I've never been here before, this place looks gorgeous. Hey guys, this is Rich from Rich TV Live. We are at Rum Point, take a look at all this. You got all the excursions here, jet skis, sailboats, water bikes, look at this water bike. That looks sweet, look at the water here. Absolutely gorgeous. Now we're here really early in the morning, so there's nobody here yet. Give it a couple hours, I'll make another video and show you guys exactly what this place is all about. There's a beautiful dock there, absolutely gorgeous. But nobody's here yet, it's super early. Give it a little bit and it'll get real busy and then we'll make another video. But this is one of the hottest tourist attractions in the Caribbean, in the Cayman Islands, Rum Point. This is Rich from Rich TV Live, reporting from the Cayman Islands, peace. Rum Point everybody, no problem, no problem. Here we are at Rum Point. We got signs pointing towards Cuba, Jamaica, Germany, England, what else we got here? India, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Scotland, Australia.  I'm gonna take a little walk here to the pier. There's a reef that is protecting this area so the waves don't actually come close to shore. The reef stops the waves and then all you have is calm, clear waters. Go right here, tied up to the dock. I'll do some water sports. We got Kelly's water sports boat here. Look at that, nice fresh fruit. These guys are living a good life. This is one of the most famous places in the island where you can have some drinks, do a lot of water sports, taking some of the sights and sounds of the Caribbean and just enjoy the finer things in life. Here's the rules, you can see the shore.


good day this is the Longmont weather forecast for Tuesday through Friday March 31st to April 3rd happy April everyone I'm Chief Meteorologist John Ensworth let's look at the April 1st Wednesday Moon we're at first quarter oops this waxing crescent well it really is almost because it's not quite at 50% visibility it's about 47% illuminate got to go out later at night to get the exact first quarter but close enough all right there is a big storm coming so let's talk about this thing first off we have this conveyor belt of moisture coming all the tropics across the southern tier of states like our last storm that moving the mountains and kind of tapped into that moisture gave us a good amount of snow and rain so we're gonna get it repeated again in fact this will be the fourth Thursday Friday window in which we've had a cold snap and a storm move in at least a little bit of snow on a Friday so kind of interesting you can get patterns where the jet stream is kind of repeating at a seven-day cycle in any certain location and that's what we have going here up in the Pacific Northwest you can see a low and this is going to be what's digging down and tapping into some of the colder Arctic air to bring down into the States the Arctic air is not going to directly hit us it's going to kind of slide past us to the northeast but it will give us a enough cold air for snow and put us on the boundary with this moisture to give us some good precipitation let's look at it by midnight Tuesday a.m. probably before this video goes up or maybe just about the time this video goes up you can see the big sloppy mess coming into Western Canada and the Northwest U.S. got a big surface low got a cold front ahead of it snow in the mountains rain at the lower elevations down in our neck of the woods our little chance of showers on Monday is moving out on the plains there's a deep southern low riding through the jet stream down there the big picture for the next 10 days we do warm up very remarkably the beginning of the week here and then we see this Thursday Friday and even Saturday morning a window really cooling down and the different model runs the GFS are pretty good agreement that rain or snow is on the way after that your regularly scheduled nice weak weather returns and also it'll be nice for the weekend so that's good but Tuesday p.m. cold front is inching its way down towards us we have that low still sinking down behind the system and we're high and dry by Wednesday morning you can see the storm is getting here finally we got low kind of tense flying over on the Utah Colorado border we got a little cold front pushing through the northern mountains passing the Longmont probably late morning early afternoon ish that will allow temperatures to get pretty warm up ahead of it let me get westerly flow off the mountains will give you downslope so you get warming that way and then as the front pushes in it compresses the air so you get a couple mechanisms for warming that way and the ridge ahead of this trough will still be influencing the area so three reasons you can get some warm weather right before the cold hits with cold air coming in a loft and some moisture available at the surface we will have a chance of a few rummels of thunder from about Denver north and the northern part of our state for Wednesday so with the rain chances increasing afternoon some those might put down a flash of lightning now and then the upper level pattern Wednesday shows what's going on we have that low that was up here Alaska Western Cult Canada coming down into Western Central Canada and a trough stretching off the West Coast a little bit of trough here I didn't mark with a red line but we're on the uphill side of a trough so we get the lift we got the moisture coming in from the tropics the ingredients we need for a storm our Thursday morning the trough is rotating in closer got sort of a double barrel low up here in Canada bringing cold air around the backside of it and we're definitely in the intensifying portion of the storm cold air coming in it changes over to snow for Thursday night the trough is almost here we got cold air in place good amount of lift it's it's really going to give us a nice storm how much well the GFS using a 10 to 1 snowfall ratio because we're still not going to be amazingly cold when you get it's really cold maybe one inch of snow of rain would be 15 inches of snow when its marginal temperatures are closer freezing it's more 1 inch of rain to be 10 inches of snow so we