Category: Inspiration

(Tom: Seems like less of a justice system and more of an enforcement arm for the deep state. Accumulated injustices weaken the social fabric and lead to the destruction of a society so injustice must be rejected at every opportunity.)

The CIA admitted his book contained zero secrets. Then they took every dollar he earned from it. Gagged him for the rest of his life. And the Supreme Court agreed without even letting his lawyers speak. His name was Frank Snepp. And his only crime was telling the truth without asking permission.

So was he a hero? Or a traitor? Read this and decide.

They sent him to Vietnam. Saigon. He became the CIA’s chief strategy analyst there. He studied the enemy. Interrogated high-level prisoners. He was one of the best they had.
He believed in the mission. He served his country.

Then came the end.

April 30, 1975. Saigon fell. North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city. Helicopters lifting people off rooftops. Total chaos.

Frank was there for all of it. One of the very last Americans pulled off the embassy roof as the city collapsed around him.

For his service, the CIA gave him a medal. The Intelligence Medal of Merit.

But Frank couldn’t celebrate. Because he had seen something that haunted him.

In the panic, America abandoned its own people. South Vietnamese who had worked for the CIA. Informants. Allies. People who risked their lives trusting America. They were left behind. Their files left behind. Left to face the communists alone. Some would be imprisoned. Some would die.

It was a betrayal. A preventable disaster caused by bad leadership.

Frank thought someone should answer for it. He asked the CIA to study what went wrong. An honest accounting. So it would never happen again.

They didn’t want to hear it.

So Frank resigned in 1976. And he decided to write the truth himself.

His book was called Decent Interval. The real story of how Saigon fell, and how America abandoned the people who depended on it.

Now here’s the part that matters.

Frank was careful. Incredibly careful. He had signed a secrecy agreement. He knew the rules. So he protected the secrets.

He named no sources. No spies. No methods. He scrubbed the book clean of anything classified. He went out of his way to endanger nobody.

He was telling a story about failure. Not giving away America’s secrets.

And here’s the stunning part. The government agreed.

When they took him to court, they conceded it. For the purpose of the lawsuit, they admitted the book contained no classified information.

Read that again. The CIA’s own case said the book had no secrets in it.

So what was the crime?

He hadn’t shown it to them first.

That was it. His contract said he had to submit anything he wrote for prepublication review. He hadn’t. So CIA Director Stansfield Turner came after him. Not for leaking secrets. There were none. For publishing a book that embarrassed them, without permission.

And the punishment they wanted was total.

Not a fine. They asked the court to take every penny the book ever earned. The advance. The royalties. All of it. Forever.

The court gave it to them.

Frank appealed. He fought. The ACLU backed him. The Authors League backed him. This was about whether the government could seize a man’s book and silence him for telling an unclassified truth.

It went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Then came one of the strangest moves in the Court’s history.

They ruled against Frank Snepp without ever hearing him. No oral arguments. No chance for his lawyers to stand up and speak. They decided the whole thing in 1980 on the paperwork alone. Almost unheard of for a case this size.

They ruled for the CIA. They handed the government every dollar of Frank’s profits. And they ordered that for the rest of his life, anything Frank Snepp ever wrote about intelligence had to be submitted to the CIA first.

A lifetime gag. On a man who had revealed no secrets.

The government seized nearly $200,000 of his money. For a while he couldn’t even get work as a journalist.

The Court said his book caused “irreparable harm.” Even though his lawyers had been blocked from making the government prove a single specific harm.

But here’s why this should matter to you.

It didn’t end with Frank.

The case is called Snepp v. United States. And it is still the law today.
Because of Frank, every CIA, NSA, and intelligence officer in America must submit their writing for government review for the rest of their lives. Even unclassified writing. Under threat of losing everything.

This is why you almost never hear the truth from inside the system. That wall was built on Frank Snepp’s back. His own name became the leash on everyone who came after him.

There’s no movie about him. He didn’t get rich. He didn’t get a Hollywood ending.

But he refused to let the story die. He became an investigative journalist anyway. Won a Peabody Award. Kept telling the truth. Even wrote a second book, about what they did to him.

They took his money. They took his silence. They turned his name into a law.

