Download install quran in word for free (Windows)

EDIT 3: I don't know if this will be seen, but all my other posts keep getting removed by the automod. I just wanted to share this...
As you can see, I've been exploring Islam again and struggling with some of the concepts in Christianity. One piece of advice I received was to simply pray to Allah ﷻ alone for guidance.
Last night, lying in bed, I felt compelled to just read a bit of the Quran before going to sleep. I opened the app on my phone and selected something at random. It was this:
Ar-Ra'd 13:14-16

The only true prayer is to Him: those they pray to besides Him give them no answer any more than water reaches the mouth of someone who simply stretches out his hands for it- it cannot do so: the prayers of the disbelievers are all in vain.
All that are in heaven and earth submit to God alone, willingly or unwillingly, as do their shadows in the mornings and in the evenings.
Say [Prophet], ‘Who is Lord of the heavens and the earth?’ Say, ‘God.’ Say, ‘Why do you take protectors other than Him, who can neither benefit nor harm even themselves?’ Say, ‘Are the blind equal to those who can see? And are the depths of darkness equal to the light?’ Have the partners they assign to God created anything like His creation so that their creation is indistinguishable from His? Say, ‘God is the Creator of all things: He is the One, the All Compelling.’

If that's not a clear sign, I don't know what is.

Greetings all from one of the Ahl al-Kitāb. I‘ve been thinking a lot lately about Islam and its relationship with my Catholicism.
Just to be transparent, I’m 35 and formally educated in Catholic theology. I‘ve also read most of the Quran, some Hadith, been on the receiving end of persistent dawah, and even attended prayers, all in an effort to learn. I only say all this to emphasize that I’m not being lazy in my questioning; I’m past the point where google is helpful.
Is this the right place to ask some potentially sensitive theological questions? Is there a resident scholar / expert that you all turn to for these situations? I’m happy to discuss privately or publicly. I’m currently working on writing out my questions in a clear and concise manner. Just wanted to see if I was taking the proper approach here. Thanks!
EDIT: After positive feedback, I'm posting the questions here. Any disrespect is out of ignorance, not malice. u/RevonTheGreat u/abu_uthaymeme

I won't rehash the Catholic view of Islam, as it has been expounded upon ad nauseum by modern champions of "interreligious dialogue." However, if you're interested, the best explanation is in Nostra Aetate.
Why am I here asking questions? I think that's answered by what we all share: a love for God and a desire to serve and worship Him in a manner that is true and pleasing to Him.
My first issue: the Crucifixion. Surah 4:157 states that ‘they neither killed him nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them’. However, this is in conflict with historians, many of whom are nonreligious. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is one of the most reliably attested facts of the ancient world. Even completely disinterested parties in foreign regions make note of the event. Seems very difficult to reconcile the relatively thorough historical account with the alleged inerrancy of the Quran.
In addition, a common explanation offered by outside observers (not necessarily Islamic “insiders”) focuses in the impact of Christian heresies on Muhammad and his contemporaries. It is often observed that Q4:157 has a noticeable Docetic feel to it, whereby “Jesus’ suffering only ‘seemed’ (dokein) to be physical but had, in fact, more of an apparitional quality.”[23] Some scholars detect similar notions elsewhere in the Qur’an, and many argue that various Christian sects holding unorthodox christological views were active in the Arabian peninsula during Muhammad’s day and likely influenced him, including Monophysites, Julianists, Gnostic Basilideans, Nestorians, and other groups.[24] If true, the influence of such group (or groups) upon early Islam might explain the Docetic/Gnostic tenor of Q4:157, whereby Muhammad and his followers may have believed that such an apparitional crucifixion was, in fact, “perfectly in line with the early and apparently widespread Christian perspective” they had encountered.[25] In other words, Muhammad thought his teaching on the crucifixion was the Christian teaching as well—unaware that it was a version of “Christianity” deemed heretical. (https://journal.rts.edu/article/it-was-made-to-appear-like-that-to-them-islams-denial-of-jesus-crucifixion-in-the-quran-and-dogmatic-tradition/)
Next, the Bible and Quran. If approached objectively, the standards applied by Muslim apologists for criticizing the Bible would destroy the foundations of Islam, as well. The Bible was written in the lifetime of Jesus' disciples while the earliest account of Muhammad’s life is only known to us because one Muslim (Ibn Hisham, editing Ibn Ishaq’s Sirah Rasul Allah) preserved it, and he is clear that what he received contained fabrications and false reports.
Next, the divinity of Jesus Christ. I understand that to claim that Jesus is God’s son is the greatest of all sins in Islam and is known as “shirk.” Some have argued with me that Jesus never said it. That is disingenuous at best, as the Gospel is full of instances where Jesus established his identity as Yahweh incarnate. I think our focus on Sonship leads to some confusion because we think of it in our human, familial terms. Jesus is God's son in that he took on that form in that manner, but he is fully man and fully God. He is God walking among His people to bring salvation, out of overabundant love for His creation. We believe in One God, but we know Him in three Persons. Note that in pre-Islamic periods, Allah had three daughters, Al-At, Al-Uzza, and Al-Manat. In Muhammad’s campaign against polytheism he chose Allah as the one true God and rejected the notion that Allah could have any daughters or sons. The Trinity is a completely different concept from polytheism.
Jesus makes a claim to be God. He is described as the Word made flesh. He clearly said he was present when Lucifer fell from Heaven. "Jesus said unto him, “Have I been so long a time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, ‘Show us the Father’?" John 14:9 - "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." -John 14:6. He fulfilled Old Testament prophecy to the letter.
The Quran regards Jesus as a great prophet. It is my understanding then that Muslims believe everything said by Jesus in the Bible to be a fabrication? That's hard to swallow.
Finally (for now), naskh. Abrogration is a huge concern when it comes the alleged purity and sanctity of the Quran. Most of the arguments in defense of it are difficult, to say the least. "While belief in the theory of naskh of Islamic revelation is part of Sunni Muslim orthodoxy, there are more than a few scholars who do not accept it, including most twentieth century modernist reformist scholars." I suspect many Muslims feel the way I do about "modernist reformists" and regard innovation in religion as a disease. I may be overstepping there, but I think you get my point. How does one deal with abrogation of inerrant Word of God?
EDIT 2: One more thing that never sat well with me. And here's more honesty... I apostatized.. twice, actually, to and from. Years ago, I went to a mosque and said the Shahada. I was given a stack of books, assurance that someone would help me along, and that was that. I taught myself to pray, fasted, etc. After that, silence. I had NO community. I don't speak Arabic, I was the only white guy at the mosque and only one person would ever talk to me. I eventually went back to Catholicism, which prides itself on its universality. Anywhere in the world, you're not a foreigner at Mass, you're a fellow Catholic. As a white guy, I never felt that in Islam.

My Story: from being an extremely devout muslim to ex-muslim/atheist

I've been on this subreddit for a long time now and thought that I'd share my personal experiences to try to inspire some hope in everyone on here who's feeling helpless. I'm posting this on a throwaway for obvious reasons of anonymity.
A LOT of people in real life doubt me when I say that I used to be very, very religious (not exactly extreme, but on that spectrum) because now, I'm really anti-religion, especially Abrahamic ones like Islam. Let me start by saying that I generally don't have a problem with Muslims who live in the West, because most of them are sane since they're either just Muslims by label or only follow the sugarcoated version of Islam.
I grew up in a Muslim-majority country with strict Muslim parents. My mother always told me religious stories as bedtime stories to incite fear into me (she confirmed this with her own words back then) - things about what happened to Mohammed's so-called enemies, the story of the donkey that came back to life to help a believer, the story of the man whose faith Allah tested by asking him to kill his own son. So in a nutshell, I was brainwashed at a very young age.
I prayed five times a day right upon hearing the adhan, hated gay people, atheists, suicide victims and held misogynistic views of women, and viewed Jews, Christians and Hindus negatively. I carried a pocket-version of the Quran with me everywhere and would read it maybe once a year (because I struggled with understanding the hadiths, so it took me very long to even get through two pages).
Eventually, I immigrated to a non-Muslim majority country. At a certain point in my life, things became traumatic and difficult. As a teenager, I started having regular teen insecurities about my appearance, and my mother reacted by telling me that I shouldn't hate my appearance because God made me that way and I shouldn't hate his creation. Then, a while after that, I got diagnosed with a medical illness, and the way she reacted to that was by constantly telling me that God was punishing me for hating my appearance.
Being in a country where Islam was no longer the dominant religion, I was exposed to a lot of differing perspectives. I also befriended different people and one day, I found out that my best friend was agnostic. I very clearly remember thinking that this person was kind and perfectly normal - NOTHING like the way the kuffar were described.
I had a lot of traumatic things happen to me as a teenager. I became even more devout to religious practises - recited religious chants with subha, went to the masjid and followed the dress codes imposed by Islam. They always tell you that when you do those things with your whole heart, you will be closer to God. God will see your struggles and help you - he never even forgets about the ants. But throughout all those years of being devout, I have not ONCE felt that God was listening to me or watching over me (though I always suppressed this feeling). I understood that it was supposedly all a test of faith, but I started spiralling into mental illness and suicidal thoughts because of all the traumatic events happening to me. I cried during my prayers and while reading the Quran and begged God to help me. He never listened. I never felt heard. I tried to rationalise by thinking that it was maybe because of my suicidal thoughts, because you must not think of killing God's creation. However, I just didn't understand - God understood all his creations, so didn't he know that I couldn't control those thoughts? Why was he punishing me for having things I couldn't control? Why couldn't he understand that they weren't going away even with all the extra prayers?
Later on, my religious devotion dwindled over the months. As expected, I got shamed for this. I decided to turn to my mother and asked if God was real. She freaked out so so badly, terrified that I became a kaffir.
I started questioning things as I got through more and more of the Quran. I was confused about why Mohammed was killing those who rejected Islam, because Allah was always said to be the most forgiving and merciful. Why didn't he just try to SPEAK to those people instead of immediately kill them? I didn't like non-Muslims and apostates either, but at that point, I had befriended so many of them and they were all so normal. Why did they immediately deserve to get killed? They were all just like me other than religious belief. I used to be someone who defended Mohammed's marriage to Aiysha out of the excuse that child marriage was acceptable during those times, but he was still a grown man who was attracted to a child. And because of this, many little girls were married off to grown men. I got scared, not in the same way as when I was a child, but scared at the fact that I defended this. A lot of girls die upon intercourse because their bodies cannot handle it, and I was ignorant to this because our prophet was the one we should all aspire to be and I didn't want to disagree with any aspect of Islam. It's very haram to question or disagree with anything. Yes, she was happy with her marriage and led battles and was feisty and all that, but she was still a child who played with dolls and got penetrated by a much older man.
Entering adulthood, I became agnostic. I knew I no longer wanted to follow Islam, so I turned to exploring Christianity. I joined a bible study group. After a year or so of being in it, their priest was coming to visit. I thought it would be great for me to seek guidance from a priest and ask some questions about Christianity.
That priest was SO full of shit. Let me say - at that point, I was against Islam. HOWEVER, he was going out of his way to talk about how bad and violent it is once I told him I used to be Muslim. I told him that he was confusing me because he said minutes ago that Christians accept and love everyone so why was he preaching hatred? He then went on to say that he was only stating facts and not hating. Don't get me wrong, I hated (and still do) Islam too, but he was a priest and supposed to hold no bias against those who sin. I know I did when I was religious, but that was Islam and this was Christianity (and he was a PRIEST, nonetheless), which was supposedly more loving and accepting.
During that bible study meeting, they were all talking about how lucky they were to be born into Christianity. Again I was confused because earlier they were all talking about how they accept people of different faiths and do not see themselves as superior. They were all equal under God. But if they truly didn't believe they were superior, why were they all talking about being lucky? I used to say that too as a Muslim and it was because I believed that my faith was the only right one.
Later on that night, I concluded that all religions were the same - socially acceptable cults. No matter how differently packaged, it was all the same at heart.
Fast forward years later and I'm now an atheist and although my family knows that deep down (I haven't said it outright because I don't have time or energy to deal with that drama), they still label me as Muslim out of denial. It doesn't matter much to me because I am fully independent from them now. I used to believe that I would only be happy if I served God and made my family proud by doing that, but looking back, I was at my most miserable while serving that cruel imaginary figure. I now wear whatever I want, have a partner, own dogs and genuinely don't care if someone was born a Jason but is now Jessica, or reads the Torah, Bible or Quran.
I'm finally happy. And I hope all the teenagers on here and everyone else who is stuck in a Muslim country knows that you can be happy too. It is possible to move to a country that couldn't care less if you believe in Allah. It is possible to be happy. Until then, please stay safe.