got about 5 to 6 inches of snow possible in this run of the GFS centered right over Longmont extending down to Boulder we we win in the high 25th corridor as far as snow goes the gem model from Canada is not quite so excited it gives the foothills a lot more snow but we get maybe three to four inches of snow right along here right on the plains you get some downslope off the Cheyenne Ridge there I get a little banding down here in the southern west and eastern plains of the state but we're a little notch here of maybe three to four go over to Firestone it might be two to three go a little bit further east and you're down to an inch or so the amount of moisture we were expecting to get through Saturday noon be about a half inch to three quarters of an inch lucky folks might even pull off an inch of water so if you don't have your spring fertilizer out yet this would be a good time to do it because this will water it in nicely and maybe give you some weed control that's what I plan to do so looking at the entire week we start out really warm with showers increasing Wednesday afternoon into the evening one cold front comes in the early afternoon around noon now the cold front comes over in overnight really dropping the temperatures into the 30s for Thursday down to the teens Friday morning we start bouncing back pretty quickly on Friday to the 40s and then back to the 60s and 70s for the weekend but Thursday is going to see a lot of snow not that you're probably going anywhere for more local news take a look at the longmontobserver.org my weather column there is updated quite frequently to keep up with events in the weather and to show you snowfall and rainfall totals after the fact so please visit there this is Ben chief meteorologist John Insworth for the Longmont public media this has been your Longmont weather forecast keep looking up


Years ago, I was at a party chatting with a very famous person who shall remain name-wiss. By the way, good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. Today's video is like Gulliver's Travels. It comes to you in four parts. So anyway, after chatting for a minute, the very famous person said to me, I'm sorry to ask this, but are you the science one or the other one? And I said that I was the other one because Hank, you have always been the science one. Like, even when we were kids, you had an early web page called the Hank Green Mars Exploration Page. While I was into writing and history and pretty much anything that wasn't science. And yet, in the last few years, I found myself reading a lot of books about science and choosing to learn about subjects that I actively hated when I was a student. Not only that, but a large e-commerce platform recently named the Anthropocene Reviewed Book, one of the best science books of the year. That's right, Hank. Now I am the science one. There are two science ones and two writer ones. Now to be fair, I'm not positive that the Anthropocene Reviewed is, in fact, a science book. There's a lot of memoir and literary analysis and history, but there is some science. And the reason I was so pleased about this isn't just because somebody named the Anthropocene Reviewed one of their favorite books of the year, but also because I love science writing. It deepens my understanding of the universe and my place in it. By the way, it would absolutely shock my 20 or 30-year-old self that I enjoy reading about science or that I have even arguably written a science book. But those selves would also be surprised that I love living in Indianapolis or that I stopped having stage fright a few years ago or that I started to love third-tier English soccer. Here's another example of what I mean, Hank. You have so many ideas that there is literally a website called Days Since Hank Green Started a Thing.com and in a recent Vlogbrothers video, I was like, Hank has an idea every 20 minutes and my job is to tell him when they are bad. But in the comments of that video, a long-time nerdfighter pointed out that 13 years ago, I had a somewhat different take on that subject. It has to be said that I have a crazy idea at least once every 45 minutes and I count on Hank to be like, that is a terrible idea. So again, something that feels super fundamental, Hank is the idea one, turns out to have changed over time. Really, so much of what I consider myself just isn't inevitable. Some of it is, of course, but not all of it. People can change and they can continue to change. The way things are, both for ourselves and for the world, is not the way things always must be. Which brings me to part two. That was a long part. One, Partners in Health Sierra Leone's annual report just came out and I really recommend reading it. Or if you prefer watching to reading, there is also a great video about improvements in maternal and child care at Koydu Government Hospital and what the Maternal Center of Excellence will mean for that community. There have been big reductions in child and maternal mortality at Koydu Government Hospital over the last year, which we hope will be accelerated by the opening of the Maternal Center of Excellence in 2023. And far more people are using the healthcare system because they finally feel like they can actually get care. It's super encouraging. Plus, the letter from PIH Sierra Leone Executive Director, Dr. Byler Berry, is so beautiful. There's a link to read it in the doobly-doo. Also, if you're at the end of the year, you're in a position to join the thousands of nerdfighters who make monthly or one-time donations to support PIH's efforts to radically reduce maternal mortality, pih.org slash Hank and John. Part three, Hank and I will both be taking next week off from Vlogbrothers, meaning that this is my last video of 2021. I would like to say good riddance to 2021, but that would imply a level of like confidence or welcoming around 2022. And, uh, mmm, yeah. I don't know what else to say about that, except that I give 2021 two stars. It's sort of like if they made Cats 2, like it probably wouldn't be as bad, but it would still be a Cats movie. Part four, the outro.  I will see you on Friday, and you will see me in 2022. Cats 3 coming soon to theaters.


