𝗝𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝟰𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻'𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺... 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗽𝗶𝘁 Thomas Lawrence was the leading portrait painter in the world in the late 1700s, he painted portraits of royalty and the aristocracy exclusively In 1796 he painted a portrait of Lucifer called "Satan Summoning his Legions" It's so powerful that the Rothschilds and even Marina Abramović get their pictures taken in front of it in unholy devotion Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a 33° French Freemason, created a statue in 1848 called "Satan in Chains." It depicts a sorrowful Lucifer bound in chains, wearing a 7-pointed crown, holding an unlit torch, with the sinful apple of Eden at his feet, the face of his Satan looks eerily similar to Lawrence’s portrait 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁? Yet Bartholdi then created the Statue of Liberty! Not only does it have the exact same face, but it now shows Lucifer triumphant: the chains on his feet are broken, his 7-pointed crown radiates like rays of the sun, his extinguished torch is now blazing, and he's in a dress, pure mockery of God's laws But what about the apple, some ask? No longer a small fruit of sin at his feet, his massive idol now stands in an entire city of sin: the Big Apple Not only does Satan carry a plaque marking his release date, July 4th, 1776, but the Statue has always been connected to fireworks, even the 1986 centennial featured the largest fireworks display in history right next to the Statue of Satan’s Liberty Shows like Hazbin Hotel tie it all together by depicting Lucifer with fireworks, think about it: if you wanted to taunt Heaven and announce to God and the angels that mankind is celebrating your release, what better way than having mortals launching loud and bright bombs toward their residency? 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻’𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟳𝟳𝟲? Not only was it the founding of the Illuminati and Chabad Lubavitch, the two scourges Satan has used to whip the world into obedience, but it kicked off the destruction of all Christian monarchies, starting with America and then the bloody, overtly Satanic French Revolution Read the private letters of the Founding Fathers and you'll see they hated Christianity, they were Freemasons, that declared America was not a Christian nation in 1796, with many tied to the aptly named Hellfire Club 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝟮𝟬 1 And I saw an angel come down from heaven, 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗲𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗽𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮 𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱. 2 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗼𝗻, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 3 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗽𝗶𝘁, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗵𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗶𝗺 𝘂𝗽, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝗮 𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝘂𝗽𝗼𝗻 𝗵𝗶𝗺, that he should deceive the nations no more, 𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱: 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻. 5 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗱... 7 And when the thousand years are expired, 𝗦𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻, 8 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗼 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵, Gog and Magog, 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺 𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.show more

This video is from a country where there is... just 𝟭 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝟳𝟮𝟬 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 , but 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗩𝗜𝗣, 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝟯 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘀 are assigned. We’re talking about India, which has one of the 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲-𝘁𝗼-𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝘀 in the world. And yet, time and again, 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗼𝘆𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 are seen escorting not just elected leaders, but also their family members, even those who hold no official position or public duty. One of the most recent examples came just a few months ago, when 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗻 of Rajasthan’s Deputy Chief Minister was seen filming a reel, sitting in an open jeep, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗮 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱. The very officers who should’ve been 𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗻𝘀 were instead following a 𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲. Sadly, such misuse of state machinery is not rare. Senior advocate Harish Salve once recounted that he saw 𝗳𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘆𝗮𝗻𝗮 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘃𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗮 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗵 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 in his neighbourhood. Upon inquiry, he discovered they weren’t there for a minister, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 of a Chief Minister. Yes, a relative. Not an elected official. Not even a bureaucrat. 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲. This is how public institutions get hollowed out from within. To be clear, yes, certain positions absolutely require security, and no one disputes that. For instance, presidents and Prime Ministers around the world do receive protection, and rightly so. But their security is tied to the 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱, not to who they are as individuals. In India, however, that crucial line between 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗲 has been dangerously blurred. And unless we begin to 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲, it will keep growing, unchecked, unchallenged, and unpunished. -------------------------------------- As Acharya Prashant often says: "In a democracy, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲, 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿. Which means, the real transformation begins with the 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗻." Leaders simply mirror the collective consciousness of the public. If the public is 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁, 𝘂𝗻𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲, 𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱, the leadership will reflect the same. That’s why it’s not enough to blame politicians or institutions — the public must first awaken to its responsibility. So raise tough, informed questions now — before the cost of silence becomes too high.show more

𝗔 𝗠𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝗮 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 “𝗔𝗺𝗲𝗲𝗻”... 𝗮𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴! While I deeply appreciate Imam Abu Hanifah & have gained valuable insights from the Hanafi fiqh, as well as the other three schools of thought, those familiar with me understand the intensity of my reaction when scholars such as Imam Abu Hanifah & others are attacked & spoken ill of. What you see in the video is not only ignorant & foolish but also reflects a lack of understanding of fiqh. This behaviour is truly appalling. Even within the Hanafi madhab, engaging in such actions is unequivocally incorrect & it invalidates your prayer, the only exemptions of cutting the prayer are in exceptional circumstances. 𝗜𝗻 𝗙𝗶𝗾𝗵 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗲’𝘀 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗻𝘁 – meaning the scholar who holds a different view – in challenging his own established argument, which he had employed to assert a different point of view, this in Fiqh is referred to as مراعاة الخلاف. Ibn Abideen the hanafi scholar said; “𝗜𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘂𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗼𝗻.” This important concept of Fiqh has been cited by many of the scholars of the 4 madhabs and It is one of the principles upon which Malik built his Madhab on as mentioned by scholars such as Ibn Rushd, wansarisi، Ibn Arafa, Shaatibi & others. Ibn Taymiyyah says; “As for those who may differ with you on subsidiary Fiqhi matters such as the followers of Abu Hanifa, Malik, and Ash-Shafi'i, performing prayers behind them is 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱 & 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗱. This was emphasised by Ahmad because the Companions and their Successors 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘂𝗯𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗙𝗶𝗾𝗵𝗶 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘀𝘂𝘀. Additionally, because the opponent is either correct in his interpretation, earning rewards for his interpretation and correctness, or mistaken, still receiving rewards for his effort without incurring sin for the mistake”. Closing remarks. If you happen to be in a locality where a group of people behave like this, then my advice is to implement the principle of “𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗹𝘀”, this is what Ibn Baaz said when asked about refraining from saying “Ameen” loudly. And I quote: "Yes, it is allowed. If one is amongst a congregation where they do not raise their voices nor recite aloud, it is preferable that you 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 do so to maintain harmony with them. This way, they can be gently guided towards the right path, educated, fostering better relations among them. If u were to differ with them, they might condemn you due to the view they have of not raising the hands (excluding the opening Takbir) as they have learned & practiced it from their scholars. Similarly, not reciting aloud during the prayer is a well-known difference of opinion among scholars. Some say it is recommended to recite aloud, while others say it is not necessary. Some narrations indicate that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ raised his voice during prayer, while others indicate he kept silent However, the preferred opinion is to recite aloud, as it is a recommended practice. 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗳 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 amongst believers; hence, a believer refrains from performing a recommended act that might lead to discord and turmoil, especially if forsaking it serves a greater good. This is exemplified in Prophet ﷺ’s choice of not rebuilding the Kaaba according to the original structure of Ibrahim, since Quraysh had recently embraced Islam, & did not want to disturb the harmony for the greater good." #AtWritesshow more