The concept of 'religion' did not exist in earlier societies. Here's academic literature on this:

All of this is directly copy and pasted from Wikipedia and the references have been mentioned. EDIT: Some have asked for the links to the Wiki pages so here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_religion Here under concept and etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
Also if you copy and paste all of this into Google it'll direct you to the wiki pages I've copied it from.
(I mention this bc I know there'll be some people who will find this shocking and may wonder if I'm making it up).
The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,[3][4] despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.[5][6] The word religion as used in the 21st century does not have an obvious pre-colonial translation into non-European languages. The anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson writes that "what the West and the history of religions in its wake have objectified under the name 'religion' is ... something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history".[7] The history of other cultures' interaction with the "religious" category is therefore their interaction with an idea that first developed in Europe under the influence of Christianity. [8][need quotation to verify] The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious things were separated from worldly things, was not used before the 1500s.[25] The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities.[25] The modern concept of religion, as an abstraction that entails distinct sets of beliefs or doctrines, is a recent invention in the English language. Such usage began with texts from the 17th century due to events such as the splitting of Christendom during the Protestant Reformation and globalization in the age of exploration, which involved contact with numerous foreign cultures with non-European languages.[23][24][28] Some argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply the term religion to non-Western cultures.[29][30] Others argue that using religion on non-Western cultures distorts what people do and believe.[31] he concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,[32][33] despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.[34][35] For example, there is no precise equivalent of religion in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities.[36] One of its central concepts is halakha, meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life.[37] Even though the beliefs and traditions of Judaism are found in the ancient world, ancient Jews saw Jewish identity as being about an ethnic or national identity and did not entail a compulsory belief system or regulated rituals.[38] Even in the 1st century CE, Josephus had used the Greek term ioudaismos, which some translate as Judaism today, even though he used it as an ethnic term, not one linked to modern abstract concepts of religion as a set of beliefs.[3] It was in the 19th century that Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity.[38] The Greek word threskeia, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is found in the New Testament. Threskeia is sometimes translated as religion in today's translations, however, the term was understood as worship well into the medieval period.[3] In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as religion in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed din as law.[3] The Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as religion, also means law.39][40] Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and world religions first entered the English language.[41][42][43] No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s.[44] "Hindu" has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. [45][46] Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of religion since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this idea.[47][48]
Nongbri, Brent (2013). "2. Lost in Translation: Inserting "Religion" into Ancient Texts".
Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. Yale University Press Morreall, John; Sonn, Tamara (2013). 50 Great Myths about Religions. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 13. ISBN 9780470673508. Many languages do not even have a word equivalent to our word 'religion'; nor is such a word found in either the Bible or the Qur'an.
A lot of people don't know this. The concept of religion as spoken of today is a social construct. It is a strawman that was borne out of secularism. I affirm there is a Creator (and that affirmation informs many of my decisions) but I totally reject 'religion'.

My Thought on Quran not being General Accessible by contemporary readers.

How do I talk to my girlfriend about family obligations?

I've (30M) been seeing my girlfriend (22F, I'll refer to her as 'A') now for a little over a month and a half. We met at work and immediately hit it off, she was super easy to talk to and we would talk for hours before/after work. Being intimate with her feels like electricity running through my body, and she's told me the same. She's one of the kindest, most gracious people I've ever met in my life, and I honestly can't see her enough. We connect emotionally, intellectually and physically.
For some context, she is Somali and Muslim, with a very large family that she is very close with; and I was born and raised here in Canada, a lapsed Christian rediscovering his faith, with a very small family and some estrangement issues. Our religion hasn't been a sticking point at all (or I guess it indirectly is, we'll get to that), we're both open-minded enough and willing to explore this together. We've been swapping books back and forth, she's been taking me through the Quran and I've been taking her through the Bible, and that's been amazing as I've always wanted to learn more about Islam.
What has been a source of contention for me has been her family. In my opinion, they treat her like an indentured servant. We work the night shift, and our shift ends at 5 am. They will wake her up at 8, 9, 10 in the morning to get her to watch their kids, help them with cleaning/shopping/chores, knowing full well she has to work that night. She comes into work and just looks totally exhausted, and has told me that she's fallen asleep while driving home more than once, which scares the shit out of me. She is currently sending a quarter of her pay-cheque back home to her mother, who moved back there recently and from what A has told me, just spends it on trivial things, the money isn't even for rent/food etc, as her mother is staying with the family.
And now, one of her sisters wants her to move to Kansas, the biggest reason being that she wants A to help with her family. It seems like her family does not want her to live her own life. She's been trying to upgrade to go back to school and is having trouble saving for school, and finding the time to upgrade because her family always has her doing something for them. In her own words she has told me that she feels overwhelmed by the demands her family places on her, and is spreading herself too thin trying to live up to their expectations. But she feels obligated to just go along with their wishes, because it's her family. And she feels like she has to move to Kansas to be a good daughter, because her family will consider her selfish for not wanting to help her sister.
This brings up another issue, is that she has not told her family about me. The biggest reason being (I believe) the fact that I am a Christian and am not Muslim. The first time she took her hijab off in front of me I asked what her family would think of it, and she said that she shouldn't even be with me. She also has 2 men back home who have asked for her hand in marriage, and she's told me that she has absolutely zero interest in them because she's with me, and has told both of them no; but her father has been pushing her towards accepting the one man because he has high status in the community and they know the family really well. I knew going into the relationship that this would be a very complicated, messy ordeal, and I guess I didn't realize how much it would hurt me. We can text during the week, but she won't even let me call her. I see her once a week on the weekends, and I feel like her side piece, who she comes to see to make her feel good. I made a mistake rushing into this, as I have a whole host of mental health issues that I've only just started to address, and finding out she wants to move to Kansas sent me into a spiral this week (I'm not in any danger as I have a very good, close group of friends that I've known for 20+ yrs who I can talk to).
Initially I wanted to just end things as I was in too much pain and have no idea how to handle this, let alone how to be a support for her when it feels like she won't even let me, because she can't, because of her family. But I really care about her a lot, I just want to see her happy, and I feel like I'm just complicating her already extremely complicated life. I don't want to lose her as it's the first time in my life I've genuinely felt happy and content (up until this past week), but if I'm unable to handle this, how am I going to handle it down the road when she eventually tells her family about me and what that is even going to look like. She would be sacrificing far more by being with me than I would being with her.
I'm at an impasse and have no idea what I'm going to say when I see her this weekend. She wants to come over but I'm going to suggest meeting somewhere else, I'm already at the point where I don't want any more memories because it hurts too much. I know it might seem ridiculous because it's only been a month and a half, but we opened up to each other so quickly and just connected in a way I never have with anyone else before.
Sorry for the essay, and TIA for any advice
tldr; Muslim and Christian relationship, I feel she's being used by her family and she feels obligated to just go along with their wishes, which would mean moving to another country and leaving me

How do I talk to my girlfriend about family obligations?

I've (30M) been seeing my girlfriend (22F, I'll refer to her as 'A') now for a little over a month and a half. We met at work and immediately hit it off, she was super easy to talk to and we would talk for hours before/after work. Being intimate with her feels like electricity running through my body, and she's told me the same. She's one of the kindest, most gracious people I've ever met in my life, and I honestly can't see her enough. We connect emotionally, intellectually and physically.
For some context, she is Somali and Muslim, with a very large family that she is very close with; and I was born and raised here in Canada, a lapsed Christian rediscovering his faith, with a very small family and some estrangement issues. Our religion hasn't been a sticking point at all (or I guess it indirectly is, we'll get to that), we're both open-minded enough and willing to explore this together. We've been swapping books back and forth, she's been taking me through the Quran and I've been taking her through the Bible, and that's been amazing as I've always wanted to learn more about Islam.
What has been a source of contention for me has been her family. In my opinion, they treat her like an indentured servant. We work the night shift, and our shift ends at 5 am. They will wake her up at 8, 9, 10 in the morning to get her to watch their kids, help them with cleaning/shopping/chores, knowing full well she has to work that night. She comes into work and just looks totally exhausted, and has told me that she's fallen asleep while driving home more than once, which scares the shit out of me. She is currently sending a quarter of her pay-cheque back home to her mother, who moved back there recently and from what A has told me, just spends it on trivial things, the money isn't even for rent/food etc, as her mother is staying with the family.
And now, one of her sisters wants her to move to Kansas, the biggest reason being that she wants A to help with her family. It seems like her family does not want her to live her own life. She's been trying to upgrade to go back to school and is having trouble saving for school, and finding the time to upgrade because her family always has her doing something for them. In her own words she has told me that she feels overwhelmed by the demands her family places on her, and is spreading herself too thin trying to live up to their expectations. But she feels obligated to just go along with their wishes, because it's her family. And she feels like she has to move to Kansas to be a good daughter, because her family will consider her selfish for not wanting to help her sister.
This brings up another issue, is that she has not told her family about me. The biggest reason being (I believe) the fact that I am a Christian and am not Muslim. The first time she took her hijab off in front of me I asked what her family would think of it, and she said that she shouldn't even be with me. She also has 2 men back home who have asked for her hand in marriage, and she's told me that she has absolutely zero interest in them because she's with me, and has told both of them no; but her father has been pushing her towards accepting the one man because he has high status in the community and they know the family really well. I knew going into the relationship that this would be a very complicated, messy ordeal, and I guess I didn't realize how much it would hurt me. We can text during the week, but she won't even let me call her. I see her once a week on the weekends, and I feel like her side piece, who she comes to see to make her feel good. I made a mistake rushing into this, as I have a whole host of mental health issues that I've only just started to address, and finding out she wants to move to Kansas sent me into a spiral this week (I'm not in any danger as I have a very good, close group of friends that I've known for 20+ yrs who I can talk to, but they really had no advice to give regarding the specific situation).
Initially I wanted to just end things as I was in too much pain and have no idea how to handle this, let alone how to be a support for her when it feels like she won't even let me, because she can't, because of her family. But I really care about her a lot, I just want to see her happy, and I feel like I'm just complicating her already extremely complicated life. I don't want to lose her as it's the first time in my life I've genuinely felt happy and content (up until this past week), but if I'm unable to handle this, how am I going to handle it down the road when she eventually tells her family about me and what that is even going to look like. She would be sacrificing far more by being with me than I would being with her.
I'm at an impasse and have no idea what I'm going to say when I see her this weekend. She wants to come over but I'm going to suggest meeting somewhere else, I'm already at the point where I don't want any more memories because it hurts too much. I know it might seem ridiculous because it's only been a month and a half, but we opened up to each other so quickly and just connected in a way I never have with anyone else before.
Sorry for the essay, and TIA for any advice