Assalamu alaikum dear students, I am Dr. Muhammad Aslam, your resource person. I welcome you all to the course Language and Gender. Usually people say linguistics is a dry subject. But in this course, you will know that this is not the case. Linguistics is all about us, what is happening around us. So it is about our practical experiences as girls and boys, as men and women. Let's start it with the hope that you will enjoy it. You will learn about the relationship between language and society, and especially with reference to gender. Language and Gender, this is an interdisciplinary field. Interdisciplinary means many disciplines are involved in your study. This is not enough that you know linguistics, you know phonetics, phonology and syntax. Now, besides this, definitely we need them. You need to know some basic things about pragmatics. You need to know something about psychology, philosophy, gender studies, women's studies, psychoanalysis, literature, English literature and so many others including philosophy. So the common thing for which all these disciplines come together in the study of language and gender is that we want to know with the help of all these disciplines, because this is their common interest, that how language connects mind with society. This is the major theme that we will explore throughout this course in different modules and units. Language performs double functions. First, it refers to things in the real world. Words refer to a book, a word refer to a table, a word refer to a girl, real objects, real things, real persons. So this is its referential function. The other function is descriptive function. Language also describes things, persons around us. Okay, these descriptions, they serve as blueprints of what we see, what we do, what we say in our real life. These blueprints which are constructed by language, they are sent to mind. They go to mind. What happens over there? Mind has imagination and with imagination you can create anything. Imagination does work. It converts those blueprints into mental pictures, into images.  See how language converts real world into mental world. This is how language connects mind and the real world and society. We call it word-building theory of language. But imagination, as I said, it is very powerful. It can create anything. So when this blueprint of the word goes to imagination, imagination can create different versions of the same blueprint. So this is called possible words theory of language. So mind can convert one image into many related images. One word into many possible words. So this is what we daily do. For example, we say what might have been. What would have happened if I did this? So this what might have been is the possible word. If we had, for example, you can say that if we had this course in a face-to-face class, what might have been? In some, language constructs are thoughts with the language constructs are thought, mental images, mental pictures with the help of imaginative power. And then expresses our thoughts in social interaction. So on one side, it builds our thought and on the other side, it expresses our thought. This is the function of language. This is how it connects. As I said in the beginning, this is how it connects mind with the world. Social language applied this theory of word building and possible word to understand how our use of language constructs are gendered self. Gendered self means we construct ourselves as men and women. At this point, our course gets connected with sociolinguistics. So this is how language and gender is related with sociolinguistics. And other view of word building is that we use words to say something, to do something or be being something. Okay. If a Nikah Khan, for example, says in Nikah ceremony that Mrs. A and Mr. B are husband and wife. So these are not just words. Saying these words creates marriage. This is how words build word. Here is a task you will attempt it to understand the ideas we have discussed. Read a news report in which the board sinking incident in Greece is reported. During this reading of the report, try to recall, try to capture what was going on in your mind. Write it down on the paper. After that, question yourself what might have been and then write an other version in answer to this question of the same incident. And then see how far the ideas of possible word we have discussed in this module are applied here.