But they never got him to say the truth wasn’t worth it.

So what do you think. Hero who told the truth? Or traitor who broke his oath?

We get the government we tolerate. If we want a better government we need to not allow what we do not want.

From a Citizens Party email to me:

Something funny happened on the way to a police state…

Unprecedented scrutiny from people pressure has delayed the ASIO bill.

The bill expanding ASIO’s secret police powers is still tied up in the Senate, months after it was set to be waved through by the major parties.

With Parliament now risen for the winter recess, the next opportunity to debate the bill is when Parliament resumes in mid-August.

Concerned Australians who lobbied against this bill should appreciate that their efforts have had a major impact, upsetting the usually smooth process by which the major parties have colluded for decades to march Australia down the path to a police state.

Production line

At last count more than 100 security laws have passed Parliament since 2002, when the Howard government first put up seven bills in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack that severely undermined civil liberties in the name of “security”.

At first all of Howard’s bills were going to be waved through, over the protests of Constitutional experts, because too many politicians are cowards when it comes to responding to “threat” narratives, going along with enacting draconian powers so as not to be accused of being “weak” on the ostensible threat.

At the time, the Citizens Party intervened and mobilised opposition all across Australia from organisations and individuals who didn’t accept that the “threat” justified cancelling the people’s civil rights.

This opposition, directed at Parliament through phone calls and emails, empowered previously timid politicians to speak up, which stopped the bills from being waved through and instead sparked a huge debate that lasted more than 18 months.

Even Liberal Party Senator David Jull broke with his party, writing in his chairman’s foreword to a report on Howard’s ASIO bill (which originally enacted the powers that the current ASIO bill seeks to expand) that “The Bill, in its original form, would undermine key legal rights and erode the civil liberties that make Australia a leading democracy.”

Labor leader Simon Crean decided to take a stand, accusing Howard of trying to establish a “police state”; Labor’s Member for Grayndler Anthony Albanese went further in a fiery speech in 2003, quoting Hitler’s Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and likening the proposed ASIO powers to the Nazis.

However, Howard and the Murdoch media relentlessly attacked Labor as weak on national security, especially as Crean-led Labor also opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion, so eventually Labor relented and passed the laws, but only after insisting on a sunset clause for the ASIO powers.

Once Labor capitulated, and especially after Crean was toppled as leader, the party put up no more fights against such laws; the most they did was complain about the erosion of civil liberties and say they would improve them when they were in government, but they never did.

This is how more than 100 draconian security laws have been enacted since 2002, including powers for intelligence agencies to spy on all Australians online, and a sinister 2014 law that jails journalists for ten years for reporting on an ASIO operation.

It’s become a smooth production line—until this year.

People pressure

Because of a lack of media scrutiny, the Citizens Party only discovered the ASIO bill in January, at the same time as Albanese called a special sitting of Parliament to ram through his hate crimes bill.

Albanese’s hate crimes bill sparked unprecedented opposition for its assault on free speech and due process, however, because for the first time in two decades a security bill received real scrutiny. Albanese only passed a version of it through a dirty deal with the Liberals that split the Coalition and cost Sussan Ley her job.

In the climate of extra awareness, the Citizens Party was also able to draw unprecedented attention to ASIO’s powers, including the bizarre fact that Albanese originally likened the powers to the Nazis, but now as prime minister is pushing to expand them.

Pressure from the people directed at Parliament has forced the major parties on to the back foot, upsetting the smooth production line: in April they backflipped on their original intent to remove the sunset clause to “normalise” the powers; and they still haven’t been able to pass the bill.

The next opportunity for the Senate to debate the ASIO Bill No. 2 will be the mid-August setting, so keep calling and emailing your Senators to insist they oppose this bill. Click here for their contact details. https://citizensparty.org.au/campaign/repeal-asio-powers#contact-senators

During final season of “Magnum P.I.” (1980), Tom Selleck asked for something that had nothing to do with his mustache, his red Ferrari, or his own star treatment.

He wanted the regular crew to get $1,000 bonus checks, because the show had been delivered with savings, discipline, and the kind of work viewers never saw.