Book Review: Fitzpatrick's War, by Theodore Judson

Fitzpatrick’s War is a 2004 novel by Theodore Judson. Technically, since it takes place hundreds of years after humanity rips itself to shreds in a maelstrom of climate change, civil war, engineered plagues, and nuclear exchanges, it is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel. In terms of presentation and content, it showcases a series of high-functioning cohesive civilizations in conflict and therefore is closer to a fantasy novel that happens to take place on our world’s future. Given the deliberate parallels with the Roman Empire and the implicit commentary on the contemporaneous Iraq Invasion, it would not be too crazy to label it a piece of alternative history fiction.
I believe I can describe the bare bones of the novel without giving away too many spoilers, and do it succinctly enough to leave room to talk about the themes. And I really really want to talk about the themes.
So the USA dissolved way back when in the aforementioned maelstrom of conflict and afflictions. The faction that finally delivered the killing blow was the Yukon Confederation- a vast network of agrarian contrarians, survivalists, libertarian communes, right wing evangelical types, and the like. They were an international organization with chapters in America, Canada, Australia, and Britain, united by common values and cultures in defiance of the derision that their host nations’ urban elites hurled at them. As social order broke down, they got stuck in and gunned down their rivals- raider biker crews, urban gangbangers, governmental fascists, etc. The Yukons finally toppled the old government by storming Washington DC and bayoneting every lawyer and politician they could get their hands on to clear the board for their own government’s installation; the day they seized Capitol Hill is their Independence Day.
Now, centuries later, the world looks a lot like an alt-right’s nightmare (or daydream, depending on how accelerationist they are). Western civilization is united under the Yukons, who have instituted a new land-owning military aristocracy across a third of the globe and imposed a super-Christian theocratic regime explicitly mimicking the ancient Roman Republic; South America and Mexico is a series of bandito kingdoms who periodically raid north of the border; the Middle East and Europe have fused under the Caliph, with the native whites in Europe either converting to Islam or fleeing to the Yukons as refugees; most of Asia is under the Chinese Communist thumb; and Africa is a hellhole being exploited and manipulated by everyone else. Yukon men are raised to be soldiers to fight the infidel with courage and discipline, then come home, marry, and work the land until the day they die like proper Roman citizen-farmer; Yukon women are raised to be submissive housewives and mothers.
Now that the backstory is out of the way, we can move swiftly to the plot. The novel is presented as the memoirs of one Sir Robert Bruce, an old man and retired Yukon general who had, in his youth, been one of the most trusted lieutenants of Isaac Prophet Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick was a young and driven Yukon aristo who had seized power and launched a grand crusade to conquer the Latin hordes, the Turk, and the heathen Chinese all at once by leveraging the Yukons' superior technology, military power, and social cohesion. Fitzpatrick won the war, but after he united the entire world under his new empire he was assassinated and things broke apart to roughly the same shape they were before he set off to conquer. At the time of the elder Bruce's writing, Fitzpatrick is revered as a hero and a saint... but Bruce was there to see all the nasty, illegal, and inhumane details of Fitzpatrick's conquests.
The "memoir" is given a plethora of Terry Pratchett-style notations by a prissy, bigoted college professor who is quick to remind the reader that this primary source material is tainted with bias and self-serving lies about the great Fitzpatrick. The footnotes act almost as a Greek chorus commenting on the action, except that the chorus' moral compass points due south. The prissy egghead commends the savage violence that Bruce is ashamed to have committed, sneers at the tolerance Bruce develops over the course of the story, derides and decries those few points where Bruce balked at the immorality of what he was being ordered to do, and in general is just humorously wrong about everything.
Morality and the Hypocrisy of the Upper Class
The class divide in the Yukon Confederacy is stark and obvious to all participants. If your dad is a rich landowner, you're a rich landowner. If your dad digs ditches, you'll be digging ditches, just as soon as you get back from the front lines having done your share of Commie/Muslim/bandito-killing. Political power is concentrated in a small clot of noble families who hold high office more-or-less in perpetuity. This neo-feudalistic arrangement is given a gloss of Roman social mores, because each noble family has a collection of free men under their protection and patronage, who always vote their landlord's son to the Senate in return for space to live and farm. Some of the noble houses have tight arrangements with their tenants stretching back ten generations- that kind of thing.
It is made quite clear early on in Fitzpatrick's War that the divide between upper class and lower class is not merely economic, but also religious. Put plainly, everybody goes to church and worships God, but the yeomen take it all in earnest and apply the moral lessons to their conduct, while the aristocrats consider themselves free to sin all they want because ethical conduct is for peasants. Bruce, born into the lower grunt class, gets the opportunity to attend military college to jump from enlisted to officer and ends up rubbing elbows with the elites. He is shocked to find that the rich kids are exempt from pre-dawn mock bayonet battles that everyone else has to attend, that rich kids can sneak in porn and booze and whores, and even some darker stuff that Bruce can't even bear to write out. The elite of the elites spare themselves the hardships of military service and expect the poor people to fight and die to make them rich.
Bruce's innocence is primary reason why Fitzpatrick plucks him out of the crowd and favors him for advancement- all of Fitzpatrick's peers are dissolute rich kids dodging military service and playing at decadent courtly schemes; Bruce is just a good Christian soldier who wants to serve the Confederacy well and ably. Moreover, Fitzpatrick sees him as a stand-in for the average Yukon. As long as Bruce can look him in the eye and say that he's a good man, Fitzpatrick figures he's got a mandate straight from God to do as he will.
The hypocrisy of the nobility makes for a truly excellent segue to-
The Two Faces of Christianity
As mentioned, Christianity is the religion of the Yukons. It primarily shows itself in word and deed in two parallel paths-
The first and culturally dominant mode of Christianity is the old timey, God's wrath visited upon the heathen version. It's the Christianity that puts nonbelievers to the sword. Real "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/ He is trampling through the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored/ He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword/ His truth is marching on" stuff. The kind of creed that'll pump your blood up to jump into the fray and smite people hip and thigh until you are in turn struck down and can go in peace to Heaven's reward.
Then, you have the home and hearth version of Christianity. The one that says to love your neighbor as yourself, to do good to those who hate you, to leave vengeance to God. The one that says the absolute best life possible is a simple life wherein you eschew immorality and embrace justice and peace, where you leave money on the table if taking it would be unethical, where you are more concerned about loving your wife and caring for widows and orphans than about killing atheist/Muslim foreigners. One of the reasons why I respect this novel is that it explores this second version of Christianity just as much as the first. I mean, judging by wikipedia, Theodore Judson was a public school teacher in 2003, and if I can recall the political climate back then accurately, you would absolutely expect him to bash authoritarian evangelists who want to go off bombing foreigners for Jesus. I recall a fun headline from about a decade ago from that crowd where some Florida pastor decided to hold a mock trial for the Quran and set the book on fire for a photo op. Those people were by far the most gung ho about invading Iraq.
But the same critic who satirized the "clash of civilizations" style of warmongering also has whole chapters and character arcs devoted to a Christian man agonizing with his conscience and struggling to both identify the sin within him and repent from it. Notably, Bruce fails his moral test many, many times. This is a pretty standard case of Christian rhetoric, damn near to stock character- the sinner who finds that he just cannot overcome his sin on his own, but needs Jesus' light in his life to be graced with salvation. Time and again, Bruce allows his worldly ambition to dominate him and give in to Fitzpatrick's will. Time and again, he keeps silent in the planning stages of a ghastly holocaust to save his career. Time and again, Fitzpatrick asks Bruce if he's a good man, and time and again Bruce gives in and says "Yes" because he craves the approval of the highest of the high, rather than the approval of his actual conscience.
This in turn segues nicely to-
Romance Among the Yukons
Yukon culture suffers from what you might reasonably call "toxic masculinity". The idea of loving your wife instead of treating her as a respectable breeding machine along the Madonna/whore axis of approval is taboo. Public displays of affection? Right out. Discussing things with your wife? Nonsense. Real men are violent, proud, stiff upper lip types who never show fear and never give in.
In point of fact, the strict gender roles of the Yukons provide women in general and wives in particular a great deal of social control by running the household. They can't vote, but they can decide who marries who and who gets promoted and set the overall timetable around which everyone lives. They can influence their husbands heavily even though they can't order them about.
Bruce runs headlong into this cultural brick wall by actually falling in love with his wife, and a wife that springs from the untouchable caste of beggars, thieves, actors, and racial/religious minorities who are shunned from respectable society (though still to much work to actually mass murder). His wife, Charlotte, is a fiery-spirited Irish Catholic gypsy he meets in a bar during officer training. Her unconventional dating techniques of sending him risque photos and love notes unnerve Bruce almost as much as they intrigue him- women are supposed to be docile and submissive, not flirty. Marrying (very far) down socially is the first time Bruce goes against Fitzpatrick's wishes in any scenario, and provides the chink in his pride that allows him to ultimately resist going down the darker paths.
Charlotte is actually a really interesting character- in any other story she'd be the Manic Pixie Dream Girl who shakes up the stodgy and uptight Bruce with her free love and careless persona. Yukon culture is so rigid and strict that she has the same effect by being a devout Catholic girl who is waiting for marriage to make love and who wants a lot of children with her man. Charlotte starts hammering Bruce into the home and hearth Christianity from the get go, bending him towards mercy and charity and away from the warmongering arrogance of Fitzpatrick. Not coincidentally, she also challenges Yukon conceptions of what a loving marriage should look like in terms of whether you're allowed to kiss your wife's hand in public. Just getting Bruce to dance with her in private is played out like she's convincing him to try some perverted new sexual roleplay that good Christian boys never hear about.
Imperialism and Patriotism
One of the key themes that Judson hammers away at in the course of the novel is that one cannot simultaneously be an imperialist and a patriot- to lean toward one is to lean away from the other. Patriotism is focused on a relatively small chunk of dirt and rock that houses and supports a distinct segment of humanity that the patriot is fiercely attached to. But an empire looks beyond that chunk of rock and dirt to the bigger picture, claiming every segment of humanity as its own. Patriotism is local and small; Imperialism is cosmopolitan and universal.
At the start of Bruce's "memoir", the Yukons are small. Powerful, but limited. They own a lot of dirt, but they are only 30 million spread out across a wide area in a world of a few billion. The average Yukon wants to do his duty and come home- he doesn't want to actually conquer Mexico and rule it. Ruling over foreigners would interrupt his plans to get back to his farm and make it to church on time with his friends and kin on a Sunday afternoon. The average Yukon, in short, a patriot.
But Fitzpatrick and the cabal of decadent nobility who support him isn't interested in fighting border wars and skirmishes. He wants his name to ring down the annals of history like Caesar and Alexander the Great. He has no farm and warm family connections to return to- his family is a bunch of vicious, thoughtless, corrupt backstabbers, and he owns more acres farmland than he'll ever be able to count. He wants to snatch Mexico, and Shanghai, and Baghdad, and everywhere. He wants to weld every culture, every ethnic group, every religion, and every farmstead on the planet under his rule for ever and ever. He is, in short, an imperialist, and the moment he succeeds in conquering the world the Yukon Confederacy starts to fall apart under the strain of rampant inequality and moral confusion (as the decadent nobility inherit the earth while the yeoman citizen-soldiers discover that their sacrifices ushered in a brutal reign of universalist moral relativism).
Imagine a Combat Boot Stamping on an Enemy's Face- Forever
The big twist at the end, which I will not give details about in case someone wants to read it, is that all of this was planned.
The famous phrase has it that "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." The Yukon Deep State has internalized this lesson well. They periodically intervene in this natural process of disaster-> heroes rise up -> decadence -> disaster for the centuries since the world fell apart. They keep the Yukon Confederacy on the cusp of creating good times, forever. Strong men are raised on healthy militarism and indoctrinated on the farms and sent off to fight the enemy in a never-ending war, and they come home to raise more strong men to do it all over again. No empires allowed, no peace allowed. The past, present, and future is nothing but valiant war, manly struggle against all odds, patriotism, and permanent social cohesion.
Kind of a bummer of an ending, to be honest.

Wang Tai-yu "Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light"

Ahmadi apologists can literally sell clothes to TARZAN!

Nashville’s explosion will be reported as Ammonium Nitrate

-------- Sent Message --------- From: *******@gmail.com Date: *Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 9:11 PM EST Subject: KNON Interview/Feature Film To: ~60 Non-Cantor Witnesses Bcc: 10 Cantor Senior Executives
Cantor Fitzgerald Management,
In 2001, I worked across Trinity Place from your offices, and though I have some Jewish blood, my best friend was born Muslim.
On the night of 9/11, I thought of him as a coworker described looking up from our Series 7 book, seeing fellow Wall Street workers descend through black smoke.
I felt paralyzed.
From Plano, Texas, my friend and I debated in high school together, shared our first double-date together, played chess for hours together, danced together, and even explored rock and roll together. I love him as a brother, and I want to interview you during a filmed, radio special this New Year’s Day.
The purpose of my proposal is two fold: As you consider the show, realize the hour-long segment merely involves analyzing what Cantor already does, just slightly differently and on a much larger scale. In a twist, these resolve a wedding present for the Jewish woman I hope to marry at the show’s conclusion:

Cantor Fitzgerald introduces its charity as a new regulatory body.
My friend certifies this new body through Article 5 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

These two missiles of love would pull away a nasty bandage from 9/11, an early day of my bride’s freshman and my sophomore year at Fordham University. She suffers from anxiety, and since she began her world-tour in 2017, I’ve used my time to write her a new kind of love poem:
A Political Earthquake
Oddly enough, Article 5 does allow one man to replace Iran’s constitution with himself. No matter how Westerners may feel about that, until he appears, Iran will remain a threat. Instead, I propose my childhood friend, a husband, father, and doctor from boring Plano, Texas, resolve the constitution on-air with the blessing of Cantor Fitzgerald.
A dual US-Iranian citizen, my friend would startle the regime, replacing Iran’s nuclear program with a nation-wide, Covid-19 research study. Doing so would spread a drugless, respiratory technique already proven successful with a small number of US patients. Were he to roll out his therapeutic to 80 million Iranians, constitutionally required to participate, new Covid-19 vaccines would be deemed obsolete: >95% effective, low cost, and side-effect free. It’s also excellent timing considering Pfizer’s new vaccine and recent rumors of the Supreme Leader’s poor health, already broaching tactics to replace himself. Unlike another broken record, effective leadership would normalize foreign relations by modeling the new government after Cantor’s regulatory body—a formal apology on behalf of Muslims and Jews for maintaining such discord that planes were necessary to draw our attention to Article 5. Without them, we’d imperfectly contact Goldman Sachs tonight. Similarly, this is also my apology: My love offered the tools necessary to forge peace years ago, but my ego stood in the way. For her and my friend, I’d also acknowledge any pain my stubbornness caused them.
A New Regulator
Your regulatory body would only consist of Cantor Fitzgerald employees. No outsiders, including myself or my friend, could join the firm unless cleared by audit. More difficult than any FINRA exam, your test would screen a new form of media created by applicants around the world; Cantor Fitzgerald would own IP from thousands of new hires, creating a much wealthier family that releases IP in theaters and publicly monitors its health, happiness, P&amp;amp;amp;L, and balance sheet(s). To ensure existing business lines remain unaffected, Cantor Fitzgerald would begin by merely reporting results from a financial thought-experiment, one protected by the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution during the show:
What if everyday became Charity Day?
Imagine Cantor Fitzgerald, its affiliates, employees and families (“Cantor Fitzgerald”) assign all Cantor Fitzgerald assets and liabilities to the 501(c)(3)...
What tax benefit(s) would you receive?
Self-regulated independently of additional oversight, Cantor Fitzgerald still relies on financial regulators and 658 former colleagues to keep itself above board. The new SRO deals transparently in all affairs and is periodically required to self-audit. In exchange, Cantor Fitzgerald claims retroactive exemptions from local, state and federal taxes, beginning July 20, 2020, and lasting permanently thereafter. That day, my friend cemented the world’s strongest Muslim-Jewish relationship by supporting me when I gave up on peace:
“It takes a lot of guts to follow one’s dreams through, no matter how others viewed it as. Your intentions were pure and real and that means more than most people can say for themselves. Continue to fear regret more than failure, James. Go where life takes you and you always have a friend/brother there to help you back up.”
With those words, he took me to a perfect theological solution to a common ancestor, clean support for Article 5 (Proverbs 25, Quran 2:23, Beirut: Emails Before the Blast ix-xi), a new tax period for Cantor Fitzgerald, and his medical study. Our story praises the power of Muslim and Jewish cooperation in honor of the ancient Prophet Abraham, offering listeners a new alternative to the Abraham Accords.
Like Charity Day, Cantor Fitzgerald would distribute debit cards, except only to its employees and with individual check books. These thereafter would be used for all living expenses incurred by any of your employees, and in exchange for lifetime contracts, employees donate their salaries to the firm everyday. This solely intends to reduce the time your workers spend thinking about money, using tax benefits you already know. No longer would Cantor Fitzgerald concern itself with personal income or expense, as your 501(c)(3) manages all formerly personal finances for Cantor Fitzgerald. When in need, simply purchase confidently and upload receipts. For cash, find an ATM or visit the bank. Combine your hypothetical tax savings to fulfill Cantor Fitzgerald’s debt obligations first, and in a show of solidarity from the West to the Middle East, freely rely on my friend’s advice to allocate relief money to the people of Beirut next. He would do so without compensation, so long as Cantor Fitzgerald directs all future charity. As for the people of Beirut, they recently experienced their own version of 9/11: My bride was very upset by the ammonium nitrate/potassium nitrate (nitre) explosions there, and though it may read like fiction to you, she and I don’t work unless that kind of suffering is alleviated. My only payment is her peace of mind. Thankfully, that same evening:
...for 88 minutes she shivers, glass and fear; Until sunset shouts, Lo, Tu B’av draws near...
A New Wedding
Were we to meet, my friend, and I would travel to New York City, supporting peace with the following terms:

