#they could target and punish dissidents

[the-great-games]

My fears regarding TikTok go beyond the blatant propaganda, narrative control, and censorship. I am concerned about the algorithm and the potential it has to be weaponized. It is so specific and accurate to find what niches, beliefs, and subcultures people are a part of that it could be used to identify people/groups the government want to target. The US didn’t want China to have the data because they wanted the data.

For instance, if they wanted to target crafty, left-handed, eldest siblings, who like [insert specific sports team here] all they would have to do is pull on the threads of the algorithm to have the accounts and information of people who were sorted into these specific boxes.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

Today would have been Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny's 48th birthday. Instead, it has been almost four months since he was murdered in a Russian prison on February 16, 2024.

The depression, anger, and heartbreak many of us feel over Navalny's death continues. Nobody can imagine the pain and suffering of Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, his parents, and his children, who have been cruelly deprived of a loving father. It is an injustice.

The man who ordered the killing, Vladimir Putin, remains in power. The terrorist infrastructure built around totalitarian control over Russian citizens and assassinating dissidents is still in power. The hideous, evil war that was launched to help validate Putin's dictatorship continues.

While not comparing my response to those of Navalny's family and friends, I personally have found it difficult to watch Navalny's investigations, to reread the articles I collected documenting Russia's corruption, or to hear his voice since that Black Friday. He often began his videos in a simple, personable manner: "Hi, it's Navalny." It became a trademark. For many of us, the fact that we won't hear him say that phrase again is deeply painful.

This is without claiming any special connection to the man. He was exceedingly brave, and such people both make us feel inadequate and yet make us better. They make the world better.

Navalny focused on the theft of Putin and his cronies, because it was through theft that the current Russian dictatorship came into being, from Yeltsin to Putin. It was through theft that both Yeltsin and Putin defrauded the Russian election system, violated the Russian Constitution, and evaded justice for their crimes. It was through theft that Yeltsin and Putin were able to launder their brutal foreign wars as campaigns in the interest of national security.

Most importantly, it was through theft that Putin in particular established government departments built for the sole purpose of following, threatening, poisoning, and assassinating Russian dissidents.

The death of Alexei Navalny isn't just painful because an innocent man died. The fact that he had already been targeted for murder and miraculously survived, recovered, then bravely returned to his country to show Putin that he was unafraid of Kremlin terrorism, all of this deepens the pain of hearing that Putin finally got what he desired.

But even worse: Navalny was far from Putin's only victim. Navalny's death was the latest in a line of assassinations and suspicious deaths going back to the 1998 murder of Russian liberal politician Galina Starovoitova in St. Petersburg. And in almost every case, the evidence points to Russia's federal security services, personally overseen by Vladimir Putin.

Navalny's murder just highlighted the impunity of this terrorist system, the impunity of Putin himself. The fact that the Russian dictator could so casually order the taking of human life, causing devastation to many, is sickening and fills me with the deepest fury.

This cannot stand. Putin can never, ever be allowed to carry out such an assassination again.

Russia must face international criminal investigation for all of the major assassinations and suspicious deaths that have taken place since the murder of Starovoitova. Up until today, justice has not been served. And we remain with the same image of mourning widows, fatherless and motherless children, flowers at makeshift graves, and the deepening silence of the majority who are unsurprisingly terrorised into accepting dictatorship.

No more.

Russia's dictatorship must be unacceptable to any civilised person. Putin has no legitimacy as "president". He never did. The entire Russian government and "legal" system are fraudulent, a racket designed by criminals to terrorise and punish the innocent. Foreigners must never forget the long list of Russians (and other nationalities) who faced brutal deaths for speaking freely, for demanding that Russia obeyed its own laws, for investigating crimes committed by the authorities, for demanding an end to mass theft of national resources, for demanding free and fair elections.

Those of us fortunate enough to live in the West, or a country that maintains Western-style freedoms, should recognise that millions of people live under tyranny. Freedom is not a given. Many of the world's nations do not uphold liberty. In many nations, the criminality and state terrorism that killed Navalny are "normal".

By demanding accountability from Russia, we also demand accountability from other tyrants who believe they can murder their own citizens with impunity and terrorise the rest. Russia props up numerous dictatorships, from the Islamic dictatorship in Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov, to Kazakhstan, to Bashar al-Assad's Syria, to Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran. Russia itself is a puppet of an even worse dictatorship, that of China, a country that threatens the freedom and sovereignty of its neighbours daily and represses its population.

Meanwhile, Westerners are becoming more and more cowardly about asserting the superiority of Western values and the success of the Western nation state. Malign social and cultural forces constantly demoralise and demonise Western history, failing to note the tyrannical nature of vast parts of the world. These forces ask us to equivocate, to whitewash, to turn a blind eye to, or even sympathise with nations whose standards lag far behind those of the West.

The result of this self-righteous, narcissistic self-hatred is the empowerment of the true tyrants and oppressors in the world. Whenever the West hangs its head in shame over real or perceived sins, dictators such as Putin position themselves as both saviours of lagging Western civilisation and the preferable alternative to said civilisation. And a disturbingly large number of gullible Westerners of any political persuasion, disillusioned with political dysfunction in their own countries, become receptive to foreign liars who hate freedom, the rule of law, and the sanctity of human life.

It's time for the West to rediscover its own greatness and sense of morality by standing up to Russia. Open an international criminal case against the Russian state for systematic assassination of citizens and keep that case open for as long as Putin remains in power. Bombard Putin and his terrorist government with questions about victims of his regime, to let them know that ending the war with Ukraine will not be enough to end these criminal investigations.

Conduct multiple, international investigations into the deaths of Russian dissidents-- the kind of investigation that uncovered the Kremlin's plot to murder Navalny with Novichok. Create public memorials to Russian dissidents across numerous countries to show the Kremlin that those Putin sought to suppress are respected by millions worldwide and their memory will remain, while Putin and his terrorist regime will end up in the same junkyard as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other tyrants.

Continue to frustrate and destroy Russia's progress in Ukraine by blocking arms supplies between the Iranian terror state and Russia, as well as increasing sanctions on North Korea and warning China of Western retaliation if it allows Russia to deal with North Korea (because how else did North Korean missiles make it to Ukraine without China's implicit knowledge?).

If organisations such as the United Nations will finally live up to their name, then they should issue permanent resolutions against the Russian terror state and demand answers concerning its assassination program and use of banned chemical weapons. This will further damage Putin's reputation abroad.

A memorial to Navalny in place of the war-mongering Russian diplomatic delegation would be preferable, but we have all seen that the United Nations prefers to commemorate the murderous former Iranian "president" Ebrahim Raisi, who executed 30 000 Iranian dissidents and unleashed a reign of terror against Iran's women between 2022 and 2023.

Is it any wonder that Russia's dictators and terrorists believe they can get away with any crime under the sun?

Don't let it be the case. We demand: no more assassinations of Russian dissidents. Putin's dictatorship must be held to account.

С днем рождения, Алексей Навальный.

Happy Birthday, Alexei Navalny.

[mariacallous]

Last week, Sikh protesters damaged Indian diplomatic facilities in the United Kingdom and the United States, smashing windows and injuring personnel at the High Commission of India in London and the Indian Consulate in San Francisco. Indian reports suggest the protesters support radical preacher and Sikh separatist Amritpal Singh, who faces an arrest warrant under India’s National Security Act. India’s police have launched a manhunt for Singh, who is believed to have fled his home state of Punjab, and detained alleged supporters in the state. Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters gathered again at the Indian Consulate in Vancouver, Canada, to protest the crackdown.

Some analysts fear that the security breaches at Indian diplomatic missions could suggest the return of the separatist violence that wracked Punjab for more than a decade beginning in the 1980s. This violence spilled beyond the state: Sikh assailants carried out the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, and a Sikh organization was implicated in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Given this history, India’s political leadership is understandably concerned about a revival of separatist ideology. But to prevent future terrorist violence, it will need Western countries with significant Sikh diaspora populations to take the threat seriously, too—presenting a delicate challenge for New Delhi.

In the 1980s, some members of the Sikh diaspora supported the separatist movement in Punjab. India eventually rooted out the insurgency through harsh methods that gave no quarter to the militants. Relative political normalcy returned to Punjab, which has since seen several peaceful transfers of power. However, elements within the Sikh diaspora—which includes communities in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the United States—have remained committed to the vision of a Sikh homeland known as Khalistan (literally, “the land of the pure”). As this diaspora has grown in power, Western countries have voiced concern over the treatment of Sikh activists in India, with some even extending political refugee status to Sikh dissidents.

In 2020, social unrest returned to the forefront in Punjab, as Sikh and Punjabi farmers organized a mass protest movement in response to national farm laws designed to end state subsidies for farmers and open up agricultural markets. Demonstrators occupied India’s capital for more than a year, ultimately leading the government to withdraw the laws. The farmers’ protest movement received widespread international support and galvanized the Sikh diaspora. The protests were mostly peaceful, and many activists who seek an independent Khalistan have sought change through nonviolent means. But the farmers’ protests, along with recent developments in diaspora communities, seem to have spawned a new generation of militant pro-Khalistan leaders.

Singh’s group, which was formed in 2021, has reintroduced a violent political rhetoric that romanticizes the militance of the 1980s. Known as Waris Punjab De, or “heirs of Punjab,” the group is allegedly linked to a new wave of violence, including several encounters with the police. In response, the Indian government has cracked down across Punjab this month, arresting suspected members and sympathizers of Waris Punjab De. Singh has so far evaded capture, but the government has set up roadblocks and limited internet service throughout the state. This crackdown has prompted protests in cities around the world, including in London, San Francisco, and Vancouver.

India’s Western partners face a challenge in responding to the possible return of Sikh separatism. The U.K. and the United States have promised to coordinate with local authorities to punish those who targeted the Indian diplomatic facilities last week. But New Delhi rightly expects more from its partners, and it would prefer to see emerging Sikh separatist groups such as Waris Punjab De designated as terrorist organizations. This would boost India’s efforts to limit Sikh separatism, especially by helping to stop diaspora support for violent organizations. India is likely to ask for assistance in stemming this foreign financing, but it could also seek the extradition of those members of the diaspora who can be held legally responsible for supporting violent separatism in Punjab.

India’s Western partners are unlikely to honor such requests, given the political power of Sikh constituencies. Democratically elected leaders in the West are already sensitive to Sikh interests and may be hesitant to take a tough stance against supporters of Sikh separatism within their own borders. Consider Canada, which has a robust Sikh diaspora mostly concentrated around Toronto. There, elected leaders tend to pursue policies in line with the demands of the diaspora, including providing asylum, dawdling on extradition requests, and largely ignoring fundraising for separatist activities. And as the 2020 farmers’ protests showed, the Sikh and Punjabi diasporas can mobilize broad support against the Indian government on the world stage.

Furthermore, Western countries remain concerned about India’s recent declines in civil and religious liberties. Under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, religious minorities face an unprecedented level of state-led persecution—including Sikhs, whose faith is distinct from Hinduism and Islam. The rise of Hindu fanaticism in India and the resulting political environment make it more difficult for Western leaders to support India’s efforts to beat back Sikh separatism, lest they be seen as condoning Modi’s efforts to build a Hindu-first state. All of this makes full-throated support from the West more unlikely.

Against this backdrop, Indian policymakers must tread carefully. New Delhi’s attempts to swiftly contain a renewed insurgency are legitimate, but its leaders need to show that they will not further erode the rule of law—especially given the country’s recent history of police brutality. India’s efforts so far have been confined to lodging official protests about the security lapses that allowed its diplomatic missions to be vandalized. But as it seeks to curb the activities of the separatists at home, it will also have to assuage the concerns of Western partners that it will not disregard legal norms.

Ultimately, Western leaders should look past their own political calculations and condemn violent Sikh separatist movements. By failing to do so, they add fodder to the popular Indian notion that the West is a fair-weather partner—which is not entirely unfounded. For example, even though India staunchly supported U.S.-led efforts in Afghanistan, it was mostly sidelined in negotiations with the Taliban and the 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal. India is also circumspect about Western entreaties to Pakistan, which continue to take place despite Islamabad’s long record of supporting terrorism, including Sikh separatism. Without taking a firm stance against violent pro-Khalistan movements, Western leaders risk further alienating India.

From a geopolitical perspective, the reemergence of Sikh separatism could not come at a worse time. A more powerful Sikh separatist movement would complicate relations between India and the West, just as Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the United States shift from focusing on terrorism to containing China in the Indo-Pacific region. If these Western countries want to establish a truly strong partnership with India, they cannot continue to support diaspora networks that enable violence, even tacitly.

[homesteadchronicles]

Original Writing Excerpt: “Quietus (Quiet Us)”

I have deprived y’all of original writing for far too long now. While this is (sadly) not related to my publicly-discussed WIPs, we’ve formulated ideas for this during my worldbuilding streams on Twitch, so you may recognize the world! Before we dive in though, let’s discuss some pertinent info...

IMPORTANT LORE:

In this world, Spirits supply supernatural power only to those whose bodies they inhabit. These vessels are known as Emissaries. This act is almost always unwilling on the host’s part.

Magic needs to be unleashed in regulation. If you never use it, you have withdrawal symptoms. If you overuse it, you burn out. But while you’re using it, it’s almost impossible to stop because of power’s addictive nature.

In come the Champions: people magically bound to their Emissaries. They have the ability to quell their Emissary’s power on command via the Eye – a magical brand that's invisibly linked to their Emissary. They are responsible for retaining their partner's sanity, lest they go crazy and raze the world to the ground.

When Emissaries use their magic, they don’t just conjure a fireball or see a vision. A portion of their Spirit is temporarily made manifest on the Emissary’s body, and their wills collide. When transformed, one would refer to them as “Emissary-Spirit”, with neither being acting wholly themselves.

CHARACTERS:

Lyrion Arias, an Emissary inhabited by the Sound Spirit, Euphony. Rahush Musedo, the Champion of Lyrion and former Waykeeper. Euphony the Lullmother, an avian spirit with dominion over music.

CONTENT WARNINGS:

Graphic Violence, Minor Character Death, Possession/Mind Control, and Bodily Transformations (a la an anti-Magical Girl)

THE EXCERPT:

Scriptures whisper of a fate most unforgiving: the Dissident deceased can no longer hear the hum of the Lullmother. Having been severed from Her song, they fail to find their way through death’s ever-dimming corridors and wander the afterlife in eternal silence. The Quietus, they call it – a dissenter’s damnation.

If it is as repulsive a punishment as the cantors claim, then consider Lyrion a masochist in the making.

Who would seek a second sans crooning unless Her song consumed their minds? Lyrion could not blame those who chose the Chant. They knew not the haunting presence of a hymn unbidden, felt not the tug of invisible fingers against their vocal cords. Plucking, prying, playing.

Yet, with his annihilation an inevitability, he cannot help but envy the ignorant. The insolent. The inanimate.

“They’re almost here.” Rahush informs him, a hook to tow Lyrion from his thoughts. Embers from a waning warmth float past the brand flickering scarlet against his skin. The Champion’s Eye had watched its Emissary drift and anchored it in the immediate, merciless present.

Lyrion need not search the horizon for long: their hunters fed on fear. Predators never suppress their appearance for long. The Waykeepers – oppressors in the guise of peacemakers – ride over the hilltops and hurry towards their target’s outpost. The brilliant white of their banners burn against the mires behind them. They barrel towards the Beyond, Lyrion thinks with ill-admitted resentment, oblivious to oblivion.

Rahush halts him, a strong hand on shaking shoulders, before Lyrion can breach the summit. Lyrion turns to the only force that could cause him to falter and finds nothing but conflict. Between duty and desire, harbinger and inhibitor.

Conflict had exacted its toll on Rahush long before this current exchange. Combat left him muscular but marred, tanned but torn. Tangles of black hair bury a face that would have, should have, worn laugh lines, had war not choked any chuckling from his mouth. Grim composure overshadows a countenance that once greeted all with unrivaled radiance – and yet it deigns to illuminate Lyrion now all the same.

“You don’t want this,” Rahush decides. It isn’t a question because neither of them doubt it. “Haven’t you labored enough?”

I never will, Lyrion thinks, but you always have. Only one of them deserves this burden. “The decision is out of my hands.”

“Then put it into mine. Say the word, Lyr, and I’ll lay waste to the world.”

Temptation – to retreat, to recede, to relinquish his responsibilities – finds its foothold. Lyrion would concede if he could. But even as he parts his lips, a stranger’s breath escapes them. The Lullmother has already warmed up. She will take the stage, whether Lyrion bows out or not.

“It is not what I want,” Lyrion says. He draws Rahush’s hand from his shoulder with a delicacy unbefitting of its calloused form and ushers it to his lips. The touch of Emissary to Champion, of lodestar to load-bearer, sparks a rush of power surging through their bloodstreams. Lyrion presses a prayer into his protector’s palm before relinquishing his grip. “It is what She needs.”

Before Rahush can rush off, Lyrion takes his place atop the hill’s apex. His stalkers flow over the adjacent knoll and slosh together in the valley below like a frothing sea. Contempt floods their eyes as they fix upon their prey.

They believe me a beast worthy of beheading, Lyrion realizes. What victim could forget a hunter who viewed them without humanity? In that, at least, we are of one accord.

Inside his mind, Her melody resounds. “The stage is set,” the Lullmother drawls with honey-sweet spite. Euphony’s voice invades his brain like a queen finding her hive. Her fervency bleeds into his very marrows. His cue comes soon and he cannot resist Her summons. “Care to raise the curtain?”

Lyrion shivers. Steels. Surrenders. His fingers trace the gem embedded into his bottom lip, circling Euphony’s Heart. He nods.

“Then make me your mask”.

One press of his fingertip to Her Heart and their joint performance starts. No sooner had Lyrion awakened His mistress than she made Herself manifest. Tapestries of light unfurl themselves around him, weaving together to form Euphony’s wings. Threads extend from arm to hip, a harp of flesh and ether sewn into his side. Intangible feathers entwine themselves with his cloak, a coat of armor in animal form.

He is Euphony. She is Lyrion. They are indistinguishable, inseparable, invincible.

They can feel their body singing, bone and limb and muscle screaming in raucous chorus. Music, magic, malice – all harmonizing as one with each thrum of Their heart. Release us, the captive choir pleads, let them hear our hymn.

Lyrion-Euphony split Their lips and unleash the lyrics within. Their wings harken the soundwaves forward with a unified flap. The entire vale reverberates with battle cries and bellowed chords.

Those initial measures do nothing more than drown the battleground in a gruesome ballad. Yet bar by bar, the enemies’ footsteps slow. Their weapons still. Their faces freeze. Euphony’s earworm had done its work, inching inside their minds until Her words became their will.

And as Their chorus reaches a crescendo, it has one command to dispense: “mutiny”.

No choreography could have done justice to the synchronized turn and attack each soldier did in tandem. Waykeeper wars against Waykeeper. Kinsman clashes with kinsman. Burning sword struggles against baptized metal in a swell of insanity. Each combatant calls out for their comrade’s blood, for their commander’s blessing, ushered onward by Euphony’s enchantment. But it is not a roar of praise. It’s a cry for help.

Only death would end the dirge.

At Their side, Rahush shudders. Battle-hardened men rarely wear their emotions outwardly, but remorse cloaks him in undeserved softness.

You were once one of them, Lyrion recalls beneath the thrum of Euphony’s influence. The sentiment softens Them, too. For a moment. But monsters don’t merit your mercy.

Seeing his Champion mourn, watching regret etch itself between fisted fingers, Lyrion yearns to connect. To coddle. To cradle. He reaches out, hand only half his own now, until Euphony urges him to withdraw.

We are monsters too, She whispers.

Lyrion acquiesces and Euphony shepherds Their fingers to the strings stretching out from Their underarm instead. “Shall we continue to Act Two?”

Lyrion need not even nod now. What could worsen what They already were? And so, he strums.

Each pluck of a string strikes another opponent to the ground. Victims clutch at their ears as blood-red rivers break through their handmade dams. Those still sound of mind stuff their ears with the torn capes of turncoats. The braindead detach their ears, be it by scraping or splicing, in a desperate attempt at salvation.

It matters not. Once the verses invade one’s skull, they stop for nothing short of a skeleton.

Lyrion-Euphony never relent in Their one-handed orchestration until carcasses riddle the hills like tumors. Lyrion knows the finale approaches. He should stop. He should want to stop. Whenever the song starts, however, he remembers only the grievous void of its absence – and the addictive thrill of its presence.

With Euphony at work, there exists no one to match him. No one to martyr him. No one to make me a monster.

Except one. Amidst the mangled lumps, a lone soldier stirs, shuffling off-beat through the bodies with blade in hand. His eyes lack the clouded evidence of Euphony’s influence, replaced instead with the shining testament of resolve. He is unbound and inbound.

They must hinder his advance.

With every corpse he passes, They pluck another string. Cry another note. Claw another chord. They hurry the tempo, hasten the pace, quicken the incantation to no avail. Their reckoning approaches, silent and asynchronous.

At Their side, Rahush brandishes his battlestaff. The two-pronged tip anticipates an impaling – a tuning fork misused to skewer.

But They – no, Lyrion, only Lyrion, always Lyrion – refuse to involve him. He is the last glimpse of integrity this world will ever see and (blemished though it may already be) They will not defile him further.

Their playing stops and so too does Their assailant.

“Who are you that would challenge Us?”

The enemy’s eyes flicker to Their lips. Reads them. He’s deaf, They realize with dreaded resignation, which means we’re dead.

“They call me Garan,” the man answers, voice shredded from shouts swallowed by warfare. His tone lacks the telltale snap of an aspiring avenger. It is serenity and sorrow. It is acceptance and abhorrence. It is dissonant to everything, including itself, but most of all to Their expectations. Somehow, that sours it all the more.

“They call You a monster.” Garan appraises Them with the egregious air of an elder disapproving of infantile antics. (But I am a child, Lyrion reminds Them. Euphony shushes him all the same). Tired eyes droop in undeniable, inexplicable pity. “I see now it’s true.”

Rahush growls, his indignation awakened. Unduly, Lyrion thinks, do not waste it on unwanted truth. “You will not vilify him.”

“I wasn’t referring to him.”

Lyrion senses a flicker of internal fury, feels the tension of ruffled feathers in the ether. Euphony joins Rahush in his rage. I must end this before they end him, he thinks. “Have you come to kill me?”

“Not you,” Garan assures in word but not in tone. His finger slides back and forth along the scimitar’s edge in morbid debate. “Her.”

Lyrion-Euphony cackle, ridicule crackling like a clipped speaker. “We are One now,” They say (but it isn’t Lyrion who prompts them to).

“That is the most disgusting lie She’s ever fed you”. Garan snorts, sneers, circles Them like a hyena on high ground. “I know: there’s no freedom for Emissaries without a new vessel for their spirits.” Garan slams his sword point-first into the dirt and stretches his arms out wide. “She expects a sacrifice, right? Then make me the offering.”

Lightning licks Their spine, shocking Their systems into silence. It’s a trick, Euphony insists. It could be. It should be – no one asks to take an Emissary’s mantle. They only want to take their life.

He cannot discern intent without answers. “Why would you help the one you hunt?”

“My daughter, they…changed her. Changed both of us.” Garan rolls up the ruffled sleeve to reveal a Champion’s Eye. Or, rather, what remained of it. The Eye sits, closed, crested atop his skin like a scab. Whatever power once dwelt within it now sleeps, leaving naught but a hollow lump in its wake.

An inactive Eye? Lyrion has seen this only once before. Back when he witnessed what he thought impossible: the murder of an Emissary. Back when that Eye had no one left to watch.

“My little girl didn’t stand a chance, and I was too weak to stand against her.” Garan appraises him, pleas with him in silent, widened stares. “But you…you’re strong, I can tell. Strong and tired. But you don’t have to be. Not anymore. Let go and let me seal this spirit inside me. Inside the Eye. Let us stop this cycle – together.”

I could be free, Lyrion thinks, I could be me. It’s unthinkable. Inconceivable. In front of him. He cannot picture this foreign lifetime alone, but when he glances to Rahush, horrified and hopeful at his side, there’s no other choice.

They step towards the sword.

Lyrion.

Step.

Listen to me, Lyrion.

Step.

You will listen to me, Lyrion.

Their body quivers, the Emissary and the eternal grappling for governance. Wings beat in rhythmic resistance. Strings shudder in resonant rejection. Still, They press onward, step by stumbling, scraping, screeching step.

Garan’s voice echoes across their death-ordained graveyard: “If you are not Her puppet, then cut your own strings!” He is begging. For himself. For his kinsmen. For the sins this would cleanse him of. He needs this, no different than Lyrion.

They – no, Lyrion declares, I – draw the sword from its soiled sheath. And with its unveiling, the voices inside fall still. How long had it been since he had heard nothing?

Lyrion raises a hand to cradle Garan’s cheek. It is the last act of kindness he could do for a man whom he soon would curse, but it will have to suffice. Am I a monster for considering his offer? He stops short, hand ghosting along Garan’s neck. Or am I a monster for taking it?

That sliver of paranoia is all that Euphony needs to overpower him.

His fingers turn intangible, Her grip irresistible. They faze through Garan’s flesh, slip into his throat, tighten around his vocal cords. Hands tug at each one, tearing babel from his lungs. Euphony plays him like an instrument.

Just like She played me.

One last pluck and the cords snap in perfect unison. Garan slumps over, their audience now undone.

The world waits, at rest.

An empty room should end Their union. Were this a theatre, the players would bow. The curtain would fall. The crowds would clear. But the star of this production refuses to dwindle – Euphony draws every spotlight into her orbit.

The thrum of Her influence neglects its mandatory diminuendo. Magic demands an encore. It pumps through him, beating against his ear drums, breathing through his lungs. You’ve locked us up for so long, it whispers, and now you wish to leave us?

But he doesn’t. Not really. Not when its song silences the grief, the regret, the reproach of unblinking eyes.

Euphony occupies his – Their – head with conviction. You heard Garan, She reminds him, let go. He wants to. Wants to give in, give up, give over his body to Her wholly if it means getting over this agony once and for all. He wants to and he almost does.

Until he sees the Eye.

Beneath the siren’s song speaks an invisible voice that anchors Lyrion to reality. Beyond the phantom’s grasp lies the familiar grip of calloused flesh on his shoulders. Behind the fog of chaos stands Rahush, composed and concerned, the Champion’s Eye blaring like a beacon from his chest.

The immaterial tie between them goes taut, Eye keeping Euphony at bay. Rahush tightens the reins as She struggles. He will steer them back towards sanity.

But Lyrion is not done with Her. Not yet. He withdraws from his Champion’s arms, despite the suspicion it draws.

“Trust me,” Lyrion requests, and he hates how close it sounds to a command. “If it’s a song She wants, it’s a song She’ll get.”

Rahush is too many things: slow to speak, quick to listen, and brutally disciplined. But more than anything else, he is what Lyrion could never again be – helplessly trusting. And so, he stands aside.

Lyrion overlooks the cemetery that his song spawned. No magic could make them wake again – but it could make them walk. He opens his mouth and lets a melody of his own make amends for Their mistake.

Call your brothers, call them home from war Drag their carcasses out from the moor Call all soldiers back from crimson shores And lay their bodies to sleep

Still-glittering wings wave in tandem with Lyrion’s makeshift tempo. Each burst of wind rustles the bodies as if they might arise.

And then, against all understanding, they do.

The bones of the dead rattle in response to Lyrion’s summons. Limb by limb, they clamber upright in broken array. Their shoulders slump. Their jaws slacken. Even still, they listen. They obey. That is all Lyrion needs.

Save your daughters from the showman’s floor Paying fines behind a bedroom door Just one night, and not a penny more While strangers lay them to sleep

With spear and splintered hand, the awakened Waykeepers carve into the earth beneath them. Deeper and deeper they dig until the holes stand high above their heads. Their arms embrace one another, brother to brother, before plummeting into the abyss of soil below.

One by one, the skeletons accept their tombs. All but Garan.

Stop your children from the sins of yore Father paid for them and left us poor No more enemies to settle scores Let Mother lay you to sleep

The husk that was Garan looks as though he may forgo the afterlife, still seek redemption. His eyes search the horizon for hope and find only horrors. They creep towards the crypt.

Let Mother lay you to sleep Let Mother lull you to sleep

Garan reluctantly greets his grave, welcoming the dirt that ushers him towards his daughter. Rahush retrieves his scimitar and plants it in the plot – a sign of misled sacrifice.

With all words loosed, Euphony’s influence takes its leave of Lyrion. Her wings unfurl in a flurry of loosened light. Her armstrings snap and recede into punctured skin. And, for but a blessed – but temporary – reprieve, her voice recedes.

Exhaustion and exasperation knock Lyrion to the ground.

No sooner had Lyrion collapsed than a dust cloud flourished beside him, forecasting Rahush’s arrival. Their pinkies sit at the other’s brink, just barely unable to broach the rift between them.

“Garan was wrong.” It’s all Lyrion can think to say. To hope. To believe.

Rahush’s breath brushes against his neck, so he must be staring with that knit-brow, pout-lipped expression that makes Lyrion melt. He can’t stand to look at it now. “About?”

“Euphony’s not the only monster here.”

Rahush wrangles his head, gripping his chin until Lyrion has no choice but to gaze back at the ire in brown eyes. “You are not what they made you. They may have put you in their irons, but we will break their chains.”

Or die trying, Lyrion finishes. Neither need say it – they already understood their end. If he be a beast, then at least he would thrash against his captor’s shackles, and bring their prison down atop them.

It is as fitting an end as any, for one flirting with ferality.

Lyrion nestles into the crook of his Champion’s neck, afraid but assuaged, and allows safe arms to encircle him. He listens to the beat of Rahush’s breath, heeds the pace of his heart, counts each pulse of the Eye. Lyrion leans into the latter until it drowns out the dissonance of all else.

In sleep, he dreams of Quietus.

[lifeofresulullah]

The Life of The Prophet Muhammad(pbuh): The Assignment of the Duty of the Prophethood and First Muslims

The Second Phase of the Call: Addressing Makkans on Safa Hill

The circle of conveyance was expanding gradually. Happiness caressed the souls that had testified to Islam while the hearts that had not saved themselves from polytheism were in a state of panic.

“Therefore expound openly what thou art commanded.” When the Divine mandate came, naturally, the Master of the Universe (PBUH) could not stay still. He wanted to show his countrymen the path to spiritual and worldly happiness as soon as possible.

During this time, he slightly expanded his circle and notified the Meccans of his prophethood and the religion of Islam on Mount Safa. 

Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) went on top of a high rock on Mount Safa and called out to the Meccans in a loud and resonant voice: O Sahaba! (O Community of Quraysh, come here and convene, I have important news for you!)

The Meccans were puzzled. Who was shouting? Were they in the face of danger? Had an enemy invaded their land or was an important message to be forwarded to them? They did not delay in responding to this call and gathered on Mount Safa at once. What had happened? The person making this call was Muhammad-ul Amin (Muhammad the Trustworthy.) What did he want? What news did he bring? What was he going to say?

With great curiosity they asked, “O Muhammad, why did you gather us here? What are you going to announce?”

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) did not lag in his response. At a moment when all minds fully gravitated towards him, when all eyes filled with looks of curiosity were directly focused on him, when all ears paid full attention, and at a moment when everyone was anxiously waiting, he delivered this eloquent response that was filled with several logical proofs:

O Community of Quraysh! Our similarity is like a man who sees the enemy and runs to his family and shouts “O friends!” since he is afraid that the enemy will harm and reach his family before he does.

O Community of Quraysh! If I were to tell you there were enemy horsemen on the other side of this mountain and that they were about to attack you in the morning or towards the evening, would you believe me?”

They had never heard Muhammadul-Amin (Muhammad the Trustworthy PBUH) tell a lie nor say something that had surpassed the truth. In unison they all replied, “Yes, we affirm your honesty because we have not seen anything but propriety from you. You are not a person who makes false allegations.”

After addressing the public, the Holy Prophet (PBUH) called each of the Qurayshi tribes by their own names and continued speaking:

“In that case, I inform you of a great punishment that is ahead. Allah the Exalted has commanded me to warn my closest kin of the punishment in the hereafter. I invite you to say, “Allah is One, there is no God.” I am His servant and Messenger. If you accept what I have said, then I guarantee that you will enter heaven. Also know that I cannot be of service to you in this world nor in the hereafter unless you say, “Allah is One, there is no other God but He.” 

Abu Lahab Again...

Abu Lahab was baffled in the face of these words that addressed the mind, heart, and soul. He took a rock in his hands and threw it straight towards the Master of the Universe (PBUH) and shouted, “'May you perish for this! Is this what you have summoned us here for?”

Nobody else said anything in dissidence among those who were listening. They only dispersed into whispers of conversation among themselves.

Abu Lahab, the Person who Deserves Hell...

With his actions, Abu Lahab now deserved Divine punishment and enmity.

He would pay dearly for his violent hostility, lasting grudge, and hate that he had towards Allah’s Apostle (PBUH). Allah heralded his frightening aftermath in Surah al-Lahab:

“Perish the two hands of Abu Lahab and perish he! His wealth and what he has earned shall avail him naught, Soon shall he burn in a flaming fire; And his wife, too, bearer of slander. Round her neck shall be a halter of twisted palm-fiber…”

Regardless of whoever spoke out in dissidence, Allah would continue to complete our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) light. For that reason, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was neither afraid of nor shaken by the ugly allegations made against him and was able to continue on his path in an immensely dignified and serious manner.

MALTREATMENT AND INSULT INFLICTED UPON THE PROPHET

After our Holy Prophet (PBUH) declared his prophethood and invited the community to Islam on Mount Safa, the polytheists of the Quraysh tortured him and targeted insults at him, and their abuse continued to increase.

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) invited them to the doctrine of “Tawhid” (oneness) whereas they insisted upon idolatry and polytheism, which they called “the religion of their fathers.”

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) invited them to the path of virtue and happiness both in this world and the hereafter whereas they tried to keep away from virtue and happiness just as a bat tries to flee from the light.

The Master of the Universe (PBUH) invited them to live humanely and to exhibit dignified behavior while they gallivanted by exhibiting ugly and dishonorable behavior and trampled over human dignity and honor with their feet.

He wanted them to enter Paradise and invited them to commit deeds that would earn them these incomparable blessings whereas they continued to commit deeds that would lead them to eternal punishment and hellfire.

Through his invitation, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) wanted to save them from falling into asfal as-safilin (the lowest of the low) and elevate them to a’la illiyyin (the highest of the high places), ranks of worth, and stations that would empower them to execute sublime duties. Nonetheless, they continued preoccupying themselves with worthless activities that would result in their entrance to the bottom pits of hell (asfal as-safilin.)

Of course, the polytheists who exhibited such desires and behavior would oppose our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) invitation, would struggle against him without mercy, would try to make him ineffective through all their means and break his perseverance, fortitude, courage, and zeal. For that reason, they attempted to commit all kinds of torment, persecution, insults, and murder attempts.

Undoubtedly, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was not the only one who faced such circumstances. Every prophet who has been sent was treated harshly, held in contempt, and subjected to torture and persecution by his tribe and community. Alongside these commonalities and other traits that all of the prophets shared, these prophets did not refrain from explaining their cause and did not make any concessions from their faith despite the torture, insults, persecution, and murder attempts they faced. As the amount of torture and persecution that they were afflicted with increased, their love, enthusiasm, and seriousness in their mission in working towards having the truth heard grew even more.

Abu Lahab is Leading

Abu Lahab and his wife, Umm Jamil, were among the leaders of those that tortured and persecuted the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

Aba Lahab would continuously stalk our Beloved Prophet (PBUH), would strive to get the crowd to stop listening to him, and would attempt to instill doubts and apprehensions in their minds.

That day, Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) was inviting the crowd to testify to the Oneness of Allah and his own prophethood at the Ukaz Fair: “O people! Say La Ilaha Illallah so that you can save yourselves,” our Holy Prophet (PBUH) said to the crowd.

Abu Lahab came from right behind and shouted, “O people! He is my nephew; he is lying to you, stay away from him.” 

This was an example that is and was filled with many lessons:

His nephew was inviting the crowd to the path of happiness and to have faith in Allah whereas he, the paternal uncle, was opposing his own nephew by yelling at the crowd to not listen!

Abu Lahab did not stop there.

One day, he threw rancid filth at the front of the door of our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was his neighbor.  At that moment, despite not yet having become a Muslim, Hazrat Hamza caught up and spilled the filth and the rancid substances upon Abu Lahab’s head.

All that our Holy Prophet (PBUH) said in the face of his neighbor’s ugly action was, “O Sons of Abd Manaf! What kind of neighborliness is this?” as he swept away the filth in front of his home.

This man, who the Quran mentions will burn in the fierce fires of Hell, would sometimes stone our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) home just to bother him.

Abu Lahab Sends his son so that he will torture the Prophet!

Abu Lahab did not want to be alone in torturing and persecuting the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

One day, he commanded his son, Utaiba, to harass our Holy Prophet (PBUH). Utaiba went to our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was reciting Surah an-Najm during that time. Upon hearing this, Utaiba remarked, “I swear by the Lord of an-najm (the star) that I denounce your prophethood” and arrogantly spat toward the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) only replied to him with this invocation:

"O my Lord! Subject him to the power of a dog from among Your dogs."

His (PBUH) prayers were never left unrequited; thus, his imprecation was answered sometime after the above incident. While Utaiba was sleeping among his friends in Hawran, a place that was in the vicinity of Yemen, a lion came and tore him to shreds!

The acceptability of his prayers is just one aspect of our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) many miracles.

Wood Carrier of Hell

Umm Jamil was the wife of Abu Lahab, the most violent opponent and enemy of the Islamic cause. This woman, referred to as the “wood carrier” in the interpretation of the Holy Quran, had become so mad and so wild in the face of the Islamic cause that she would sprinkle hard, spiked shrubs every day on the path that our Holy Prophet (PBUH) walked without showing the slightest sign of boredom; in fact, she derived great pleasure from this action.

An incident related to Umm Jamil is as follows:

While our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was on Mount Safa and openly delivering the Divine invitation to the Quraysh for the first time, she and her husband, Abu Lahab scolded him and even affronted him. Abu Lahab shamelessly said, “'May you perish for this! Is this what you have summoned us here for?” and hurled a rock that he had lifted from the ground towards our Holy Prophet (PBUH). Upon this incident, Allah revealed Surah Tabbat, which mentions the ugly behavior and aftermath of Abu Lahab and his wife.

Umm Jamil could not contain herself once she heard this surah. She carried a rock and went to the Masjid al-Haram. Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was sitting there with his loyal friend, Hazrat Abu Bakr. Umm Jamil saw Hazrat Abu Bakr but did not notice our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was sitting there right next to him. She said to Hazrat Abu Bakr: O, Abu Bakr! Where is your friend? I heard that he has satirized me. I am going to smash his mouth with this rock when I see him.”

Since Umm Jamil’s eyes could only see Hazrat Abu Bakr and failed to notice our Holy Prophet (PBUH), she had no choice but turn back since she could not achieve her goal. 

Of course her eyes could not see!! How could a “wood carrier” of Hell dare to see our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was under Allah’s protection and grace?

[chessinventor]

病之前寫的：It is likely that US and Russia would engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine, and Ukraine domain is already flooded with Russian made misinformation in order to submit Ukraine, I don't think Ukrainian are that weak in willpower. If you read Facebook of that news, all the comments are pro-Russian and said NATO is never a reliable partner. Read between lines one would see the ultimate goal is to weaken NATO amid the chaos of COVID pandemic, and without such an protection umbrella all of the Eastern Europe nations are threatened. What I believe is US is playing weak and dumb so the Russians overestimate their military power, there may be new strategy or tactics US in the back of it mind. Maybe massive drone strikes or something electronic via satellite so armed personnel are not necessarily needed at the place. In the surface it looks like US is not provoking Russia but there maybe other things to act as a surprise tactics that Russian army never faced before. Anyhow, war is closer than ever, the geopolitical risks of a global war is very high.That is an indirect consequences of the economics downturn caused by COVID pandemic, it probably intended to shaken several of the world's major power players like CCP China, Russia, USA, EU countries and some lesser evil like N.K., Iran which refused to go along with Saudi Arabia to recognize the sovereign state of Israel. The biggest economic like US and probably CCP China with a lot of people they could just write off can withstand and absorb a lot of impacts but not smaller one. Russia always count on EU to buy their natural gas for forigen currencies to buy other daily necessities. If US has something up in its shelves to replace that role then theoretically it could dealt a death bolt to Russian economic. (It also depending what others alternative energy generation mechanisms  EU have other than wind and solar energy, such as the Hungarian Overunity generator maybe?) Taken it that way, there is some sense when Chinamerica is "working" together to shake up the world. Probably CCP China start that to punish HK (thus the current CE Carrier Lam done an excellent job in extend the inconvenience and panic from this virus with record high teenagers suicide rates) but DT's state strategist then got wind of this and they planned such an response in US as well as giving some scripts/incentive for the rest of the world to follow. i.e. A lot of chaos, commotions, legal and political infighting as well as the economic recession (as part of the Great Reset) and redistribution of power and wealth is expected, and effect on the morale and fighting capacities are also calculated. So it gave the impression to Russia and China and probably Iran (Burma dictatorship?).... a message for them to strike while US is weak and chaotic. CCP China is probably too weak to strike when pandemic hits very hard on every sectors of its economy while the trade war between US and CCP China is far from over. It wanted to reserve all its strength to strike ROC be prepared for India offensive in Tibet. This is when Russia had some economic trouble and some dissidents and interest groups grow really hateful of the Putin hegemony so it want to play the nationalistic card to submit the easiest target, it also wants to send a message that NATO expansion would cause a war to the leftard of EU but I don't think the NATO would be stopped by Russian aggression nor the leftard. Whoever strike first, be Russia or China or Iran... (N.K. is probably straving and their easy target is CCP China) gave US a really good cause to start a war against the aggressor thus releases all its tension accumulated during the pandemic.Sun Tsz's rule of war: Pretending to be weak and let your enemies strike your "weakness", counteract them and strikes with strength. (thus to eliminate your enemies for good.)

左膠同通俄者係無分別嘅，為和平而和平既人係可以完全睇唔到普京係經濟簫條之後用民族主義去轉換視線這點，他們個世界係無戰爭的，我用台灣同中共對奕既角度去睇就見到莫斯科想先斷烏克蘭後援，恐嚇鄰國不得干預，最後一塊塊地食晒成個東烏克蘭，剩番個窮既烏克蘭你NATO咪養飽它，斷人外援再關門打狗，它想俾其他前加盟共和國一些顏色亦唔想中共分一杯羹。民族主義必然導致戰爭，邊種政體一樣。

https://www.facebook.com/21516776437/posts/10159671911246438/

前俄羅斯所謂加盟共和國舉國天然資源被莫斯科掠奪用來用養俄羅斯人其次同美國對抗，當年中下血海深仇左膠提也不提，未計姦淫同種族滅絕，係唔係而家蘇聯無左條數就咁一舉勾銷？美國左膠真係痴撚左線。不過當年布殊把口咁大未做先講做乜，當年入左就無仇報，或者係NATO個名太有冷戰味道，改成歐洲聯盟可能中性小小，或轉一轉名叫中亞共和國經濟合作發展組織？或者莫斯科會開心D，不過NATO係軍事組織點和平轉型做乜春好？計分裂他人國家既話，車臣條數點算？莫斯科大言不慚話俄民被種族屠殺，未計新疆回教徒，原來車臣回教徒唔係人來的，好多都係共產主義受害者。一日俄羅斯仲有個大國夢一日它周圍國家都唔安寧，美歐特別係前東歐國家好大反應，它似乎好學唔學見到北京大國巴撚閉，北京咁威水我點可以樣衰過人？

加多幾點去篇國際評論：

1. 俄羅斯以前係全球大帝國橫跨歐亞大陸因此有帝國心結，以前唯一可以同它比美只係日不落帝國英國，但英國已經放棄左好多殖民地，俄羅斯依然係全世界第一大國家，加埋冷戰美蘇對抗既歷史就背住巨大既歷史包袱，普京就好似做左另一個沙皇咁樣，某程度都係咁既國家歷史需要咁既統治者，這種大國心結同中共國自以為繼承「華夏正統」心態係好相似；

2. 可以追溯到中共國8964之後蘇聯既無序解體，蘇聯解體並唔係有計劃的一個個宣佈獨立而係一次過拆散成好多個國家，而這些國家之前既經濟同政治因蘇聯體制都完全依賴莫斯科，它們一直都好想獨立好討厭莫斯科指手劃腳同將該國既天然資源用左去第二到，獨立係需要一段時間同過程就半類似前英國殖民地獨立否則當地被蘇聯壓抑既民族歷史衝突好快就浮面，咁樣俄羅斯自覺係被西方「欺負」咁樣令個大國好失威好無面，當時俄羅斯急速轉左幾個總統就咁「跳過」這個帝國合理崩解模式既問題，當中最重要係俄羅斯同新拆出來既前殖民地國際既政治經濟關係問題，我理解係忽然多左好大堆新國家令成個國際政治經濟秩序忽然好混亂，各國既政客政黨都需要一個新結構去理解新國際秩序；

3. 我膚淺既意見係如果歷史有得「慢慢來實驗」一個可行性係建立一個比起EU更鬆散既共同經濟區，根本獨立國家聯合體完全無發散它應該有用來援和歐洲同俄羅斯利益衝突既問題，係亨領頓既歷史之終結提過國家唔再用意識形態結成同盟就可能用文化／宗教等等來結成文化結盟，例如中國就係東南亞因儒家思想而「領導」日本同南北韓仲有成堆東南亞國家（儒家文化圈）不過複雜之處在於中國依意識形態分裂成台灣同中共國未算統一國家，咁理論上俄羅斯係可以用東正教同沙俄文化而結一個泛沙俄文化圈，如果係由EU帶領仲可以弱化左它同俄羅斯由沙俄到法國德國入侵俄羅斯到它反擊到資本主義同共產主義對疊時既歷史（嫌隙） ，咁個終極目標係將俄羅斯帶回歐洲共同市場這個大家庭，將它覺得它可以係文化上經濟上政治上同回歸歐洲，進而唔會行上中共國既霸權同民族主義復興之路，咁樣俾個終極（和平奮進）目標就希望最終用西方價值觀勝過民族主義，因民族主義對所有曾經既大國都係好大誘惑，你睇第一二次世界大戰既歷史當中資本主義最發達既都走向法西斯同納稅獨裁暴政既懷抱，唯有用意識形態附加經濟利益先可以避免俄羅斯走上歪路；

4.俄羅斯既國際重要性無可置疑，地緣政治上它歐亞多條通道既樞紐，好多東亞國家既前宗主國，這堆國家同俄羅斯有由沙俄去到被迫成為蘇聯一部份同美國對抗有好多既歷史恩怨，例如回教非俄羅斯國教一直備受壓迫，蘇聯本來係無神論係壓迫所有宗教既，東正教後來解禁而好多回教徒就同時覺得他們係宗教／文化到經濟上都受到莫斯科長期既壓迫同剝削，我覺得它們參與中共既一帶一路都係無奈既選擇，咁似乎會比係NATO即美國同獨立國家聯合體即蘇俄好一點，不過中共一樣打壓部份唔聽話既回教徒咁樣令他們國家人民口服心不服，俄羅斯最大既籌碼係它豐富既天然氣同媒氣蘊藏，歐洲係需要它提供冬天所需既暖氣否則會凍死，但EU所唔滿意既係俄羅斯成日出錢支持反歐盟既右翼政黨，拆散成個EU似係俄羅斯終極既外交目標，德國法國兩國係爭EU籠頭之餘對此如 當然非常唔滿意，因EU似乎除左人權之外就唔可以用樣方式去影響俄羅斯這個半獨裁國家體制，俄羅斯人權記錄強差人意，咁他們所擔心既係一種半極權既極右法西斯價值觀，同一時間他們又被Syria難民問題所困；

5. 其實外人係唔可以亂將NATO同EU當成一體因兩個係唔同性質既組織，NATO係同蘇聯牽頭既華沙公約國軍事集團既冷戰組織，國際局勢講度平衡，好多系統理論家就會話世界最穩定有秩就係當冷戰時期，所以當世界失去東西兩大集團對抗就有好多嘗試去結成一個集團同西方集團即係NATO對抗，例如中東既恐怖主義嘗試立國仲有中共國既一帶一路等等都有一種同美國牽頭既國際秩序對抗既意味，常理來說，NATO係華沙集團已經解體之後應該都自動解體來緩解俄羅斯既對NATO敵意，NATO既存在就好有未完成既戰爭既意味在內，俾俄羅斯當中既好戰份子一個「NATO亡我國之心不死」既最大籍口去擴張軍備同發展武器，似乎係蘇聯解體得太快太突破而歐洲未識得點樣去處理冷戰時期既遺產，唔處理它們就當處理左，無左一個咁樣既軍事合作組織歐洲可能失去安全感，咁它們係依然擔心俄羅斯既軍事威脅，依然生活係當年紅軍隨時可以橫掃歐洲既陰影之下，咁係需要一個緩解方案去同時緩解兩方既憂慮；

6. 不過歐盟可以辯解話NATO唔係一個完全歐洲既軍事合作組織，NATO非歐盟既軍事組織，所以俄羅斯反NATO可以係反軍事霸權而唔一定係反對歐洲，咁就要考慮NATO同EU既代表性同它們對歐洲唔同國家既象徵意義同價值既問題，這點非常複雜同各國既歷史有莫大關係，我睇到最顯著一點係布殊用反恐戰爭俾左NATO一個新既發展方向，咁樣唔算解決左冷戰遺留落嚟既歷史問題而似係用美國價值去壟斷於歐洲利益之上，反恐既前題就係不斷搵新既恐怖主義國家，咁俄羅斯覺得早晚都會被美國列在這清單之內而被針對，就埋下左不滿同反感既伏線，NATO同EU非完全重疊它們之間有所謂維度問題，例如NATO當中有土耳其而土耳其非歐盟成員它仲同歐盟成員既希臘爭奪緊寨浦路斯既控制權，歐盟並無軍隊只有軍事合作，NATO代表象徵美國係歐洲同全球既勢力，理論上NATO同EU都應該重組來對應歐洲今時今日所面對既威脅同挑戰，咁或者可以係要求俄羅斯重組一個更接近EU一個更有實權同以民主方式既管理前俄羅斯衛星國，兩方同時「解除武裝」或者就可以俾到和平小小㛃機，雖然我認為一旦有中共這個霸權主義既影響件事會變得複雜好多。

[sayedhusaini]

Democrats and Media Do Not Want to Weaken Facebook, Just Commandeer Its Power to Censor

by Moderator

📷(Stock Catalog / Flickr)By Glenn Greenwald / SubstackMuch is revealed by who is bestowed hero status by the corporate media. This week's anointed avatar of stunning courage is Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager being widely hailed as a "whistleblower” for providing internal corporate documents to the Wall Street Journal relating to the various harms which Facebook and its other platforms (Instagram and WhatsApp) are allegedly causing.The social media giant hurts America and the world, this narrative maintains, by permitting misinformation to spread (presumably more so than cable outlets and mainstream newspapers do virtually every week); fostering body image neurosis in young girls through Instagram (presumably more so than fashion magazines, Hollywood and the music industry do with their glorification of young and perfectly-sculpted bodies); promoting polarizing political content in order to keep the citizenry enraged, balkanized and resentful and therefore more eager to stay engaged (presumably in contrast to corporate media outlets, which would never do such a thing); and, worst of all, by failing to sufficiently censor political content that contradicts liberal orthodoxies and diverges from decreed liberal Truth. On Tuesday, Haugen's star turn took her to Washington, where she spent the day testifying before the Senate about Facebook's dangerous refusal to censor even more content and ban even more users than they already do.There is no doubt, at least to me, that Facebook and Google are both grave menaces. Through consolidation, mergers and purchases of any potential competitors, their power far exceeds what is compatible with a healthy democracy. A bipartisan consensus has emerged on the House Antitrust Committee that these two corporate giants — along with Amazon and Apple — are all classic monopolies in violation of long-standing but rarely enforced antitrust laws. Their control over multiple huge platforms that they purchased enables them to punish and even destroy competitors, as we saw when Apple, Google and Amazon united to remove Parler from the internet forty-eight hours after leading Democrats demanded that action, right as Parler became the most-downloaded app in the country, or as Google suppresses Rumble videos in its dominant search feature as punishment for competing with Google's YouTube platform. Facebook and Twitter both suppressed reporting on the authentic documents about Joe Biden's business activities reported by The New York Post just weeks before the 2020 election. These social media giants also united to effectively remove the sitting elected President of the United States from the internet, prompting grave warnings from leaders across the democratic world about how anti-democratic their consolidated censorship power has become.But none of the swooning over this new Facebook heroine nor any of the other media assaults on Facebook have anything remotely to do with a concern over those genuine dangers. Congress has taken no steps to curb the influence of these Silicon Valley giants because Facebook and Google drown the establishment wings of both parties with enormous amounts of cash and pay well-connected lobbyists who are friends and former colleagues of key lawmakers to use their D.C. influence to block reform. With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party's ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests.And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress. Haugen herself, now guided by long-time Obama operative Bill Burton, has made explicitly clear that her grievance with her former employer is its refusal to censor more of what she regards as “hate, violence and misinformation.” In a 60 Minutes

interview on Sunday night, Haugen summarized her complaint about CEO Mark Zuckerberg this way: he “has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach." Haugen, gushed The New York Times’ censorship-desperate tech unit as she testified on Tuesday, is “calling for regulation of the technology and business model that amplifies hate and she’s not shy about comparing Facebook to tobacco.”Agitating for more online censorship has been a leading priority for the Democratic Party ever since they blamed social media platforms (along with WikiLeaks, Russia, Jill Stein, James Comey, The New York Times, and Bernie Bros) for the 2016 defeat of the rightful heir to the White House throne, Hillary Clinton. And this craving for censorship has been elevated into an even more urgent priority for their corporate media allies, due to the same belief that Facebook helped elect Trump but also because free speech on social media prevents them from maintaining a stranglehold on the flow of information by allowing ordinary, uncredentialed serfs to challenge, question and dispute their decrees or build a large audience that they cannot control. Destroying alternatives to their failing platforms is thus a means of self-preservation: realizing that they cannot convince audiences to trust their work or pay attention to it, they seek instead to create captive audiences by destroying or at least controlling any competitors to their pieties.As I have been reporting for more than a year, Democrats do not make any secret of their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley power to police political discourse and silence their enemies. Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO's of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. At the last Congressional inquisition in March, one Democrat after the next explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not immediately start censoring more.A Pew survey from August shows that Democrats now overwhelmingly support internet censorship not only by tech giants but also by the government which their party now controls. In the name of "restricting misinformation,” more than 3/4 of Democrats want tech companies "to restrict false info online, even if it limits freedom of information,” and just under 2/3 of Democrats want the U.S. Government to control that flow of information over the internet:

The prevailing pro-censorship mindset of the Democratic Party is reflected not only by that definitive polling data but also by the increasingly brash and explicit statements of their leaders. At the end of 2020, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), newly elected after young leftist activists worked tirelessly on his behalf to fend off a primary challenge from the more centrist Rep. Joseph Kennedy III (D-MA), told Facebook's Zuckerberg exactly what the Democratic Party wanted. In sum, they demand more censorship:

This, and this alone, is the sole reason why there is so much adoration being constructed around the cult of this new disgruntled Facebook employee. What she provides, above all else, is a telegenic and seemingly informed “insider” face to tell Americans that Facebook is destroying their country and their world by allowing too much content to go uncensored, by permitting too many conversations among ordinary people that are, in the immortal worlds of the NYT's tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, “unfettered.”When Facebook, Google, Twitter and other Silicon Valley social media companies were created, they did not set out to become the nation's discourse police. Indeed, they affirmatively wanted not to do that. Their desire to avoid that role was due in part to the prevailing libertarian ideology of a free internet in that sub-culture. But it was also due to self-interest: the last thing social media companies wanted to be doing is looking for ways to remove and block people from using their product and, worse, inserting themselves into the middle of inflammatory political controversies. Corporations seek to avoid angering potential customers and users over political stances, not courting that anger.This censorship role was not one they so much sought as one that was foisted on them. It was not really until the 2016 election, when Democrats were obsessed with blaming social media giants (and pretty much everyone else except themselves) for their humiliating defeat, that pressure began escalating on these executives to start deleting content liberals deemed dangerous or false and banning their adversaries from using the platforms at all. As it always does, the censorship began by targeting widely disliked figures — Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and others deemed “dangerous” — so that few complained (and those who did could be vilified as sympathizers of the early offenders). Once entrenched, the censorship net then predictably and rapidly spread inward (as it invariably does) to encompass all sorts of anti-establishment dissidents on the right, the left, and everything in between. And no matter how much it widens, the complaints that it is not enough intensify. For those with the mentality of a censor, there can never be enough repression of dissent. And this plot to escalate censorship pressures found the perfect vessel in this stunningly brave and noble Facebook heretic who emerged this week from the shadows into the glaring spotlight. She became a cudgel that Washington politicians and their media allies could use to beat Facebook into submission to their censorship demands.In this dynamic we find what the tech and culture writer Curtis Yarvin calls "power leak.” This is a crucial concept for understanding how power is exercised in American oligarchy, and Yarvin's brilliant essay illuminates this reality as well as it can be described. Hyperbolically arguing that "Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all,” Yarvin points out that it may appear that the billionaire Facebook CEO is powerful because he can decide what will and will not be heard on the largest information distribution platform in the world. But in reality, Zuckerberg is no more powerful than the low-paid content moderators whom Facebook employs to hit the "delete” or "ban” button, since it is neither the Facebook moderators nor Zuckerberg himself who is truly making these decisions. They are just censoring as they are told, in obedience to rules handed down from on high. It is the corporate press and powerful Washington elites who are coercing Facebook and Google to censor in accordance with their wishes and ideology upon pain of punishment in the form of shame, stigma and even official legal and regulatory retaliation. Yarvin puts it this way:However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his,

but someone else’s. . . .Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh. He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is….And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written poast, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige. In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.As I have written before, this problem — whereby the government coerces private actors to censor for them — is not one that Yarvin was the first to recognize. The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since at least 1963, that the First Amendment's "free speech” clause is violated when state officials issue enough threats and other forms of pressure that essentially leave the private actor with no real choice but to censor in accordance with the demands of state officials. Whether we are legally at the point where that constitutional line has been crossed by the increasingly blunt bullying tactics of Democratic lawmakers and executive branch officials is a question likely to be resolved in the courts. But whatever else is true, this pressure is very real and stark and reveals that the real goal of Democrats is not to weaken Facebook but to capture its vast power for their own nefarious ends.There is another issue raised by this week's events that requires ample caution as well. The canonized Facebook whistleblower and her journalist supporters are claiming that what Facebook fears most is repeal or reform of Section 230, the legislative provision that provides immunity to social media companies for defamatory or other harmful material published by their users. That section means that if a Facebook user or YouTube host publishes legally actionable content, the social media companies themselves cannot be held liable. There may be ways to reform Section 230 that can reduce the incentive to impose censorship, such as denying that valuable protection to any platform that censors, instead making it available only to those who truly allow an unmoderated platform to thrive. But such a proposal has little support in Washington. What is far more likely is that Section 230 will be "modified” to impose greater content moderation obligations on all social media companies.Far from threatening Facebook and Google, such a legal change could be the greatest gift one can give them, which is why their executives are often seen calling on Congress to regulate the social media industry. Any legal scheme that requires every post and comment to be moderated would demand enormous resources — gigantic teams of paid experts and consultants to assess "misinformation” and "hate speech” and veritable armies of employees to carry out their decrees. Only the established giants such as Facebook and Google would be able to comply with such a regimen, while other competitors — including large but still-smaller ones such as Twitter — would drown in those requirements. And still-smaller challengers to the hegemony of Facebook and Google, such as Substack and Rumble, could never survive. In other words, any attempt by Congress to impose greater content moderation obligations — which is exactly what they are threatening — would destroy whatever possibility remains for competitors to arise and would, in particular, destroy any platforms seeking to protect free discourse. That would be the consequence by design, which is why one should be very wary of any attempt to pretend that Facebook and Google fear such legislative adjustments.There are real dangers posed by allowing companies such as Facebook and Google to amass the power they have now consolidated. But very little of the activism and

anger from the media and Washington toward these companies is designed to fracture or limit that power. It is designed, instead, to transfer that power to other authorities who can then wield it for their own interests. The only thing more alarming than Facebook and Google controlling and policing our political discourse is allowing elites from one of the political parties in Washington and their corporate media outlets to assume the role of overseer, as they are absolutely committed to doing. Far from being some noble whistleblower, Frances Haugen is just their latest tool to exploit for their scheme to use the power of social media giants to control political discourse in accordance with their own views and interests.

Correction, Oct. 5, 2021, 5:59 pm ET: This article was edited to reflect that just under 2/3 of Democrats favor U.S. Government censorship of the internet in the name of fighting misinformation, not just over.

[thegeekyzoologist]

My opinion on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (SPOILERS)

Like many people interested in the Jurassic franchise, I binge-watched that show back in september and here are my thoughts.  First of all, I precise that I had no expectations for the series as the combo Jurassic World + kid show didn’t attracted me at all, and the trailers have done nothing but confirm my fears.

Let’s start by the positive: - Amidst the cringefest that the first episodes were, the scenes with Darius back home stand out from the rest by their quality as they are centred more on drama and character development and not on clumsy comedy like the scenes on Nublar. The idea of getting an access to Jurassic World and Camp Cretaceous as a reward for beating that virtual reality game reminded me the recruitment of Eli Wallace by the SGC at the very beginning of Stargate Universe. - Starting from the beginning of the season’s second half, the series gets better and a little more mature in its unfolding and writing, up to the point where it doesn’t seem targeted for young children but rather young teens. Some dumb scenes remain however (like the one of the geneticist Eddie, abandoned in the lab with the sole company of his birthday cake). - There is a few action and suspenseful scenes that aren’t bad in the second half with, among other things, a hide-and-seek game with the Indominus amidst the containers, a part in the tunnels that can remind some people of Telltale’s game, a monorail attack by the pteranodons which should have deserved a live-action treatment, and a climax in a storage area where the protagonists have to use their wits in order to defeat the carnotaur and escape from the underground network. On the matter of the carnotaur, one can note a nice paleontological reference with its difficulty to turn when it is chasing prey. - Of all of the characters, Roxie is the most realistic, responsible and reasonable one (and the only tolerable one in the first episodes). And let’s bring now the negative aspects: - On the matter of the original soundtrack, I don’t remember any of the original themes sadly. As I had the same problem when I viewed The Witcher though (I didn’t liked its first season but I rather well appreciated its soundtrack following a separated listening), I will wait for the release of the soundtrack before criticizing it further. - The first episodes are a total farce with a succession of all kinds of nonsenses with the bunch of stereotypical buffoons that the kids are that are involved in stupid acts by the night of their first day, acts that fall under Reversed Darwinism (the survival of the most idiotic like Grant would say in Jurassic Park 3) and that gave me the desire to give some slaps and send those Kennys to a firing squad (for the crimes of property destruction and, above all, endangering dinosaurs and employees); the infringements during the activities of hygiene and security rules that are applied in many theme parks and laboratories around the world (with the kids wandering around in the lab and touching to everything in a total dissidence; running down a zipline and brushing past brachiosaurs...); the counsellor Dave which talks to Wu like if he was an old pal of his while Wu is one of the highest corporate executive around and someone famous and respected in-universe; Wu being depicted with the subtlety of a fat beer-drunk sea lion (with his mannerisms and attitude worthy of a James Bond villain, we know right away that he is bad); cartoony action scenes (I mean bloody hell. Look at that Parasaurolophus that jumps off the jeep’s roof like he was a fookin’ kangaroo while the jeep itself wasn’t miraculously crushed under the hadrosaur’s weight); the employees and the park’s security being shitty (one enter so easily in the underground network that Biosyn could organise rave parties there right under InGen’s nose; Darius and Kenji being left with no supervision in the middle of the jungle while they are supposed to shovel shit as a punishment); the dinosaurs that passes too as incompetent for failing to kill the kids while such situations in real-life or in the first films would have unforgiving or barely forgiving but only at a certain cost. - Despite the ordeals they are going through, the kids seems to be never traumatised or at least shaken like the Murphys, Kelly Malcolm or Maisie were respectively in JP, TLW and FK since here, they seems to be in shock for a moment or two before starting again to squabble or quipping once they are away from danger. - At the end of the monorail attack scene, I thought that the writers had the balls to kill off Ben  and I would have tipped my hat to this narrative decision and give more credit to this kid show if we didn’t had the reveal at the end that he was still alive. At the end, we just got another Billy Brennan situation. - Bumby is useless in this season, aside from encouraging toy sales and being the show’s cute caution and still, it’s relative as her closeups along with Brooklynn’s rapy face in episode 2 have scared me more than the predators’ attacks in the season’s second half. And her growth rate is so fucked up as she hatch in episode 2 before reappearing in episode 5 I think which is supposed to be set two days later, where she is already the size of a bulldog. And the scene where she cries while the kids are being kicked off the lab (for understandable reasons) is so ridiculous... - Aside from in the action and suspenseful scenes mentioned above in the positive aspects, the use and depicting of dinosaurs is either anecdotal, either WTF with the Sinoceratops being almost as gentle as a lamb (try to do with a hippo or a rhino what the Kennys did with the sino, I wouldn’t mind some funny antics...). I’m not a fan of the bioluminescent Parasaurolophus and their scene either. It seems like they wanted to copy the Na’vi River Journey’s attraction from Animal Kingdom in Orlando, with semi-aquatic parasaurs worthy of some outdated depictions from the last century.   - Visually speaking, the universe and the artistic direction are poor. The jungle has the same look everywhere on the island (with trees of average height being relatively spaced from one another while the ground is covered with grass) and its scenery never seem foreboding or ominous while Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna were, in some way, entire characters in the films that sometimes aroused an eerie sense of mystery and danger, at east in the original trilogy and Fallen Kingdom. The park itself is quite empty too, even before the evacuation. There is only scene with a large amount of people and the latter seems to all share the same model and the same animation in addition of being blurred (probably as a camouflage for the lack of budget) and we don’t believe in this world as nothing grand comes out of the visited locations (aside from maybe the eponymous Camp Cretaceous) and that everything seems so bland, with even the employees being of the same corpulence, age group and behaviour except for a few exceptions. - Finally, let’s discuss about the coherence with the Jurassic World film, of which this show is supposed be a canon interquel. Even though if there is several nods to some of the latter’s events (Masrani’s helicopter is seen a couple of times; the Kennys take the ACU’s van; they walk past Zach and Gray’s destroyed gyrosphere and the killed ankylosaur’s body...)  as well as other materials of the franchise, including JP3 and Masrani Global website, like if the show wanted to tell us “Hey look! I did my homework!” in order to please the fans. It’s one thing to make references to the rest of the saga and it’s easy actually, but it’s another to use them for something else than just fan-service. Despite all this, Camp Cretaceous has its share of inconsistencies with Jurassic World. I won’t list them all since it wouldn’t be that interesting but among other things, we have the mention of fences falling apart across the entire island while nothing like this happened in JW (it seems they mixed up the JP and JW incidents) or at least not on this scale; the kids visit a lab somewhere north of the park whose existence seems a bit off as the Innovation Center’s lab can do everything that lab does, in addition of housing Wu’s secret lab; the surroundings of the mosasaur lagoon which seems empty by the end of the afternoon while chronologically speaking, the scene is supposed to happen just after the pterosaurs attack (and thus the area should be crawling with employees that are looking for eventual late visitors, or the still running security cameras could have spotted the kids) and why did those foolish Kennys didn’t thought of going to the nearby hotels right after the ordeal with the mosasaur instead of hanging around in the bleachers up until sunset, hotels where a large number of visitors are supposed to be found up until quite late in the night according to the Jurassic World film? Anyway, Camp Cretaceous might have got a kick up the backside halfway through and the quality of the episodes did increased little by little but the whole season stays nevertheless mediocre and the viewing of the series is honestly quite dispensable, especially if you were disappointed by the Jurassic World films. Some will probably tell me that I’m being too hard with a kids show but actually, the fact that it is targeted for kids is no excuse for some flaws like a lack of ambition in the artistic direction, the shitty humour or the wtf scenes. Whether a work is for adults, for all audiences, or for kids, the creative investment and the work quality should stay the same.

[victor1463]

Before Night Falls

The tone of the writing is bleak at times. Reinaldo Arenas describes the struggles he experienced in the country during his childhood. There are sexual interactions that he had with people around him that could be considered sexual abuse. Arenas may not see it that way because it was normal to explore sexual desires with whoever or whatever was around in the countryside. The tone was ever-changing and depended on the stage of life that Arenas was in. When he was in the county, he felt in his element, but he was confused about his sexuality. Arenas tried to suppress his love for men; it created a hopeless tone for the writing. The way he speaks about the people who did not hide their sexuality is with admiration. He was impressed by those who accepted their feelings and did not hide for fear of persecution. When Arenas witnesses the support that others around him have for communist Cuba, there is a tone of fear. The political climate in Cuba is unstable, and no one is safe from Fidel Castor's control.

The atmosphere of the reading was unstable, and things were never what was expected. The sexual desire that Arenas felt was all over the place, and hiding his genuine desire for men was only making it harder for him. The political state went from one dictatorship to another. Fidel Castro took control under false pretenses, and this only creates a more fragile political state. When the people took to the streets, once they heard the truth about their leader's intention, they went along with it. They were indoctrinated into communism, and to object meant death. Arenas knew this, and it is why he pretended to show support for what happened. He was already in constant danger because he was gay, and showing his actual distrust for Fidel Castro would have put an even bigger target on his back. People were being prosecuted for their sexuality. “sweetness. Little by little, those enemies started to make headway, saying that María Teresa was a lesbian, an aristocrat, and a counterrevolutionary, and they finally managed to get her replaced” (Arenas, 72). She was accused and persecuted even though she was just rumored to be gay. Throughout the reading, I could only feel an anxiousness about what was going to happen next. The history of the book is well known, but the events that Arenas experienced were never predictable. There was danger around him, and he was close to getting outed because of the people around him. Arenas wanted to learn and improve his writing skills, and the people who were willing to help him were against Castro. His association with these people made him suspicious. Arenas is constantly on the brink of losing everything. His writing is starting to be recognized but has yet to make the impact that he wants.

While reading this, I was shocked, and at one point, I had to put the book down. I could not handle the description of animal cruelty that Arenas had written about. Arenas mentions witnessing that  “Sheep would be hung by their legs to have their throats slit, and after the blood had been drawn, while they were still half alive, they would be cut into pieces” (Arenas 20). There were so much cruelty and pain around people and animals. It made me think about what the people in the town had experienced and what cruelty they do to each other. Arenas mentions, “We had returned to the times of Nero, the times when the masses rejoiced in watching how a human being was being condemned to death or murder before their eyes” (Arena, 59). People enjoyed the fact that they could get someone killed if they disagreed with Fidel Castro’s belief. Surprisingly, Arenas did not end up as a cruel person who would give up those around him in Castro's support. The university he attended had brainwashed everyone who attended, but he saw what was going on before public knowledge. Arenas even admitted that there were people in power who were openly gay but were not arrested because they supported communist Cuba. Arenas was educated and knew how to use his words to create a reaction. If he wanted to, he could have climbed the political ladder and loved whom he wanted, but he kept his viewpoint and saw the system's right and wrong.

The issues seen throughout the reading are endless. Arenas describes the executions of those who opposed Castro and the persecution that the gay community experienced. Cuba was struck by poverty, violence and people were using the system to get rid of people they did not like. Arenas depicted the unstable nature that existed within the citizens of Cuba. Whether it be people living in fear of being gay or having someone lie to get rid of them, Cuba's people were never truly safe. The trial system did not rely on evidence; if there was an accusation, it was enough for someone to be sent to jail or be executed. Arenas wrote the book not to highlight his experiences but everyone's experience. He does not only focus on himself, and he brings in everyone's beliefs and actions. In the “... decade of the 1960s, when the state assumed an ever more prominent role in policing sexual behavior and identities,”. (Lambe). The Cuban government tries to control all aspects of life. He writes to show how those around him helped him grow, but he also depicted their downfall because of communist Cuba. Arenas wanted to show how everyone under Castro's control was a victim who could not escape their captor. In the end, “the executions were thus for Fidel a measured attempt to ensure the survival of Cuba's revolution, as well as to propagate long-term political transformation. (Karl). Many people died during the revolution and suffered right after the revolution under Fidel Castro’s control.

In the end, the dissidence, homosexuality, and literature all correlate with the Cuban Revolution. The disagreement of homosexuality and censorship of literature played significant roles in the revolution. Many people died and were punished for their sexuality or even being accused of being homosexual. Arenas mention in the library chapter, “I decided the Library was no longer a place for me either. Any book that could be deemed to be “ideological diversionism” disappeared immediately. Of course, any book dealing in any way with sexual deviation also vanished”(Arenas, 73). Many things were being used to punish people if the government didn’t agree with them. This type of censorship limited the revolution and cost. Arenas was writing to spread his word and the truth about Cuba. He mentions that he had lost some of his work, and some disapproved of his writing because of its topics. “Arenas was also writing as an ‘outlaw’ since some of the episodes in which he had become involved fell within violation of sexual laws in Cuba.” (Ocasio). Arenas was becoming free through his writing. Still, in reality, he could not be seen in public without the fear of someone turning him into the government.

                                                       Works Cited

ARENAS, REINALDO. BEFORE NIGHT FALLS: a Memoir. PENGUIN Books, 2020.

Karl, Robert A. “Reading the Cuban Revolution from Bogotá, 1957–62.” Cold War History, vol. 16, no. 4, 2016, pp. 337–358., doi:10.1080/14682745.2016.1218848.

Lambe, Jennifer L. “Historicizing Sexuality in the Cuban Revolution.” Radical History Review, vol. 2020, no. 136, 2020, pp. 217–232., doi:10.1215/01636545-7857392.

Ocasio, Rafael. “Arenas, Reinaldo (1943-1990), Novelist and Political Activist.” American National Biography Online, 2000, doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1602886.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

IF YOU ARE RUSSIAN, PLEASE WATCH AND SHARE THIS VIDEO. 

Infuriating news: Roskomnadzor, one of Russia’s state-owned corporations, wants to block the YouTube channels of NavalnyLive and Lyubov Sobol. 

This forms part of Putin’s campaign of persecution against Navalny’s allies. If we remain silent, brave Russian dissidents will be forced to pull their content from the web, or, as others have already done, flee Russia entirely. 

Lyubov Sobol has faced multiple rounds of persecution, including a frivolous lawsuit for slander filed by billionaire Evgeny Prigozhin, after she exposed him for poisoning Moscow schoolchildren with rotten meat. 

(To my utter shock, she has been fined around 5 million roubles for several more cases!)

Recently, she had to end her election campaign for the Moscow State Duma, even though she had a rigorous and principled set of policies; owing to ongoing persecution, she could no longer protect her staff. 

Sobol has also faced legal repercussions for questioning one of the FSB agents who poisoned Navalny, as well as a ludicrous fine of 250 000 roubles for allegedly inciting protests; in fact, she barely mentioned the April 21 protests during her Echo of Moscow radio interview prior. 

On top of this, a Moscow court banned FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation) for ‘extremist’ activity. As a result, FBK closed their offices and dismissed hundreds of volunteers, as they could no longer guarantee their safety. 

FBK heads Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov have fled Russia to avoid further criminal cases. Zhdanov, like many Belarusian refugees, now lives in Lithuania. 

Europeans must step in to help Russian dissidents. We already have a devastating tool: Magnitsky Sanctions, which punish human rights abusers through asset freezes and visa denials. 

Alexei Navalny, who has been unjustly imprisoned for 193 days, suggested these sanctions in his address to the European Parliament. His ally, Leonid Volkov, published a list of 35 Putin enablers who we could target immediately. 

Despite having this list since January, we have not sanctioned these individuals. One of the men on Navalny’s list is Alisher Usmanov, the convicted blackmailer from Uzbekistan who has given multi-billion rouble bribes to politicians like former Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. 

A quick Google search shows that, rather than facing crippling sanctions, Usmanov seems well-established in his business dealings at Arsenal Football Club. Yet several months ago, Dame Margaret Hodges had asked the British government to sanction Usmanov in support of Navalny’s freedom.  

When we will abandon greed and support the human rights of Russian people? 

PLEASE WATCH AND SHARE!

[expatimes]

What is Israel's secret weapon against Iran?

There is much reason to believe, but obviously no hard evidence to prove, that Israel is behind the most recent assassination of yet another high-ranking Iranian scientist.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was seen by United States and Israeli intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons capability, was evidently killed on November 27 in an ambush on a highway near Tehran “with remotely controlled smart devices”.

It is, of course, impossible to know what exactly happened on that highway. The Israelis have reasons to exaggerate their capabilities in conducting deadly covert operations in Iranian territory. Iranians, meanwhile, have reasons to conceal the manner in which their prominent official was killed, and engage in their own reciprocal disinformation campaign.

What we are left with is the evident fact that Israelis, perhaps in cahoots with the Americans, the Saudis or even the Emiratis, were behind yet another targeted assassination of a prominent Iranian official.

But how does Israel do it? How does this puny little settler colony get away with murder, repeatedly?

Projecting more power than they actually possess

Although Israel wants to project an image of an omnipotent and omniscient force that can kill and destroy with the flick of a finger, the fact is that it is all a bogus, cliché, and gaudy posture. There is not much mystery surrounding this cowardly operation: we have the Israeli-US intelligence, Saudi-Emirati finances, and the sleeper cells of the treacherous Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) - the ex-Iranian terrorist outfit - operatives inside Iran as the most likely combination of factors that allowed Israel to commit this murder.

Targeted assassination is a common feature of Israeli behavior. The murder of prominent Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut on July 8, 1972, together with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees Najim, is perhaps the most infamous and iconic of such assassinations.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was not the first and likely will not be the last Iranian scientist presumed murdered by the Israelis. At least half a dozen Iranian scientists have been murdered over the last decade, and Israel is to have been chiefly responsible for half of these murders.

To be sure, Israel is neither the first nor the only state that has eliminated its perceived enemies with assassinations outside its borders. Earlier this year, Donald Trump ordered the US military to murder Qassem Soleimani, a high-ranking Iranian military official, in Iraq. Just two years ago, Saudi Arabia chopped to pieces Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist, in Turkey.

The Iranians themselves have a long history of brutally murdering their perceived enemies around the world. They, for example, stabbed prominent opposition figure Shapour Bakhtiar to death in France in 1991. They do not hesitate to murder dissidents inside Iran either, as in the notorious case of the so-called “chain murders” of the 1980s and 1990s.

So no state can assume a holier than thou posture here. They are all guilty as sin. It is a dog eat dog world out there among these ruling regimes of terror and murder, each one worse than the other.

But still, the bald-faced incursion of a colonial settlement into a sovereign nation to murder one of their high-ranking scientists requires some examination.

What is Israel's secret weapon?

The specific question I wish to raise here is how could Israel murder Fakhrizadeh, then cowardly assume a stance of “neither denying nor confirming”, and get away with it?

The issue at hand here is not the Israeli behavior, which is systematically criminal. All you have to do is read Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018) to learn chapter and verse the sustained and systematic history of the settler colony being founded and kept in place with such targeted assassinations.

There is a link, I wish to propose, between the fact that Israelis can just move into Iran and murder anyone they want and the cowardly sellouts like the rulers of the UAE, Bahrain or Sudan “normalising” the historic theft of Palestine and entering into diplomatic relations with the settler colony.

That link spells out the scandalous incompetence of ruling states on all sides of the Gulf and beyond having no trust in their own people and degenerating the state apparatus into the instrument of tyranny against their own populations instead of learning how to protect their national sovereignty. On this score, there is no difference between the rulers of the UAE and Iran: they are both pathetically weak towards American-Israeli militarism because they are pathetically tyrannical towards their own citizens.

Let us talk specifically about Iran. The ruling state dedicates an overwhelming segment of its security and military apparatus to keeping Iranians themselves in line. It is so conscious of its own illegitimacy that its single most important function is to grab power, control the economy, and systemically subjugate Iranians to oppressive surveillance.

The ruling military, intelligence and security apparatus of the Islamic republic does not want to accept how utterly ridiculous it looks that Israel can infiltrate their country and point-blank murder one top scientist after another, while they are busy brutalising a teenage child into wearing her scarf one way and not the other. The sheer stupidity of this state just boggles the mind.

Stateless nations, illegitimate states

Israel is a garrison state - a state without a nation ruling over the Palestinians, a nation without a state. And so is precisely every single other state around it, chief among them Iran that has long since lost the trust and support of the nation over which it rules with wanton cruelty.

Imagine for a minute if people in Iran or anywhere else in the Muslim world were the masters of their own destiny. Imagine if the dungeons of the Islamic republic were not filled with political prisoners and human rights activists. Imagine if the ruling state did not waste much of its resources and abilities to surveil the Iranians and punish them for the slightest sign of life and liberty.

That is the secret weapon Israel has against Iran and all the other corrupt regimes in the region. That these illegitimate rulers do not see the strength of their countries is in their own population; that freedom, liberty, the ability to stand up proudly and claim national sovereignty is the true source of power for any country. Instead these pathetic incompetent fools who cannot even protect their most precious assets are trying in vain to keep an entire nation prisoner of their outdated, corrupt and moronic politics.

Israel is a military base created by a gang of European adventurists. They would not even dare to imagine infiltrating Iran, or Turkey, or Egypt, or any other real country, and murdering one of their citizens if they realized they had the will of an entire nation confronting them. They know the entire apparatus of the Islamic republic from top to bottom is irredeemably foreign to the defiant will of the Iranian people, that after 40 years they have miserably failed to become integral to the will of their nation, that they and their entire propaganda machinery has become parasitic to the organic integrity of an ancient but young, proud and competent nation, over which the ruling clergy has much power but little authority.

Nations against states

What can Iran do in retaliation for their top scientists being murdered by Israel? Nothing. Can they reciprocate and go and kill an Israeli nuclear scientist? Of course not, they do not have the wherewithal to do anything remotely similar to that. So they huff and they puff and ultimately shoot a few useless missiles in one direction or another and continue abusing their own population and supporting Hamas, Hezbollah or the murderous al-Assad regime for one useless act of “resistance” or another.

But at the same time, the habitual chicaneries of Israel will ultimately have to face not these feeble and pathetic states but the root of the power of resistance to its murderous deeds which is the will of the Palestinians and the Iranians alike.

What is lost to Israel and its sustained course of criminal activities is how utterly futile they are. They mobilize all their evil means and assassinate a few Iranian nuclear scientists - so what? Iran has literally thousands upon thousands of such unclear scientists, more than half of them women physicists from top Iranian universities. What is Israel going to do? Kill them all? Drop a couple of their pathetic and useless atom bombs on Iran as its American godfather Sheldon Adelson wants to do?

Is it possible to prevent Iranians from achieving nuclear knowledge or technology for peaceful or even non-peaceful purposes if that is what Iranians decide to do? Do they think a puny little settler colony can stop an entire nation that has given Maryam Mirzakhani to the world? Where do they think the late genius mathematician came from? Tel Aviv University? Israelis will fail miserably in this as they fail in everything else they touch - from stealing Palestine, to convincing anyone with an iota of decency and empathy to accept this blatant theft.

Both the ruling Islamic republic and the settler colony of Israel will ultimately fail to silencing the will of Palestinian and Iranian peoples. The repressed but defiant will of nations, Palestinians under the boots of Israeli soldiers and Iranians under the cruelties of their ruling regimes, will prevail.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15357&feed_id=22325

[sepublic]

Xian Characters, Features, and Landmarks (Pt. 1)

Roodaka- Roodaka is the ruthless CEO of Vortixx Industries, having secured a practically permanent position there from a young age after she scaled The Mountain. A cutthroat business-dealer, she helps direct the company’s actions, oversees stocks, and surveys the occasional experiment or investment, providing a personal hand of involvement every now and then. She has done business with just about every major power in all of Xia, and is among the Powers That Be. With an eye for potential, she has led Vortixx Industries to the top of Xia’s arms-manufacturers, and is not just content with her current success either. Roodaka is an opportunist, and will and has back-stabbed others and crushed enemies for the total domination of Vortixx Industries.

           She is cold-hearted and ruthless, and believes whole-heartedly in the idea that might makes right. Roodaka has been conditioned both by experience and by others that only the most powerful have the authority to lead; If one cannot prove their merit and mettle, then they are a liability and must be cast out, not to be trusted by neither peers or even themselves. Regularly Roodaka does puzzles and tests her intelligence, reflecting on and questioning her own progress. And despite being a noble, Roodaka despises most other aristocrats like herself, seeing them as pompous, lazy fools who have become atrophied from resting on their laurels. A sharpened wit is the key to victory for Roodaka, and she sees challenges as the ideal whetstone for her mind.

She has no intent of letting herself become weak and arrogant, and seeks to do more with her life and purpose than just a live a pointless, meaningless life of hedonism. For Roodaka, she wants something more; More than what the other rich fools on Xia typically have to offer. She has no intention of living and dying like any other fool, and for that she sees little difference between most of Xia’s upper-crust and its lower-class. Control is all Roodaka cares about, and she prizes the ability to strike fear in one’s minions in order to keep them in line.

           Roodaka herself is not necessarily a fighter, and is thus often flanked by a trio of Exo-Toa Lerahk, machines she helped oversee the design and construction of. But even without her bodyguards, Roodaka is not entirely defenseless- She has access to a Rhotuka Gauntlet that allows her to spawn a wheel of energy, one that drastically mutates whatever target it comes into contact with. Roodaka possesses a cruel sense of humor, and has used her Mutation Rhotuka to dispatch enemies of hers, often leaving them to suffer their cursed forms as ruined outcasts of society. Roodaka herself is highly intelligent, able to read and understand others well, and is a master-manipulator and complex schemer.

Sidorak- Known as the ‘Visorak King’ in some sectors of Nynrah, Sidorak was once an esteemed, celebrated war general with a wide collection of medals on his chest to honor him. However, his boldness eventually got him in trouble with one of the Powers That Be; And incensed, the powerful individual had Sidorak exiled to Nynrah as a death-sentence. Stripped of his title, rank, and badges, most would have despaired and left themselves to die in Sidorak’s place- But Sidorak himself continued forging on, making a new path for himself in Nynrah.

           He eventually came into contact with a pack of Visorak Spiders, and recognizing that the creatures wanted to be free from their Nynrah Ghost masters to hunt as they pleased, Sidorak offered them freedom. He defeated the Visorak Spiders before letting them know that underneath his command, they could have total freedom and impunity to hunt and kill as they pleased; And having been won over by his strength, the spiders obliged to Sidorak’s offer. Ever since, Sidorak has slowly begun to amass a Visorak Horde of spiders under his command, and has become an enemy of the Nynrah Ghosts for providing their creations an outlet with which to go rogue.

           Now, Sidorak frequently roams Nynrah with his packs of Visorak spiders, leading them on hunts for prey. A bold, charismatic commander, he has won the loyalty and respect of his soldiers, and is now adorned with a ‘medal’ made up of webs, gunk, and other unsavory materials that he treasures as a personal token of comradery. Sidorak is a true commander, personally leading his armies into battle and fighting alongside them. He desires to help his Visorak spread and hunt as they please, and this has put him at odds with multiple Vorox Clans.

           Sidorak is a skilled combatant and a brilliant strategist. He wears a breathing apparatus over his lower-face, covering his nose and mouth in order to protect himself from airborne pathogens and other contaminants. On his left arm, he wields the Herding Blade; A powerful artifact that can cast a brilliant crimson light that will summon and herald Sidorak’s armies to himself. As for Sidorak’s right arm, it is cut off at the elbow; Instead, it has a mechanical implant. Hovering slightly beyond this implant is a mechanical tri-claw that can shoot energy-beams from its palm, or Rhotuka that instill loyalty and obedience within targets. Sidorak can launch this cybernetic arm of his forward, latching it onto surfaces before using it as a grapple to pull himself forward with the electro-magnetic connection it has with his implant.

Turaga Dume- Once a lowly errand-boy in the Artidax District, he has since risen to power as a totalitarian dictator controlling most of the region. Dume is strict and harsh, believing in the evils of free will, and desires total control as a means of peace; He has command over the Vahki to enforce his will and the laws that he passes. Local powers frequently ally with Dume, letting him use his Vahki as a replacement for traditional law enforcement, allowing Dume a wide reach over Xia. He is the island’s head of security, and is responsible for cracking down on dissidents and punishing them, as well as brainwashing and encouraging the Xian population to become mindless, obedient workers for all of eternity.

           Dume has a stern, tall face, and angular shoulders, constantly walking with his back hunched forward and his arms folded behind him. He wears a clean, dark-red uniform, with a coat, hat, and black boots to match. Dume believes in total discipline over himself, and can be found frequently strutting the halls of a Vahki Hive, allowing zero reprieve in the face of his duties. He oversees all actions and data from his Vahki and frequently collaborates with Xian powers on suppressing riots, unions, and other forms of rebellion.

The Shadowed One- An ancient warlord and the leader/co-founder of the Dark Hunters. The Shadowed One has no known origin nor name; His earliest appearances were as far back as the War of Six Kingdoms, at least. Back then, he led a cruel mercenary organization known as the Dark Hunters alongside his lieutenant and co-founder Ancient. Centuries of success on various missions and assassinations have earned him Xia’s most powerful crime organization. The Shadowed One operates from within the Odina Fortress, having a hand in brutal murders, thefts, and other various crimes as he seeks to consolidate power for himself.

Prideful to a fault, he is a twisted and charismatic individual with a cruel sense of humor. In his quest for power, The Shadowed One has employed researchers and invested others in the creation of unique and dangerous assets for his Dark Hunters. Recently, he has attempted to gather the six fragments of Makuta’s Mask of Life, all of which are inexplicably on Xia, hoping to recreate the world-ending artifact. What exactly he has planned for it is unknown, but knowing him, it certainly can’t be any good.

The Shadowed One can conjure powerful eye-beams that disintegrate and deconstruct anything they touch on the molecular, even atomic, level, granting the warlord the ultimate offense. He wields a staff capable of summoning and creating crystalline formations that he can control and carry through the air as if by telekinesis, and The Shadowed One has used many gems to slaughter enemies or subdue them. In addition to this, he can conjure a Rhotuka; One that temporarily inflicts devastating madness of any sort onto victims. The Shadowed One is a skilled, experienced combatant, and with his skills combined with his powerful abilities, he is an unstoppable opponent.

He possesses one additional, terrifying ability as well; Those foolish enough to challenge The Shadowed One in his own throne room will sometimes find themselves unable to move from their positions upon confronting him, as if their own feet were attached to the floor. By the time his rebels realize this, it is too late- The Shadowed One will unleash his eye-beams, vaporizing them all as they cannot move out of the way. Whatever the nature of this invincible ability, it is the final seal on the apparent unstoppable power of the mercenary-king.

Spiriah- A brilliant and disgracted scientist, Spiriah was once a member of the Nynrah Ghosts. However, his own incompetence and poor handling of the Nynrah Incident, in addition to being somewhat negligent in containing the leak of VISORAK, led to his reputation being tarnished. Even so, he retained membership amongst the Nynrah Ghosts, until a botched experiment involving the Skakdi Clan of Zakaz resulted in them becoming far more dangerous, temperamental, and difficult to control than intended.

           With the Skakdi incident as the final straw, Spiriah was exiled and disgraced from the Nynrah Ghosts. Cast out and bitter, Spiriah quickly found work from The Shadowed One, who was eager to employ his skills. Spiriah happily performed experiments with the intent of furthering the Dark Hunters’ power, proving his intelligence and hidden potential. With Spiriah clearly a viable researcher, The Shadowed One eventually entrusted him with Makuta’s notes, gathered from the Mask Hoarder’s abanoned lab by Dweller. With additional resources straight from Okoto, Spiriah set to work dissecting and discerning the very nature of Life energy itself, eventually implementing his findings into various experiments, many of which became Dark Hunters themselves.

           Having turned his life around after his past failures, Spiriah went on to help lead experiments on the Kanohi Dragon alongside Vortixx Industries. However, he disappeared after going on an expedition to Nynrah, hoping to gather resources and intel; Attempts to locate him (or his body) have failed, and the Dark Hunter Tracker has been unable to find anything sufficient enough with which to track down Spiriah. Presumably, he has been killed by the Vorox- Or perhaps by the Nynrah Ghosts, who did not want their academic knowledge to be shared amongst the Dark Hunters, regretting their exile of Spiriah?

The Shadowed One himself in unsure… Regardless, Spiriah was an innovative individual who could’ve unlocked many more forbidden secrets of Life had he not disappeared- Perhaps, with the proper resources, he could’ve even gone on to rival Makuta himself! Not that it mattered, because Makuta, too, has perished…

Trydahk- The leader of the Nynrah Ghosts and its ‘high priest’, Trydahk is considered the most brilliant and esteemed member of the group. His intelligence and work has helped spawn and pioneer multiple Xian inventions, including the lethal VISORAK, or the Zamor Launcher. The space-warping Trydahk Pods are named after the Nynrah Ghost himself, and he desires to unlock the secrets of reality at any cost; No matter how many innocent lives must be sacrificed, or how much destruction he must cause. To him, understanding everything is the only thing that matters, and Knowledge is his peace of mind.

           Intriguingly, Trydahk has been around since the very inception of the Nynrah Ghosts, several decades ago. And yet, he does not seem to be any older than he currently is, despite his age back then meaning he should be dead by now. Who knows what experiments he performed on himself to allow this?

Nektann- A brutal Skakdi warlord, Nektann was named after the powerful Xian war-machines that plagued Zakaz alongside other machinations of destruction. An unstoppable brute, Nektann quickly rose to power amongst the Skakdi, challenging other warlords and defeating them in combat. Now, he has practically reunited the Skakdi clans back into one, promising his brethren glory and conquest upon the rest of Zakaz.

           Tall and thuggish, Nektann is nevertheless cunning enough to have earned control over the Skakdi. He wields an ornate Crescent Scythe in combat, and is a loud and boisterous individual who will happily partake in carnage. Unsurprisingly, Nektann is seen as ‘undignified’ by other Xians, but he doesn’t let this get to him. He knows the Skakdi are looked down upon as modified ‘freaks’, but he figures that will change when he marches upon Zakaz and becomes one of the Powers That Be.

           Nektann frequently rides to combat, leading his armies on mobile war-machines and vehicles. He himself rides a large one equipped with a massive grinder-wheel on the front. Additionally, he has a pet Muaka adorned in spiked armor. He got the beast after buying it off of the Dark Hunters, who themselves got it from Umarak on a whim. Nektann is proud of his exotic pet and likes to boast of its foreign, mysterious origins, but some Xians doubt the validity of his claims- They believe the Muaka is just another manufactured bioweapon, an assertion that greatly angers him.

[things2mustdo]

Adam, the first man, was also the first blue pilled man to have been red pilled. To examine this hypothesis, lets re-read the very short story of Adam and Eve, analyzing it line by line using the classic NIV translation—and along the way, each sentence of this brief, ancient story will reveal a bunch of other red pill wisdom.

This story is precisely Genesis 3. It starts:

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

We all know the snake tempted Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, but what’s interesting here is that he does so by planting doubt about an eternal truth. This is lesson #1 from this story: the classic strategy of bad people is to go to well-meaning, average people, and start planting doubts about what is true or false, trying to get them to doubt the wisdom of the world they were born into. This is precisely the core weapon of SJWs: they go to average people and plant seeds of doubt about your instincts about what is right or wrong.

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

Earlier in Genesis, God had told Adam not to eat from the tree, but he never told him not to touch it (Genesis 2:17). Lesson #2: Women exaggerate.

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

This line is important for two reasons. First, the snake here—the embodiment of evil—is actually the one telling the truth. God had earlier told Adam that if he eats from the tree, he will “certainly die” (Genesis 2:17), but the snake says he won’t. And, to skip to the end of the story (I’m guessing you know the ending already?), Adam and Eve are banished from the garden but they’re not killed. So, God lied (or changed his mind), and the snake was right.

Second, Lesson #3 is that sometimes, evil people are actually telling the truth. And Lesson #4 is the deep utility of the “limited hangouts.” Limited hangouts (to use the CIA term) are powerful weapons: a bad person (the snake or the CIA) reveals a small amount of true information, but not all of it, in order to get their target to engage in the bad action.

It goes on:

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

So, Adam knows there’s one law he shouldn’t break, his wife asks him to break it, and he does. That’s the definition of being blue pill. The first man is also the first blue pilled man.

But this tree they ate from, earlier in Genesis (2:9) is referred to as “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the snake above had made the same comment. Lesson #5: only through doing what is forbidden, breaking the rules, will you be able to learn why wisdom says that X is good and Y is bad. This is a metaphor for the pickup universe morphing into the dissident right: we had to go through the rule-breaking phase (doing what we can to pick up women) in order to learn what is good and what is evil.

But there’s another lesson in this line, Lesson #6: as soon as he could see the difference between good and evil, what was the first thing Adam realized? He’s naked. That’s a great metaphor for wisdom: as we learn the subtle way the world works, the first thing we learn is that–although we thought we knew a lot, we really know nothing. That we’re intellectually naked.

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

So, God comes looking for Adam, and Adam, having realized he was naked, went into hiding. This is the first example of fear in the bible, and also Lesson #7: the first fear, the deepest fear, the fear before all others isn’t a fear of anything external to you—but a fear of yourself because of your own ignorance.

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Finally, at Genesis 3:12 Adam takes the first red pill in history. God realizes that Adam had eaten from the forbidden tree and asks him who gave it to him, and he doesn’t white night the woman. Blue Pill Adam would have been the white night, taking the fall for her. But instead, he simultaneously blames her—and calls out God for being an asshole to him for setting him up for the fall (“you put [her] here with me”). He started standing up for himself. The first man in the record of humankind was bluepilled… and then took the red pill as well.

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

To the woman’s credit, she’s admits responsibility. On the other hand, Eve comes off a bit like the apocryphal quote attributed to Churchill: “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing… after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” That’s Lesson #8: woman can be counted on to do the right thing, after having tried all other options.

14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

The snake, the first evil creature, is punished by having to crawl, eat dust, and have his children brutally murdered. This leads to Lesson #9: the worst punishment isn’t death—it’s unclear if death is even a punishment—but to have to be on your knees, low down, bending, submitting to someone else. Death is preferable to a life where you need to slither. And Lesson #10, almost equal to condemning someone to a life of submission is a life of eating shit (“dust”) in the exact words here. A life without basic, physical pleasures like good food is a life worse than death. And Lesson #11, the one other punishment greater than death is to see your children suffer before your eyes. Any parent will agree to that.

16 To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Woman’s punishment is pain in childbirth and… the desire for her man to rule over her. This is Lesson #12 and comes to the heart of red pill wisdom: women WANT her man to dominate and rule over her. Women wanting to submit to her man wasn’t only common knowledge for the thousands of years of recorded history pre-feminism, but the Bible opens with a story that gives an origin for this behavior.

17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

This verse not only includes one of the most beautiful, powerful, and eternal passages of recorded literature (“for dust you are and to dust you will return”) reminding us of the brevity of life, but it also gives man his basic commandment: he has to work, and his work will be painful. And this is Lesson #13: men have to sweat and work to survive, and it will be painful. There’s no way around it. So man has two options: to accept our fate, and turn our hard work into meaning, or find meaning elsewhere.

20 Adam[l] named his wife Eve,[m] because she would become the mother of all the living.

21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

This concise story wraps up with man and woman, having been given a glimpse of what the difference is between good and bad, can no longer live in paradise. Only the goods can know the difference between good and evil. What this boils down to is Lesson #14: since knowing what is good and what is bad is something we will never be able to learn, so the best we can do is guess based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages. But we need to have the humility to remember that our ideas of what is good and bad are only approximations, that we may be wrong so we should have an open mind… and since you may be wrong, you shouldn’t crucify every single person with whom you disagree. This is a lesson I wish the SJWs on Twitter understood. Maybe they ought to re-read Genesis, too.

Much more about conspiracy theories and protecting your privacy.

Read More: 4 Lessons From Mankind’s Very First Shit Test

[agent-7-at-your-service]

Lore: The Inkopolis Family

Among the many parties and unions that are keeping the progressive movements in Inkopolis alive, one alliance has elevated itself to be the leading force: The Inkopolis Family.

Started after a fire that’s claimed to be the action of the opposition, enemy sympathizers, and progressives who didn’t see their views, it holds a high reputation of being run on the will of the people and the charisma and leadership of a group of socialites and personalities. Among them is a senator and a former Turf War powerhouse player, The Squid of Splatdown, Abigial Atled Calliostro.

This “family” consists of the best and brightest of Inkopolis progressive movement along with its supporters who do what they can to push their agendas. Associations also pour their funds into this massive conglomerate with the promise of supporting their franchises and products. Inkopolis politicians, military officials, members of the agency, and foreign figures also put their support behind them, each for various reasons. 

After the formation of The Inkopolis Family, they successfully incited 15 protests against various Inkopolis organizations and social unions within 3 days, forcing them to dissolve and punishing those who continued to resists. With the else of the Inkopolis police departments, they swiftly arrested them and finding those responsible for the fire.

The agenda of this conglomerate consists of agendas from when they were just separate entities. When Abigail united them and reformed the functions of this union, she broke the agendas down into the most essential for Inkopolis:

Protect the rights of all in Inkopolis and it’s neighbors.

The rights for everyone regardless of sex, species, status, or beliefs.

The eradication of social dissidents and those who oppose change.

The eradication of corruption in society and the political system.

The protection of all youth from obscenity and taboos.

Total reform of the court justice system, investigation and forensics, and the police department.

Freedom of speech and the press and fair control of censorship.

Protection of all Celebrities and Personalities.

End of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice. 

Proper Education of History, Science, and Culture.

Strengthen the right to assembly and petition. 

The Inkopolis Family is praised for its progressive actions and beliefs, their success in using the right to assembly, the pride in their agendas, and their commitment to Inkopolis’ problems.

On the other spectrum, there are controversies that Abigial claims as rumors and accusations based on bogus evidence. It is said that The Inkopolis Family has turned to extremism to get their agendas across and radicalism to weed out the so-called weak members of their own organization. They are also accused of going overboard with punishing their enemies and pushing their agendas to the point of unnecessary violence and punishments. Thus, their judgment and restraint were claimed to be flawed. But the biggest controversy is the leader themself, Abigail, with rumors spreading about her being responsible for the fire only to gain power. In addition to the rumors, she is accused of promoting call-out culture, cancel culture, radicalism, extremism, and violence as essential elements in pushing the progressive movements. She is also criticized for attacking fanbases, oddballs, and certain personalities, claiming them as enemies of the Inkopolis Family and thus the society of Inkopolis. It is also rumors that she harasses her opponents and the people she targets as dissidents and opponents even provoking them through agent provocateurs. And this is noted be one of many methods she uses to take justified actions while keeping her reputation and the movement strong.

Whether or not these are true, Agibail and the Inkopolis Family has gained enough momentum for these to be ignored. And their influence spreads to all parts of the city, just enough for Abigail to try and gain the highest position that could change the course of Inkopolis’ History.

[lifeofresulullah]

The Life of The Prophet Muhammad(pbuh): The Assignment of the Duty of the Prophethood and First Muslims

The Second Phase of the Call: Addressing Makkans on Safa Hill

The circle of conveyance was expanding gradually. Happiness caressed the souls that had testified to Islam while the hearts that had not saved themselves from polytheism were in a state of panic.

“Therefore expound openly what thou art commanded.” When the Divine mandate came, naturally, the Master of the Universe (PBUH) could not stay still. He wanted to show his countrymen the path to spiritual and worldly happiness as soon as possible.

During this time, he slightly expanded his circle and notified the Meccans of his prophethood and the religion of Islam on Mount Safa. 

Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) went on top of a high rock on Mount Safa and called out to the Meccans in a loud and resonant voice: O Sahaba! (O Community of Quraysh, come here and convene, I have important news for you!)

The Meccans were puzzled. Who was shouting? Were they in the face of danger? Had an enemy invaded their land or was an important message to be forwarded to them? They did not delay in responding to this call and gathered on Mount Safa at once. What had happened? The person making this call was Muhammad-ul Amin (Muhammad the Trustworthy.) What did he want? What news did he bring? What was he going to say?

With great curiosity they asked, “O Muhammad, why did you gather us here? What are you going to announce?”

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) did not lag in his response. At a moment when all minds fully gravitated towards him, when all eyes filled with looks of curiosity were directly focused on him, when all ears paid full attention, and at a moment when everyone was anxiously waiting, he delivered this eloquent response that was filled with several logical proofs:

O Community of Quraysh! Our similarity is like a man who sees the enemy and runs to his family and shouts “O friends!” since he is afraid that the enemy will harm and reach his family before he does.

O Community of Quraysh! If I were to tell you there were enemy horsemen on the other side of this mountain and that they were about to attack you in the morning or towards the evening, would you believe me?”

They had never heard Muhammadul-Amin (Muhammad the Trustworthy PBUH) tell a lie nor say something that had surpassed the truth. In unison they all replied, “Yes, we affirm your honesty because we have not seen anything but propriety from you. You are not a person who makes false allegations.”

After addressing the public, the Holy Prophet (PBUH) called each of the Qurayshi tribes by their own names and continued speaking:

“In that case, I inform you of a great punishment that is ahead. Allah the Exalted has commanded me to warn my closest kin of the punishment in the hereafter. I invite you to say, “Allah is One, there is no God.” I am His servant and Messenger. If you accept what I have said, then I guarantee that you will enter heaven. Also know that I cannot be of service to you in this world nor in the hereafter unless you say, “Allah is One, there is no other God but He.” 

Abu Lahab Again...

Abu Lahab was baffled in the face of these words that addressed the mind, heart, and soul. He took a rock in his hands and threw it straight towards the Master of the Universe (PBUH) and shouted, “'May you perish for this! Is this what you have summoned us here for?”

Nobody else said anything in dissidence among those who were listening. They only dispersed into whispers of conversation among themselves.

Abu Lahab, the Person who Deserves Hell...

With his actions, Abu Lahab now deserved Divine punishment and enmity.

He would pay dearly for his violent hostility, lasting grudge, and hate that he had towards Allah’s Apostle (PBUH). Allah heralded his frightening aftermath in Surah al-Lahab:

“Perish the two hands of Abu Lahab and perish he! His wealth and what he has earned shall avail him naught, Soon shall he burn in a flaming fire; And his wife, too, bearer of slander. Round her neck shall be a halter of twisted palm-fiber…”

Regardless of whoever spoke out in dissidence, Allah would continue to complete our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) light. For that reason, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was neither afraid of nor shaken by the ugly allegations made against him and was able to continue on his path in an immensely dignified and serious manner.

MALTREATMENT AND INSULT INFLICTED UPON THE PROPHET

After our Holy Prophet (PBUH) declared his prophethood and invited the community to Islam on Mount Safa, the polytheists of the Quraysh tortured him and targeted insults at him, and their abuse continued to increase.

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) invited them to the doctrine of “Tawhid” (oneness) whereas they insisted upon idolatry and polytheism, which they called “the religion of their fathers.”

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) invited them to the path of virtue and happiness both in this world and the hereafter whereas they tried to keep away from virtue and happiness just as a bat tries to flee from the light.

The Master of the Universe (PBUH) invited them to live humanely and to exhibit dignified behavior while they gallivanted by exhibiting ugly and dishonorable behavior and trampled over human dignity and honor with their feet.

He wanted them to enter Paradise and invited them to commit deeds that would earn them these incomparable blessings whereas they continued to commit deeds that would lead them to eternal punishment and hellfire.

Through his invitation, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) wanted to save them from falling into asfal as-safilin (the lowest of the low) and elevate them to a’la illiyyin (the highest of the high places), ranks of worth, and stations that would empower them to execute sublime duties. Nonetheless, they continued preoccupying themselves with worthless activities that would result in their entrance to the bottom pits of hell (asfal as-safilin.)

Of course, the polytheists who exhibited such desires and behavior would oppose our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) invitation, would struggle against him without mercy, would try to make him ineffective through all their means and break his perseverance, fortitude, courage, and zeal. For that reason, they attempted to commit all kinds of torment, persecution, insults, and murder attempts.

Undoubtedly, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was not the only one who faced such circumstances. Every prophet who has been sent was treated harshly, held in contempt, and subjected to torture and persecution by his tribe and community. Alongside these commonalities and other traits that all of the prophets shared, these prophets did not refrain from explaining their cause and did not make any concessions from their faith despite the torture, insults, persecution, and murder attempts they faced. As the amount of torture and persecution that they were afflicted with increased, their love, enthusiasm, and seriousness in their mission in working towards having the truth heard grew even more.

Abu Lahab is Leading

Abu Lahab and his wife, Umm Jamil, were among the leaders of those that tortured and persecuted the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

Aba Lahab would continuously stalk our Beloved Prophet (PBUH), would strive to get the crowd to stop listening to him, and would attempt to instill doubts and apprehensions in their minds.

That day, Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) was inviting the crowd to testify to the Oneness of Allah and his own prophethood at the Ukaz Fair: “O people! Say La Ilaha Illallah so that you can save yourselves,” our Holy Prophet (PBUH) said to the crowd.

Abu Lahab came from right behind and shouted, “O people! He is my nephew; he is lying to you, stay away from him.” 

This was an example that is and was filled with many lessons:

His nephew was inviting the crowd to the path of happiness and to have faith in Allah whereas he, the paternal uncle, was opposing his own nephew by yelling at the crowd to not listen!

Abu Lahab did not stop there.

One day, he threw rancid filth at the front of the door of our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was his neighbor.  At that moment, despite not yet having become a Muslim, Hazrat Hamza caught up and spilled the filth and the rancid substances upon Abu Lahab’s head.

All that our Holy Prophet (PBUH) said in the face of his neighbor’s ugly action was, “O Sons of Abd Manaf! What kind of neighborliness is this?” as he swept away the filth in front of his home.

This man, who the Quran mentions will burn in the fierce fires of Hell, would sometimes stone our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) home just to bother him.

Abu Lahab Sends his son so that he will torture the Prophet!

Abu Lahab did not want to be alone in torturing and persecuting the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

One day, he commanded his son, Utaiba, to harass our Holy Prophet (PBUH). Utaiba went to our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was reciting Surah an-Najm during that time. Upon hearing this, Utaiba remarked, “I swear by the Lord of an-najm (the star) that I denounce your prophethood” and arrogantly spat toward the Master of the Universe (PBUH).

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) only replied to him with this invocation:

"O my Lord! Subject him to the power of a dog from among Your dogs."

His (PBUH) prayers were never left unrequited; thus, his imprecation was answered sometime after the above incident. While Utaiba was sleeping among his friends in Hawran, a place that was in the vicinity of Yemen, a lion came and tore him to shreds!

The acceptability of his prayers is just one aspect of our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) many miracles.

Wood Carrier of Hell

Umm Jamil was the wife of Abu Lahab, the most violent opponent and enemy of the Islamic cause. This woman, referred to as the “wood carrier” in the interpretation of the Holy Quran, had become so mad and so wild in the face of the Islamic cause that she would sprinkle hard, spiked shrubs every day on the path that our Holy Prophet (PBUH) walked without showing the slightest sign of boredom; in fact, she derived great pleasure from this action.

An incident related to Umm Jamil is as follows:

While our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was on Mount Safa and openly delivering the Divine invitation to the Quraysh for the first time, she and her husband, Abu Lahab scolded him and even affronted him. Abu Lahab shamelessly said, “'May you perish for this! Is this what you have summoned us here for?” and hurled a rock that he had lifted from the ground towards our Holy Prophet (PBUH). Upon this incident, Allah revealed Surah Tabbat, which mentions the ugly behavior and aftermath of Abu Lahab and his wife.

Umm Jamil could not contain herself once she heard this surah. She carried a rock and went to the Masjid al-Haram. Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was sitting there with his loyal friend, Hazrat Abu Bakr. Umm Jamil saw Hazrat Abu Bakr but did not notice our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was sitting there right next to him. She said to Hazrat Abu Bakr: O, Abu Bakr! Where is your friend? I heard that he has satirized me. I am going to smash his mouth with this rock when I see him.”

Since Umm Jamil’s eyes could only see Hazrat Abu Bakr and failed to notice our Holy Prophet (PBUH), she had no choice but turn back since she could not achieve her goal. 

Of course her eyes could not see!! How could a “wood carrier” of Hell dare to see our Holy Prophet (PBUH), who was under Allah’s protection and grace?

Abu Jahl’s Hands Remain Suspended

Abu Jahl also had a similar experience.

One day, he made a promise to his tribe:

“By God, if I see Muhammad prostrating I will smash his head with this rock!”

The next day, he carried a huge rock that was difficult to lift. Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was in prostration. Abu Jahl’s arms stiffened and froze in the air right as he was lifting the rock and about to hit our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) head. They stood there until the Master of the Universe (PBUH) finished his prayer… When his prayer finished, Abu Jahl’s arms loosened; since there was no longer any need for them to remain frozen.

Another Attempt by Abu Jahl...

Despite everything, Abu Jahl did not cease his attempts at disturbing our Holy Prophet (PBUH); and on another day, he swore, “By God, if I see Muhammad in prostration, I will step on his neck and rub him against the floor.”

Right then, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) appeared. When Ibn Abbas explained the situation to him, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) became angry and without waiting to go through the door, he climbed (jumped) over the wall to enter the Masjid al-Haram. He recited Surah al-Alaq till the very end and prostrated.

Those who were around him immediately said to Abu Jahl, “O Abu Jahl there is Muhammad!”

As soon as Abu Jahl started to walk toward our Holy Prophet (PBUH), he returned. Those who were watching were puzzled and asked, “What happened? Why did you return?”

Abu Jahl responded in an even more puzzled manner:  “Do you not see what I see?” and then added, “By God, an enflamed rift opened between him and me.”

In this manner, Allah protected His Beloved Messenger (PBUH) from the torture and murder attempts made by the polytheists’ leading figures!

The Prophet refers the Quraysh to God Almighty!

The torment, insults, and murder attempts that the Quraysh polytheists subjected upon our Holy Prophet (PBUH) took place in various forms.

One day, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was praying in the Kaaba in a very reverent manner. A group of polytheists had gathered around the Kaaba and were talking with one another; Abu Jahl was also in this group. He leaped forward and asked the group, “Which of you will go and bring the stomach of so-and-so’s slaughtered camel and bring its rumen and placenta in their bloody state and place them on top of him while he is prostrating?”

Uqba bin Abi Muayt, who had been blinded with rage, came forward, said “I will do it” and left. Sometime later, this man, whose soul had been darkened, appeared next to our Holy Prophet (PBUH) with a camel’s rumen in his hands.

Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was unaware of anything and had already gone into prostration.

The raving Uqba placed the camel’s rumen between our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) shoulder blades.

The polytheists, whose souls and consciences were buried in darkness, watched the scene as they laughed loudly.

Hazrat Fatima came running when she heard that her Honorable Father (PBUH) was being subjected to the polytheists’ despicable cruelty. She held the rumen and tossed it towards the group of polytheists.

When our Beloved Prophet (PBUH) completed his prayer the words, “My Lord, I leave the Quraysh to you” spilled from his holy lips and were repeated thrice.

Afterwards, he recited the names of the ringleaders individually and referred them to Allah, who is the Possessor of Infinite Power. 

Abdullah b. Amr Narrates:

Hazrat Abdullah bin Amr explained another instance in which the polytheists insulted and troubled our Holy Prophet (PBUH):

“One day the leading figures of the Quraysh gathered in a place called Hijir and I was also there. The Quraysh were talking about Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) and said:

“We have never shown as much patience to anything as we have to this man’s mission. This man accuses you of stupidity. He has insulted our fathers and grandfathers, has condemned our religion, has ruined our unity, and has defamed our idols. We have been patient with all that he has done.”

“While the Quraysh were discussing this, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) suddenly appeared. He came walking and kissed the Hajar al-Aswad. Afterwards, he walked by them to circumambulate the Kaaba. In the meantime, the Quraysh were dissing at him. Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) was greatly saddened. I noticed his sadness from the immediate change of color that was seen on his face.

“The Messenger of Allah continued his circumambulation. When he passed by the group of Qurayshis, they teased him. He got very sad. I noticed that he was sad by looking at his face.

“When Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) walked by them for the third time, the Qurayshis continued to diss at him in the same manner.

“Upon this, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) stopped and said to them:

“O Qurayshis, do you hear my words? I swear by Allah, Who possesses my existence in His powerful hands, that a disaster is going to befall upon you.”

Our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) address deeply influenced the crowd. No one moved from his spot. At last, even those who initially spoke against our Holy Prophet (PBUH) the most and provoked their friends (primarily Abu Jahl) tried to please him by saying:

“O Abal Qasim! Go in peace. By God, you are not among the ignorant or among those who do not know themselves.”

“Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) walked away.

“The next day, the Qurayshis gathered at Hijir again and I was among them once more. In the same manner, the leading figures were talking about Allah’s Apostle (PBUH) and said:

“You keep talking about what Muhammad has done to you and the news that has been brought regarding him. However, when he stands in front of you and says bad things to your face, you let him free and do not touch him.”

“Our Holy Prophet (PBUH) appeared while they were talking.

“The Qurayshis quickly sprung up from where they were sitting and surrounded him. They cited his words regarding their idols and religion and asked, “Are you not the one who made these comments about us?”

“The Holy Prophet (PBUH) answered, “Yes, I am the one who said them.”

“And they all pounced on him upon hearing this answer. Someone clung to his throat. In the meantime, someone ran and notified Hazrat Abu Bakr and he rushed to the Haram ash-Sharif. Amid his tears, he shouted at the polytheists: May Allah damn you! Do you want to kill an individual who says, “My Lord is Allah?”

“When our Holy Prophet (PBUH) heard this he said, “Leave them alone, O Abu Bakr! I swear by Allah, Who possesses my existence in His powerful hands, that I will deal with them all.”

“The Qurayshis got scared, quickly dispersed, and released our Holy Prophet (PBUH) upon hearing these words.”

The ugly acts our Holy Prophet (PBUH) were inflicted because he said, “my Lord is Allah” and invited the community to this Divine reality did not end here.

On another day, our Holy Prophet (PBUH) was found praying near the Kaaba again. As soon as he placed his forehead on the ground before the presence of his Supreme Creator, the savage Uqba bin Muayt took his cloak, coiled our Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) throat, and squeezed it with all of his strength in order to choke him.

During that time, Hazrat Abu Bakr was able to catch up and save our Holy Prophet (PBUH) from this savage. Then, he recited the following verse from the Quran as if he wanted the entire universe to hear: "Would you kill a man because he says: My Lord is Allah, and he has come to you with clear signs (proofs) from your Lord? And if he is a liar, upon him will be (the sin of) his lie; but if he is telling the truth, then some of that (calamity) wherewith he threatens you will befall on you." Verily, Allah guides not one who is a Musrif (a polytheist, or a murderer who shed blood without a right, or those who commit great sins, oppressor, transgressor), a liar!" 

Attempt to Kill

A group of disbelievers from the Sons of Makhsoum among whom were such fierce enemies of Islam as Abu Jahl and Waleed Bin Moughriah came together and decided to kill the Noble Prophet (pbuh) after lengthy discussions. Waleed Bin Moughriah was to do it.

When the Prophet Muhammad, (pbuh) started to recite from the Holy Qur’an in the namaz (stated prayer), Waleed came very near to him. His ears heard his voice reciting from the Qur’an, but his eyes could not see him around.

Waleed became bewildered. He went back to his friends to tell about the incident. Then they all went there. Yet again, they could see nothing. When they were in the back, the voice came in the front, when they were in the front; the voice came from the back. Finally, they left there astonished.

The Most Difficult Day for the Prophet

Once, the Master of the Universe left his house and started to walk. All of the Qurayshis that he met, slaves and free people, rejected him, teased him and insulted at him as if they had agreed before. That day was the most difficult one of the troubled days.

The Prophet, who had risen like the sun of mercy in the universe, returned home due to those insulting acts of the polytheists. He covered himself and lay down in order to relieve his sorrow.