This is a story from when I was nine years old.  Stay safe out there. The internet is a freaky place. September 14th, 2014.  One was named, be careful. It sounded like a strange thing to name a game. But that's what I was looking for. So I opened the link to the game. The thumbnail was a distorted version of the big head. I said, whoa, that's really scary because I didn't expect it. I went into the game. It was a flat smooth terrain area. There was a noob. The old-style one with the yellow head. It had a sword through its chest, blood splattered all around it.  The horrifically injured noob had the chat bubble over it, so I decided to walk up to it to chat.   That was the biggest mistake I've made. I heard a brutal snap of bones breaking. The noob turned its head 180 degrees to look at me. It had the face from the 2012 April Fools hack. I was only nine at the time, so I was super scared and closed out of the game. September 23rd, 2014. Nine days later, my laptop started having issues. I thought it was nothing since my mom bought the laptop for me off eBay. Issues like lagging, noise distortion, and eventually, my computer switched backgrounds to the be careful thumbnail. It gave me a splitting headache looking at it. I opened up Google and started up Roblox. It said I was terminated, and I spent so much money on that account, so naturally, being a nine-year-old, I bawled my eyes out. It said I was terminated for not being careful.   September 24th, 2014.  I looked up how to change it, and I switched it to a Sonic the Hedgehog background. I tried to make a new Roblox account since I was terminated. An error popped up. Not a Roblox error, a legitimate Windows error. August 8th, 2018. I'm much older. I decided to check if the game was still up. It wasn't, which was good. I don't know what kind of freak was behind that game, but I hope they are gone forever. My old account is still terminated. I'm under a new name.


This is stock number HA493B. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used car headquarters. Today we are checking out this super clean 2014 Lexus IS250. This vehicle has the 2.5 liter V6 motor which pumps out 204 horsepower and from this HD video you'll be able to tell that this car is extremely clean considering the age and miles on it. Nebula gray pearl is the color. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p 60 frames per second so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it is like you're right here looking at the car with me and definitely your best way to check out the vehicle before seeing it in person. Very clean down this side of the car. I didn't see any dents or dings. Doors look really good. Comes with the painted alloy rims. Really nice shape. No scuffs or scrapes on there and it has Goodyear Eagle Sport tires on here. 225 40 R18s and they got about half the tread left I'd say. Pretty good amount. Front fenders and excellent condition. You can see it has the HID headlamps, the LED running lights, front bumpers and pretty nice condition. No passenger side fender. I didn't see any dents or dings on that and the passenger side rim is in really nice condition as well. No scuffs or scrapes. As you go down this side of the car you can see just how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down you can still see the car, hear the car and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. In fact we offer a Summit Auto Fastpass option on our website in the upper right end part of the screen you can click that. It takes you right to this vehicle where you can start your online purchase, you can apply for financing, get a payment quote and even appraise a trade right on our website. Four wheel disc brakes, back rim is an excellent condition as well and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires, maybe even a little bit more. As we come around to the back of the vehicle, take note of how clean the rear bumper is, no major dents, stings or cracks on that. Nebula Grey is a really cool looking color here. It's an all wheel drive vehicle. The deck lid is in absolutely perfect condition as well. The trunk area is very clean.  Very clean back here. I believe those back seats do fold down, which we'll check out in just a minute. Looks like it has the LED tail lamps as well. And down this side of the car just as clean as that passenger side. Once again I didn't see any dents or dings on the rear quarter here and for full disclosure this back rim is just as clean as the rest. Very, very nice. Down the rest of this side, very nice and clean. You do get blind spot monitoring and built in directional signals.  Both of these seats are heated. Both of these seats are cooled. No rips, no tears, no scuffs, no scrapes on that leather. Factory all-weather formats throughout. Power windows, power locks and power mirrors. Blind spot monitoring, odometer controls. And as we hop inside the car here this one has 106,000 454 miles. Really nice shape considering the miles on it. And you can see it as an outside temperature display as well. Leather wrap steering wheel, Bluetooth audio controls on the left, information center controls on the right, cruise controls back there. Has the information radio up here. This is where your backup camera shows up as well. You do get AM and FM radio on here. Not sure if you get XM or not. I think it's just AM and FM. Well you do get serious satellite radio capabilities on there as well. So that's that. Dual climate control down here, CD player. Your heated and cooled seat buttons. It also has the heated steering wheel button right there. Automatic transmission. You have your controls for that radio right there. You get an eco, normal and sport mode on this car as well as stability control and a snow mode. All-weather format on the passenger seat or side and the passenger seat is in excellent condition as well. No rips or tears on that. And this one does come with the power sunroof. Up here you get your map lights, SOS system. You get compass in the mirror and you do have your home link buttons in that mirror for your garage door security systems and lighting systems. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. You get the latch or ISOFIX child car seat anchors. All-weather formats back here as well and like I said these seats do fall down for extra storage and to get to the trunk area and you do get side curtain airbags back here as well. You do get child safety locks on the doors and we'll take a quick look under the hood. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you will have been able to tell just how clean this car is all the way around. Inside and out under the hood we have the 2.5 liter V6 motor. Engine based, very clean runs, very smooth. This vehicle has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. This car has been gone through mechanically 100%. It's all cleaned up and is 100% ready to go. To see more pictures of this car, one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, decoder tons, one-tons. You name it we got a go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com and if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summitauto. Remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. You'll link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right if you have not been to our website on the bottom. A link to this video, this vehicle on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to help you with this super clean 2014 Lexus IS250 all-wheel drive. Thanks again.