CBS would not make crew bonuses part of the deal, so Selleck found another door. He negotiated a bigger payment for himself, then used that money for the people carrying the series from call time to wrap. It meant electricians, drivers, makeup artists, camera workers, sound people, and set hands were not invisible. The leading man did not just play Thomas Magnum. He looked at the people sweating behind the Hawaiian breeze and made sure their names reached the checkbook too.

That is what made the story hit harder than a normal Hollywood thank-you. A star could have taken the extra money, smiled for the cameras, and called it business. Selleck turned it into a personal thank-you to the workers who helped make him look effortless on screen. Years later, when he was asked what he would miss on another long-running set, he still went straight to the people behind the scenes, the writers, the crew, and the daily faces who made work feel like home.

In November 2020, the same quiet pattern showed up at Elio’s on the Upper East Side. The bill was $204.68. Selleck left $2,020 for the servers. The handwritten note did not brag. “For Elios, I am honoring my friend Donnie Wahlberg’s ‘tip challenge’ with my sincere hope for a better 2020. Thank you all.” Donnie Wahlberg found out later, even though he had worked with Selleck through several dinner scenes after it happened. That detail made it better. Selleck had a perfect chance to tell his TV son, and he said nothing.

On “Blue Bloods” (2010), Wahlberg called him TV dad, but it grew into something heavier than a nickname. After years of Reagan family dinners, hallway greetings, police commissioner scenes, and long shooting days in New York, Donnie spoke about Tom like a set anchor, not just a costar. “Passing Tom in the hallway and saying, ‘Hi, Dad.’ I’ll never forget the first time he responded back, ‘Hey, son.'” The line sounds small, but on a 14-season show, small rituals become family language. The set had nearly 300 episodes, countless family-table scenes, and crew members who watched each other’s lives change. Selleck did not need to act louder to lead. He let people feel steady, respected, and safe around him.

That steadiness also came from a life before television made him famous. Selleck served in the California Army National Guard during the Vietnam era, with the 160th Infantry, and later carried that respect into public remembrance. When he became involved with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s Education Center project, he did not treat veterans as background symbols. He brought his own connection too, because his friend Ron Montapert went to Vietnam and never came home. At one ceremony, he told the crowd, “I would like to say to all those who served and sacrificed in Vietnam and in all of America’s wars, thank you for your service.” Then he brought the point even closer, saying the center would help people think of the more than 58,000 names as individuals, not one faceless number.

That is the thread running through the crew checks, the restaurant tip, the set friendships, and the veterans work. Selleck’s care was usually practical. A check. A tip. A hallway greeting. A public thank-you. He did not need a speech when the action already said enough.

He thanked people before the spotlight ever found them.

“Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.” – Thomas Carlyle, Philosopher (1795 – 1881)

In the spring of 1983, a British actress named Rachel Ward appeared on American television for four nights, playing a character named Meggie Cleary in a miniseries called The Thorn Birds.

Around one hundred forty million people watched.

For four episodes she played the forbidden love of a Catholic priest, a story spanning decades, set against the Australian outback, built on longing and sacrifice and landscapes so wide they barely seemed real. It became one of the most-watched television events of its decade.

Hollywood had its next star. And Rachel Ward, at twenty-five, had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

She had not planned any of it. Born in England in 1957, raised in an aristocratic family in the Cotswolds, she had moved through the world of high fashion modeling in London, Paris, and New York before drifting toward acting in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. She noticed early what that world was actually offering her.

“You soon find it’s a very empty and unsatisfying place to inhabit,” she said later. “I was just make-up. I was fantasy.”

What happened instead was something quieter.

On the set of The Thorn Birds she met Bryan Brown, an Australian actor playing her on-screen husband. He was funny, grounded, and completely comfortable in his own skin. He proposed within months of meeting her. She asked him to wait. He told her he might not ask again. She said yes.

They married in 1983, the same year the show aired. They moved to Australia together, where she became a citizen in 1986. They bought a farm, eight hundred sixty-five acres in New South Wales. Three children followed.

Rachel kept working and eventually moved behind the camera too, writing scripts and directing, winning an Australian Film Institute Award in 2001. But the farm kept growing in importance until it became the point of everything.