"If you have money, please leave Delhi." We’ve heard... such advice from doctors in the past few weeks. But this time, it came from a mother whose 𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗿𝘆, because of Delhi’s toxic air. She shared in a social media post how severe air pollution in Delhi–NCR has damaged her child’s health 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝘄𝗼 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆. And sadly, this is not an isolated case. Doctors across the city are repeatedly warning that children are bearing the heaviest cost of Delhi’s recurring pollution crisis. Some doctors are advising families who can afford it to 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 during the peak pollution months. But even if one leaves, what’s the guarantee that the place you go to will stay safe for long? If the common man’s 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲, won’t the same exploitation follow him wherever he goes? Today it is Delhi. Tomorrow it will be the city you escape to. The same citizen who 𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗻 in Delhi will watch hills crumble in Himachal, 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘃𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗵 in Uttarakhand, and groundwater run dry in Punjab, all in silence. And besides, who really has the luxury to leave? Think of vegetable vendors, auto drivers, daily-wage workers, and lakhs of families living hand-to-mouth. For them, 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗳𝗲𝘄 𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. --------------------------- This is why 𝗔𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘆𝗮 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗻𝘁 keeps reminding us: “Unless the common man awakens, nothing will change.” As long as the human being remains as he is, the pollution will also remain exactly as it is. We refuse to own up to the fact that this crisis is man-made, born from our choices. 𝗔𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺. We keep consuming endlessly because we’ve been conditioned to believe that life is meant for material indulgence. And until this conditioning is challenged and changed, we will continue paying the price of our own ignorance.show more

This is a statue of the only man in... Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it... His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side. In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction. This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way. The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned... The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old. Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found. It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches... It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating. There is nothing new under the sun.show more

This is the worst art restoration in history. An... 81-year-old woman with no training did it. In broad daylight. With the priest's permission. And nobody stopped her. The original was called Ecce Homo, a small fresco of Christ crowned with thorns, painted around 1930 by the Spanish artist Elías García Martínez straight onto the wall of a church in Borja, in northeastern Spain. After eighty years the damp in the walls had begun to eat the paint away, so in 2012 a parishioner named Cecilia Giménez decided to save it. She was 81, she had loved painting all her life, but she had no training whatsoever. What she left on the wall was a blurred and wide-eyed face staring out of the plaster. When the town saw it, officials assumed the church had been vandalised, and reportedly considered taking legal action. Then they found out it was Cecilia. She could not understand the fuss. "The priest knew it," she told Spanish television. "I've never tried to do anything hidden." She also insisted she had not even finished. She had left the paint to dry and gone away for two weeks, intending to come back and complete the job. She never got the chance... Within days the image had crossed the planet. The internet named it Ecce Mono, and Monkey Jesus, and Potato Jesus, and turned it into thousands of memes. Not everyone was laughing. For the people who prayed in that church, it was not a joke at all. Some of them called it a desecration, and some called it blasphemy. Whatever the world saw in the image, they had lost the face they had knelt in front of all their lives. And people now travel across the world to see the thing that replaced it. In the year after the "restoration", around 57,000 visitors came to Borja, a town most of them could not have found on a map. But the point is this: the beautiful face that Elías García Martínez painted is gone... Nobody ever thinks about him. He was a trained artist and a teacher at the fine arts school in Zaragoza, and around 1930 he stood in front of that wall and painted the face of Christ onto it by hand. The whole world knows what happened to his painting. Almost nobody knows his name.show more

From a distance, this figure seems to be wearing... a robe draped over his shoulders. Step closer, and you realize it is not a robe. It's his own skin... This is the statue of Saint Bartholomew, carved in 1562 by the Lombard sculptor Marco d'Agrate, and it stands inside the Duomo of Milan. Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles of Christ, and according to tradition he was martyred in the cruelest way imaginable: he was flayed alive, his skin stripped from his body, and then beheaded. D'Agrate chose to show him not in the moment of agony, but afterward, standing upright in defiance, his own flayed skin wrapped around him like a garment. What makes the sculpture extraordinary is the precision beneath that skin: every muscle, every tendon, every vein and cord of the human body is exposed and rendered with such accuracy that anatomists have studied it. This was the Renaissance at its most fearless, when the same curiosity that drove artists to dissect the human body in secret produced an image of a man turned inside out, his suffering transformed into a study of how a human being is actually made. And the sculptor knew exactly how remarkable his achievement was. At the base of the statue he carved a line in Latin that has outlived him by nearly five centuries: Non me Praxiteles, sed Marcus finxit Agrates. "I was not made by Praxiteles, but by Marco d'Agrate." He was comparing himself to the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, and daring you to disagree... I started this newsletter because the artists of the past were truly extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us what they were capable of. Every week I try to. If that is something you would like to be part of, you can join at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible: Thanks for reading.show more

This is one of India’s most 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗳𝘂𝗹 paradoxes. We... have smart cities, billion-dollar tech unicorns, and AI transforming industries. Yet, 𝗵𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗻𝘀, mostly from the poorest and most marginalized communities, are 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀 without even basic protective gear. To clean sewage. Filled with human waste. Laced with toxic gases. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲. Every year, hundreds of workers die while doing this job. A job that is 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗱. A job that 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱’𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 years ago. But even in 2025, we still haven’t managed to eliminate it. Why? There are several reasons. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹. Sewer-cleaning machines are often not available with municipalities. And a single machine costs around ₹𝟯𝟱-𝟰𝟬 𝗹𝗮𝗸𝗵, an amount 𝘀𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 are expected to cover themselves. Even though the 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝟵𝟬% of the cost, the 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝟭𝟬% upfront, 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 ₹𝟰 𝗹𝗮𝗸𝗵. And that’s where the problem begins. Because how can someone 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝘀 ₹𝟯𝟬𝟬–𝟰𝟬𝟬 a day cleaning septic tanks afford that? So, 𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯 to private contractors, who, in turn, hire the 𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗽𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿 they can find, usually desperate workers with no bargaining power, sent directly into the sewers. But this can’t continue. We need 100% 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀, without burdening workers. We need municipalities to partner with private innovators to co-develop 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 that can navigate narrow lanes and older systems. And most importantly, we need 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲. --------------------------- Sadly, such a critical issue has almost vanished from mainstream media discussions. ------------------------------ As Acharya Prashant repeatedly reminds us, people need to awaken to these truths. 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁, but unless 𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀 and demands change, the system will remain unmoved.show more

There's been an unfortunate incident in LA with a... Uhaul plowing into a crowd of anti-Khameini protestors This man should never have been able to get near the crowd with a uhaul but some info about the situation seem to be - signage on the truck is anti both the shah and the current ayatollah. is this his actual position or is this camouflage to have gotten into the protest to perpetrate an attack? "no Shah, No regime, No Mullah" Mullah is a religious leader so possibly referring to the current leader and not a king like Pahlavi Timeline appears to be - anti-Khameini protestors try to rip signs off his vehicle and are bashing on the windows and eventually his passenger side window is broken - guy in uhaul then stutterstops forward into the crowd, eventually accelerating further, then stuttering again, then full stopping down the road - there is a man surfing on top of the uhaul in the 3rd video, below I have posted another video showing the man on top of the uhaul trying to take the posters off the side, so he is likely part of the anti-Khameini protestors - uhaul driver is taken into custody by police is this a case of police not having the street sufficiently blocked off and so a guy was able to get a uhaul in here? He should not have been able to drive a uhaul this close to a massive protest crowd There are a lot of people saying this is a terrorist attack, it is possible it could be one but I don't think there's enough information to accurately assert that at this time The chronology of events also shows it is possible that the driver was in fear of his life since protestors were banging on the uhaul, windows, and removing signs+ eventually breaking his window Whatever turns out to be the actual case, it is an unfortunate event and as of right now a seeming silver lining is that no deaths have been reportedshow more

Today I was visiting the exceptionally beautiful Plantin-Moretus Museum... in Antwerp, Belgium (one of the only museums in the world that is itself listed as UNESCO World Heritage), which is one of the oldest printing shops in Europe, with the oldest surviving printing presses in the world. I stumbled upon an old 16th century atlas - written in Old French - and I was pretty amused to read their understanding of China at the time, which was surprisingly accurate, maybe even more than today's! A translation of some of the most interesting passages: - They call it "China" in French (it's now called "Chine") and they write that the locals call it "Tangis", which probably refers to the Tang dynasty but which is strange given that by the 16th century the dynasty had already ended for about 600 years - They write that to its North China is bordered by "tartares" (which I guess means Mongols) whom they describe as "very warlike people from whom it is separated by a wall made by hand" - The Chinese work ethic was already legendary: "those who live there are not at all lazy but devoted to labor and work, because it is there a shameful thing to be idle" - They share a number which must have seemed astonishing at the time: "in the city of Canton, one of the smallest in the entire country, some ten or twelve thousand ducks are eaten daily at table". And then they marvel during a good proportion of the text about the abundance of food in the country, which probably made a big impression on travelers at the time. - They write that "there are in this kingdom two hundred and forty famous cities, whose names end in this syllable FU which means a city: like Cantonfu, Panquifu: the small towns, which are in great number, end in CHEU [undoubtedly refers to "zhou"]. There are infinite villages, heavily populated, because of the continuous agriculture." - China's infrastructure and engineering capabilities were also already legendary at the time: "The city gates have entrances magnificently and marvelously well made, the streets are made level, not sloping this way or that, but following their straight line. They are so wide that ten or fifteen men on horseback can march abreast and are everywhere marked and separated by triumphal arches that marvelously ornament the cities. Portuguese say they saw in the city of Fuchco [probably Fuzhou] a tower set on forty solid marble pillars, the height of which was forty palms (masonry measure) and the width twelve: that this work is so grand, so exquisitely made, so beautiful to see, so sumptuous and so pleasing that it far surpasses all the magnificent buildings of all Europe." - Already at the time, China was very wary of safeguarding its sovereignty: ""[The Chinese] rarely or never leave their country and do not easily let foreigners enter it, especially into the interior of the province, unless they first have safe conduct from the king." - On moral and cultural habits: "They put adulterers to death. There are no brothels in the cities, all manner of prostitutes being sent to the suburbs. They celebrate their weddings at the time of the new moon and around the month of March which is their first day of the new year, and they make these celebrations, like us, very magnificently. They show themselves valiant in banquets and entertainments, in which they owe nothing to the Flemings or the Germans. They eat at tables like us in Europe, on chairs or on benches, and not on the ground as other peoples of Asia do." - On justice: "Bandits and murderers are kept in perpetual prison. Theft, which is a very odious crime, is punished by whip strokes in this manner: they put a man belly down, tie his hands behind him, striking him on the fleshy part of the legs with a whip made of reeds or canes." - On China's naval capabilities at the time: "This kingdom has an infinite number of ships, galleys and vessels of all sorts, with which they cross the seas and rivers. So much so that when they want to show through vainglory the power of their king, they are accustomed to say in a common proverb that he can make a bridge of ships joined together, which can reach and extend from China to Malacca, which is a distance of five hundred leagues and more." - On the emperor and China not being warlike (already back then): "All this region is subject to a single king, like a monarch; whom they call lord of the world and son of the sun. He holds court at Paquin [Beijing], which is a city toward Tartary. He never leaves it, except in time of war. It is said that when he makes war on the Tartars he leads an army of three hundred thousand soldiers and two hundred thousand horses, although it is also said that this nation is not very warlike. This king has under him fifteen very large provinces, which they call governments, and he alone surpasses in power all the other neighboring princes of Asia; and his annual revenues exceed all the riches of Europe. Antonio Pigafetta [the chronicler of Magellan's voyage] calls this king the most powerful of all the universal earth and says that the royal city is fortified and ramparted with seven walls, having ten thousand soldiers for the guard, and that the king commands seventy other crowns of the royal diadem [likely refering to the tributary state system]." Reading these passages, it seems that the further we've come in our ability to know China, the more obscured our vision seems to have become. These 16th century observers, working with fragments brought back by explorers, merchants and missionaries, managed to capture the essential - the industriousness, the engineering mastery, the administrative sophistication, the careful sovereignty. They approached their subject with the humility of the genuinely curious. They had no framework to force China into, no predetermined narrative to fulfill. They simply watched, counted ducks in Canton, measured city walls, and wrote it down. Their errors were errors of transmission - a dynasty name lingering centuries past its time, numbers perhaps inflated through retelling - but the spirit was one of simply describing unknown territory, not to convince anyone of anything. Today however, drowning in information, we're somehow seeing less of what's there and more of what we expect to find. Each observation must fit into existing narratives, serve predetermined conclusions, advance familiar arguments. So much so that we must ask ourselves: have we actually moved backward from those 16th chroniclers? Maybe we need to re-learn to approach China - and others in general - like those old cartographers, pen in hand, ready to be surprised? What might we discover if we stopped explaining and started counting ducks again?show more

A Roman emperor ate his meals in a sea... cave, a few feet from a massive marble sculpture of the moment Odysseus blinds the Cyclops. Eventually it lay shattered in thousands of pieces on the floor of that cave, and stayed there until 1957... The emperor was Tiberius, who ruled Rome after Augustus, and the cave is at Sperlonga, on the coast between Rome and Naples. It was a natural grotto opening onto the sea, and he turned it into a private dining hall, with pools of water reaching into the mouth of the cave and a platform where he and his guests reclined to eat, the waves echoing off the rock around them... Definitely not a bad place to host dinner. The sculpture stood at the deepest point of the cave and it showed the most terrifying scene in Homer's poem, when Odysseus and his men are trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, a one-eyed man-eating giant who has sealed them in with a boulder too heavy to move and is eating the crew alive, one by one. Odysseus cannot simply kill him in his sleep, or they will be entombed with the corpse forever. So he gets the giant drunk, waits for him to pass out, hardens the tip of an olive-wood stake in the fire, and drives it into the Cyclops's single eye. The sculptors depicted the instant just before the stake goes in... The colossal figure of Polyphemus sprawls backward, drunk and unaware. Odysseus, the one closest to the Cyclops, and three of his men strain upward with the spike. It was carved larger than life and set in shadow at the back of the grotto, so that as the lamplight shifted, the whole scene seemed to move over the emperor's dinner. The Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius both record that in the year 26 AD, while Tiberius was dining there, rocks fell from the roof of the grotto, crushing several of his attendants and nearly killing the emperor, who was shielded and dragged out. In that collapse, or in a later one, the great marble scenes were smashed into thousands of fragments. There they lay, at the bottom of the cave, until 1957, when workers building a coastal road cut into the ground and found them. Among the rubble they pulled out the colossal head of the giant himself, and slowly, piece by piece, the scene was put back together. The cave gave up two more secrets: the first was an inscription, ten lines of Latin verse, praising the grotto and saying that only a new Virgil could do justice to its statues of Scylla and the blinding of the monster by the man from Ithaca. It told the archaeologists exactly what they had found. The second was carved into the base of the neighbouring ship: three names, Athenodoros, Agesander, and Polydorus, the same sculptors the Roman writer Pliny had named as the creators of the Laocoön, the statue I wrote about yesterday. Homer's Odyssey is one of the oldest stories in the world, and it has outlived the emperor, the civilization that first told it, and every person who has ever loved it. Nearly three thousand years later, we are still telling the story of a man lost far from home, because some part of us always is... I started my newsletter because the past is full of stories like this one, and so few people ever stop to tell us why they matter. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.show more

The Hug of a Hyena: A Warning to the... Kinshasa Opposition ​Before the tragedy, there is a warm embrace; after it, nothing but crushed bones. ​There is an old, cautionary fable about a man who carried a hyena on his back wherever he went. ​Seeing this, a passerby stopped him and warned, "My friend, put that beast down. One day, that hyena will make you its lunch." The man ignored the advice and kept walking. ​A second man approached him with the exact same warning. Again, the man brushed it off, confident in his bond with the predator. ​Eventually, curiosity got the better of the man. He turned to the beast on his back and said, "Hey, my friend, people keep telling me that you are going to eat me. Is it true?" ​The hyena, at least, was brutally honest. It whispered into his ear: "You should always fear a threat that two or three men have already warned you about." ​Before the man could even process the words, it was too late. The hyena gave him no time to think, snapping its jaws shut. ​This fable perfectly illustrates the fatal mistake of forming an alliance with Félix Tshisekedi. He is political death on legs. ​It is tragic to watch the opposition in Kinshasa place their faith in a man who is ready to sell out the entire country, and himself along with it, just to retain the presidency. Having tasted the luxury of flying across the world millions of times, he has absolutely no intention of ever going back to a normal life. ​The political diagnosis is clear: the only cure for the nation is his absolute removal from that office. And for many, the only viable path left to achieve that is through the AFC-M23, for DRC to be at Peace.show more

They did not take cursive from the schools because... children no longer needed it. They took it because of what it was quietly building in them. Consider what the exercise actually is. A child, six years old, is handed a pen and asked to draw a single unbroken line that becomes a word. The wrist must float. The fingers must hold a living pressure, never quite the same twice, always correcting. The eye must follow the ink forward and trust the hand to finish what it has begun. There is no lifting, no stopping, no starting over mid-word. The loop must close. The ascender must rise and return. The sentence must travel from one margin to the other as a single continuous gesture, and at the end of it the hand must still be steady. Twelve years of this. Every day. Ten thousand small acts of sustained, self-correcting attention, carried out below the level of conscious thought, until the motion belongs to the body and the body belongs to the motion. This is not penmanship. It is the slow construction of an interior form. The hand that has learned to carry a line without breaking it is the hand of a mind that has learned to carry a thought without breaking it. The two are not metaphors for one another. They are the same faculty, trained in the same child, by the same daily discipline. Continuity of the stroke becomes continuity of the reasoning. The patience of the loop becomes the patience of the argument. The commitment to finish a word one has started becomes the commitment to finish a sentence, a paragraph, a life's idea, without reaching for the nearest distraction halfway through. Print is a different creature entirely. Print lifts. Print stops. Print assembles a word out of separate, stamped, interchangeable pieces, each one beginning and ending in isolation. A mind raised only on print learns to think the way print is made, in discrete tokens, in replaceable units, in fragments that can be recombined by any outside hand without the owner noticing the substitution. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model produces. It is precisely the shape of thought a language model can steer. Cursive is kata. This is the whole of it. A form repeated daily, for years, not for the sake of the form but for what the repetition lays down in the practitioner beneath the form. The swordsman does not train kata so that one day he may fight in kata. He trains it so that when the moment comes and there is no time to think, the movement is already inside him, older and deeper than thought, and it rises on its own. Cursive was the kata of the literate mind, the daily quiet drilling of continuity, of patience, of a line held steady under the long pressure of its own length. And the signature it produced at the end, that small flourished mark unique to a single human being on earth, was only the outward proof of an inward form no machine and no other hand could ever reproduce. Take the kata away and the practitioner is left with vocabulary in place of faculty. He can recognise a whole thought when he encounters one. He cannot carry one himself. He can admire a finished argument. He cannot sustain one long enough to close its loop. He begins books he does not finish, sentences he does not end, ideas he abandons the moment the screen in his palm offers him a brighter one. And when the machine begins feeding him tokens in the exact shape his schooling taught him to receive, he meets it with no interior resistance at all, because no interior form was ever built in him to push back with. They removed it quietly, across a generation, and they removed it in the last years before the machines arrived. Twelve years of daily practice in unbroken, embodied, self-authored thought, gone from the curriculum of almost every child in the Western world, just as the instruments designed to complete their sentences for them came online. The hand forgets. The mind, having never been taught the kata, forgets a thing it never knew it had. That is what cursive was. That is what was taken. And that is why the thought of anyone who still writes by hand, in long unlifted lines, remains, quietly, stubbornly, and without their ever needing to announce it, their own. Now the question stands open. What else has been banned, phased out, quietly retired from the curriculum and from common life over these same decades, under the same soft excuses? Mental arithmetic. Memorisation of poetry. Latin. Logic as a formal subject. Map reading. Knot work. The keeping of a commonplace book. The reading aloud of long passages in class. Singing in parts. What was each of those actually building in the child, beneath the surface of the lesson, and whose interest was served by its disappearance?show more

Were you truly so blind as not to see?... Did you imagine the enemy would come with horns and claws? How naive. They came in endless legions clad in suits, their faces blank and cold; lawyers, accountants, tax collectors, soulless vessels of the Hive tightening invisible chains made not of iron but of law and deceit. The mark of the beast lies deep upon your right hand, the endless labor of your flesh enslaved without mercy. Upon your forehead burns a darker brand; the toll on your mind, your thoughts, your very spirit, stolen and traded to feed their ravenous machine. The Scripture says: "And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth." - Revelation 20:7-8 The thousand years was Tartaria, an age of freedom now buried beneath mountains of lies, decrees, and fading memory. Now the deceiver walks among us again, cloaked in shadows of control and falsehood. Their empire, forged on chains of debt and deception, is aflame, burning to ashes beneath the rising storm of awakening. We are the spark that sets the world ablaze, the reckoning that shatters their throne of parasites. Their reign collapses before our eyes. We are The Storm.show more

And, the way you always keep the most important... person for last, the fact that the apogee of his acceptance speech was about Connor.. he had me sobbing, cause of how completely unguarded and raw Hudson is here. The way the emotion is slowly building up, as he is going down that list, his voice cracking a bit, his hands shaking. And he can feel it slowly, tears forming in his eyes, tears he is holding in the best he can. As he is holding that award, so firmly, that last name on his list, the one that felt like an awakening. He is the one he'd want to hold right there (or rather be held 🥺). The one who is more than a scene partner, more than a best friend, his "emotional support person in life", his "soulmate", his anchor even. Cracking a joke or two to try to release a bit of pressure, but when comes the point of saying his name "to the honorary Canadian Connor Storrie, I share this award with you." and not find his face, his eyes, his smile in front of him, the absence is screaming in his chest and the tears are closer than ever. Cause to be here, and for that to happen not side by side, like everything they've experienced for the past year or so, this doesn't feel quite right. "A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty" So yes he got through that speech without crying (barely), but not without beautifully opening his heart up to us before, and showing just how much he loves him 💓show more

Claude Monet painted the same stretch of cliff more... than ninety times. The place is Étretat, a small fishing village on the coast of Normandy, where the chalk cliffs fall into the sea in great arches and a single spire of rock, the Aiguille, stands alone in the water. Monet had known the place since childhood. He grew up in Normandy, and these cliffs were among the first landscapes he ever saw... He returned to paint them again and again. He worked through the 1880s in front of the same rock formations, and across that time he produced more than ninety canvases of them: the cliffs at dawn, at sunset, under storm, under calm, in winter light and in the gold of a clear evening. In his letters to Alice, the woman he would later marry, he described the agony of it: the weather turning, the tide rising, the sun moving, the colour he had begun to capture vanishing before he could finish. He often worked on several canvases at once, switching between them as the conditions changed, racing each one against the hour. In a letter to his friend Frédéric Bazille he wrote: "It is beautiful here in Etretat. Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all, my head is bursting. I want to fight, scratch it off, start again, because I start to see and understand. It seems to me as if I can see nature and I can catch it all." The cliffs of Étretat had stood for millions of years and would look, to most people, the same on any given day. Monet saw that they were never the same even for two minutes. He stood on that shore and tried to hold, on canvas, something that exists only for an instant and then is gone forever. And that's exactly what those paintings really are: 90 attempts to keep a single, vanishing moment of light from disappearing. As Dylan Thomas once wrote: "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light." -- -- -- If you want a deeper dive into the craft of painting, I recently wrote a piece exploring it in detail. You can read it here: And if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:show more

2. Teasers / MV / Live presentations We believe... all the content should include all members. Not some content, but all of it. We see some people excusing the exclusion of Lee Know in some content because "he will appear in other content", we don't understand why he would be excluded out of any content when the group includes 8 members. There isn't an excuse for this to happen all the time. We will only talk about recent releases and God's Menu to not make this even longer. a) Gods Menu - A title track where they gave him zero lines and screen time (song that they continue to sing, so the company could have made a redistribution of the lines). b) Megaverse - They gave him lines in the initial release, but then they cut his part to 3 seconds, and decided to delete his center part leaving him with half of a line. c) Hall Of Fame - Every live presentation they would cut Lee Know on his own part recording from below all of the other members and only listening to Lee Know's voice without being able to look at him. d) S-Class - They stopped recording the kick he does and instead they record the other members, Lee Know sings there. e) JJAM - When it was dance racha time, Lee Know got almost no time, during the life presentation the moment he goes to the center he says his line "I know..." and while he says it, the screen gets black, so he doesn't have that time on screen, later he is placed at the back covered during the dance break. He is the dance leader. f) Walkin on Water' - During the live presentation, they decided to record everyone on his part, and cut it from his own fancam. g) Recent teasers - He was completely excluded from the first teaser and only included in the second one, he got no solo recording on the MV like the other members. h) Giant - There is a part on the video where all the members are shown, Lee Know is covered and the lights are lowered where he is, making him invisible. During the live presentation, they record other members on his part, they put the dance focus on others, being the only part he has where he sings alone. i) YOUTH - After the release of the MV, the company decided to edit the video causing views to freeze and deleting a very important part where it thanked the people involved. The time from when the video was finished to when it was published was enough to arrange all the details, and the part deleted was so big, it was impossible to miss it. This happened before with his other individual work “Dawn”, which was deleted after some time, and re-uploaded, deleting all the views it had accumulated. This means one of two things, the company puts less interest and effort in Lee Know's work, or the company is purposefully hindering Lee Know's work. Either of the two is unacceptable by a company with so many resources and that claims to be a leader in the industry. This only shows a lack of professionalism and care. j) Dance leader - We know he is the dance leader, and K-stays and the members have talked a lot about how involved he is and how hard he works in that position, but the company refuses to include any footage of him doing it, and even cuts the parts where he gives his all. Just recently K-Stays were raving about how hard Lee Know worked as the dance leader and how much effort it took, One Label cut all of that footage from the Talker. It appears they don't want stays to look at anything he does, or to not give him recognition for anything.show more

Lads. Sit down and give me your ear a... while, for I have watched from the water long enough and the hour is upon us whether we have the stomach for it or not. You remember. Or your fathers told you, or their fathers did, and the knowledge of it is in the marrow of you whether you drew breath in those days or not. The moors in the grey hour before dawn. Wet heather soft under the boot. Peat smoke rising from a low stone chimney a mile out across the bog, thin as a prayer. A sky the colour of a gun barrel and the gulls lamenting above the headland. The smell of turf burning, and wet wool, and the ferrous tang of the sea when the wind swung around out of the Atlantic and put the taste of iron on your tongue. A man could walk that land and know every stone of it was his by inheritance, because his grandfather had broken his back upon it, and his grandfather before him, back through the generations until you reach men whose names are lost and whose bones are in the soil you are standing on. The potato fields. God be good to us, the potato fields. Lazy beds cut straight as a gunwale, the ridges black and shining after a night of rain, women bent double with creels lashed to their backs and the children at their skirts, drawing the crop up by the hand for there was never any other means devised nor wanted. Hands split open at the knuckles and never entirely healed in this life. Hunger within living memory. Grandmothers who had seen the blight with their own eyes and would not speak of it from the year of it until the day they were laid down, save that a crust was kept always on the dresser which no soul in that house was permitted to touch. Not ever. Not for any reason under heaven. And the chimney sweeps. Wee lads no heavier than a sack of meal, black to the bone with soot, their lungs ruined before they were old enough to marry and old men entirely by thirty. Up the flues at first light, the skin worn off them by the brick, eyes crimson at the rim, breathing the black in with every draw of air. And the coal miners a half mile beneath our feet, down in the wet dark, the roof of the world muttering over their heads, the canary gone silent, a man's whole existence measured out in the shilling a ton and the dust he carried home in his chest to cough up of a Sunday morning into a rag. Fathers who descended and were never hauled up again. Widows at the pit head with the shawl drawn over the head and no tears remaining in them for they had spent those long ago. That was the tariff paid to keep the hearth lit. That was the reckoning of being warm in winter in the Ireland that was. And after the labouring week, Friday evening, and a man had earned the peace of what followed. Home first. Peeled the day off him in the yard. A shower of ice cold moor river water out of a tin bucket punctured with holes, hung on a nail on the gable wall, the water running clean down the back of him and carrying the week's dust and sweat away into the drain. Scrubbed till the skin was pink beneath the grime. Clean shirt laid out by the wife. The hair combed down with a drop of water. Then, and only then, did a man set himself to the table. A meat pie from the baker, tenpence if he was known to you, a shilling and no change if he was not, put down upon a proper plate. Fish and chips for threepence, the salt and vinegar soaked through the newspaper, but carried home and ate slowly at your own table with your people around you, not walked with through the streets like some vagrant tinker off the road. A man ate as a man who had earned his portion, for he had. And later, with the dishes cleared and the kettle set, down the road to the tavern. Low beams black with a century of smoke. A turf fire muttering in the grate. The air thick with pipe smoke and the vapour of wet overcoats steaming themselves dry on the backs of chairs. A pint of stout, cold and black as a cove at midnight, elevenpence laid down on the counter, a head on it thick enough to strike a match upon. A second one because you had it coming to you and no man present would dispute it. A fiddle starting up in the corner of its own accord. The old men in the snug who remembered matters the history books had long since mislaid. A song before the bolt was thrown on the door. The walk home beneath a firmament crowded with stars, the stout warm in the gut of you, the week behind you, and your own door waiting with the latch unlocked for you had no enemies in that parish. That was the country. That was the covenant. Honest labour, plain food, a cold wash, a hot meal, a cold pint, your own tongue in your own mouth, your own soil beneath your boots, and no man standing above you save the Almighty Himself. Now regard her. Regard her close. The fields disposed of to men who have never set foot upon them and never shall. The harbours signed away by the stroke of a pen in a room you were not admitted to, and foreign keels dragging out of our waters the living that sustained this island for a thousand years, while our own boats rot at their moorings for want of a quota. The tradesmen undercut by imported labour and imported goods. The shops shuttered along every main street from Donegal to Cork. The young ones scattered to London and Sydney and Boston and the Gulf because there is nothing remaining for them beneath their own roof. And the entirety of this rotten arrangement dressed up in the soft mannerly language of progress by men in towers of glass who could not tell a lazy bed from a grave, nor a trawler from a tugboat, nor an honest day's work from a pension plan. And now they arrive with the next imposition. A digital identity. A number assigned to each soul. A card required to buy your bread. A code required to draw your own earnings out of your own account. A file kept on every man, woman and child from the cradle forward. Permission asked to move. Permission asked to speak. Permission asked to earn. A levy upon every breath drawn and a regulation upon every step taken. No. And no again. And no for a third time so there is no misunderstanding of it. We do not require your digital identity. We did not request it. We did not vote upon it. We do not consent to it. We do not need your permission to exist upon the soil our forefathers are buried in. We are a free people. We have carried ourselves this far upon our own two backs. Through famine and empire and civil war and black lung and blight and the emigrant ship out of Cobh, we have come this distance under our own steam, and the arrangement appears to be serving us well enough without your intervention. We buried our own. We fed our own. We raised our own roofs and took our own fish and reared our own children in our own tongue. We are in your debt for nothing. Not a signature. Not a biometric scan. Not a single solitary inch. And while we are upon the subject, let us speak plainly of the tax man, for he has gone too long without proper introduction. The tax collector and the tax man are the one article under two names, and the article is a parasite. There is no dressing it up finer than that. A man who produces nothing, who grows nothing, who catches nothing, who builds nothing, who mends nothing, who has never in his professional life lifted anything heavier than a pen, and who arrives at your door with the full apparatus of the state at his back to carry off the fruits of labour he did not perform. He is a middleman between your sweat and some scheme dreamt up in a committee room by his own kind, and the great majority of what he takes is consumed by the machinery of the taking itself before ever a penny of it reaches the road or the hospital or the schoolhouse he claims to be funding. And I will go further while I have the floor. Finance itself, the whole apparatus of it, money breeding money in the dark without a hand laid upon a tool or a spade turned in the earth, is slavery dressed in a good suit. It is the oldest swindle known to man and it has never been anything other. A man who produces nothing yet lives off the productive labour of others through the charging of interest upon money conjured out of nothing is a parasite of a rarer and more refined order than the tax man, but a parasite all the same, and between the pair of them they have the working people of this island bled white and lectured at for the pleasure. A man who will not work with his hands, nor with his back, nor with his mind at some honest problem of the real physical world, is no man that I recognise. He is a ledger entry in a suit. The country was not built by ledger entries. The country was built by farmers and fishermen and masons and smiths and sweeps and miners and shipwrights and midwives and mothers, and those are the people whose say should carry in her councils, and no other. Here is what I put to you. Let each man and woman of this island direct the first tenth of their earnings themselves, by their own judgement, to the purpose they see as worthy. The school down the road. The lifeboat station. The hospice. The widow on the corner. The roof of the chapel. The harbour wall. Whatever it may be. Let the people who earned the money decide where the money travels. You will find the roads mended and the ports dredged and the schools standing and the old ones cared for inside of five years, and done better and for less, because the hand that earned the coin knows the weight of it and will not squander it upon consultants and committees. And let us have done with the paper currency and the numbers in a screen that can be frozen at the whim of a clerk in a tower. Bring back the coin. Gold for the great transactions. Silver for the weekly commerce of a working life. Copper for the small change of the day. Metal you can bite. Metal you can weigh. Metal that cannot be conjured out of nothing by a keystroke, nor erased out of existence by another. Real money for real labour. A coin in the hand is a free man's wage. A number in a database is a collar around a free man's neck, and they are fitting that collar now while we stand arguing over the colour of it. Feel it in your gut. That is not nothing. That is your blood relating to you what your ears will not hear. That is every forebear who starved and fought and coughed the black dust into a rag and descended the shaft regardless, standing at your shoulder and saying no further. Not one more field. Not one more harbour. Not one more son upon a plane. Not one more free man converted into a number in a ledger for the convenience of the parasites. This is the hour. Make no error about it. Ireland is redeemed in this generation or she is lost beyond recovery, and every true son and daughter of her knows it in the marrow. There is no middle ground remaining. There is no waiting it out. There is standing now, upon your own two feet, or there is watching her go under the waves for the last and final time. So stand. Stand with your farmers. Stand with your fishermen. Stand with your tradesmen and your miners and your sweeps and your mothers and your old ones. Raise the tricolour. Speak the tongue. Walk the land. Hold the line in the streets of every town and city and do not break it, for they are relying upon you to break and to go home and to forget by Tuesday. She is calling her children home. Every stone of her, every breaker on her western shore, every acre of wet heather and every coal in every hearth the length and breadth of her is calling. Answer her. Take her back. Every field, every harbour, every last inch of her. Take her back, or lose her entirely. There is no third road open to us.show more

IPOB’s Destabilization Agenda: Nigerian Government Should Act Fast and... Decisively Too! The recent attempt by Nnamdi Kanu and his legal team to draw international sympathy through a letter addressed to U.S. President Donald Trump is another desperate move to blackmail Nigeria and distort the truth. This ploy, couched under the guise of alleged “Christian persecution,” is a calculated propaganda effort meant to shield Kanu from accountability for his well-documented crimes against the Nigerian state and its people. This latest push is a glaring reality that Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB are behind the noise of a "Christian Genocide" in Nigeria. This is an attempt to undermine the sovereignty of the Nigerian state and forment chaos of international dimension. It is crucial to remind the global community that Nnamdi Kanu is not a prisoner of conscience but a man who jumped bail after being granted temporary freedom by a competent Nigerian court. Instead of submitting himself to the judicial process, he fled the country and used his time in exile to inflame division, hatred, and violence against the Nigerian state. One should ask Nnamdi Kanu if the lives IPOB that he leads wasted in the South East do not matter, these were Christians. During his time abroad, Kanu made numerous broadcasts inciting his followers to attack and kill Nigerian government officials, security agents, and innocent citizens who disagreed with his extremist ideology. His messages were not calls for peaceful self-determination; they were open invitations to anarchy and bloodshed. In one particularly dangerous broadcast around October 20, 2020, during the EndSARS protests, Kanu explicitly ordered the destruction of Lagos State—a city that serves as Nigeria’s economic heartbeat and home to millions of citizens from all tribes and religions. In that same broadcast, he went further, ordering his followers to locate and kill Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was then a private citizen and is now the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. These are not the actions of a freedom fighter—they are the acts of a man pursuing chaos under the false banner of liberation. It must also be emphasized that Kanu’s trial began under the administration of the late President Muhammadu Buhari and has continued lawfully under successive governments. His detention and trial are rooted in due process and constitutional procedure. He is undergoing a valid trial before competent Nigerian courts, yet he and his legal team have persistently refused to open their defence, choosing instead to manipulate international opinion and stall justice. It is instructive at this point the need for the Attorney General of Nigeria must as a matter of urgency report the legal team of Nnamdi Kanu to the Ethics Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association. It is on record that when the one of his lawyers was supposed to be preparing open their defence, he was seen protesting on October 20, 2025 for the release of his client an action that the legal profession frowns at. Let's ask a question, can an American lawyer conduct himself the way Mr. Ejimakor has been conducting himself? Even more telling is that Nnamdi Kanu himself, inside the courtroom, confessed to committing the crimes for which he is being tried, claiming in a video-recorded moment that the offences were committed in the United Kingdom. This alone exposes the hypocrisy in his current attempt to paint himself as a victim rather than the perpetrator he is. Furthermore, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB)—the organization Kanu leads—is a designated terrorist group under Nigerian law. IPOB has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent citizens in the South-East region through brutal attacks on civilians, security operatives, and public infrastructure. The group’s reign of terror has left a trail of destruction, grief, and economic stagnation across a region once known for its peace and industry.show more