we consider cancer a disease of aging, right? It used to be that. So I've been in the business a little longer than you have and it was always 60, 70, 80 year olds with cancer but look at our breast cancer population. Even our lung cancer, our GBM, they're all young now. What is going on? And I will challenge the idea, is it age or is it actually insulin resistance?  The longer you live, the more insulin resistant you become unless you are doing things to prevent that. And as our food environment has changed into a more processed food, higher sugar laden type, everything is processed and in bad oils which we could go into too. But those are all things that can increase our risk of cancer and again, I see it happening younger and younger and younger. So it's very scary and I'm like, please everybody. Like I just wanna scream from the mountaintops. Like can everybody just start doing this now and prevent your cancer? So just in my own patient experience, you know, I've seen various people for various reasons but I have seen like the even pre-cancers, things that we would normally want to take out a ductal carcinoma in situ, a colonic polyp. And I've had some patients who have opted, I'm not sure I want to take it out. Let me just think about that. Let me do other things and then I'll consider it. If I, and they're gone, we can't find them anymore. I have seen people who even had very advanced, you know, stage four breast cancers or fungating lesions, you know, like lesions that have come through the skin surface where already before they have embarked on their conventional therapy because they found me early, we started a process and while they were still getting either evaluated, staged, approved for whatever therapy, they're already seeing reduction in size.


Appalachian Wireless proudly brings you unlimited data. Unlimited data is only $80 a month for a single line. Four lines as low as $200. Better service? Bigger savings? That's today's Appalachian Wireless. An East Kentucky network company. Get a speed slow to 25 gigabytes per line to 512 kilobits for phones and tablets. And 15 gigabytes for motors. See store for more details. Four Belfrey High School students have the chance to travel to India this summer. The trip is part of a project through the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. The project is called Exploring Water Quality in India and Kentucky. Research for the project is funded through the U.S. State Department's Mission to India. The organization partners schools in Kentucky with schools in eastern India to research water quality in the community. Each school has to find a body of water in the community with scientific and cultural significance and then draft a research proposal about that body of water. So we selected well water because the great cultural importance well water has and also the impact that coal mining can have on the quality of well water. The project is part of the group's dual credit physics class taught by Dr. Heridas Chandran. Thank you for doc to give us this opportunity. Whenever you actually benefit other people in your community and around the world, it makes school and songs just much more enjoyable. I just think it's really like neat that we like won this and it's like not something that we're paying for just like a tourist experience. It's something that we actually like worked for all semester. The trip will allow students from India to travel to Belfrey in April and Belfrey students to travel to India in June. I'm really excited about the cultural experiences that we'll get to see like not only us like getting to interact with people from India, but then getting to like see Appalachian culture as well. The group will present their projects to different schools in eastern India. At Belfrey High School, Shelby Porter, EKB News.


