Mats Järlström
In 2017, a highly determined Swedish electrical engineer named Mats Järlström successfully fought an absolutely massive legal and mathematical battle against the entire state of Oregon, fundamentally changing modern traffic laws.
Järlström’s wife had previously received a highly expensive automated red-light camera ticket for driving through a specific intersection. Instead of simply paying the annoying fine, he actively mathematically analyzed the intersection and discovered that the timing of the yellow light was fundamentally, scientifically flawed and entirely too short for drivers making right-hand turns.
When he publicly presented his highly detailed mathematical research to the state engineering board, they actively fined him five hundred dollars for practicing engineering without a local license and tried to silence him.
Refusing to back down, he filed a massive federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that basic mathematical physics cannot be legally censored.
A federal judge completely agreed with him, striking down the state's fine and forcing the traffic light formulas to be officially updated nationwide.
His brilliant victory proved that sheer mathematical stubbornness can completely defeat a corrupt system.
The Need For Freedom
Christoph Meili and the Ledgers
(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.
Janette Fennell
Her name was Janette Fennell. And she was 41 years old when it happened.
Janette had spent her career as a marketing and sales executive in San Francisco – sharp, driven, the kind of person who understood how systems worked and how to move people. In 1995, she had taken a break from all of that to raise her firstborn son, Alex. He was 9 months old.
He had been wearing a pumpkin outfit that night because it was Halloween.
29 October 1995. San Francisco. Just before midnight.
Janette and her husband pull into the garage of their home after dinner at a friend’s house. Alex is asleep in the backseat. The night is ordinary in every way.
Then 2 men in Halloween masks come out of the dark, and they are holding guns.
In the space of seconds, the Fennells are forced out of the car and into the trunk. She hears the lid close. She hears the engine start. She does not know where her son is.
The car backs out of the garage and drives into the night.
In the trunk, in complete darkness, Janette Fennell does something remarkable. She does not panic — or rather, she panics and keeps moving anyway. She and her husband run their hands along every surface of the trunk, searching for anything that could help them. At some point, her fingers find a gap in the interior lining. Behind it, a thin cable. A faint line of light from somewhere in the car’s mechanics.
She pulls it.
Nothing.
She keeps feeling. She keeps looking for the light.
They are driven through the streets of San Francisco and out into the darkness beyond. At some point the car stops. The men open the trunk. They assault the Fennells, take what they want, and leave them there – in the trunk of their own car, at a remote location, with no idea whether their infant son is alive.
Eventually, somehow, the Fennells claw their way out. They make their way back. Alex had been removed from the backseat by the men and placed in the foyer of their home, unharmed, before the car drove away.
They were all alive.
And Janette Fennell, who had just spent hours in a locked car trunk in the dark, now knew something that most people in America did not, there is no way out.
The problem, as Janette sees it, is an engineering problem.
Every car trunk built in America is constructed from the outside in – a mechanism designed entirely to keep the lid closed. There is a latch, operated by a key or a button. There is no corresponding mechanism on the inside. Nothing to pull, nothing to push. If you are in the trunk, you are in the trunk, and the only way you are getting out is if someone opens it from outside.
This is not controversial. This is simply how cars are built. It has never occurred to the automotive industry that it needed to be otherwise.
Janette goes to the car manufacturers and explains the problem. They listen politely. They tell her that trunk entrapment is vanishingly rare, that the data doesn’t support a mandate for redesign, that the cost would be significant for a risk that is statistically minimal.
She goes back.
She starts gathering data.
She founds an organisation called TRUNC – the Trunk Releases Urgently Needed Coalition — and begins building the evidence base that the automakers say doesn’t exist. She combs through death records, police reports, emergency service calls. She tracks cases of adults locked in trunks by criminals. She tracks the cases no one wants to talk about: children.
Because here is what Janette has come to understand. It is not only kidnapping victims who end up trapped in trunks. Every summer in America, children – curious, playful, unsupervised for a moment – climb into car boots and pull the lid shut behind them. On a cool day, a child locked in a trunk might be uncomfortable and frightened. On a hot day, in the middle of summer, a car trunk becomes an oven in minutes. Core body temperature rises. Organs begin to fail.
The children who die this way die slowly, in the dark, alone.
Janette takes her data to Congress.
The late 1990s. Washington, D.C.
She finds an ally in Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, who is persuaded by the evidence and sponsors a bill to require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to study the problem formally. NHTSA forms an expert panel. Janette is on it.
Then, in the summer of 1998, everything changes.
A 3-week heatwave settles over the United States. In the space of those 3 weeks, 11 children die locked in car trunks. It is an avalanche of preventable deaths, concentrated into less than a month, and it is impossible to look away from.
The automotive industry still resists. They argue that criminals could simply disable an internal release mechanism. They argue that the data doesn’t support the cost. They argue, and Janette keeps showing up, and the children keep dying, and she keeps showing up again.
