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dgarski · 4 years ago

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Time and Death

I've long since stopped counting the months since my collapse. Anniversaries are based on the calendar concept. Calendars are based on the measurements of time. Time is a man made concept. Time does not exist. Clocks exist. For argument's sake, let's consider the usage of time as a means for understanding how much of it each of us has on this Earth.

There are many millions of people who believe that when a person dies, they are transformed from a living being into a spiritual being that will travel to either a good place or a bad place. This dichotomy is also a man made concept. Most believers fear questioning the validity of an ultimate fate. There are those however, who do question the lack of proof as to where we all go when we die. Perhaps it is true that all that happens when our heart stops beating is, the electricity that is stored in our body to keep us alive, leaves our body, all that is left is a shell of our former self. Where does the electricity go? Well, as you know electricity is energy, and energy cannot be created or destroyed. So, the energy that leaves our body must go somewhere. Perhaps, it merely travels to the ground and dissipates.

What do you think happens to our consciousness when we die? Some consider the idea that when we die, (and if we could determine that we are no longer alive), we'll know about as much about our death as we did the billions of years before our birth. We don't remember anything before our birth, and yet, so many believe that we will somehow remember everything after our death?

Animals are killed on a daily basis. They are destroyed and processed as food. Everything dies. Everything is on its way to somewhere else. Well over 100,00 people will die today, globally. The difference between humans and animals is that animals are not aware of their mortality. The oldest (recorded) human being to ever live was Jeanne Calment. She was born on February 21, 1875 and lived 122 years, 164 days until her death on August 4, 1997.

When we are children, life is a vast exploration of wonder and mystery. Our young brains are super sponges, absorbing immeasurable amounts of information at immeasurable rates. We grow older and our body grows to an average adult size, into our later teenage years. In our twenties, we begin to notice lines around our eyes. We begin to see evidence of a receding hairline. We notice a few extra pounds around our gut. By our thirties, we realize that parts of our bodies need to be maintained much more often than when we were younger. Into our forties, trying to keep our body in some sort of healthy shape, has become much more difficult. Getting plenty of exercise and eating a healthy diet, slowly begins to creep lower and lower on our priority lists of life. By the time we reach our fifties, we believe that what we look like, how we feel is simply the slow decline that reflects old age.

With youth comes the belief in our own immortality. We try new things, experience new people, new ways of living and thinking. Our youthful curiosity is far stronger than our fear of the unknown. Time has a special way of changing these perspectives to switch them, around. With older age, comes the understanding in our own mortality. We fall into the illusion of a comfort zone where we no longer feel the desire to try new things, meet new people, or embrace new ways of living or thinking.

One day, you leave your house to go to the grocery store. You get to the store and begin shopping. You are half way through your list when out of nowhere, you experience severe dizziness and chest pains. Your left arm begins to feel strange and you collapse to the floor. Your eyes close and your brain begins to function in survivor mode. You don't dream and you don't remember anything of the event. Days later, your eyes open and everything is blurry. You see a large window of a room and you begin to hear beeping sounds. Then you hear voices. You slowly turn your head and see blurry figures lurking about, across the room. Your eyes begin to focus and you see that one person is a nurse and the other is a doctor. They notice that you've awakened and walk to your bedside. They call out your name and you do your best to vocalize something, anything. They inform you that you had a heart attack and that you've been asleep for three days. The doctor tells you that you were very close to death, but they were able to bring you back.

What goes through your mind when this happens? Mostly, it feels like a really bad dream. It feels like you are watching the unfolding of the life of someone else, through the eyes of someone else. Time has halted everything. Your life has completely stopped. Nothing is moving. As you begin to become more lucid in your thoughts, you realize that you are laying in a hospital bed, hooked up to several tubes through your arms, your genitals, your nose and your mouth. You have been out cold for a long time, and you have very little strength to even speak, much less move any parts of your body. How did this happen?

In your minimal arrogance, you thought that you were plenty healthy. All you were doing was going to the store to get groceries. How did you have a heart attack? You're only 55 years old. Why didn't you die? What happens next? How do you get out of this bed and out of this hospital? Why is everything a blur. It's hard to think straight. Time seems to be a normality for those who aren't wearing this stupid hospital gown. You experience new levels of embarrassment and humiliation. Your body is weak. They pump you with medication on the hour. The food they bring is less than appetizing. How did this happen?

A few days go by and you are getting your strength back. The doctors inform you that you had a blockage in your heart that prevented blood flow, thus causing the heart attack. They recite the obligatory speech on dietary changes that you must heed immediately, and begin a regiment of medications and therapy to get you back to some sense of normal human functionality. Anger, frustration, denial, depression and eventually determination all become a new part of the processing.

So, you didn't die. Why? How did you cheat death? How was your experience different than someone who did die from the same exact type of attack? What do you remember about collapsing? What do you remember while you were asleep? What if you don't remember anything in the three days they couldn't wake you? An entire chunk of your life is complete unaccountable. What happened to your brain when you were asleep for three days? Did you actually almost die, but they were able to save you? How was that possible?

How many people do you know, who have been thorough something similar to this, and have lived to tell about it? Did you notice a change in their behavior? Perhaps their personality changed. Some call it post traumatic stress disorder. A major life altering event happens to a person, and everything about them is changed forever. They see things differently. They hear things differently. Food smells and tastes differently. Their body feels differently. Their mind has changed dramatically. What used to matter, no longer does. What didn't matter before, now holds precedent over so many other things.

When you are in your fifties, and something like this happens to you, everything changes forever. Your eyes begin to see things much more clearly. Sunsets take on a whole new kaleidoscope of colors. The realization of our own mortality is far more evident. We begin to truly understand just how short our life is. We begin to truly learn what it means to life everyday as if it were our last. We find enjoyment in the little things. We do our best to make time for ourselves. We learn to truly appreciate the quiet and solitude and peace of our sanctuary.

You do not know how much time you have to live. You could be gone tomorrow. Maybe you'll live over a hundred years. What you do with your life ultimately matters only to you. Time and death are concepts known only to humans. We are aware of our own mortality, and we are reminded of it on a daily basis. If you survive a near death experience, it means that you have more to do in your life. It means you should learn to listen more. It means that you should teach what you know. It means that you should share what you have experienced to help others understand. It means that you should find your purpose and make a difference in your life and the lives of others. It means that you should let go of the past and live in the present and look forward to your future. The past is history, the future is a mystery and the present is a gift.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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THREAD and article by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian @BethanyAllenEbr on the detention(concentration) camps inside China where millions of Uighurs and other minorities are held and the use of AI to identify, round up and detain innocent people. If you're wondering why the people (especially young people) are fighting so hard to keep their freedoms, this is why among other reasons!!! GRAVE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES ARE HAPPENING AS WE SPEAK. PLEASE 📖 READ AND SHARE. TY. ALSO PLEASE SUPPORT ICIJ for their incredibly important work. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

BREAKING: "We at ICIJ have obtained a NEW trove of highly classified Chinese govt documents, including the operations manual for China's concentration camps."

"I served as ICIJ’s lead reporter for the China Cables, with 17 media partners from 14 countries." /1

https://t.co/l1mMVajLVQ

"The China Cables represent the first leak of a classified Chinese government document revealing the inner workings of the detention camps, as well as the first leak of classified government documents unveiling the predictive policing system in Xinjiang." /2

"The leak features classified intelligence briefings that reveal, in the government’s own words, how Xinjiang police essentially take orders from a massive “cybernetic brain” known as IJOP, which flags entire categories of people for investigation & detention."/3

"These secret intelligence briefings reveal the scope and ambition of the government’s AI-powered policing platform, which purports to predict crimes based on computer-generated findings alone. The result? Arrest by algorithm."/4

Details about the detention camp how-to manual:

"It was approved by Zhu Hailun, Xinjiang’s deputy party secretary and disseminated in November 2017. It was issued by the Xinjiang Political and Legal Affairs Commission."/5

"It presents a master plan for managing mass internment, including details on how to “prevent escapes.” This proves, in the Chinese government’s very own words, that detainees are held in the camps against their own will."/6

"The manual’s written style combines standard Chinese bureaucratese with Orwellian doublespeak, blandly prescribing the secure management of toilet breaks and combat training for guards, while referring to inmates as “students” and listing the requirements to “graduate.”"/7

"The manual reveals a points-based behavior-control system within the camps. Points are tabulated by assessing the inmates’ “ideological transformation, study and training, and compliance with discipline,” the manual says."/8

"The camps have 3 security zones: ”very strict,” “strict,” and “general management.” Detainees are sorted into zones based on background and points. They are moved to lower-security zones as their scores improve; or punished for low scores by being placed in higher-security zones./9

"The manual also includes a creepy section on “manner education,” directing camp personnel to provide instruction to detainees in such areas as “etiquette,” “obedience,” “friendship behaviors” and the “regular change of clothes."”/10

"Why do Chinese authorities think that normal adults need help making friends and dressing themselves? Xinjiang expert @dtbyler said this stems from a prevalent belief among Han Chinese that Uighurs are “backwards”--aka the colonial narrative of the savage “other.”"/11

"Now on to the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform”-- the “cybernetic brain” behind many detentions in Xinjiang. @jmulvenon said IJOP isn’t just “pre-crime,” it’s a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes AI for human judgment."/12

"The China Cables provide inside details about what all the mass surveillance and data collection is FOR. It is fed into IJOP, which learns from the data and uses it to produce lists of names, sometimes 1000s at a time, for police to detain." /13

"For example, in a seven-day period in June 2017, IJOP flagged 24,412 names as “suspicious.” In that week alone, Xinjiang security officials rounded up 15,683 of those people and placed them in internment camps."/14

"And the rest of that particular intelligence briefing was dedicated to analyzing why police hadn’t been able to detain even more of the original list. (Some reasons included: the person was dead, they could not be located, or they were a govt official)."/15

"IJOP generates a sense of an omniscient, omnipresent state that can peer into the most intimate aspects of daily life. As neighbors disappear based on the workings of unknown algorithms, Xinjiang ethnic minorities live in a perpetual state of terror."/16

"The seeming randomness of investigations resulting from IJOP isn’t a bug but a feature, said @He_Shumei, an expert in China’s surveillance state. “That's how state terror works,” Hoffman said. “Part of the fear that this instills is that you don't know when you're not OK.”"/17

"Ominously, one of the leaked intelligence briefings points to the role of China’s embassies and consulates in collecting information for IJOP, which is then used to generate names for investigation and detention."/18

"Information provided by Chinese embassies was one way that Chinese authorities were able to locate Uighurs abroad and press local governments to deport them; and it’s also one way that Xinjiang officials located (and detained) Uighurs who had previously lived abroad."/19

"Let me just re-emphasize that point: China’s embassies and visa consular offices abroad have played a clear role in the global Uighur dragnet, and in the detentions of Uighurs inside China who had previously lived abroad."/20

"You may have heard that people of non-Chinese nationality are in the camps. The China Cables reveal that was the result of an *explicit* directive, not collateral damage. The Chinese govt told police to detain people BECAUSE of their foreign citizenship. Huge diplomatic scandal."/21

"ICIJ also obtained a Uighur-language court judgment, which shows how one Uighur man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for telling his co-workers to pray and not to watch porn, and sharing other normal Islamic teachings."/22 (Pornography is illegal in China anyway!)

"A personal note: China Cables was the most meaningful project I have ever worked on. And what a privilege to work together with such a dedicated group of journalists from around the world. Many thanks to the incomparable and courageous team at @ICIJorg."/23

"To everyone whose lives and families have been shattered by China’s concentration camps, our hearts go out to you. So many people around the world are doing everything they can to help. Don’t give up. You’re not alone."

END./24

Exposed: China’s Operating Manuals For Mass Internment And Arrest By Algorithm

Published On November 24, 2019 |

Reading Time 20 Minutes | VIDEOS |Posted November 24, 2019 | Reporting By

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

SEE CABLES AND DOCUMENTS ON ICIJ WEBSITE

A new leak of highly classified Chinese government documents has uncovered the operations manual for running the mass detention camps in Xinjiang and exposed the mechanics of the region’s Orwellian system of mass surveillance and “predictive policing.”

The China Cables, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, include a classified list of guidelines, personally approved by the region’s top security chief, that effectively serves as a manual for operating the camps now holding hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs and other minorities. The leak also features previously undisclosed intelligence briefings that reveal, in the government’s own words, how Chinese police are guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of Xinjiang residents for detention.

The manual, called a “telegram,” instructs camp personnel on such matters as how to prevent escapes, how to maintain total secrecy about the camps’ existence, methods of forced indoctrination, how to control disease outbreaks, and when to let detainees see relatives or even use the toilet. The document, dating to 2017, lays bare a behavior-modification “points” system to mete out punishments and rewards to inmates.

The manual reveals the minimum duration of detention: one year — though accounts from ex-detainees suggest that some are released sooner.

The classified intelligence briefings reveal the scope and ambition of the government’s artificial- intelligence- powered policing platform, which purports to predict crimes based on these computer-generated findings alone. Experts say the platform, which is used in both policing and military contexts, demonstrates the power of technology to help drive industrial-scale human rights abuses.

The China Cables reveal how the system is able to amass vast amounts of intimate personal data through warrantless manual searches, facial recognition cameras, and other means to identify candidates for detention, flagging for investigation hundreds of thousands merely for using certain popular mobile phone apps. The documents detail explicit directives to arrest Uighurs with foreign citizenship and to track Xinjiang Uighurs living abroad, some of whom have been deported back to China by authoritarian governments. Among those implicated as taking part in the global dragnet: China’s embassies and consulates.

New Clarity on Vast Internment Camps

The China Cables mark a significant advance in the world’s knowledge about the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority since World War II. Over the past two years, reports based on ex-inmate accounts, other anecdotal sources and satellite images have described a system of government-run camps in Xinjiang large enough to hold a million or more people. They have also sketched the outlines of a massive data-collection, surveillance and policing program across the region. A recent New York Times article shed light on the historical lead-up to the camps.

The China Cables represents the first leak of a classified Chinese government document revealing the inner workings of the camps, the severity of conditions behind the fences, and the dehumanizing instructions regulating inmates’ mundane daily routines. The briefings are the first leak of classified government documents on the mass-surveillance and predictive policing effort.

“It really shows that from the onset, the Chinese government had a plan for how to secure the vocational training centers, how to lock in the ‘students’ into their dorms, how to keep them there for at least one year,” said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., who has reviewed the documents. “It’s very, very important that these documents are from 2017, because that’s when the whole reeducation campaign started.”

Responding to questions about the camps and surveillance program from ICIJ media partner the Guardian, the Chinese government called the leaked documents “pure fabrication and fake news.” In a statement this weekend, the press office of its UK embassy said: “First, there are no so-called ‘detention camps’ in Xinjiang. Vocational education and training centres have been established for the prevention of terrorism.”

“Xinjiang is a beautiful, peaceful and prosperous region in China. Three years ago, this was not the case,” the statement said. “It had become a battle ground – thousands of terrorist incidents happened in Xinjiang between 1990s and 2016, and thousands of innocent people got killed. So there’s an enormous uproar among the Xinjiang people for the government to take resolute measures to tackle this issue. Since the measures have been taken, there’s no single terrorist incident in the past three years. Xinjiang again turns into a prosperous, beautiful and peaceful region. The preventative measures have nothing to do with the eradication of religious groups. Religious freedom is fully respected in Xinjiang.”

The statement also said: “Second, the trainees take various courses at the vocational education and training centres, and their personal freedom of the trainees is fully guaranteed.”

It continued: “The [M]andarin is widely used in China and thus taught as one of the courses at the centres. The trainees also learn professional skills and legal knowledge so that they can live on their own profession. That’s the major purpose of the centres. The trainees could go home regularly and ask for leave to take care of their children. If a couple are both trainees, their minor children are usually cared for by their relatives, and the local government helps take good care of the children. These measures have been successful – Xinjiang is much safer. Last year, the tourists increased 40%, and the local GDP increased more than 6%.”

Finally, the statement said, “Third, there are no such documents or orders for the so-called ‘detention camps.’” It adds: “There are many authoritative documents in China for the reference of Chinese and foreign media want to know more about the vocational education and training centres. For instance, seven relevant white papers have been published by the State Council Information Office.”

The China Cables documents have been verified by linguists and experts, including James Mulvenon, director of intelligence integration at SOS International LLC, an intelligence and information technology contractor for several U.S. government agencies. Mulvenon, an expert in the authentication of classified Chinese government documents, called the Chinese-language documents “very authentic,” adding that they “adhere 100% to all of the classified document templates that I’ve ever seen.”

More than 75 journalists from ICIJ and 17 media partner organizations in 14 countries joined together to report on the documents and their significance.

The leaked documents include:

The operations manual, or “telegram,” nine Chinese-language pages dated November 2017 that contain more than two dozen detailed guidelines for managing the camps, which were then in the early months of operation.

Four shorter Chinese-language intelligence briefings, known as “bulletins,” providing guidance on the daily use of the Integrated Joint Operation Platform, a mass- surveillance and predictive- policing program that analyzes data from Xinjiang and was revealed to the world by Human Rights Watch last year.

Both types of documents are marked “secret,” the middle of a three-tier Chinese secrecy ranking. The manual was approved by Zhu Hailun, then deputy secretary of Xinjiang’s Communist Party and the region’s top security official. The bulletins were distributed to police and local party officials in charge of security around the region. Zhu did not respond to questions sent to him via China’s international press contact point. Attempts to fax its Xinjiang equivalent failed.

A Uighur-language sentencing document from a regional criminal court that details the allegations against a Uighur man imprisoned for inciting “ethnic hatred” and “extreme thoughts.” The allegations feature such seemingly innocuous acts as admonishing co-workers not to use profanity or watch pornography. The document is unclassified, but in a political system with little transparency, Xinjiang court documents are rarely seen by outsiders.

Uighurs in the Crosshairs

A predominantly Muslim community that speaks its own Turkic language, Uighurs have lived in the arid central Asian region now known as Xinjiang for more than 1,000 years, adopting Islam after contact with Muslim traders. Uighurs have long faced economic marginalization and political discrimination as an ethnic minority, now accounting for nearly 11 million people in a country where nearly 92% of the 1.4 billion population is of Han Chinese ethnicity. Most Chinese Uighurs live in Xinjiang, a region of mostly mountains and desert in the country’s far northwest. The nominally autonomous region — also home to Kazakhs, Tajiks, Hui Muslims and a large Han population — has been under formal Chinese control since the 18th century.

In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped up a nationwide campaign promoting conformity to Communist Party doctrine and Han cultural norms, and Uighurs, with their distinctive religious and ethnic identity, have increasingly come in the crosshairs.

Tensions between Uighurs, on one side, and the government and the region’s Han Chinese population, on the other, have sometimes turned violent. In 2009, Uighurs rioted in Xinjiang’s capital city of Urumqi, killing nearly 200 people, most of them Han Chinese. Beginning in 2013, Uighurs committed a series of deadly attacks on civilians in several Chinese cities, killing dozens. A Uighur Islamist group claimed responsibility for at least one of the attacks. Reports also emerged of dozens of Uighurs abroad joining the Islamic State. Beijing has responded with increasing ferocity. Blaming Uighur separatism and Islamic extremism, it imposed increasingly severe restrictions on religious practice in the region, outlawing beards, many forms of Muslim prayer and some forms of religious attire, including burkas and face veils.

By 2017, moving to curtail expressions of cultural, political and religious diversity, Xi ordered a quiet campaign of mass detention and forced assimilation in Xinjiang. Large numbers of people across the region began to disappear, according to witnesses and news reports, and rumors of secretive detention camps swirled. In some villages in southern Xinjiang, police had been ordered to sweep up nearly 40% of the adult population, it was reported later.

“At that time, it was terror among people,” said Tursunay Ziavdun, a 40-year-old Uighur woman now in Kazakhstan who spent 11 months in a camp in Xinjiang. “When we saw each other, people were terrified. The only thing we were talking about was saying, ‘ah you’re still here!’ In all the families there was someone arrested. Some, the whole family.”

“In February 2018, they arrested my older brother. Ten days later my little brother,” she said in an interview with ICIJ media partner Le Monde in November. “I thought, it’ll be my turn soon.” She was taken to a camp on March 10, 2018.

The Chinese government tried to keep the camps a secret. But beginning in late 2017, journalists, academics and other researchers — using satellite images, government procurement documents and eyewitness accounts — revealed a string of detention facilities, surrounded by fences and guard towers, across the region and the outlines of a new and alarming system of mass surveillance.

In October 2018, after the satellite images and eyewitness accounts made it undeniable, Xinjiang’s governor, Shohrat Zakir, acknowledged the existence of a system of what he called “professional vocational training institutions.” He said their purpose was to de-radicalize those suspected of terrorist or extremist leanings.

In an official white paper released in August, the government proclaimed the “vocational training centers” a resounding success, claiming that an absence of terror attacks in Xinjiang in the past three years was a result of the policy.

The China Cables starkly contradict the Chinese government’s official characterization of the camps as benevolent social programs that provide “residential vocational training” and meals “free of charge.” The documents specify that arrests should be made in almost any circumstance — unless suspicions can be “ruled out” – and reveal that a central goal of the campaign is general indoctrination.

Master Plan with Doublespeak

The lengthy “telegram” – inscribed with Zhu’s name at the top and labeled “ji mi”, Chinese for “secret” – presents a master plan for implementing mass internment, including more than two dozen numbered guidelines. Titled “Opinions on the Work of Further Strengthening and Standardizing Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers,” it was issued by the Xinjiang Autonomous Region’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the Communist Party committee responsible for security measures in Xinjiang.

The style combines standard Chinese bureaucratese with Orwellian doublespeak, blandly prescribing the secure management of toilet breaks and setting conditions for seeing loved ones while referring to inmates as “students” and listing the requirements to “graduate.”

The manual emphasizes that personnel must “prevent escapes” and mandates the use of guard posts, patrols, video surveillance, alarms and other security measures typical of prisons. Dormitory doors must be double-locked to “strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes during class, eating periods, toilet breaks, bath time, medical treatment, family visits, etc.,” the manual says.

“Students” are permitted to leave the camps only for reasons of “illness and other special circumstances,” it says, and camp personnel are required to “accompany, monitor, and control them” while away.

The memo also includes the provision – not always enforced, according to some former inmates – that detainees must remain in the camps for at least a year.

The manual reveals a points-based behavior-control system within the camps. Points are tabulated by assessing the inmates’ “ideological transformation, study and training, and compliance with discipline,” the manual says. The punishment-and-reward system helps determine, among other things, whether inmates are allowed contact with family and when they are released.

The manual also outlines a three-tiered system that classifies inmates by the degree of security required: “very strict,” “strict” or “general management.”

The manual does make provisions for inmates’ basic health and physical welfare, including explicit requirements that camp officials “never allow abnormal deaths.” It requires that personnel maintain hygienic conditions, prevent the outbreak of disease and make sure that camp facilities can withstand fire and earthquakes. “For training centers with more than one thousand people,” the manual says, “special personnel must be stationed to do food safety testing, sanitation and epidemic prevention work.”

The manual instructs personnel to “ensure that the students will have a phone conversation with their relatives at least once a week, and meet via video at least once a month, to make their family feel at ease and the students feel safe.”

Testimony of ex-inmates suggests that this guideline has been widely ignored. Last February, Uighurs outside of China and their supporters launched a Twitter campaign imploring the Chinese government to provide information about missing family members.

And despite the manual’s instruction to ensure health and safety, an unknown number of detainees have died in the camps due to poor living conditions and lack of medical treatment, according to eyewitness accounts. Mihrigul Tursun, a Uighur from Xinjiang now living in the United States, told a U.S. commission at a November 2018 hearing that while in detention, she saw nine women die under such circumstances.

Numerous ex-inmates have reported experiencing or witnessing torture and other abuses, including water torture, beatings and rape.

“Some prisoners were hung on the wall and beaten with electrified truncheons,” Sayragul Sauytbay, a former detainee who has been granted asylum in Sweden, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in October. “There were prisoners who were made to sit on a chair of nails. I saw people return from that room covered in blood. Some came back without fingernails.”

The “telegram” also includes an odd section on “manner education,” directing camp personnel to provide instruction in such areas as “etiquette,” “obedience,” “friendship behaviors” and the “regular change of clothes,” among other things. Darren Byler, a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Washington and an authority on Uighur culture, said the fixation on teaching normal adults how to bathe and make friends stems from a prevalent belief among Han Chinese that Uighurs are “backwards.”

“It’s like the discourse about the savage ‘other’ or the uncivilized ‘other,’ where you need to teach them how to be civilized,” Byler said. “But it’s been operationalized in Xinjiang.”

A Camp-to-Factory Pipeline

China’s authorities have championed what they call “poverty alleviation” policies in Xinjiang. New vocational skills, the Chinese authorities say, allow Uighurs to pursue employment beyond fields and farms and thus improve their standard of living.

But researchers and journalists have uncovered a vast system of forced labor across the region, concentrated in textiles and other consumer goods manufacturing.

The manual mentions additional facilities for former camp detainees that appear to support these reports. “All students who have completed initial training will be sent to vocational skills improvement class for intensive skills training for a school term of 3 to 6 months,” the manual reads. “All prefectures should set up special places and special facilities in order to create the environment for trainees to receive intensive training.”

In a guideline called “employment services,” the manual then instructs camp officials to implement a policy called “one cohort graduates, one cohort finds employment” — suggesting that those who complete vocational training are to be placed in a work facility.

Finally, the manual tasks local police stations and judicial offices with providing “follow-up help and education” to former detainees after they are placed in employment, and instructed that after release, “students should not leave the line of sight for one year.”

The directives support reports that detainees are sent from camps to job sites under constant police watch.

“The ethnic minority population is being moved into closed, surveilled and state-controlled training and work environments that facilitate on-going indoctrination,” wrote Zenz in a July 2019 report.

Detention By Algorithm

The shorter “bulletins,” meanwhile, provide a chilling look inside the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which collects vast amounts of personal information on citizens from a range of sources, and then uses artificial intelligence to formulate lengthy lists of so-called suspicious persons based on this data.

According to Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights group, the sources include Xinjiang’s countless checkpoints, closed-circuit cameras with facial recognition, spyware that the police require some Uighurs to install in their phones, “Wi-Fi sniffers” that collect identifying information of smartphones and computers, and even package deliveries. Police and other authorities use a mobile app to run background checks and communicate with IJOP in real time, Human Rights Watch says.

“The Chinese have bought into a model of policing where they believe that through the collection of large-scale data run through artificial intelligence and machine learning that they can, in fact, predict ahead of time where possible incidents might take place, as well as identify possible populations that have the propensity to engage in anti-state anti-regime action,” said Mulvenon, the SOS International document expert and director of intelligence integration. “And then they are preemptively going after those people using that data.”

Mulvenon said IJOP is more than a “pre-crime” platform, but a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes artificial intelligence for human judgment. He described it as a “cybernetic brain” central to China’s most advanced police and military strategies.

Such a system “infantilizes” those tasked with implementing it, said Mulvenon, creating the conditions for policies that could spin out of control with catastrophic results.

The program collects and interprets data without regard to privacy, and flags ordinary people for investigation based on seemingly innocuous criteria, such as daily prayer, travel abroad, or frequently using the back door of their home.

Perhaps even more significant than the actual data collected are the grinding psychological effects of living under such a system. With batteries of facial-recognition cameras on street corners, endless checkpoints and webs of informants, IJOP generates a sense of an omniscient, omnipresent state that can peer into the most intimate aspects of daily life. As neighbors disappear based on the workings of unknown algorithms, Xinjiang lives in a perpetual state of terror.

The seeming randomness of investigations resulting from IJOP isn’t a bug but a feature, said Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute whose research focuses on China’s use of data collection for social control.

“That’s how state terror works,” Hoffman said. “Part of the fear that this instills is that you don’t know when you’re not OK.”

The four China Cables bulletins obtained by ICIJ, totaling 11 pages, focus on the details of IJOP’s implementation, discussing problems and offering possible solutions. Dated June 2017, they are titled, “ ‘Integrated Joint Operations Platform’ Daily Essentials Bulletin” and comprise issues No. 2, 9, 14 and 20.

“Bulletin No. 14,” for instance, provides instruction on how to conduct mass investigations and detentions after IJOP has generated a lengthy list of suspects. It notes that in a seven-day period in June 2017, security officials rounded up 15,683 Xinjiang residents flagged by IJOP and placed them in internment camps (in addition to 706 formally arrested).

The bulletin goes on to note that IJOP had actually produced 24,412 names of “suspicious persons” that week and discusses the reasons for the discrepancy: Some couldn’t be located, others had died but their ID cards were being used by third parties, and so on. The bulletin notes that some students and government officials were “difficult to handle.”

Last year, Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the IJOP mobile app and reverse-engineered it to learn how it is used by police and what data it collects. The group found that the app prompts police officers to enter detailed information about everyone they interrogate: height, blood type, license plate, education level, profession, recent travel, household electric-meter readings and much more. IJOP then uses an as-yet-unknown algorithm to create lists of people deemed suspicious.

Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said IJOP’s purpose extends far beyond identifying candidates for detention. Its purpose is to screen an entire population for behavior and beliefs that the government views with suspicion, including signs of strong attachment to the Muslim faith or Uighur identity. “It’s a background check mechanism, with the possibility of monitoring people everywhere,” Wang said.

Dragnet Extends Abroad

For two years, news organizations have provided increasingly alarming accounts of China’s efforts to shut down Uighur travel and target Uighurs abroad. In November 2016, news organizations reported that officials were confiscating the passports of Xinjiang’s Muslim residents. In July 2017, at China’s request, Egypt deported at least 12 Uighur students studying at Al-Azhar University, a well-known institution for religious studies, and detained dozens more. In early 2018, Uighurs living abroad reported that security bureaus in Xinjiang were systematically collecting detailed personal information about them from relatives still living there.

“Bulletin No. 2” reveals that such acts were part of a broad policy initiative. Dated June 16, 2017, the two-and-a-half page bulletin deals with foreign citizenship and Uighurs who have spent time abroad. It categorizes Chinese Uighurs living abroad by their home regions within Xinjiang and instructs officials to collect personal information about them. The purpose of this effort, the bulletin says, is to identify “those still outside the country for whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out.” It declares that such people “should be placed into concentrated education and training” immediately upon their return to China.

The bulletin instructs officials to arrange to deport anyone who has given up, or “canceled,” Chinese citizenship. “For those who haven’t canceled their citizenship yet and for whom suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out, they should first be placed in concentrated training and education and examined,” the bulletin adds.

“Bulletin No. 20” directs local security officials to screen all Xinjiang-based users of mobile phone app Zapya — almost 2 million people — for affiliations with the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.

Throughout the China Cables, the threat of “terrorism” and “extremism” is cited as grounds for detention, but nowhere in the leaked documents is “terrorism” or “extremism” defined. News reports have indicated that detentions have at times targeted intellectuals, Uighurs with ties abroad and the overtly religious. Yet many others outside these categories have also been swept up. Experts say the campaign is targeting not just specific behavior but also an entire ethnic and religious group.

Ominously, Bulletin No. 2 points to the role of China’s embassies and consulates in collecting information for IJOP, which is then used to generate names for investigation and detention. It cites an IJOP-generated list of 4,341 people found to have applied for visas and other documents at Chinese consulates or who applied for “replacements of valid identification at our Chinese embassies or consulates abroad.” The bulletin includes instructions for those people to be investigated and arrested “the moment they cross the border” back into China.

News organizations have already reported that camp inmate populations included some foreign nationals. Now Bulletin No. 2 shows that their presence in the camps was not accidental but rather an explicit policy objective.

Bulletin No. 2 mentions an IJOP-generated list of 1,535 people from Xinjiang “who obtained foreign nationality and also applied for Chinese visas.” IJOP provided a remarkable level of detail. It determined that 75 were in China, and broke them down by their citizenship: “26 are Turkish, 23 are Australian, 3 are American, 5 are Swedish, 2 from New Zealand, 1 from the Netherlands, 3 from Uzbekistan, 2 from the United Kingdom, 5 are Canadian, 3 are Finnish, 1 is French, and 1 is from Kyrgyzstan.” The bulletin directed officials to find and investigate as many of them as possible, without apparent concern for any diplomatic fallout that might result from placing foreign citizens in extrajudicial internment camps.

‘Extreme Thoughts’: Praying and Opposing Pornography

The final document — not classified but of a sort rarely seen outside Chinese government circles — is from a 2018 court case in the Qakilik County People’s Procuratorate in southern Xinjiang. It details, in the Uighur language, allegations against a Uighur man detained in August 2017 and formally arrested the next month on a charge of “inciting extreme thoughts.” Eight months later, he received an additional charge of “incitement of ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination.”

The case provides a glimpse into how China’s court system has criminalized routine expressions of Islamic belief.

Among the acts deemed unlawful were the man’s urging of co-workers to avoid pornography, to pray and to avoid socializing with those who don’t pray, including “Han Chinese kafirs” (kafir is an Arabic word meaning infidel or nonbeliever). The witnesses to the alleged offenses were co-workers, with Uighur names, with whom he had spoken.

The court document indicates the defendant’s lawyer asked the court for leniency, stating that this was the man’s first offense and that because of his “low legal awareness and education level, he was easily susceptible to being misguided and committing crimes.”

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

_______

Contributors to this story: Dean Starkman, Fergus Shiel, Scilla Alecci, Sasha Chavkin, Emilia Díaz-Struck, Richard H. P. Sia, Tom Stites, Joe Hillhouse, Amy Wilson-Chapman, Hamish Boland-Rudder and Antonio Cucho

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nemesis-nexus · 6 years ago

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Full Flower Moon 2019

HAIL NINHURSAG, Great Mother Earth,Grand Creatrix and Healer! HAIL ENKI, Lord of the Sweet Waters, Wise Father and Protector! You who know best in ALL situations, hear us! We know that life is a journey, not a destination and that journey can take us literally anywhere mentally, physically and/or emotionally. As we go through childhood we learn from all kinds of sources; our parents, our friends, our teachers and even clergy. Many of the things we were exposed to were supposed to build character, but some things were also destructive and intended to erode us mentally and emotionally until there was nothing left! We experienced several happy gains and we also experienced heartbreaking losses. All of these things were meant to steel our nerves and strengthen our resolve to move forward no matter what!

The struggles faced as teenagers, often dismissed by adults which is why many teens stop talking to adults to begin with, were very real to us no matter how trivial they may have seemed to them or anyone else. These issues often included things like arguments with friends, not getting asked to the dance, not getting along with a teacher among other things. Failing to understand that these things, while not usually life-threatening, can be very emotionally charged and therefore can build or erode trust and the ability to open up, leads to a teen feeling there is no point in talking about things that are much more serious because who’s going to actually take the time to listen to them anyway ESPECIALLY if they have a hard time articulating their thoughts in the first place?

While they may be young these days teenagers are also coping with a variety of problems including relationship issues such as physical and emotional abuse, sexual assault and even rape in some cases. Drug and alcohol addiction to deal with abuse of all types at home, bullying and other forms of social and peer pressure or to self-medicate in an attempt to mask mental illness issues such as PTSD, Anxiety, Depression and more serious ailments including Schizophrenia, Bi-Polar Disorder and even Body Dysmorphia so as to avoid being labelled “crazy” or “unstable” should they seek help.

It's easy enough to spot a whiner because they can't ever STOP telling anyone and everyone who will listen about their problems, however, someone who is actually dealing with a serious issue such as Suicidal Depression or coming to terms with their sexuality are MUCH more likely to NEVER open up due to fear of being judged and stigmatized, instead they will act like everything is OK so as not to inconvenience anyone else.

This often ends badly which is why it is necessary for society to evolve and cast aside the negative stereotypes regarding drug and alcohol use, mental illness, sexual preference and lifestyle choices, especially with teens because more often than not it is the SILENCE that kills them, not the drugs and alcohol or the mental illness in and of itself! Father we ask you to embrace all those who are fighting for their own survival and to hold on ESPECIALLY tight to those who are battling the enemies inside their own spirits that no one else can see!

If we are lucky enough to make it to adulthood, that's when the fun REALLY begins. We get to know who our friends actually are per those who choose to keep in touch with us after graduating high school or if we make even the slightest lifestyle change such as coming out or choosing to party less.

In many cases people drift apart and that's alright too as those who are meant to stay in our lives will find a way to be a part of them or if they wander, will eventually wander back. Those that aren't, won't and that's all there is to it! We must always remember to NEVER make ANYONE a priority in our lives if we are not even an OPTION in theirs!

Also in adulthood we experience much more devastating losses such as foreclosure on a home, loss of a parent (equally devastating for a child), loss of a child and/or loss of a spouse. These things can greatly change a person's outlook on life if they don't have the mental or psychological strength to cope or at the very least a person or people to help them deal with the loss. Father we ask that you be with all those who are going through the motions of grief and loss, help them to push on through and emerge stronger in Heart knowing that their loved ones will always be there and in Spirit knowing that YOU will always be there and as such we shall never face anything alone! AVE DRACONIS!

As we transition from our teenage years to adulthood we gain more technical freedoms such as the ability to obtain a driver's license, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and also to enlist in the military. When I think about the ages of those who are able to legally do any of the above, it makes me wonder who determined the logic behind them! I mean you can get your license at 16 but you can't smoke until you're 18; you can't drink alcohol until you're 21, but you can enlist in any branch of the military at 18. So you can operate a potentially dangerous machine at 16, you can smoke cigarettes and go to WAR at 18, yet you can't drink until you're 21? It seems to me that any ONE of these things has the potential to be fatal so why not just regulate ALL of them to 18 when one is a LEGAL ADULT, it makes more sense to me!

Yet another part of life is trying to see it through other people’s eyes. When I think about all the children born with horrific diseases such as cancer, HIV and those born with severe mental and/or physical disabilities, I am reminded to always be grateful for my own health no matter what issues I may have because to see a child at 7 who is fighting for their life not only not give up but have such a positive outlook on life no matter how dire THEIR circumstances may be makes one realize that our attitude towards any situation can be what makes or breaks us and that we too need to keep moving forward with everything we have no matter how difficult!

When I think of all the soldiers past and present, who were willing to sacrifice it all for people they will never meet, it reminds me that sometimes in life it is not only necessary, it can be VITAL to put others ahead of ourselves even if it means that life as we knew it may change forever! When people think about the military, more often than not they ONLY think about Washington and scandals such as Abu Grahib, they very seldom think of those soldiers on the front lines who enlisted NOT for the glory, the notoriety, the medals or commendations, but because they cared more about those they left behind than they hate those who they went to fight against!

These soldiers more likely to suffer from PTSD, Depression and Suicidal Thoughts because of what they have seen including their friends and in some cases their FAMILY getting killed in front of them, things they may have had to do to survive and things they may have to do because they were ordered to even if the one handing it down ALSO knew it was the wrong move. In many cases when they return stateside, they face foreclosure on their homes, ridiculous wait times to be seen by a doctor, even being abandoned by their own family because their stress and anxiety issues became too much for them to handle. Suicide among Veterans should NOT exist or should be minimal, they should NEVER feel that they have nowhere to turn ESPECIALLY when it comes to their mental health! That the government has allowed the VA to languish to the point that some Vets have given up completely is UNACCEPTABLE!

Mother, Father we ask that you guide all those who fought bravely in a war zone and made the ultimate sacrifice as well as all those who physically came home but whose Spirits were so ravaged that they couldn’t deal with it across the Great Divide to sit and feast at your table side by side with all the Warriors who came before! Let those who died in war be free of any confusion, anger and denial regarding their crossing and those who lost the battle in their own Spirits of any guilt that may have followed them back home and let them once again know peace! AVÉ NINHURSAG! AVE ENKI!

Now is the time of the Full Flower Moon when the last frosts are melting away and all the beauty of Nature really begins to burst forth in the form of wildflowers and lush greenery! Trees are near full blossom, animals rouse from hibernation and begin to seek out their mates and the hustle and bustle of the Natural World resumes activity at full throttle! It is during this time that we also need to pay attention to not only the Earth but the Sky as well! One of several reasons why the Human Race has devolved in many ways is because we got complacent! We used to look to the Stars and dream about life beyond them, now we can barely sustain our own ecosystem! We used to be industrious and create ways to protect necessities such as our water supply and our soil from being destroyed, now we are all too willing to dump toxic waste, coal mining and medical debris directly into the rivers and tear Mother Earth’s flesh apart with drills which have created a rise in seismic activity and compounding this by sending sonic blasts to locate oil deposits in the water that are known to kill and maim marine life!

Now more than ever we ALL need to wake up and realize that for all the fighting and squabbling over such petty issues such as religious differences and financial status, what are we really accomplishing besides expediting our own deaths Physical, Spiritual and otherwise? NOTHING. THAT IS WHAT. Let’s for the sake of argument say that everyone respected each other regardless of religion, sexual identity/preference, ethnicity, race or physical appearance - THAT ALONE would save MILLIONS of people from being cast out by their families, tortured by their government or marked for social persecution by any religious sect!

As for money, humans place so much value on IT instead of EACH OTHER that they allow themselves to be blinded by it! They oftentimes also use it as an excuse to treat others as though they were beneath them as well as demand preferential treatment, but what would happen if all that money were to disappear as though it were never there in the first place and they, unable to prove who they are because their entire fiduciary Identity were erased, were forced to live as those they mistreated?

People seem to forget that in this age of reliance on technology and with cyber crimes such as Hacking and Identity Theft becoming more and more common, a situation like that is VERY possible thus they need to step back and take a moment to understand that it is not and should not be the amount of paper or coin one possesses that make should make them worthy of being treated like a human being but the fact that they ARE a human being no matter what their socioeconomic status is and what they do to pay their bills!

Glorious Dragons who oversee All, the world is in need of a serious Spiritual Healing! It is beyond imperative that humans learn to balance technology with Nature as the two were never meant to be mutually exclusive, in fact the reason we have the intellect we do is so we can use it to utilize technology for the protection not only of Natural Resources but OURSELVES as well yet we have allowed our own egos, self importance and greed to overpower our better sense and the results of that corruption is all around us!!!

Two years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Europe and I’m glad I did! One thing I noticed as I walked around Amsterdam, Holland and even as I sat looking out my hotel room in Mönchengladbach, Germany I can’t help but notice is the differences in the landscape, the verdant green of the trees and grass that are not ornamental but were never disturbed even as the cities grew around them and the quality of such things as a simple meal!

I had some of the most delicious scrambled eggs I EVER tasted in Hoofddorp, Holland and what was it that made them better? Superior chickens? No. The fact that they’ve never been on antibiotics to fatten them up faster and they’ve never been factory farmed? Absolutely! The water is crisp and clean, even from the tap! It’s disheartening to know that our government allows our soil and water to be compromised and claims that it’s in the interest of JOBS and MONEY as though EITHER is going to matter if we are all DEAD due to the chemicals that are poisoning both!

I think one of the reasons that people are so willing to let the government get away with so much is because it is easier for people to rant, rail and blame the government for the state of the country rather than take responsibility for their own actions, from electing the officials to office to the policies they make that we do nothing to stop because we are too busy being blinded by empty promises and official stories to accept reality! The reality being that the government doesn’t give a damn about the people and most governments never will! In fact it is my contention that 75 - 90% of politicians who run only do so to have power over the people, not to help the people in any way, shape or form!

I think the other reason is because we have become so Spiritually disconnected that we allow things to happen here because we have been convinced that things will be better on the “other side” the problem with this is that in order to GET to the “other side” we have to DIE first so where does that leave us HERE while we are ALIVE? Better question, where does it leave our CHILDREN and our CHILDRENS children? We need to stop acting as though we are the only generation that matters and start looking towards the future generations and realize that the Native saying “We do NOT inherit the Earth from our ANCESTORS, we BORROW it from our CHILDREN” is true because what the future generations will end up with will be determined by what we leave them!

We are not here to trudge through life under someone else’s heel until the Reaper claims us; we are here to live our lives on Earth while keeping our eyes to the Sky and our hearts untethered and boundless across the Astral Plane! We are here to grow and evolve with the Natural Order of things, not to remain stagnant, stationary and unmoving! When we disconnect from the Universal Qi or Energy that connects ALL life, the effects are drastically clear, we are unable to relate to ourselves nevermind anyone else. It is this disconnection from our own Humanity that leads to ignorance, fear, hate, violence, war, rape, abuse of substances as well as ourselves and loved ones and can even cause nations to go war with each other! When we lose sight of what is really important in life, we lose sight of everything and that puts us and anyone who relies on us for guidance on a path of destruction that the higher up the political or social ladder a person is, the more potential that person has to create a situation that ends in mass casualties!

Mother, Father, we ask you to draw your swords and strike down all those who callously disregard their Natural Duty as a HUMAN BEING to safeguard our environment so that we don’t end up KILLING the very thing that is KEEPING US ALIVE!

We ask you to rein down Justice upon those who would KILL in the name of shameless GREED, who would LIE, CHEAT AND STEAL from those who barely have anything as it is just to fill their own pockets!

We ask you to raise your shields to protect those who are powerless against their abusers, to protect the most vulnerable amongst us from be taken advantage of or harmed in any way be they human, animal or part of the flora and fauna! !

To cover those who are still fighting with honor and courage on the front lines so that they may come home alive and guide those who lost their lives across the Great Divide so they may take their rightful place by your sides!

To shelter those who physically came home from their deployment, but are STILL fighting the war in their heads! Help them find their way back to themselves through you so that they may continue to live as a whole person!

We ask you to Enlighten the so called powers that be as to who the true power is on Earth and that would be THE PEOPLE! On the same token REMIND the People who REALLY has the power and that would NOT be the officials who NEEDED them to be elected to their offices in the first place! We ask that you continue to keep the watch over us as we continue to rise up and push back against those who would dehumanize any of us for the sake of selfish gain especially those who would destroy the ecosystem in pursuit of it!

Mostly we simply ask that like you always keep the watch over us, help us to help ourselves as we continue to grow and evolve! Be with us as we find our way and aid others in finding theirs! Help us find the Door, but make us Walk through it alone so that we may become stronger and able to learn all lessons no matter how harsh or hard! In short we ask that you don’t change anything you have done as far as being our Blessed Mother and Father, we only ask that you help us to help ourselves so that we may spring forth and stand tall like all the Flowers in your Garden!

I am including in this sermon alongside my own prayer, the lyrics to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation; I have loved this song since it came out in the 1990’s and I find it to be more relevant than ever, NOT just regarding race relations but regarding relations of ALL kinds across the board from personal to professional, political to Spiritual, we have grown so far apart as a HUMAN RACE that we NEED to come back together if we have any hope for a viable future ESPECIALLY much further down the road!

“With music by our side

To break the color lines

Let's work together

To improve our way of life!

Join voices in protest

To social injustice!

A generation full of courage

Come forth with me!

People of the world today

Are we looking for a better way of life?

SAY IT!

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

People of the world UNITE,

Strength in numbers we can get it right,

One time!

SAY IT

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

This is the test

No struggle, no progress!

Lend a hand to help

Your brother do his best!

Things are getting worse,

We have to make them better!

It's time to give a damn,

Let's work together come on, yeah!

People of the world today

Are we looking for a better way of life?

SAY IT!

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

People of the world UNITE,

Strength in numbers we can get it right

One time!

SAY IT!

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

People of the world UNITE,

Are we looking for a better way of life?

SAY IT!

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

People of the world UNITE,

Strength in numbers we can get it right

One time!

SAY IT!

We are a part of the Rhythm Nation!

-Janet Jackson (“Rhythm Nation”)”

“’Seeds of Wisdom and Determination’

Plant the seed even if no one should notice,

It will sprout through the mud, a beautiful lotus!

No matter how far down we are buried,

We will arise, no need to be hurried!

For everything happens in Nature’s own time,

The secrets locked within, all reason and rhyme!

The Stars above are Eternal, their Wisdom is vast,

And we stand to learn from their far reaching past!

We are not here by accident, not here by chance,

We are here as a result of Mother and Fathers dance!

For loved us they did and love us they still do,

They’ve stayed by our sides always tried and true!

Now is the time for us to show them how far we’ve come,

By stepping up to the plate and reversing the damage done!

It won’t be easy, but it will be worth every minute,

To save the whole world and everything in it!

The responsibility is not theirs, it is our own,

To take heed of the weakened structure that is our Home!

We can do this; there is still time to come together,

To embrace and revere every Sister and Brother!

That doesn’t mean that we will always get along,

It is through compromise we will remain strong!

So raise up your chalices and toast to the Family,

Remember we are ONE even though we are MANY!

ZI ANA KANPA! ZI KIA KANPA!

MAY THE DEAD RISE AND SMELL THE INSENCE!

Etiamsi MULTA Et Nos UNUM Sumus Nos Sto Validus Ut Nos Sto Una!

Semper Veritas, Semper Fideles, In Diabolus Nomen Nos Fides! AVE SATANÍ!

(We Are ONE Even Though We Are MANY And We Stand STRONGEST When We Stand TOGETHER!

Always TRUTHFUL, Always FAITHFUL, In Satan's Name We Trust! HAIL SATAN!)

Etiamsi MULTA Et Nos UNUM Sumus Nos Sto Validus Ut Nos Sto Una!

Semper Veritas, Semper Fideles, In NINHURSAG'S Nomen Nos Fides! AVE NINHURSAG!

(We Are ONE Even Though We Are MANY And We Stand STRONGEST When We Stand TOGETHER!

Always TRUTHFUL, Always FAITHFUL, In NINHURSAG'S Name We Trust! HAIL NINHURSAG!)

AVÉ IGIGGI!

AVÉ ANUNNA!

AVÉ DRACONIS!

AVÉ THE GREAT SERPENT OF WISDOM!

HPS Meg "Nemesis Nexus" Prentiss

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