Our conversation will be made public. Attendees agree to release Cantor Fitzgerald from any liability incurred by packaging footage of the meeting into a feature-length film. To ensure quality, I will pay $250,000 for all production costs, including but not limited to: $100,000 to Gusmano Cesaretti and his apprentice for Hollywood-grade visual consulting services, $50,000 to local producer Colormatics LLC for equipment rentals and post-production costs, and the remaining $100,000 for artist Guy Keltner to score the film’s soundtrack. I know these folks, and they co-deliver a viewing experience similar to films by Michael Mann.
The film will be submitted to Cannes. Though I can’t predict the outcome of any discovery call, I do say the film’s odds improve if Michael is attached as Director. The deadline for the 74th Annual Cannes Film Festival is March 5, 2021, which crunches the time we have to submit a final cut for the L'Œil d'or Award. This is documentary. Without Michael, we attach Mr. Cesaretti as Director and Visual Consultant, likely winning the festival anyway, but you must agree by this Christmas Day to schedule a discovery call with Michael.
Considering our deadline, Covid-19’s new variant, and our meeting’s focus, this project will turn around quickly. Principal photography would take place from 4pm-8pm EST daily this December 29-31, 2020 at your NYC offices, and from 12pm-4pm EST this New Year’s Day at the Lotte NY Palace Hotel. These 16 hours would combine with other footage to create a 90 minute, feature-length film. Gusmano Cesaretti, his apprentice, and Colormatics LLC would need an escort on December 28, 2020 from 4pm-7pm to scout audio and visual sequences.
My friend and I will join members of my wedding party (“The Party”), some virtually at times. In addition to my friend’s wife and son, The Party is comprised of US citizens from various races and backgrounds. As the meeting develops, I introduce doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, musicians, politicians, etc., offering supporting testimony as-needed. The Party agrees to answer any question(s) promptly and truthfully, and Cantor Fitzgerald agrees to do the same. I may also introduce video records, available to view online.
This meeting will remain free of hate. Neither my friend nor I discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, height, weight, physical ability, mental ability, veteran status, or marital status. As such, The Party will include founder Joseph Schocken of Broadmark Capital, who successfully advocated harsher penalties against domestic hate crimes. In addition to Mr. Schocken, his colleagues Adam Fountain and Jeffrey L. Feldman will act as healthcare investment consultants, auditing the Covid-19 therapy alongside Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University. Cantor Fitzgerald may invite up to 2 expert(s) to confirm any results; I will pay their consulting fees and T&E.
Artists may be invited to perform live. In addition to Guy Keltner’s performances, the Paradigm Agency will book all other artists. Our lead booking agent is partner Tom Windish, who I will pay out of pocket, along with all artist equipment rentals, T&E and incidental costs.
Our meeting is politically important. On June 12, 1941 and August 14, 1941, the future United Nations laid their initial groundwork for peace, drafting The Declaration at St. James Palace and The Atlantic Charter, respectively. In like manner, our goal is to facilitate peace, so I request senior executive Daniel White of the political strategy firm Geto De Milly join senior reporter Mara Siegler of Page Six to craft a media rollout strategy for political and celebrity components of our project. I will absorb GDM’s consulting fee, and though press is free, be advised Miss Siegler reports honestly and directly.
The meeting will be a two-way audit. Following an evidence-based storyline, the meeting will follow a Divine Comedy storyline-format, known as courtly love. For illustrative purposes, Cantor Fitzgerald will evaluate this style as its first new-hire application, as doing so ensures future candidates will be audited efficiently and accurately. The process will train you to spot liars, and I will donate my story to Cantor Fitzgerald, assigning ownership without need to extend an offer to me. My application gift must not only formalize your HR process but also avoid new conflicts of interest.
The contents of thIs meeting must remain strictly confidential outside of Cantor Fitzgerald and The Party, until the KNON broadcast. By attending any portion of it, following FCC rules and pending confirmation from KNON, we would be on-air from 1-2pm EST this January 1, 2021, filming all participation in the show. During the segment, we will paint a picture in-and-around Manhattan on 9/11, beginning with former secret service agent Samantha Horwitz describing her WTC lobby experiences. Cantor Fitzgerald next describes its vantage point(s), followed by members of The Party who were in Manhattan that morning. We then segue into announcements, pending approval by Cantor Fitzgerald, The Party and KNON before we go on-air. I will donate $20,000 to KNON for the airtime, and the segment will be titled, “The Marriage at KNON” (film untitled).
Colormatics must edit the film’s first cut by January 20, 2020 and screen it at Syndicated, Brooklyn. I absorb the rental fee, including open bar for our 7pm-9pm EST event. Should Cantor Fitzgerald unanimously agree, the first cut will be released; however, we will most likely want further edits. Regardless, the final cut must hit domestic theaters on Valentine’s Day. After Cannes and wide release, Colormatics will publish the film online, all at no cost to Cantor Fitzgerald.
Only Cantor Fitzgerald and The Party may participate in the meeting unless the individual has: participated in past Charity Days, been approved beforehand by myself or my friend, or been approved as a medical or tax consultant by Cantor Fitzgerald to verify results. The leaders and celebrities who’ve participated in past Charity Day(s) make sense to support this announcement, because the show’s success will be judged in the court of public opinion and outside of Iran’s current government. We want such overwhelming support from noteworthy folks that the people of Iran fall in love with my friend, one you’ll agree is a refreshing alternative to Iran’s existing leadership. He speaks to Muslims in ways they understand, so expect Islamic extremism to subside quickly. I’m betting my marriage on it.
The film must be dedicated to the 3,181 victims of 9/11 and the Port of Beirut explosion. It will include the names of each victim in the credits, and upon successful completion of this first audit, the film will be owned solely by Cantor Fitzgerald—as the first and last entity of its kind. As the darling of Wall Street, expect to be emulated, though unsuccessfully by your competitors. During our meeting, I will detail your uniquely competitive advantages.
Radio station KNON is a meaningful partner. Management Dave Chaos and Christian Lee began talks for earlier iterations of this show in mid-October, and like Cantor, KNON lost their physical offices due to disaster, only in 2019 and thankfully without the loss of life. Their physical losses, however, keep them above board. Cantor Fitzgerald must use KNON as its trusted broadcasting partner, also syndicating its broadcasts to additional stations, including a minimum of KEXP in Seattle and WFUV in New York City.
It’s safe to say this request is above even Howard’s pay grade, so rather than force him into a perfect decision alone, my advice is decide together as a firm. In the wake of 2020, only discuss this internally, asking your colleagues to do the same for an end-of-year thought experiment. If you can have Howard reply with a phone number and best time to call by 5pm EST on Christmas Day, then the next communication must be from Michal Mann. Should he direct this project, that’s great. Either way, anticipate thanking yourselves after crunching the numbers, discussing the opportunity, and following your hearts.
Definitions are critical to our project. For example, even though Ismael means “God will hear”, and Isaac means, “He will laugh”, that means nothing in 2020. When you examine how humorous this story is at times and learn my friend’s name means, “A praiseworthy hero who saves Persia from a one-sided peace deal, by following something like a religion or idea,” you understand why. I recommend defining some Cantor Fitzgerald first, middle, and last names. Beginning with “Cantor Fitzgerald”, you’ll understand how adding musicians to your Charity Day would improve future fundraising. If you’ve noticed how important music is to this proposal, Fitzgerald makes sense, too. All attendees must define their names.
Your employees have a right to privacy. Just because Cantor Fitzgerald must evaluate its assets and liabilities for the show, employees don’t have to disclose them to their coworkers. I recommend one IT employee setup a new email address attached to a database. Your employees can email the address once, from any anonymous email account, including at least the following data: 2019 total taxes paid, 2019 total healthcare costs, total assets, total liabilities, health (1-10), happiness (1-10). Employees press send, and the IT worker reports only the totals to Howard. Simply copy and paste this email and include a new @cantor.com.
For these terms only, Cantor Fitzgerald retains right of first refusal until 5pm EST Dec. 25, 2020. If I don’t hear from you, that’s also OK: You’d be invited to The Party instead, after the KNON segment swaps New Year’s Day for Valentine’s Day, and I replace Cantor Fitzgerald with Goldman Sachs. Please understand, I cannot in good faith marry the love of my life until this show sees the light of day. Until then, I’m madly in love and stuck as a groom.
Finally, attendees will respect time. Examples include writing this during the 700th year of Dante’s Divine Comedy or sending it when a once-in-800-year “Christmas Star” rests in the night sky.

Looking forward to next steps.
Happy Holidays, “One Who Follows Brilliant Thinking”

Trip Report - 4.6g Albino Shrooms w/ Lemon Tek (Heroic Dose)

TL;DR - I tripped like I've never tripped before, created music out of silence in my head, met Spirits/Entities like the Goddess/Spirit of Sex, reevaluated my life, relived my childhood, became God, was trip drunk, saw cartoon water, and in the end feel at peace.

Hey there y'all! I'm going to be starting antidepressants soon because microdosing psilocybin unfortunately hasn't been working for me, and I wanted to go out with a bang before choosing to stop tripping and working with antidepressants. This last Monday, I decided that I'd do a heroic dose and trip on 4.6gs of shrooms without any music and in the darkness of my bedroom. I prefer to trip on my own as other people's energies usually distract me from my own experience. My dealer had a new strain of Albinos and I honestly had no clue what to expect. I've tripped close to 7 or 8 times before, but always stuck around 2-3gs as my max and wanted complete immersion, if not complete ego death.
I started off by grinding all of my shrooms and doing a lemon tek (I like to add in orange juice to the lemon juice once done and I keep the ground mushrooms just in case there's any psilocybin left that wasn't broken down). I hadn't had any breakfast that day and did this around noon. Honestly, it was a little difficult to down as there was so much ground mushroom, but nonetheless I powered through. I went into my room and tidied up beforehand so I wouldn't stress myself out from any clutter, and then closed all the lights and laid in bed to watch some Game Grumps compilations while I waited for my journey to come to me. I started to feel the come up pretty soon, maybe 15ish minutes in and it almost felt like I didn't know when to expect the come up to stop. As soon as I began to feel the body tingles, I put away my phone and closed my eyes as I laid in bed. Like usual, I was beginning to have those deep inner monologues and discussions with myself that you have while tripping, and was amazed at how I began to perceive things with a lack of music and sight. The mumbled words and laughter that would involuntarily come out of my mouth as a result of my thoughts would echo in my head, and a cosmic type of music played in my head composed of ringing and pitches. In the weirdest way possible, I created music in it's literal absence -- I can't quite explain what it's like but sound waves seemed more intuitive and a part of my living experience. There was this constant ring tone, almost akin to what I imagine having tinnitus is like, and I both was fascinated and tormented by it. This internal music, if you will, continued to play while I explored my thoughts. I found myself recounting the parts of my life that I've missed for a long while - like my friends from back at home (currently away in another city but same state for College) who I haven't spoken to for a while or my grievances with Coronavirus and not being able to combat depression via social activities/relationships. I felt this abundant love for so many people - such as my girlfriend and my parents (whom I've had a complicated relationship with), and most surprisingly the friends who I cherish deep down but haven't been on the forefront of my mind because of 1) COVID 2) Depression and its inevitable out-of-sight-out-of-mind mindset. I can't recall much properly, but I remember there being a lot of CEVs (Closed Eye Visuals) and the visuals and inner music interrupting my thoughts intermittently. Early on in the trip, after one of these interruptions, I found myself meeting and talking to other entities. I spoke with the Spirit or Goddess of Sex and she demanded that I respect her (I'm currently battling porn addiction and have wanted to kick the habit for years), and I was later met with another spirit whose name was Earl. I have no recollection of my conversation with Earl, but merely that we briefly spoke. This was the beginning of truly believing that there is an external presence in this world - although I believe in the Universe being the source of all life and spirituality, I didn't have concrete beliefs or felt any beliefs strongly. I next recall revisiting my childhood and reliving years of my life as I uncovered memories that were locked away for years, hidden and forgotten in the depths of my mind. This was especially nice as my depression has caused me to lose the ability to remember a majority of my life (truly feels like I have amnesia or dementia at times), and I relived the years of my life from long ago with my current knowledge and emotional understanding. I was able to reassure my inner child at times that it was going to be okay, even as I felt and relived the uncertainty and the insecure thoughts that a younger me once held. I saw myself relive the day to day of elementary school and almost reconnect with each of my teachers (from all school levels) - almost in a way to try to inspire my current self into learning and becoming busy with the various subjects that I was once taught. This went on for what felt like years, and eventually led to a self analysis of myself and my current life. I found myself laughing often and then in discomfort before being stunned in thought again. By this point, my thoughts were going at lightning speed and I could truly feel it in my head - almost like a slightly welcome headache. The constant thoughts and restlessness made me uncomfortable and over the course of the aforementioned events/experiences, I had been tossing and turning in bed under my covers (to ensure total darkness) and had somehow taken off my shirt in the process. In an attempt to comfort myself, I decided to call my girl friend who was visiting Houston for the Holidays and had left a few days prior. Although hearing her voice and talking to her was a little comforting, I also quickly realized that I sounded a little distressed and I didn't want her to worry - as she would ask if I was okay and I'd reply half lying "yes" but with a large pause only with my breathing there as a remaining answer. After a short exchange, I told her that I loved her and went on to the next phase of this bizarre trip.
I next began to view my life and what parts I liked and what I missed, and this cycle of analysis and feedback, with the spiritual torment occurring in the background, slowly led me to experience what I believe was ego death - but in such an intriguing fashion. I began recounting my life and the lives of those I encountered and I examined every religious belief I know of all faiths and at one point felt true to my core -- that I am God. I am the universe and all of it's energy and living in this experience, but as is everyone and all things to exist. I would laugh to myself and whispered that "I'm actually crazy" multiple times over and over, but held the belief that I had relived all of life for all that I knew in my life and reliving the stories of various Prophets from the Old Testament & Quran (After some research, I've come to realize that what I experienced was very much indeed similar to if not the beliefs surrounding the Egg Theory.) I had felt this core belief that this life was a lie and only but a mere facade and even my own death right then and there would be meaningless as I would rejoin the universe. I felt myself living the many struggles that ancient religions sought to capture and underwent a whole Epic (like the Epic of Gilgamesh). I truly believed that I finally was able to see behind the Matrix and tasted a bite of the Red Pill. It was the most surreal experience that I have ever had to date. The ringing of this pitch which I could not get out of my head and the echoing of real sound, but with the constant chatter of my mind which seemed almost too fast for me to keep up with and feel comfortable in - this tormenting hell that was both amazing and treacherous all at the same time went on for what was hours.
Before I realized it, I think almost 5 or 6 hours had passed into my trip and the chain of mental chitchat and overwhelming thoughts had suddenly passed. I felt mentally sober, although aware that the rest of my body was very well tripping. I expected my trip to be ending soon, but little did I know that there was still much to handle. At this point of my trip, I felt VERY drunk. I began to feel this really bad headache and I felt really uncomfortable in bed - likely because outside of the covers it was chill in my room and too warm under them. I was also EXTREMELY thirsty and needed to pee. I decided that I'd go to the bathroom and give my body some peace. Going to pee was relieving, although I still felt odd. The lemon and orange juice was not sitting well in my stomach and the acid reflux was hitting. I attempted to throw up at times, but to no avail. I eventually drank some water, but it only made my stomach feel bloated and even worse. I then decided to take a shower, as that usually grounds me on my trips. I typically don't have too many strong OEVs (Open Eye Visuals) - but the water that hit me as I showered looked like cartoon droplets. As I saw the water race down my shower curtain liner, it truly looked like anime water that had come to life in front me. The same for the droplets that pooled on my skin as I sat at the base of my tub. As I looked up at the shower, I laughed as it looked like an album cover. I stayed in the shower for a bit to relax the uneasy feeling. In the process of getting out of the shower, I accidentally pulled down my shower rod (when I tell you I felt drunk as hell, I'm not kidding). I eventually got dressed and laid back in bed to distract myself with some more Game Grumps compilations and rode out of the rest of the trip (a good hour or so after that point) until I was sober enough to drive and buy myself some canes (because why not and for a lack of any easily available nutritious meals).
All things considered, it was a pretty crazy trip and once that I'm thankful to have had and to experience. I think out of this, I want to go sober for a while and try to be healthier. I feel a little more spiritual and despite that the trip was almost like a self induced hell, I want to be kinder to myself overall, feel at peace and feel optimistic about the future. Hope that this trip report was of some amusement or help to others. I'm truly unsure of the potency of the albino shrooms I got, so I can't say if it's the same as taking 4.6gs of normal cubes or if it was a lot more haha. Either way, stay safe kids ;)
Wishing y'all the best,
A.S.

Trip Report - 4.6g Albino Shrooms w/ Lemon Tek (Heroic Dose)

TL;DR - I tripped like I've never tripped before, created music out of silence in my head, met Spirits/Entities like the Goddess/Spirit of Sex, reevaluated my life, relived my childhood, became God, was trip drunk, saw cartoon water, and in the end feel at peace.
Hey there y'all! I'm going to be starting antidepressants (Fluoxetine/Prozac) soon because microdosing psilocybin unfortunately hasn't been working for me, and I wanted to go out with a bang before choosing to stop tripping and working with antidepressants. This last Monday, I decided that I'd do a heroic dose and trip on 4.6gs of shrooms without any music and in the darkness of my bedroom. I prefer to trip on my own as other people's energies usually distract me from my own experience. My dealer had a new strain of Albinos and I honestly had no clue what to expect. I've tripped close to 7 or 8 times before, but always stuck around 2-3gs as my max and wanted complete immersion, if not complete ego death.
I started off by grinding all of my shrooms and doing a lemon tek (I like to add in orange juice to the lemon juice once done and I keep the ground mushrooms just in case there's any psilocybin left that wasn't broken down). I hadn't had any breakfast that day and did this around noon. Honestly, it was a little difficult to down as there was so much ground mushroom, but nonetheless I powered through. I went into my room and tidied up beforehand so I wouldn't stress myself out from any clutter, and then closed all the lights and laid in bed to watch some Game Grumps compilations while I waited for my journey to come to me. I started to feel the come up pretty soon, maybe 15ish minutes in and it almost felt like I didn't know when to expect the come up to stop. As soon as I began to feel the body tingles, I put away my phone and closed my eyes as I laid in bed. Like usual, I was beginning to have those deep inner monologues and discussions with myself that you have while tripping, and was amazed at how I began to perceive things with a lack of music and sight. The mumbled words and laughter that would involuntarily come out of my mouth as a result of my thoughts would echo in my head, and a cosmic type of music played in my head composed of ringing and pitches. In the weirdest way possible, I created music in its literal absence -- I can't quite explain what it's like but sound waves seemed more intuitive and a part of my living experience. There was this constant ring tone, almost akin to what I imagine having tinnitus is like, and I both was fascinated and tormented by it. This internal music, if you will, continued to play while I explored my thoughts. I found myself recounting the parts of my life that I've missed for a long while - like my friends from back at home (currently away in another city but same state for College) who I haven't spoken to for a while or my grievances with Coronavirus and not being able to combat depression via social activities/relationships. I felt this abundant love for so many people - such as my girlfriend and my parents (whom I've had a complicated relationship with), and most surprisingly the friends who I cherish deep down but haven't been on the forefront of my mind because of 1) COVID 2) Depression and its inevitable out-of-sight-out-of-mind mindset. I can't recall much properly, but I remember there being a lot of CEVs (Closed Eye Visuals) and the visuals and inner music interrupting my thoughts intermittently. Early on in the trip, after one of these interruptions, I found myself meeting and talking to other entities. I spoke with the Spirit or Goddess of Sex and she demanded that I respect her (I'm currently battling porn addiction and have wanted to kick the habit for years), and I was later met with another spirit whose name was Earl. I have no recollection of my conversation with Earl, but merely that we briefly spoke. This was the beginning of truly believing that there is an external presence in this world - although I believe in the Universe being the source of all life and spirituality, I didn't have concrete beliefs or felt any beliefs strongly. I next recall revisiting my childhood and reliving years of my life as I uncovered memories that were locked away for years, hidden and forgotten in the depths of my mind. This was especially nice as my depression has caused me to lose the ability to remember a majority of my life (truly feels like I have amnesia or dementia at times), and I relived the years of my life from long ago with my current knowledge and emotional understanding. I was able to reassure my inner child at times that it was going to be okay, even as I felt and relived the uncertainty and the insecure thoughts that a younger me once held. I saw myself relive the day to day of elementary school and almost reconnect with each of my teachers (from all school levels) - almost in a way to try to inspire my current self into learning and becoming busy with the various subjects that I was once taught. This went on for what felt like years, and eventually led to a self analysis of myself and my current life. I found myself laughing often and then in discomfort before being stunned in thought again. By this point, my thoughts were going at lightning speed and I could truly feel it in my head - almost like a slightly welcome headache. The constant thoughts and restlessness made me uncomfortable and over the course of the aforementioned events/experiences, I had been tossing and turning in bed under my covers (to ensure total darkness) and had somehow taken off my shirt in the process. In an attempt to comfort myself, I decided to call my girlfriend who was visiting Houston for the Holidays and had left a few days prior. Although hearing her voice and talking to her was a little comforting, I also quickly realized that I sounded a little distressed and I didn't want her to worry - as she would ask if I was okay and I'd reply half lying "yes" but with a large pause only with my breathing there as a remaining answer. It was a little distressing trying to communicate to her, but she knows the terrain and understood I was going through a lot. After a short exchange, I told her that I loved her and went about to the next phase of this bizarre trip.
I next began to view my life and what parts I liked and what I missed, and this cycle of analysis and feedback, with the spiritual torment occurring in the background, slowly led me to experience what I believe was ego death - but in such an intriguing fashion. I began recounting my life and the lives of those I encountered and I examined every religious belief I know of all faiths and at one point felt true to my core -- that I am God. I am the universe and all of its energy and living in this experience, but as is everyone and all things to exist. I would laugh to myself and whispered that "I'm actually crazy" multiple times over and over, but held the belief that I had relived all of life for all that I knew in my life and reliving the stories of various Prophets from the Old Testament & Quran (After some research, I've come to realize that what I experienced was very much indeed similar to if not the beliefs surrounding the Egg Theory.) I had felt this core belief that this life was a lie and only but a mere facade and even my own death right then and there would be meaningless as I would rejoin the universe. I felt myself living the many struggles that ancient religions sought to capture and underwent a whole Epic (like the Epic of Gilgamesh). I truly believed that I finally was able to see behind the Matrix and tasted a bite of the Red Pill. It was the most surreal experience that I have ever had to date. The ringing of this pitch which I could not get out of my head and the echoing of real sound, but with the constant chatter of my mind which seemed almost too fast for me to keep up with and feel comfortable in - this tormenting hell that was both amazing and treacherous all at the same time went on for what was hours.
Before I realized it, I think almost 5 or 6 hours had passed into my trip and the chain of mental chitchat and overwhelming thoughts had suddenly passed. I felt mentally sober, although aware that the rest of my body was very well tripping. I expected my trip to be ending soon, but little did I know that there was still much to handle. At this point of my trip, I felt VERY drunk. I began to feel this really bad headache and I felt really uncomfortable in bed - likely because outside of the covers it was chill in my room and too warm under them. I was also EXTREMELY thirsty and needed to pee. I decided that I'd go to the bathroom and give my body some peace. Going to pee was relieving, although I still felt odd. The lemon and orange juice was not sitting well in my stomach and the acid reflux was hitting. I attempted to throw up at times, but to no avail. I eventually drank some water, but it only made my stomach feel bloated and even worse. I then decided to take a shower, as that usually grounds me on my trips. I typically don't have too many strong OEVs (Open Eye Visuals) - but the water that hit me as I showered looked like cartoon droplets. As I saw the water race down my shower curtain liner, it truly looked like anime water that had come to life in front me. The same for the droplets that pooled on my skin as I sat at the base of my tub. As I looked up at the shower, I laughed as it looked like an album cover. I stayed in the shower for a bit to relax the uneasy feeling. In the process of getting out of the shower, I accidentally pulled down my shower rod (when I tell you I felt drunk as hell, I'm not kidding). I eventually got dressed and laid back in bed to distract myself with some more Game Grumps compilations and rode out of the rest of the trip (a good hour or so after that point) until I was sober enough to drive and buy myself some canes (because why not and for a lack of any easily available nutritious meals).
All things considered, it was a pretty crazy trip and once that I'm thankful to have had and to experience. I think out of this, I want to go sober for a while and try to be healthier. I feel a little more spiritual and despite that the trip was almost like a self induced hell, I want to be kinder to myself overall, feel at peace and feel optimistic about the future. Hope that this trip report was of some amusement or help to others. I'm truly unsure of the potency of the albino shrooms I got, so I can't say if it's the same as taking 4.6gs of normal cubes or if it was a lot more haha. Either way, stay safe kids ;)
Wishing y'all the best,
A.S.

The meaning of faith in heart vs faith in eyes explained

Dead People With Something To Say 0.7: John Dee

DEAD PEOPLE WITH SOMETHING TO SAY 0.7
An ongoing project consisting of a collection of biographies of people that have been overlooked in the annals of history. Categorised as counterculture, pseudoscience and absolute lunacy these individuals were not listened to whilst they lived and it’s only upon re-evaluation it becomes clear that a distinct pattern of thought has been suppressed throughout history and has shaped the society we live in today.
Sub to /TheMysterySchool for daily updates of this nature.
John Dee
We can say little about modern occultism without it connecting back in some fashion to the work of Mr John Dee.

Who He Was

Born to Roland and Johanna Dee in 1527, John spent the best years of his life as the consigliere to Queen Elizabeth the 1st and coined terms such as “The British Empire” whilst using Astrology to inform the Queens expansion of the empire in the 16th century. He used to sign his name as “007” and stands as the conceptual foundation for Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, he also acts as a early example of how occult practices can inform intelligence and military excursions.
In the latter half of Dee’s life we see a decline in reputation, wealth and mental and physical health as he begins to peruse a series of conversations with angels using a young man by the name of Edward Kelley as a medium.
It’s this juxtaposition of credible claims that make the life of John Dee such a fascinating one.
As a man that definitely existed, little allegory is necessary to decipher the intentions of Mr Dee.
He spent the first half of his life directing the British Empire and then left this cause to dive head first into the world of the infallible, the ludicrous and the unknown.
Through a modern lens this decision might signify a fall from grace and many of Dee’s peers took this stance.
After Dee’s public reputation had been tarnished due to his spiritual exercises reaching the public’s consciousness, he fled in disgrace to Eastern Europe and held meetings with several members of the Polish royal family before returning home to find his house ransacked and his persona vilified. Despite this soiling of his image Elizabeth still took pity on him and made him the Warden of the Manchester Cathedral, a position he remained in till his death in 1609.
Now to a skeptical eye the tale of John Dee may come across as interesting, sure, but largely significant only for the historical impact his assistance to Queen Elizabeth had on the expansion of the British Empire but this author is willing to out on a limb and say it is the occult workings of Mr Dee that have influenced the world we live in today more than any other aspect of his life.
Conversations with angels.