She testifies before committees. She meets with executives. She brings the families of children who did not survive. She is precise, factual, relentless – the way a person is relentless when they have been inside the thing they are asking people to take seriously.
1 September 2001.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issues its mandate. Every new passenger car manufactured with a trunk must be equipped with an internal release mechanism – operable from inside the trunk – as standard equipment.
The mechanism must glow in the dark. So that a child in the dark, in the heat, with no understanding of what is happening to them, can find it.
Every car built in America from model year 2002 onward has a small luminescent handle inside the trunk. It is usually yellow or green. Most people have never noticed it. Many people don’t know it exists.
Janette Fennell knows it exists. She put it there.
After the trunk mandate, she went on to found Kids and Car Safety – a national organisation dedicated to preventing every kind of harm to children in and around vehicles. She has spent the decades since tracking heatstroke deaths, backover incidents, power window entrapments. She has never stopped showing up.
In her 2003 Senate testimony, she said simply- “We were able to use this traumatic experience to help guide the Federal Regulatory process to ensure that no one else had to end up in the trunk of a vehicle without a way to escape.”
The next time you open your car boot and see the small glowing handle in the corner, you are looking at 1 woman’s answer to the worst night of her life.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded what it looks like to turn something terrible into something that protects the people who come after you.
Mikala Sposito
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.
Common Mullein
Across the Appalachian highlands, the Cherokee, Iroquois, and Mohawk nations all independently identified the same striking plant for the treatment of suffocating cough and asthmatic attack. Verbascum thapsus — common mullein — grows wild from Pennsylvania to Georgia, sending up tall stalks crowned with bright yellow flower spikes and broad fuzzy gray-green leaves so soft early colonists called them “cowboy toilet paper.” Beneath the humble appearance is one of the most documented natural bronchodilators ever identified.
Native American healers dried the leaves and burned them in clay pipes for sufferers of asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia — instructing them to inhale the smoke deeply. Within minutes, even the most severe wheezing patients reported a sudden opening of the airway. Spanish and English colonists adopted the practice across the eastern colonies. By the 1800s, mullein was the standard pulmonary medicine of rural America.
Then in the 1940s, American pharmaceutical companies introduced inhaled albuterol — a beta-2 adrenergic agonist that forces bronchial smooth muscle to relax through catecholamine signaling. Albuterol works fast and effectively, but at a measurable cost: rapid heart rate, hand tremor, nervousness, downregulation of beta receptors over time (so it works less well the more it is used), and a documented increase in asthma-related deaths in long-term heavy users.
Mullein operates through a completely different mechanism. The leaves contain two active compound families. Verbascoside (a polyphenol) acts directly on bronchial smooth muscle, reducing acetylcholine-mediated constriction without touching the adrenergic system. Saponins emulsify and thin mucus, allowing trapped phlegm to be cleared from deep airways. Mucilage soothes irritated tissue at the surface.
The result is bronchial relaxation without heart stimulation, mucus clearance without dependency, and tissue repair without downregulation. Patients can use mullein chronically — for years — without losing efficacy. They cannot say the same for albuterol.
In 2012, a study in Phytotherapy Research measured significant bronchodilator effects in mullein extract using standardized pulmonary function tests. Subsequent investigations have catalogued additional antiviral activity against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza A — a profile no pharmaceutical bronchodilator possesses.
The American pharmaceutical asthma industry is worth $26 billion. Mullein grows wild along every American highway. Your pulmonologist will not mention it. Native healers wrote no patents.
Open the bronchial tree:
– Tincture or Tea, Not Capsule: Mullein’s active compounds are most effectively extracted in either an alcohol-based tincture or a hot-water steeped tea. Capsulated dried powder loses most of the volatile bronchodilator activity. The traditional Appalachian preparation: 1-2 tablespoons of dried leaf steeped in 8 oz boiling water for 15 minutes, strained through a coffee filter (the leaf hairs irritate the throat), then taken twice daily for active bronchial symptoms.
– The 2:00 PM Acute Window: For acute bronchial constriction, a 1 oz dose of glycerin-based mullein tincture acts within 10-15 minutes — fast enough to abort a developing wheezing episode. Keep a 4 oz bottle accessible during ragweed and cold seasons.
– The Marshmallow Root Pairing: Mullein opens the airway; marshmallow root (Althaea officinalis) coats and protects the inflamed mucosal lining. Traditional pulmonary herbalism uses them together. Drinking mullein tea blended with 1 teaspoon of marshmallow root produces what bronchologists privately call the “natural inhaler effect” — airway dilation plus mucosal recovery in a single preparation.
Sources:
Phytotherapy Research. “Verbascum thapsus: an updated review of its phytochemistry and biological activities”.
Journal of Ethnopharmacology. “Traditional uses and pharmacology of Verbascum thapsus”.
How Much Binder?
I have written an article on detoxification you might find of interest: https://healthelicious.com.au/Detoxification.html
Stu Hilborn – Fuel Injection
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.
Castor Oil vs Lotions and Serums
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: