Category: Inspiration

Every morning for nearly thirty years, John Chhan arrived at his donut shop at 2 a.m.

Not 6 a.m. Not 5 a.m.

Two in the morning. Every single day. Seven days a week. No exceptions.

He and his wife Stella had come to the United States as refugees from Cambodia in 1979 — arriving with nothing, building everything. They opened Donut City in Seal Beach, California, and for nearly three decades, the two of them worked side by side in that small shop, making everything fresh before the sun came up, opening the doors at 4:30 a.m. to a community that had come to think of them as family.

Generations of families had grown up buying donuts from John and Stella. Children who had sat on the counter as toddlers brought their own children in years later. The Chhans had become, as one customer put it, “national treasures” of Seal Beach.

Then, in September 2018, Stella suffered a brain aneurysm.

She fell into a coma. Doctors weren’t certain she would survive. When she emerged, she was partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The woman who had stood beside John every morning at 2 a.m. for thirty years was now in a rehabilitation facility, fighting to come back.

And John — alone — kept going to the shop at 2 a.m.

Because what else do you do? The bills don’t stop. The rent doesn’t stop. You bake the donuts. You open the doors. You sell what you can. And then, when the day is done, you drive to the rehabilitation center and you sit beside the person you’ve worked next to every single morning for three decades, and you hold their hand.

Customers noticed immediately that Stella was gone. When they asked John where she was, he told them the truth.

Word spread.

People immediately wanted to help. Someone suggested a GoFundMe. Someone else offered to cover the medical bills directly.

John Chhan said no. To all of it.

He wouldn’t accept a handout. He didn’t want money. He just wanted more time with his wife.

That answer broke Dawn Caviola’s heart.

She was a regular customer — had been for thirteen years. She went home after hearing John’s story and couldn’t stop thinking about it. “I just couldn’t get it out of my head,” she said later. She had never done anything like what she was about to do. But she sat down and wrote a post on Nextdoor — the private community network for Seal Beach residents — and she asked a simple question.

What if everyone just came in and bought donuts early? As many as possible, as fast as possible? Because the moment John sells out for the day, he can close the shop, get in his car, and go be with Stella.

The post spread. Then it jumped to Facebook. Then it went further.

The next morning, the line outside Donut City started forming before dawn.

And then every morning after that.

People came from 50 miles away. From 60 miles. From 70. A woman flew in from Minnesota. A man heard about it through his daughter in Hawaii. People arrived in lines that stretched around the block, buying donuts by the dozen — sometimes two dozen, sometimes more. Some of them didn’t even particularly want donuts.

They wanted John to be able to close early.

By 6:30 some mornings, every donut in the shop was gone. A store that normally stayed open until 3 p.m. was selling out before sunrise.

“A lot of people, they come to buy a lot of doughnuts from us,” John said quietly, “and gave me more time to go visit my wife.”

That was the gift. Not money. Not a fundraiser.

Time.

Every dozen donuts sold was twenty minutes John could spend at Stella’s side instead of behind the counter. Every early sellout was an afternoon he got back. The community wasn’t buying donuts. They were buying him hours — one glazed, one apple fritter, one chocolate old-fashioned at a time.

Stella Chhan came back.

About a year after her aneurysm, after the coma, after the paralysis and the silence and the doubt that she would ever return — Stella walked back behind the counter at Donut City.

“I feel grateful,” she said.

“They give me a hug.”

John and Stella Chhan arrived in America with nothing. They built a life at 2 a.m., one morning at a time, for thirty years. And when that life was threatened, the people who had eaten their donuts for decades showed up before sunrise and bought every single one — not because they were hungry, but because a man who wouldn’t accept charity deserved to be with his wife.

The donuts were just the method.

The message was: we see you. We’ve always seen you. Go be with her.

Last month, while a judge in a Paris courtroom finished reading her verdict, police walked over and arrested Bruno Lafont. He’s 69, the former CEO of Lafarge, the largest cement manufacturer in the world. He’s now serving a 6 year prison sentence, and his former second-in-command is serving 5.

When corporations cause real harm in pursuit of profit, when they poison rivers, flood communities with deadly drugs, or fund violence to keep a factory running, the typical outcome is a fine. The company pays out, the executives keep their jobs or retire quietly or move on to a board seat somewhere else, and almost no one personally goes to prison. We see this massively in the pharmaceutical field.

But this ruling may change things moving forward.

What Lafarge actually did

Between 2013 and 2014, as Syria collapsed into civil war, Lafarge paid roughly 6.5 million dollars to ISIS and two other groups designated as terror organizations. The payments bought safe passage through ISIS checkpoints, which meant the company’s Syrian cement plant could keep running and keep generating revenue.

Nobel laureate Nadia Murad and more than 400 other Yazidi survivors, all of them American citizens, eventually sued Lafarge directly. Their argument was that the company’s payments helped finance the genocide of the Yazidi people, the mass executions, the sexual slavery, the abduction of thousands of women and children.

According to the lawsuit, Lafarge’s own cement was even used to construct the underground tunnels and bunkers where ISIS held Yazidi hostages captive.

While the European staff at the plant were evacuated to safety, the Syrian workers were told to keep working, crossing checkpoints under sniper fire, risking kidnapping, showing up to a job inside an active war zone because the cement had to keep flowing.

The judge, in delivering her verdict, said something that has stayed with me since I read it. “I am trying to make you understand,” she told the executives, “how choices made in your offices, thousands of kilometers away, turned into Kalashnikov bullets, into blood.”

This level of downline thinking is what responsibility looks like. It’s what we have been trying to offer to our readers for 17 years, the idea that as a culture, we have to think more deeply about what we’re creating and what effects it has downline, vs. thinking about more short term gratifications.

In defense, Lafont told the court he hadn’t read the emails documenting the payments. His exact line, which I cannot improve on, was “I’m not a child of the internet.” His former deputy was more direct in that he admitted in court that the groups receiving the payments had been described, in writing, as “hard-core terrorists,” and that he kept authorizing payments to them anyway. When the judge pressed him, he said they had a choice between two bad options. The judge asked, “The worst one and the less bad one?” “Exactly,” he replied.

Translated out of legalese, the defense was not surprisingly: “We were faced with losing profit or funding terror, and we chose the less expensive option for the company.”

These types of decisions are being made all over the place in our world within it’s current design. CEO’s follow incentive and fiduciary responsibility, which in essence provides them plausible deniability in most cases.

To be clear, this isn’t really a story about individually wicked men, it’s a story about a system that trains its decision-makers to weigh two things on the same scale and choose whichever one protects revenue. The race to the bottom logic baked into modern incentive structures is doing a lot of the moral work here, long before any individual executive signs off on a payment.

The court ultimately did not buy the CEO’s story and Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez called the conduct “stunningly cynical.” She fined the company €1.12 million, ordered the confiscation of €30 million in assets, and sent the executives to prison.

Why this matters more than the fine

To understand why this verdict is a big deal, you have to understand what hasn’t been happening for the last eight decades.

The most directly comparable case goes back to 1947, when executives of I.G. Farben, the German chemical company that supplied the gas used in Nazi concentration camps, were tried at Nuremberg. Most were acquitted. The few who were convicted received light sentences that were quietly commuted not long after. The legal precedent that a corporation and its leaders could be criminally accountable for the violence their products enabled was established, and then more or less left to sit on a shelf for 80 years.

In the meantime, when corporations have been found liable for harming people, the standard response has been a fine. In many cases, those fines get absorbed as a normal cost of doing business, paid out of one revenue stream while the rest keep flowing untouched.

When the fines get big enough to actually threaten profit, the response has often been overwhelming retaliation against whoever is fighting for justice. Chevron, for example, spent roughly 2 billion dollars dragging out a legal war against the lawyer who beat them in Ecuadorian court for poisoning the Amazon.

A fine is a transaction, but a prison sentence is something else entirely. It changes who, personally, is on the line, and that changes the way companies will operate form there on out. The system needs accountability, or else incentives will always win out.

The good news is that this verdict is a real crack in the assumption that corporate decision-makers can operate at a safe altitude above the consequences of what their companies actually do in the world.

But here is where I want to slow down a little, because there’s a fair question that still needs to be asked here:

Why did this one end in prison sentences when Chevron in Ecuador didn’t? When Purdue Pharma’s executives walked? Or Pfizer’s or Monsanto’s or Big Tobacco’s?

One honest part of the answer is that Lafarge’s payments helped fund a network that eventually killed French civilians on French soil. That made the politics of prosecution very different from the politics of poisoning Indigenous rivers in the Amazon, or flooding rural American towns with opioids, or any number of other harms that fall outside what Western states are willing to call a serious crime.

The legal systems we have are largely the same ones that have historically protected capital’s right to extract from communities deemed expendable.

So this verdict is a real step forward, and at the same time, it’s a reminder of where the line currently sits for who gets protected and who doesn’t. Both things can be true. The win is real, and the asymmetry is real, and pretending otherwise is just another way of not seeing the situation clearly.

What’s next

A few related cases are already moving. Starting in July of this year, EU member states will require large companies to identify and address human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, with actual consequences for failure.

Last October, a federal jury in New York found BNP Paribas liable for aiding atrocities in Sudan. The Lundin Oil trial in Sweden, which looks structurally similar to Lafarge, is expected to deliver a verdict soon. The next Lafarge trial, this one on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity, will likely follow.

There is also reasonable concern about backlash. A US administration that has sanctioned a UN rapporteur for documenting corporate complicity in Gaza, presided over a 660 million dollar verdict against Greenpeace for opposing an oil pipeline, and dismantled large parts of the EPA’s regulatory powers is not going to quietly accept a wave of accountability rulings.

The process of accountability is not fast or easy. I’ve been doing this work for 17 years and most of the stories I’ve followed or talked about don’t end up in real accountability. Pfizer’s C0VID vax trials were fraudulent, we’re not even talking about that anymore. Look at the lack of Epstein network accountability. This isn’t meant to get us down, but to realie the power of the system at hand and maintain our sense of resilience in working toward a better world.

Ultimately, this all has to still move through courtrooms, through journalism, through people who are willing to spend years pressing on a story that powerful interests would much rather have buried. None of those tools is sufficient on its own, but together, slowly, they shift what powerful people can get away with.

The good news is, the judge in Paris drew a line that hasn’t really been drawn in 80 years, and that line now exists. What we choose to build on top of it is the next question.

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“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” – Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642)

I have heard this from other wise men and personally observed the inability to impart data to those ‘who do not have it within themself’.

I also helps partially explain the failures many of have had over the last 6 years trying to impart to others what seems to be obvious and incontrovertible truths.

Grant time in your stream of consciousness to only those thoughts that align with your goals.
Speak as if your words were inspiration to the receiver and the person who overhears them.
Always act as if your deeds were examples.

Apple swore to the U.S. government that it never silences workers. One self-taught coder was holding the document that proved it was a lie. Her name is Cher Scarlett. High school dropout. Single mom. And she just made the most powerful company on earth rewrite its contracts.

Cher is born April 6, 1985. Walla Walla, Washington. Rough start. Dad gone. Stepdad gone. Mom works construction to keep food on the table.

Life breaks early. Cher drops out of high school. Battles bipolar disorder. Hits bottom young. Nearly doesn’t make it.

But she has one thing. A computer. She teaches herself to code in the late 1990s. A teenager building websites alone. No degree. No school. Just figuring it out.

Then she has a kid. Single mom. She needs real money. So she turns that self-taught skill into a career. Software engineer. Climbs all the way up. Lands at Apple. The biggest company on the planet.

Then she sees it.

Women paid less than men. Workers scared to talk about pay. Harassment. Discrimination. Keep your head down. Don’t make noise.

Cher makes noise.

2021. She runs a simple survey. Asks coworkers about their pay. Apple shuts it down.

So she goes bigger. Starts #AppleToo. Like #MeToo, but for Apple workers. Current staff. Former staff. Hundreds of stories pour in. Racism. Sexism. Abuse. The secrets the most secretive company on earth never talks about.

Apple is not happy.

Cher says she gets harassed. Intimidated. Pushed out. September 2021. She files with the labor board. Then she leaves with a settlement.

But the settlement has a catch.

Apple’s lawyers hand her a gag order. They even write her goodbye line for her. They tell her to say: “After 18 months at Apple, I’ve decided it is time to move on and pursue other opportunities.” Words stuffed in her mouth. Sign here.

Then, on October 18, 2021, Apple writes to the SEC. Shareholders had asked a question. Do you use gag clauses to hide harassment and discrimination? Apple answers in writing. To the federal government. Says no. Says it is our policy not to use those clauses.

Cher reads that. And she knows it is a lie. Because she is holding one of those exact clauses in her hand.

Now she has a choice. Stay quiet. Keep the money. Move on. Easy.

Or break the gag order. Lose the money. Prove Apple lied to the government.

She breaks it.

October 25, 2021. She files a whistleblower complaint with the SEC. Hands over her own settlement agreement as proof. Then goes public. Shows the gag order to the Financial Times. She knows the cost. She will likely never see the rest of that settlement money. She says it plain. The money is not worth letting Apple off the hook.

Here is the part nobody wants to think about.

That clause she refused to stay quiet about? Versions of it are everywhere. Millions of workers sign them every year. Severance papers. Exit deals. “Keep quiet and here is your check.” You may have one sitting in a drawer right now. The thing that makes you stay silent about what happened to you was Apple’s official, written-down practice, while they told the government the opposite.

January 2022. Eight state treasurers write the SEC. California. Colorado. Delaware. Illinois. Iowa. Kansas. Rhode Island. Washington. All asking the same thing. Investigate Apple. Find out if they lied to the government and their own investors.

One single mom. 8 states behind her. Against a trillion dollar company.

And things actually change. Apple shareholders vote to review the gag orders. First shareholder proposal passed in over 10 years. The review forces Apple to rewrite its employee contracts. Cher then helps push the Silenced No More Act in Washington state. It makes it illegal to use gag clauses to bury harassment and discrimination. A law that now protects workers who were never supposed to be able to speak.

And Apple? In October 2024, the labor board’s prosecutor charges the company. Says Apple illegally forced her out for speaking up.

That fight is still open right now. Cher is still organizing. Still pushing companies. Still refusing to disappear quietly.

A high school dropout with no degree caught the richest company on earth lying to the government, gave back the money to prove it, and changed the law so they cannot do it to you.

She handed back the check. She kept the receipts.

And she is not done with them yet.

James Bamford was 28 years old when he put on a pair of headphones and heard a crime.
1974. A Navy listening post in Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico. A two-week reservist placement. Routine. Then he heard the operator monitoring the line. American voices. The NSA was spying on American citizens. That was illegal.
He could have unheard it. Law degree almost finished. Safe life waiting. He didn’t.
1975. The Church Committee opens Senate hearings on intelligence abuses. The NSA testifies under oath. Says they stopped intercepting US citizens 18 months ago. Says it’s over. Says trust us.
Bamford knew they were lying. He’d heard it himself. Months earlier. With his own ears.
He called Senator Church’s office. Said the NSA is lying and I can prove it. They brought him into a closed hearing. Church’s private office. He told them what he heard, where, and when. His testimony helped build the case that created the FISA law in 1978 — the law that required a warrant before the government could spy on you.
Then he filed a FOIA request and asked the NSA for everything.
A year later hundreds of declassified pages landed on his desk. And the names of secret programs came with them.
Operation Shamrock. From 1945 to 1975, the NSA secretly copied every international telegram going in or out of the United States. Thirty years. Millions of private messages. Western Union, ITT, and RCA all handed them over. Zero warrants.
Project Minaret. Watch lists of American citizens. Civil rights leaders. Antiwar protesters. Martin Luther King Jr. Jane Fonda. Senator Frank Church himself was on a list — the very senator investigating them.
Bamford decided to write a book. He’d never written anything but legal briefs. Didn’t matter.
1981. Reagan takes office and the Justice Department switches sides. They come after Bamford. Demand the documents back. Say they’ve been reclassified — top secret now. Threaten him with the Espionage Act. Decades in federal prison.
He refused. He’d gotten them declassified, legally. He walked out of a meeting with NSA officials and his own lawyer and just kept the documents.
Reagan signed a new executive order so reclassified documents could be pulled back. The Constitution stopped him — you can’t make something illegal after it already happened. Bamford kept every page.
1982. The Puzzle Palace hits shelves. The first major book ever written about the NSA. National bestseller. The New York Times said he’d uncovered everything except the combination to the director’s safe.
The NSA still wasn’t done. Agents walked into a private library in Virginia, reclassified papers Bamford had used, and physically removed them from the shelves. The American Library Association sued. That’s how far they’d go to bury one man.
Here’s the part that should make you laugh and then make you furious.
In 2001 he wrote a second NSA exposé. Another bestseller. And the agency that tried to throw him in prison invited him to its Fort Meade headquarters — and sold his book in their gift shop.
Then 2005. President Bush admits to warrantless wiretaps on Americans after 9/11. No warrants. No FISA court. The exact thing Bamford’s testimony built the law to prevent. He joined the ACLU and sued the NSA as a plaintiff.
2013. Edward Snowden leaks the files. Mass surveillance of Americans, on a scale beyond Shamrock — exactly what Bamford had been screaming about for almost 40 years. In 2014 he flew to Moscow and sat with Snowden for three days. The longest interview Snowden has ever given anyone.
And it never stopped. The surveillance machine he exposed in 1974 is bigger now than it has ever been. Your calls. Your texts. Your searches. They built the infrastructure to watch everyone, and one Navy reservist saw it coming half a century before the rest of us did.
He’s 79. Lives in Washington DC. Still investigating. Still publishing — his latest book dropped in 2023. Still fighting an agency with a $10 billion budget and 40,000 employees.
Four presidents tried to silence him. They threatened him with prison. They raided libraries. They reclassified his evidence.
He’s still here. Still writing. Still warning you.