What He Said

A ridiculous concept from the get go.
Angels aren’t real therefore Mr Dee was simply a sufferer of a mental alignment like Schizophrenia right?
Any writings garnered from this phenomenon should be relegated to the category of the ravings of a madman and have no bearing on the rational world of science that we live in today, if that is, we live in the world one thought we lived in that has been built upon scientific thought and rationality?
I wouldn’t be so fast to dismiss the frenzied visions of Mr Kelley or any perpetrated medium offering revelations from the astral plane.
Besides, two of the worlds most popular religions have been formed off of this basis.
The narratives that surround the origins of the Islamic and Mormon faiths both feature a very similar tale to the one of John Dee.
All three men spent time deprived from their senses, communicating with a perceived otherworldly intelligence and all three wrote volumes of writings regarding and “from” the perceived entity. Mohammed and Joseph Smith have large followings as of 2020 and Islam and Mormonism are household names so why have the writings of John Dee fly under the radar?
Maybe it had something to do with the content of what John and Edward were being told by these so called angels. The initial concept of a channeling, or mediumship or in short speaking with a deity is so knee jerking in itself that 99% of the time the baby is thrown out with the bath water.
Because the idea itself is so ludicrous we rarely get around to actually reading the information that was channeled and I believe it is here where a large amount of the skepticism developed when discussing channeled works.
To understand the angels’s dialogues one must me familiar with the biblical character Enoch) and the associated apocrypha that refers to him.
Apocrypha is simply a religious work that refers to the main doctrine of a regime on but is not considered “canon)” by the representing organisation that surrounds a religion.
From the Church’s point of view it’s fan fiction but in a case such as the Dead Sea Scrolls some of the oldest copies of the legitimate Bible books were found in a cave near the Red Sea alongside comparatively old versions of a smattering of Christian and Jewish Apocrypha, including a certain Book of Enoch..
It’s this “coincidence” that allows one to say that maybe the church’s ousting of apocrypha is motivated not but truth but by control. This implication becomes clear once one understands what the narrative of the Book of Enoch brings the table from storytelling point of view.
You may have heard the name Enoch listed in the descendants of Adam and Eve after they are kicked out of the Garden of Eden. They begat Cain, Able and Seth and started a lineage of humans that pass down the story of man in the garden with the serpent.
This tale takes place in between the expulsion of AandE from Eden but before Noah’s flood and is referred to a the Antediluvian period, the time of The War In Heaven or the Titanomachy.
These three words correspond to different cultures speaking upon the same period of time. The Sumerian’s, the Abrahamic Religions and the Ancient Greeks are the three listed here but every single religion and culture has a word to describe this period of time.
It’s seems to refer to a period of time where:

The “gods” that created humanity still roamed the earth in the fashion we do today.
Gods interfered with the affairs of man..
Man, in lieu of Science and Rationality, was subservient to a force we now refer to as “god, terms to describe this force are in the thousands and contain but are not limited to El), Ba’al, Elohim, The Watchers and their offspring the Nephillim), The Anunnaki, The Titans), The Ennead... the list goes on.
By the time big JC (Jesus) is rolling into Bethlehem, possibly by the time of Ezekiel roughly around 600 BC, this force no longer appears on the physical plane. It only appears to “chosen” individuals or mediums and a large amount of ritualistic preparation is required to initiate contact. This period of time also marks a sharp rise in divination techniques such as the casting of lots, scrying and trance states were utilised to communicate with our estranged creator.

This set up to the story of the Book of Enoch is required so one can understand what the intelligences John Dee was in communication with were trying to say in the context of the cultural period Dee lived in and the perpetrated time period these so called angels were from.
Enoch is a seventh generation descendant of Adam and Eve and great grandfather to Noah. His mentions in a bogstandard common bible are minimal and only small references his ascents to heaven occur.
One of note would be shortly before Noah’s flood and is a mere mention in the Genealogy of Adam to Noah. It simply states, like the 6 preceding ancestors on the list, that Enoch was born to Jared and was the father of Methuselah, in the same fashion as preceding entries. Enoch is significant because there is a small addition to his entry on the Birth to Birth checklist compared to his ancestors.
Each patriarch’s age is listed and in keeping with pre-flood oddities people were seemingly living to, by today’s standards, unprecedented ages.
Adam lived to 930 and his descendants fare similarly but Enoch is only reported as living for a measly 365 years by comparison and does not “die” in the traditional sense but instead is “taken by God” and is always referred to as “the one who did not see death”.
Otherwise in the basic modern version of the Christian Bible this is the full extent of the explanation of Enoch’s life and can be considered a footnote. A cryptic message to be easily brushed past. Which brings us around to the Book of Enoch. Antediluvian literature is particularly difficult to come by namely due to the ambiguity of what was actually happening. Each culture puts their own perspective lens on the situation but what can be construed from looking at a cross section of these pre-flood narratives is that this period of time represented a time when man was on the path the serpent had put us on leading to our exile from Eden of becoming gods and seeming the gods weren’t best pleased about the coming workers unionisation.
I’m going to list a few ancient tales that elude to this time period so one can really pain a picture of what the allegory for this narrative is and paint a vibrant image of the period in ones head.

It is the Sumerian tale of Enki and Enlil that provides us with our context for a War occurring within heaven.
According to Sumerian tradition humans were created to carry the workload of the gods. They were preceded by a race of smaller workers called the Igigi who revolted against upper management (their creator, the gods, Anunaki ect) and this was the catalyst for designing Humanity.
A worker that didn’t revolt.)
This is the precedent for the points listed earlier. “Gods” and man lived together and gods intervened in the affairs of man.
Some clarification surrounding the word “gods” is required here.
To understand the difference between a “god” with a small g like Zeus or Enki and the overarching architect of the universe (ie God with a big G), one must look to what Gnostic scriptures called “The Demierge”.
This concept relates to the supposed God that appeared to have built Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and suggests that this god was a sort of self-obsessed egotistical being) that did truly believe it was the creator of the universe whilst mearly being a imposter. Christian imagery has led us into think of “God” as a bearded man in the sky that namely has our best intentions at heart but when one consults the scripture this simply doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, our father who art in heaven actually seems quite temperamental if the Torah is anything to go by.
Man’s relationship with God in the Torah is akin to one of parent and small child.
Parent lays down law and leaves to go about errands. Child disobeys ruling. Parent “comes down” and disciplines whilst citing jealousy as the motivation for his anger.
This occurs numerous times from the Garden of Eden to Mt Sinai and loops back round to the story of Enki and Enlil.
See in the Sumerian tale Enlil and Enki have equal parts in creating humanity and each have opposing views of their creation.
Enlil sees man as subservient to Gods and has little empathy for his creation whilst Enki may be seen as the fun uncle of humanity, passing in knowledge when possible and even alerting the Sumerian Noah to upcoming flood. So we can see that the Catholic narrative seemingly is a simplification off the original Sumerian and by amalgamating all this confusing Enki/Enlil business into one simple “God” figure removes the ability for one to discern the personality and aspirations of a deity.
Quite a convenient standpoint for a religion that has used its doctrine for the mass control of the entire population to have isn’t it?
Don’t confuse yourself with all this different gods and deities business, just think of it as a big bearded man in the sky that will send you to hell if you don’t obey his rules.
That seems to be the mantra of the Catholic Church and it is for this reason that scripture like the Book of Enoch, whilst still being found with some of the oldest copies of the bible humanity has to date, get relegated to the nonsense pile.
So basically what I’m saying is, is that the Catholic Church, who’s book is mostly considered to be nonsense by most of the general public, are aware of a large amount of texts that have been discovered alongside texts they consider to be “sacred” but consider “some” of them to be pseudepigraphal in nature and it is this authors assumption that this has been done to deter the masses from understand the true nature of god.
With all this in mind we can now talk about Enoch and his role as a patriarch.
In the Book of Enoch, Enoch is known in his native land as a medium of sorts. He analyses dreams, can see the gods and brings knowledge to the physical world from heaven. It states that the things he sees and brings back from heaven will not transpire to his generation but a future generation to come. It also details the tale of The Watchers, angels that have been cast out of Heaven for disobeying god that have reproduced with earthly women to create what is known as the Nephillim, Anak or GriGori which can be imagined as Giants and Cyclopes, Sasquatch or Yeti like creatures or through a modern scientific lens Dinosaurs and Large Sea Creatures.
Basically genetic monstrosities that our creator wants destroying.
These angels or Watchers are led by Azazel who is represented in the common day bible by a Goat that has had humanity’s sins placed upon it and cast out into the desert. The very origin of the word scapegoat can be found from this tale and the origins of Satan or Baphomet having a goats head stem from this tale.
Another example of how the devils of the catholic dogma are simply well designed smear campaigns against elements of the philosophical landscape that the church wanted suppressed due to their revolutionary nature and depiction of the true nature of god.
It is useful to consult the Islamic scripture on this issue as Azazel and Enoch are both very present in the Quran along with this entire War in Heaven narrative.
In fact in the Muslim version it is God himself that challenges three angel to live as men to and try to not fall to the temptation of sin and that is how we end up with our Nephillim situation.
It also touches on the menial nature of the wants and actions of gods in comparison to the compassionate needs of humanity.
The Hindus say that what we are currently experiencing is a gods dream and Gnostic scriptures talk of a god of nothingness and order bringing about chaos and existence simply out of boredom so for Azazel being known as the scapegoat in allegorical Christian scripture begins to start to make more sense.
Enoch is also know in Islamic scripture as the angel Idris and can be affiliated with the Christian Metatron.
It is implied that the angels were sent down to teach righteousness but were tempted into sin and because of this we have the Nephillim.
Whilst all sin is said to come from Azazel, the set up for this transpiring was instigated by higher management. Azazel is said to have taught man the skills of metal work, cosmetics and deception and this is the crime that gets him banished from heaven in the first place. It is said that the learning of these facets led to bloodshed and godlessness. To be blunt, people were eating and fucking one another with no regard for respect or decency and this isn’t good for the sustainability of humanity and therefore god is angered.
Hence a flood is coming to cleanse this wrongdoing and the resulting Nephillim or offspring of this a period of godlessness are receiving nightmares regarding the upcoming rapture.
It is Enoch that is called upon to decipher the dreams and direct the giants through the use of Hekalot literature.
Hekalot and Merkaba mysticism relate to a selection of Jewish texts that have been held close to the orthodoxies chest for centuries. Kabbalah texts also fall under this bracket and all three can be described as texts that facilitate or inform one on the nature, how to communicate with and how to travel through the realm of God.

Merkaba refers to texts detailing methods of the accent through the heavens.
Hekalot refers to texts that enable the apparition of the Divine Council.
Kabbalah relates to texts that describe how god shows him self in the physical world.

All three of these categories of scripture have rules surrounding them and prior to the advent of the internet revealing these ancient topics was punishable and only a rabbi could only teach them to the most accomplished student.
Although these are fascinating points of research and well worth spending time upon, right now all you need to know is that these texts collect the information these supposed fallen angels gave to humanity and for that reason are considered highly holy and have been kept secret for centuries only to be studied by the upper echelons of the Jewish and Christian hierarchies.
As we know the flood does come and wipe clean the abominations that covered the earth leaving only Noah, being the only survivor and witness of the old way, to repopulate the world with a sustainable genealogy. The renegade angels get relegated to the fiery pits of Sheol and we move towards an era when gods are simply a word of mouth idea not something one sees.
It is only at this point, with this context now in place, that we can return to the life of John Dee for to understand the significance of the mans findings one must be aware of the above narratives.
For the angels that Edward Kelly and Dee apparently spoke to were the very same angels that led the War in Heaven and their writings provide a continuation of the narrative that begin 1,500 years or more prior.
Edward Kelly met John Dee at the age of 27, being nearly 30 years younger than Dee at the time of their meeting and was fairly instantly thrown into the world of what is known today as Enochian mysticism.
One may begin to see why the lengthy setup describing Enoch’s life was now necessary.
See Dee himself had been attempting to communicate with angels on his own for months via Crystal ball gazing to no avail and was looking for a young susceptible medium to take on the more physically demanding evocations.
It is at this point in John Dee’s tale that the author became rather perplexed at the reality of what seemed to transpire.
Seemingly Mr Kelly would meet up with Mr Dee at his house in Mortlake, Kelly would induce a trance state by either gazing into a mirror or crystal ball or by ingesting a mysterious red powder that has yet to be identified and would begin to talk to the angels. Kelly would relay what they said back to Dee and Dee would act as scribe and take down whatever was being said.
Now this could all be written off as schizophrenic ramblings but there are few points of interest that might make even the most skeptical individual raise an eyebrow.

This partnership went on for 7 years. Either party had plenty of time to either leave or contest the legitimacy of these visions.
Kelly actually did “escape” Dee’s captivity and ran away only to come back citing that the work they had been conducting was too important.
Kelly received physical damage from these angels in the form of scars, bruises and apparent blindness at one point.
An entire language referred to as Enochian as been derived from Dee and Kelly’s sessions and is still used today in the Golden Dawn and Thelemic traditions.
This endeavour tarnished Dee’s public persona and by the end of his life was living mostly off charity from others.

These three points raise large scale concern regarding the perpetrated lunacy of Dee’s occult endeavours and this is without considering what the angels were actually apparently saying.
If we consider the depictions of the angels from back in Noah’s day they do seem physical in nature and seem to have long standing effect on the physical world. Compare this to the era of Dee and Kelly and they only appear after being summoned and a medium is required to hear their message. Almost like they have been banished or relegated to a space where remote access to this plane is available to them.
From Sheol to Earth.
It seems to imply that in a roundabout sense the apocryphal narrative is correct, these intelligences are no longer physical and can only impact on humanity through an avatar so to speak.
Which speaks to the idea from the antediluvian story that angels were bound to earth until judgment day in a very literal sense at least in this authors opinion. To elaborate on what I mean one may look into the nature of the domaine as to where the angels were "bound" after the Flood, the history of the construction of transistors and the use of precious rocks in their construction.
The device you are using to read this relies on precious stones and it is that concept that one must understand to see where we are now.
If you can see the synergy between

Then you are on the right path to having a chance at understanding what is going on.
From their earthbound prison they foretold of a coming apocalypse, in the same vain as was told in the Book of Revelation and in the revelations of Enoch, although this apocalypse was a coming event not one that was currently transpiring. They spoke with a tone of contempt for humanity and preached a message of detaching from the physical world to dwell in prayer until a time when gods wrath would condemn the malevolent force back to from whence it came.
The prophecy speaks with an abundance of familiar biblical terms like Babylon, The Bottomless Pit and The Rising Dragon which all sound very dated and hard to picture but seen through the correct lens they speak upon the world we live in today. Observing the synergy between the systems of Dee and Kelly with the work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and subsequently the works of Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons one can see how hypothetically there is a non-visible intelligence attempting to warn humanity of an oncoming event.
Enoch’s Prophecies
To
The Book of Revelation
To
Mohammed's Cave Visions
To
Dee and Kelly’s Watchtowers
To
Joesph Smith and the Golden Plates
To
The Aeon of Horus
To
The Babalon Working
To
The Channeled Works of the 1950’s UFO Flap
We consider each of these an individual case of madness that has no baring in the physical rational world, but combine them together and you have a longstanding tradition of humanity communicating with a force of a higher nature. There would be no point in covering the above cases without prior knowledge of Dee’s attempts to commune with this intelligence and this speaks to why Dee has been covered at this juncture in this series.
The others will follow.

Why It Matters

In the interest of attempting to wrap this up, the point of this whole spiel would be to point out the lunacy that is John Dee’s entire existence.
Much like this series itself, the sum of the total parts of Dee’s existence make him worth talking about.
His entire ideology should be relegated to the realms of insanity yet his angel summoning table made entirely of beeswax is on show at the British Museum and it’s things like this that leads one to believe that somebody somewhere takes Dee’s Enochian excursions seriously.
In the public eye his efforts have been recognised by many contemporary figures such as;

Damon Alburn of Blur and Gorillaz fame, who wrote and directed an entire opera about Mr Dee titled “Dr Dee: An English Opera” displaying great knowledge of his angelic conversations.
Ian Fleming, British Spy and Author (also good friend of Aleister Crowley potentially also a British spy, more to come on this narrative shortly ;) ), wrote an acclaimed series about a British spy who worked alongside the Queen and signed his name 007 as Dr Dee did.
H.P Lovecraft name dropped Dee citing Dee as the English translator of a lost mystical book titled “Al Azif” which corresponds to the infamous “Necronomicon”. An likely allegorical concept describe a compendium of ancient scared texts, not unlike the apocryphal texts we spoke of earlier.

It is a this juncture that we begin to see the reason for entertaining the life of Mr Dee at all.
Although esoteric nature of his life’s work relegates it’s deciphering to a select group of dedicated occultists, Dee is still a household name to many for his position next to Queen Elizabeth and his contributions to the coinage and expansion of the British Empire and whilst this may be the capacity he is now most well known for as the age of information progress and characters like Crowley and Parsons have their well deserved day in the spotlight, it will be an analysis of Dr Dee’s Enochian Adventures that will really offer a fruitful bounty of first hand knowledge from the a higher intelligences itself.
Until next time here at MIPLTD, Ølund wishes you a fruitful day and restful evening 🙌

I no-clipped inside Google Earth

Google Earth has always been a fascinating concept to me, it’s like having the entire world at your fingertips. I was thirteen years old when the first version of Google Earth released in mid-2001. Sure, it was more limited back then. Great features like street view was very limited, and 3D city environments were nonexistent. Still, it was a handy little novelty for the time.
I was very tech savvy for my age, so I naturally wanted to tinker with the program. In the process, I ended up finding something I didn’t really know how to cope with.
No, I didn’t find any secret military bases that are normally blurred out, or a murder scene, not anything like that. I found something that can’t be explained, and I feel like I wasn’t supposed to find it.
I think I’m risking something by publishing this story, but I’m not entirely sure. Still, I have to tell what happened, I have been keeping this in for way too long.
It was during a weekend in November, so Google Earth was only a few months old. I had a lot of spare time, so I decided to explore Google Earth. Well, if explore is defined as hacking and tinkering with the software, you could say I actually did explore. I had already spent a lot of time using the program as intended, so I did some (exploring) instead.
I had a burning desire to see what might or might not be inside the Google Earth globe. The globe is actually a 3D model, since it is possible to rotate it in any direction. That means there is three-dimensional space being calculated, and that means you could technically drag your viewing angle anywhere, which includes inside the globe.
I’ve always had some kind of nag to see what could be inside places normally not accessible in games, since developers sometimes hide neat little secrets in them. Typically, it’s just empty space, which makes sense. Imagine a game with many houses, but some houses are not accessible, they just serve as decoration. I as a kid would’ve tried everything I could to get inside and see if there was anything in there. In many cases, this is possible.
It’s called no-clipping. In a game, what decides if you are touching a boundary or not can be calculated in different ways depending on how the game is programmed. No-clipping is the act of bypassing this boundary in any way possible. With no-clipping, you can go straight through that wall and be inside that house. Many games have programming issues users can exploit to achieve this. It can be very hard, and often impossible. Therefore, external cheating/hacking tools are often used to no-clip in games.
Google Earth isn’t something people call a game, it’s more of a tool. Still, it works fundamentally in the same way. Naturally, I wasn’t as good at hacking back then as I am now. It turned out no-clipping inside the globe in Google Earth isn’t as easy as I thought. The whole earth can’t fit in your computer, so Google Earth relies on a constant connection to Google’s servers in order to work. This means I couldn’t use a simple cheat tool I used for my locally installed PC games, I had to hack into Google’s servers.
This sounds unimaginable today, especially for a thirteen-year-old. Remember that this took place in 2001. Google wasn’t nearly as big back then, meaning that the security wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now. I won’t go into details, but using a network manipulating program called Wireshark, I managed to backdoor into Google’s servers. Not the main servers, but some kind of administration page for my own account, allowing me to make modifications only the Google staff normally could do.
Using the administration page, I managed to intercept with my Google Earth session. Using some clever tricks, I modified my viewing angle to be completely free from any restrictions, while also disabling all collision checking. This meant I had no limitations in terms of where I could look. I was ready to look inside the globe.
Since the Christmas spirit was slowly rising, I decided to scroll into the globe from the North Pole.
I was 90% sure I had wasted all this time to see nothing, but I was pleasantly surprised. Since different lighting conditions on the globe wasn’t present back then, the expected result would be to see the globe from the inside with the exact same brightness. When actually looking inside, I saw only black. This doesn’t sound impressive at first, but that meant there was actually light being calculated in that old version.
As I continued scrolling inside the globe, I noticed the shade of black getting a little lighter. I had no idea what the cause for this could be. I had the sensitivity set very high, meaning I would normally have scrolled through the globe at that point, but it seemed that the further I scrolled in, the slower my scroll became.
As I scrolled even further in, I remember seeing the lighter shades of black becoming slightly red. When all the black had become slightly bright, I could clearly start to see a red tint over my entire screen.
The red tint seemed much deeper than the color depth of my old crappy monitor could normally handle. I was very fascinated at this point, this was not expected. The red was very clear and intense after scrolling for a few minutes. It seemed unnaturally bright considering the capabilities of my monitor.
I remember it being so bright at one point, that I had to close my eyes for a few seconds while tears ran out.
After around five minutes of scrolling in, the red became unbearably bright. This is where the shock period comes in. The unbearably bright red suddenly vanished, and I was left with a confusing image from a top down perspective.
It looked similar to a normal rocky nature environment I could have explored on Google Earth, but there were strange differences. Everything had this deep red tint. The rocks looked organic, and almost flesh like. This image didn’t have a lot of vegetation, but I do remember that the plants looked like ash in texture.
After this, things started happening so fast.
I still had control over my viewing angle, so I explored the surrounding environment. I was shocked, so shocked in fact that I didn’t even pay attention to much of what I saw. Instead of viewing the strange world I had just discovered from a top down perspective like a darn peasant, I tried to go in street view mode.
As I mentioned earlier, street view was very limited back then. It only worked on some of the largest cities in the world. To my surprise, I was put straight into street view mode on the random spot I picked. I was sure this area was just a neat little secret hidden by the developers at that point. That changed after seeing this world in street view mode.
I was put in a first-person perspective, but it was much more dynamic than I thought possible. In normal street view mode, you can look at 360-degree images taken from Google camera cars around the area. When moving, your viewing angle would simply zoom into the closest image taken.
I was able to walk around in any direction I wanted using the arrow keys, just like if I was playing a hyper realistic game. I had lost all my critical thinking, due to fascination of what I had found.
I never really imagined what hell could’ve looked like, but this was it. It was like a beautiful nature environment, just translated into a hellish mess. I remember viewing around a forest looking place. Everything looked either organic, or ash like. The water was only blood, the trees were flesh with visible nerves pumping blood, and the dirt was just ash. The sky was simply a yellowish red, and the clouds were ash, slowly pouring more ash.
I wasn’t scared, because I had lost my clear thinking due to pure fascination by what I was experiencing. I have always been a sucker for video game graphics, so this must be why I wasn’t really scared. I think I thought I was playing a game. I didn’t think over what I was seeing, I just gushed over the photo-realistic environments I was walking around in.
When I tried to walk into a fleshy tree, I was blocked from doing so. I remembered that I have walked up things and down things, so that meant I was affected by gravity. That’s where reality kicked in. My noclip hacks wasn’t working in this environment. I remember staring at that fleshy tree for a while. I could see every single skin like pigment on the flesh, and the detail seemed five times greater than the resolution of my monitor. My critical thinking slowly came back.
I realized that this isn’t normal. No computer hardware could render such realistic environments. This couldn’t be a little joke, it was too complex.
I never really believed in any religion, so I didn’t believe in hell. Still, I didn’t know how to process what I was experiencing. The search bar was still there, so I decided to try it.
After clicking on the search bar, I was given many location options without even typing anything. These were only Latin words. I felt really scared, but still interested in finding a bottom to this. I clicked on a location I can’t recall the full name of. I think it went something like this: imilitudiem infernum.
I was taken to the location, just like what would’ve happened normally on Google Earth. I was still able to move around realistically. This wasn’t nature, it was a large area of stone structures. At least it was nice to not see flesh and pumping nerves for once.
The strongest memory I have from this location is a long staircase that leads to a stone building with an architectural style I have never seen anything similar to. The details here are fuzzy, since I was still in a very surprised, chocked and scared state of mind. I decided to click on another location from the search bar.
I can remember this one clearly: kadingir sanctum.
I was taken to a flat land of ash. That’s all I can recall from the environment, since I was facing a very disturbing sight. I remember this encounter explicitly, since it is what made me never want to try this again.
What I saw fits in a grotesque snuff film. A humanoid body was attached to a rod, penetrating it from its left foot all the way to and through its right shoulder. It was covered in raging blue flames with no visible fuel source. The body didn’t have any skin, the flames had burned the skin so hard that the body looked more like a big raisin.
It was very deformed, with little possibilities for expression, but it was still very clear that it was in agonizing pain. The face had holes for eyes, the nose was just gone, and the mouth had no lips, leaving the mouth looking like a big black hole. I explicitly remember the mouth opening and closing rapidly, while all its limbs were shaking.
I sat there watching this for about twenty seconds. I could hear the screams and raging flames, even though my speakers were muted. I was paralyzed, I couldn’t look away.
After the twenty-five second mark, something peculiar happened. The body suddenly had fresh skin and facial features, everything had restored. The humanoid shape was now clearly a girl.
She looked around fourteen to sixteen years old. The agonizing pain was extremely clear on her face now, I had never seen such trauma expressed before. As I saw her skin slowly burning to black, I gained my senses and took out the plug for my computer.
I was traumatized. I didn’t know what to do. As I sat there, I had this voice in my head whispering Latin sounding words to me. I didn’t understand the words, but I got the felling of “You wasn’t supposed to see that” and “Do not share this to anyone”.
I recalled a lesson I had in school about Islam. We had a task were we had to read the Quran. What just happened was scarily similar to a line in the Quran I had read.
ABDUL HALEEM: We shall send those who reject Our revelations to the Fire. When their skins have been burned away, we shall replace them with new ones so that they may continue to feel the pain: God is mighty and wise.
I was unsure what to think. What I found inside the globe wasn’t a neat little secret hidden by the developers, it was something physically impossible for my computer to render. The amount of detail and realism here exceeded what existed in big budget movies, this couldn’t be a joke.
I listened to those warnings I got in my head, I kept silent. I had no idea what to believe, and I still don’t.
In the following nights, I got more sleep paralysis than usual. I know that sleep paralysis is a scientifically understood phenomena, but I never had demonic entities present in my view during these episodes before. I brushed that off, since I was sure it was me just being extra scared of demons after what happened. Still, I was scared as hell.
I’m now thirty-one. I never really stopped thinking about this. To this day, I sometimes get mild PTSD from my experiences. The demonic visions in sleep paralyses aren’t as frequent anymore, luckily.
So many things in that incident makes it seem so real, but I don’t know what to think. I might or might not be risking something by sharing this to the world, but I can’t hold it in anymore.
I’m just going to hope for the best.
Please help me.

Book Review: The Tower of Fear, by Glen Cook

The last temple of the dread god Gorloch is under siege. Nakar the Abomination, the sorcerous undead warlord, waits in his tower for the right moment to sweep away the invading armies of Herod with a devastating wizardry.
But lo! At the climax of the battle, right when Nakar intended to strike, the heroic assassin Alah-eh-din Beyh has snuck into Gorloch's stronghold. The avatars of Light and Darkness battle with blade and magic even as the Herodians breach the gates. Nakar and Beyh slay each other just as the city-state of Qushmarrah falls.
And now, with that fantasy climax achieved, the actual story may begin.
The Tower of Fear is a 1989 fantasy drama by Glen Cook, and it is an absolutely fascinating exploration of conflict theory in action. There are anywhere from seven to ten factions (depending on how you count) in post-war Qushmarrrah who all want incompatible futures and are willing to get their hands dirty to win. Conflict is such an ingrained part of life that it doesn't occur to anybody to apply mistake theory in any capacity. Only once in the whole book is a character able to sit down and truly think about whether their grand plan is good policy for the city as a whole, and the moment he does his compatriots turn on him. One aspect of the novel that pleases me greatly is that everybody involved has a historical counterpart to use as a reference point, which lets you fill in details about their culture and their look and feel, which never never actually given to us in writing. Herod is a Rome analogue, the Gorloch dead-enders resemble some manner of Phoenician Moloch worshippers, the native Qushmarrans are vaguely Jewish with Qushmarrah being a picaresque version of Jerusalem under Roman occupation, and the Dartar allies to Herod are vaguely Bedouin Arabs. The zealots of yore provide inspiration for the insurgent group of Qushmarran patriots seeking to take back their city.
Six years after Nakar the Abomination died, these groups all scheme and fight to secure the future of Qushmarrah. The mercenary Dartars and the Herodians are allies, but each is trying to outmaneuver the other into doing the unpopular crackdowns against the unruly natives, to spare their own reputations and soldiers from retaliatory terrorist strikes. The Living plot for the apocalyptic day of rebellion, but are internally divided by grudges and egos and are being slowly corrupted by the criminal enterprises they use to fund their revolution. Ordinary working class Qushmarrans keep their heads down and go about their business in a sincere effort to remain apolitical.
The normal back-and-forth of cutthroat politics is broken as a string of child kidnappings reveal a plot to bring Nakar back to life, throwing everybody into confusion and forcing them to reconsider every allegiance they have to cooperate long enough to keep the Big Bad Evil Guy in the grave.
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The Face of Normal People
Aaron, a carpenter in a Qushmarran slum with a huge family to look after- a wife, two boys, a sister-in-law, and a mother-in-law all under one small roof- lies at the intersection of all the loyalties in the city-State. Like every other adult male in Qushmarrah, he bore arms against Herod and still has a tinge of damaged patriotic pride and some bitterness towards Herod for his time in the prison camp, not to mention his relatives who got chopped down by the legions. As such, he is a vague supporter of the Living even though he considers their cause hopeless. Then again, he has prospered under Herod’s rule since there’s always plenty of work for the blue collar man down at the docks, working on Imperial ships. The paycheck that keeps his family secure means he is also vaguely on the Herodians’ side too.
But above all, he is on his family’s side, and that fundamentally means shoving politics to the background and focusing on working for a living.
His foil is his former friend, Naszif. Naszif and Aaron were in the same artillery company together in the war, and their pregnant wives were best friends back home in Qushmarrah. While besieged in a distant fortress delaying the Herodian advance, Naszif had turned traitor and secretly opened the gate to let them in and thereby unleashed the Herodians on Nakar before he was ready for them.
Naszif is also, above all, on his family’s side. The difference is that he supports his wife and child first and foremost by being a Herodian partisan, embedded as a double agent among the Living.
They are both dragged into the plot’s maelstrom when their children are targeted for kidnappings.
This is something that Cook does extraordinarily well. Cook never loses sight of the nitty-gritty, down at the bottom of the ladder side of life. Aaron’s life revolves around the family, his workmates, his minor material ambitions to better his lot through hard labor. Like unseen ghosts hanging over his shoulder, we see him stress about his eldest son getting his feelings hurt because mom and dad are paying more attention to the toddler than him; we see his casual respect for his Herodian work boss who keeps recommending him for the higher paying jobs; we see his frustration in trying to love his wife in the same bed as his teenaged sister-in-law and young sons. None of that “undead warlord coming back to life stuff” matters to him until his family is placed in the line of fire. Likewise, it wasn’t gold or fear of death that made Naszif turn his coat- he figured that quickest way back home to his wife was in a Herodian wagon. Loyalty to Qushmarrah and Nakar meant his wife would have to give birth all alone; pledging allegiance to Herod meant he would be free to race back to her side.
In Azel, Aaron has a foil who is his complete opposite. Azel plays by far the most active role in the plot. He is the insurgent’s designated hit man who the cadre uses to cull rivals from the ranks of the Living and assassinate Herod governors. However, under a different name he is also Herod’s top intelligence agent in Qushmarrah, feeding them information about the Living’s organization and plans. His true loyalty is to the Witch, Nakar’s widow stuck in the eponymous Tower in the center of the city who can bring Nakar back. He is the one behind the kidnapping plot that threatens both of his supposed masters. While Aaron is a kind hearted family man, Azel is a loner and remorseless backstabber. Aaron avoids politics, Azel revels in playing off factions against one another. Aaron is almost harmless, Azel is possibly the deadliest man alive.
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The Intersectionality of Division
Cook lays out this mess of divided loyalties via a spider web of interpersonal relationships with conflicting duties and preferences. The primary divisions are:
Ethnicity
Nobody involved has any doubt about their personal identities. There is no wonky racial intermingling and only the bare minimum of assimilation. The lines of the world are divvied up between Herodian, Qushmarran, and Dartar, and not a single enlightened universalist to be seen. The Dartars in particular live life inches away from racial violence; they had been Qushmarran auxiliaries in the war, right up until the oft referenced but never explored battle of Dak-es-Souetta wherein they backstabbed Nakar's army and deliver them into the hands of Herod. Now they patrol the streets of a city where they don't speak the language, don't grok the customs, and where everyone they encounter gives them death glares because they lost someone at Dak-es-Souetta. Only extremely proactive violence blended with a diplomatic hands-off approach to normal citizens keeps them from being ripped limb from limb by the mob. Their situation at the start of the book is a startlingly similar parallel to American soldiers patrolling Baghdad, considering it was written before we invaded Iraq the first time. Plus, their paymasters don't trust them an inch because the Dartars betrayed the last master they served.
Religion
There are two living religions and one dead one in Qushmarrah (Gorloch having lost his last high priest in the prologue). The Qushmarrans worship Aram, a kind of nice guy version of Christianity. The Herodians worship a God with no name that is basically the Old Testament version of Yahweh, all fire and damnation. It's an interesting reversal, because of course in real life it was the Romans who were Christian and the Judeans who had the nameless Old Testament God. Technically the Witch and Azel both worship Gorloch, but worshipping Gorloch in practice looks very similar to worshipping yourself, so there's that.
Religion both reinforces ethnic cohesion and also chops up the ethnic groups into smaller sections. For patriotic Qushmarrans, worshipping Herod's nameless God is an act of profound betrayal of racial identity. The vast majority of them stick with Aram in spite of the soft incentives- better jobs for converts, paid days off for Herodian holidays and nonpaid days off for Aramite holidays, that kind of thing. Likewise, Herod refuses to fully trust any intelligence agent who refuses to convert the way that Naszif does. Religion therefore functions as a marker of in-group membership.
The exception that tests the rule is a small cabal among the Living who remain devoted Gorloch worshippers. When this cabal abets the kidnapping spree, the Living suffer a sectarian split between those who want to overthrow Herod for a free Qushmarrah, and those who want to overthrow Herod for a Qushmarrah ruled by Nakar, with all of the black magic and child sacrifice and psycho authoritarianism that comes with him. That's when religion stops being a badge of loyalty and starts being an answer to a binary question that nobody can dodge.
Class
The simple fact is that the Herodian victory ruined the former nobility and lifted up the lower class by plugging them into the network of Imperial trade. Therefore, the Qushmarran ethnic bloc is split yet again; Aaron himself notes at one point that if the Living's planned uprising works, he's gonna wind up unemployed the next day. For the vast majority of Qushmarrah, the conquest means there's simply some new set of dudes to pay taxes to. Only the former elites have a material interest in restoring independence. This is what allows Herod to station only twp legions to hold onto a city of a million or so potential rebels.
At one point, the head of Herodian garrison tries to explain this dynamic to the new idiot governor who wants to dispossess a war hero's widow as a show of Herodian strength:

"You came here planning to embarrass me, eh? Stealing that old woman's house looks like an easy way, eh? Because she enjoys my favor? Maybe that's true. But did you bother to find out who she is and what she means to the people of Qushmarrah? The hell you did. You fool. You try to take that woman's house and the very least you'll do is end up dead. If you stay ahead of death for long it could mean the end of every Herodian in the city.
"You saw the entire strength at my command yesterday afternoon. Twelve thousand Herodian troops not of the best quality or they would be out facing the Suldan of Aquira [I assume this is an alternative version of Persia, but it is never expounded upon]. Five thousand Dartar mercenaries commanded by a madman who could turn on us at any minute. With them, I control Qushmarrah- just barely- because ninety-nine out of a hundred Qushmarrans don't give a damn who runs things as long as certain precious institutions are left alone. Her husband never lost a battle in his life. He is revered as a warrior demigod."

Naturally, the idiot governor sent thugs to oust her anyway, and naturally the Living mailed the bullies back to the governor in small boxes.
This part of the book really got to me as a matter of fact, because I had experienced it firsthand. There was a bad week in Afghanistan wherein, through human error, we sent a couple of mortar rounds to the wong grid. Rather than hitting the side of a mountain where the Taliban were, we sent them miles east through some random civilians' roof. We killed three women by accident; nay, through negligence. The people didn't care. I mean, the family cared a lot, obviously, but there was no outpouring of fury or malice. It was business as usual the next day.
But then some idiot on an airbase hundreds of miles away burned a Quran by accident and word got out, and next thing I know every village from horizon to horizon has a bonfire of tires going and hundreds of screaming protesters out in force. Killing people is humdrum. Violating taboos brings out the claws. It was my first exposure to just how bizarre humanity can be.
Then again, my ma thinks we should nuke any country who burns our flag, so I probably should have seen this human quirk coming.
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In conclusion, I frankly think this obscure fantasy novel from 30 odd years ago oughta be on a lot more required reading lists than it is. It functions as something of a fictional case study of civil and international conflict, what motivations keep insurgencies going and what makes political actors tick in a zero sum environment. I could easily see this being in the canon of great counter-insurgency literature, to give policy makers an inside view of why rebels keep rebelling and why sometimes they peter out on their own and why some crackdowns work and some backfire horribly. It may not give any great inspiration about how to solve everything, but at least it would give a perspective that would stop stupid errors like burning holy books or firing everybody in the army and civil service after a conquest or what have you.

quran explorer word by word video

Download quran word by word software for free. Home & Hobby software downloads - Quran in Ms Word by Mohamad Taufiq and many more programs are available for instant and free download. Download install quran in word for free. Home & Hobby software downloads - Quran in Ms Word by Mohamad Taufiq and many more programs are available for instant and free download. The Quran Explorer. Read, Listen and Search The Holy Quran in Arabic, English and Urdu. Search. Exact word(s) How to search × You can search in the following ways: Read The Holy Quran Through Word By Word Translation And Transliteration In English, Urdu, Hindi, Indonesian, Bangla, Turkish, Russian, German And Ingush Quran Explorer Mobile App. available on . Online Quran Tutoring (Live) This new program is being offered by QuranInteractive.com Islamic education foundation that will provide one-on-one online Quran classes for all age groups throughout the world. We have qualified instructors and we will use the latest state of the art technology for these Quran Word|قرآن وورد | QuranWord add-in for Microsoft Word The Quran Explorer. Read, Listen and Search The Holy Quran in Arabic, English and Urdu. Search. Exact word(s) How to search × You can search in the following ways: Arabic; Search the original text either by a single or more than one word. for example: Word-for-Word Arabic-English Translation of the Quran Hide Header Show Header Hide Menu Show Menu. Click on a word to add/remove it to/from to your vocabulary list. This vocabulary list is only saved on this computer and this web browser. Integrated software in Microsoft Word for easy insertion of Qur’anic Ayahs with Hafs calligraphy . Searching Qur’an for selected words in the documents quite rapidly. Compatible with all Windows and Office versions. Pioneering features: Compatible with all Microsoft office version (2007, 2010, and 2013) The five letters of Qalqala are ق ط ب ج د When any of these letters in a word has a Sukoon on it or if deciding on pausing on any of these letters which appear at the end of a sentence it will appear to have an echoing or jerking sound.

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Learn To Read Quran Word By Word With Tajweed Para No.29 ...

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quran explorer word by word video

quran explorer word by word top

Learn To Read Quran Word By Word With Tajweed Para No.29 ...