it back.
The search took years.
They explored Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka — property after property, disappointment after disappointment. Then someone suggested Kodagu, a district nestled in the Western Ghats, one of the planet’s most significant biodiversity regions, a mountain range so ecologically rich it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The land they found there was, by any practical measure, worthless.
Decades of intensive cardamom and coffee cultivation had stripped away the native tree cover. The soil was depleted. Springs had dried up. The wildlife was gone. What remained was quiet in the worst possible way — the silence of a landscape that had forgotten how to be alive.
Pamela and Anil bought it immediately.
What they did next is what separates their story from ordinary idealism.
They didn’t arrive with bulldozers or grand engineering schemes. They didn’t import exotic species or redesign the landscape according to human preference.
They simply… let the land remember what it was.
They planted native species — rosewood, wild fig, jackfruit, teak — in the places that needed the most help. Everywhere else, they protected the soil, removed pressures, and waited. They understood something that takes most people a lifetime to learn: nature doesn’t need to be controlled. It needs to be trusted.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the land responded.
First came the insects. Then the birds — dozens of species, then hundreds. Small mammals appeared at the forest edges. Deer moved through the undergrowth. And then, years into their patient work, the camera traps began capturing something that made researchers stop and stare: Bengal tigers. Leopards. Asian elephants using the land as a migration corridor between surrounding protected reserves.
A wasteland had become a wildlife highway.
As the forest grew, so did their mission.
They realized early that conservation doesn’t stop at property lines. When neighboring farmers — often buried in debt, unable to make loan payments — faced losing their land to banks, the Malhotras stepped in. They purchased those properties at fair prices, giving struggling families financial relief while expanding the sanctuary’s boundaries.
It was, quietly, one of the most elegant solutions in modern conservation: economic rescue and ecological restoration, achieved simultaneously, one desperate farmer and one exhausted field at a time.
The 55 acres became 100. Then 200. Then 300 acres of breathing, thriving, self-sustaining rainforest.
Today, SAI Sanctuary — Save Animals Initiative — is officially recognized as India’s only private wildlife sanctuary. It runs entirely off-grid on solar panels, micro-windmills, and biogas. Springs that had been dry for decades now flow year-round. The forest hosts over 350 species of birds and 24 species of mammals. The temperature inside the sanctuary is measurably cooler than the surrounding landscape.
Scientists travel from around the world to study what Pamela and Anil built. Schools send children to learn inside it. Injured and rescued animals are rehabilitated and released into it.
In 2017, the President of India awarded Pamela the Nari Shakti Puraskar — the country’s highest civilian honor for women — in recognition of her life’s work.
They never had children. It was a choice they made early and deliberately.
What they wanted instead was a forest.
In November 2021, Dr. Anil Kumar Malhotra passed away at the age of 80. He left behind no financial empire, no political legacy, no famous invention.
He left behind 300 acres of living rainforest that didn’t exist when he arrived.
Pamela still lives there — in the heart of the sanctuary, in an eco-friendly home surrounded by the trees they planted together, listening each morning to a forest that has learned, after decades of patient love, to sing again.
The land broker was right, of course.
It never gave them any returns.
It gave them something better: proof that two ordinary people, with no special power except commitment and patience, can quite literally bring a dead forest back to life.
If they could do that with 55 acres of abandoned wasteland — imagine what’s possible when more of us decide that the Earth deserves something back.
Their forest breathes today as the answer to everyone who ever said it couldn’t be done.
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Katheryn Winnick

Katheryn Winnick

She didn’t audition for the role of warrior. She had been living it since she was seven years old.
Katheryn Winnick grew up in a Ukrainian-Canadian household where discipline wasn’t a suggestion — it was the language the family spoke. She began training in martial arts at age seven, and by the time she was thirteen, she had earned her first black belt. Not a participation ribbon. A black belt. Earned through thousands of repetitions, early mornings, and the kind of quiet ferocity that doesn’t announce itself.
Then, at sixteen, she did something that stopped people in their tracks.
While most teenagers were figuring out who they were, Katheryn opened WIN KAI — her own martial arts school in Toronto. She stepped onto that mat and taught adults twice her age, commanding respect not through status or seniority, but through undeniable mastery. By the time she turned twenty-one, she had grown WIN KAI into three schools across Toronto and New York, earned a 3rd-degree black belt in Taekwondo and a 3rd-degree in Karate, and became a certified licensed bodyguard. She also completed a university degree in Kinesiology — because she didn’t just want to move with power; she wanted to understand it scientifically.
She entered Hollywood the same way she entered the dojo: through the side door, doing the work.
She began teaching martial arts and self-defense to actors on film sets — watching, learning the industry from the inside, studying the camera the way she had once studied her opponents. No shortcuts. No connections handed to her. Just a woman with an extraordinary skillset and the patience to wait for the right moment.
That moment came in 2013.
When the creators of Vikings were casting Lagertha — a legendary Norse shieldmaiden — they needed an actress who could embody centuries of warrior instinct. Katheryn didn’t simulate that instinct. She was it. Every strike, every stance, every battle scene carried authenticity that no boot camp could manufacture, because her body had been learning this language for over two decades. She wasn’t an actress pretending to be a warrior. She was a warrior who had quietly studied how to act.
But the story doesn’t end on a screen.
Today, Katheryn Winnick directs, produces, and leads. She made her directorial debut on the final season of Vikings. She founded The Winnick Foundation, a humanitarian organization supporting women and children in need around the world — with a special focus on Ukraine, a country whose spirit she has carried with her since childhood.
Her life is not a story about talent. Talent is common. It is a story about what happens when someone chooses to become genuinely, deeply prepared — and then simply waits for the world to catch up.
The world saw Lagertha in 2013. Katheryn had been ready since 1993.
Real authority was never given to her. She forged it — one repetition at a time.