Then she went further. In recent years she threw herself into regenerative farming, rebuilding soil health and working with the land rather than against it. She spent her days fixing water pumps and moving cattle, her hands roughened in ways that had nothing to do with any role she had ever played.

In late 2024, at sixty-seven, she posted a video. No makeup. Short grey hair. Driving an ATV through a muddy field. Just doing what she does every day, not performing anything at all.

The comments were quick and unkind. What happened to her. I didn’t recognize you. She has aged really bad.

Ward saw them and responded, not with anger, but with something that landed harder.

“I’m so past caring about what people think about one’s appearance or age. All I want to hear is, ‘Actually, Rachel’s cows are looking pretty good.'”

Then she added: “How ironic that my going grey garnered me more attention than if I’d taken my top off.”

And to those defending her in the comments: “I just feel sorry for those poor souls who fear aging so much. They will learn that it’s ultimate freedom as a woman to let youth and beauty go.”

Forty-three years ago, one hundred forty million people fell in love with Rachel Ward on a screen. Today she is more interested in whether her soil is healthy and her cows are doing well.

Hollywood gave her a face half the world recognized. The farm gave her work that actually mattered to her.

She never had much trouble knowing the difference, even when the rest of the world was still catching up.

For those who have been told you were just make-up, just fantasy, by an industry offering you everything except the thing that actually felt like a life, who understand that meeting someone on set who is funny and grounded and completely comfortable in his own skin and saying yes when he tells you he might not ask again is what choosing the quieter thing looks like, who know that eight hundred sixty-five acres and regenerative farming and hands roughened from fixing water pumps instead of any role you ever played is what filled the emptiness the fame never could—this story might feel like recognition that posting a video with no makeup and short grey hair driving an ATV through mud and being told what happened to her by strangers who once watched you cry on their television screens is a strange kind of full circle, and that past caring about appearance and wanting to hear that the cows are looking pretty good instead is the ultimate freedom of letting youth and beauty go.

Which emptiness did you discover behind something the whole world envied, and what does it mean when the freedom you find on the other side of fame is simply not caring anymore what anyone thinks about your face?

Sometimes courage is not lifting a trophy.
Sometimes courage is standing in front of impossible odds and refusing to quit.
That is exactly what Eloy Room did.
At 37 years old, the Curaçao goalkeeper delivered one of the most extraordinary performances ever seen on football’s biggest stage. Facing a relentless Ecuador attack at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Room spent nearly the entire match under pressure as wave after wave of chances came crashing toward his goal.
Most goalkeepers would have cracked.
Room did the opposite.
Save after save, he kept his team alive.
Shots from close range.
Powerful strikes.
Dangerous headers.
Every time Ecuador thought they had found a way through, there was Eloy Room standing in the way.
By the end of the match, he had made an astonishing 15 saves, one of the greatest goalkeeping displays World Cup fans have ever witnessed.
Yet the statistics only tell part of the story.
Because behind every save was a veteran goalkeeper carrying the hopes of an entire nation.
A player who had spent years working for moments like this.
A man who refused to surrender no matter how difficult the challenge became.
As the final whistle blew, the scoreboard showed a hard-earned draw.
For Curaçao, it felt like a victory.
For Ecuador, it felt like a missed opportunity.
And for Eloy Room, the emotions became impossible to contain.
The goalkeeper collapsed to the ground in tears.
Not because he had won a trophy.
Not because he had broken a record.
But because he had given absolutely everything he had.
Football can be cruel.
It can break hearts.
It can expose every mistake.
But every so often, it also produces moments that remind us why we love the game.
Moments where determination matters more than talent.
Where resilience matters more than fame.
Where one person refuses to stop fighting, even when the odds seem overwhelming.
Eloy Room may never score the winning goal.
He may never be the most famous player at the World Cup.
But on that day, with 15 saves and tears in his eyes, he showed the world something just as important.
That sometimes greatness is not about winning.
Sometimes greatness is simply refusing to give up.

Steve Jobs narrates the first ‘Think Different’ commercial ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’. It never aired. (Richard Dreyfuss did the official spot.)

Click to view the video: https://www.flixxy.com/think-different-by-steve-jobs.htm