Vice President and Director of Research at the East West Center and host of East West Center Insights. The Center is a cutting-edge research and capacity building institution and we're based right here in Hawaii and our mission is to forge a deeper understanding and connection between the East and the West. So every two weeks here on this show, which on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. in Hawaii, I'll have a conversation with an East West Center expert or one of our guests from our global network about critical issues facing the age of specific region. So do check us out on a eastwestcenter.org slash insights. I'm super excited about our guest today. We have Dr. Akemi Glenn who is the founder and executive director of the Pueblo project which is a Hawaii based non-profit organization which is redefining what it means to be black in Hawaii and in the world through cultivating reconnection with the self, the community and sisters in the land. She's also co-founder of Hawaii Strategy Lab which is an initiative seeking to democratize data and research. Dr. Glenn is a linguist whose research focuses on Pacific languages in particular Tokilao which is quite random and I'm really keen to dig into that and today we're going to be talking about blackness, blackness in the Pacific, culture, race and racism. Dr. Glenn thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me, Aloha. Hey and before we get into it I just wanted to remind those who are joining us live if you have a question for Dr. Glenn, please submit your questions via email to shows at thinktechhawaii.com that's shows at thinktechhawaii.com and I have to articulate it like that because of my kiwi accent. So thanks for making the time today. I know that you've been super busy over the last couple of weeks doing all kinds of activities and I wanted to dump straight in because the name of the show is called Blackness in the Pacific and what is blackness? It's a wonderful question and not surprisingly one that we get asked quite often at the Popolo project. When we talk about blackness we're talking about a way of categorizing people that does come from Europe. It's a way that relies on ideas about the phenotypes of people to make larger statements about their value in the world and their position in the world and while blackness is historically something that has been used to subjugate people and to make them available for various kinds of extraction whether the actual extraction of their bodies from their land their homeland or the extraction of resources from that land to be kind of circulated in the global markets. There are also really interesting pieces of blackness that also foster solidarity across great distance. So whether we're talking about the African diaspora and the concept of blackness uniting us there because of that shared experience of extraction and movement or we're talking about the connections between Africa and the Pacific under the kind of blanket of blackness there's a lot of interesting kind of solidarity and learning that happens across those those really vast spaces. Right so you don't have to be African to be black in the particular construct is that what you're saying? That's right. So how is then blackness talked about in the Pacific? Well you know in a lot of places in the Pacific the concept of blackness came with Europeans entering into the region so Europeans had lots of experience interacting with black people and people that they kind of categorized as black in the African world and in sub-Saharan Africa eventually in the Americas and the Caribbean and by the time they came to the Pacific they had already kind of calcified a lot of ideas about what it meant to be black. So of course the phenotype that we're looking for is dark skin and curly hair and in truth that's the majority of humans on the planet fall somewhere within the range of blackness. One of the reasons that that was really attractive for folks as colonization was spreading around the globe was that it also identified more people who could be available for this kind of extraction that I mentioned. So you know we have history here in the Pacific of people who were enslaved and there were people who were identified primarily for that kind of extraction from their own home based on their phenotype. So in here in the in the Pacific a lot of the ideas about blackness were actually developed by Europeans in their interactions with African people and when they encountered people on the other side of the world who had curly hair and dark skin they applied those same notions about them that they had kind of constructed in those previous centuries of interaction. Of course that's why we have places like New Guinea called New Guinea by Europeans because they recognize the connections in the phenotype at least and in some cultural aspects between the inhabitants there the native people there and people in Guinea in West Africa as well. I just was thinking about how Pacific people may identify within this construct I mean in your research did you find that people who fit that you know who have those immutable personal characteristics Melanesians for example did they identify within this construct and if so then what do they call it because as a as a data of the Pacific at least the term is relatively new to me and I and I think of it purely in an American context so your insights there. Sure well you know I think it is important to continually connect this back to Europe's construction of the world. This is not an indigenous specific concept just as it was not an indigenous African concept this idea of blackness this kind of you know this consuming category that gets rid of a lot of our differences our ethnic and cultural differences our particular histories and really boils our value as humans and our potential as humans down to our phenotypes and then what those phenotypes say about our particular possible histories. So this idea of blackness in the Pacific I think you're quite right that it's new in some ways in the in the sense of people here actually subscribing to it themselves. So certainly Europeans imposed this as they talked about people in in the western part of the Pacific that we call Melanesia people in Fiji they use these ideas of their encounters with African people and people of African descent on the other side of the world to inform their interactions with folks in the Pacific. But when we really see people embracing this concept of blackness was part of it was as part of the decolonization movements that we saw in the 20th century. So you have people starting to understand that as they're interfacing with colonial regimes like the French for example in the Pacific that they have something in common both in terms of the way that France or the metropolitan power is looking at them in similar ways to people in the Caribbean or in Africa who are who are raised as black and who are of African descent they see some solidarity there and so there was a lot of intentional work that was done kind of politically especially in the 20th century through the middle 20th century into this very moment where people are thinking about small island states in the Caribbean having things in common with small island states here in the Pacific and thinking about how part of the work of encountering blackness in a political realm is reasserting that humanity that it's been kind of extracted in a way by the imposition of this category on people who are quite diverse even if we're talking about people of African descent the continent is huge the diaspora is enormous but we still have this overarching concept of who these people are and how they behave and understanding that that the pacific is also painted in some of those brushstrokes I think is what has drawn people into seeing a solidarity of blackness and being able to talk about the specific ways that that racial identities have been constructed in the pacific that are not separate they're different but connected to some of these ideas that have been developed in Europe and the Atlantic world yeah I mean that really resonates with me but I remember the first when I first began working in the Caribbean uh as a as a pacific woman I I wasn't really sure what to expect and because uh we were all you know for some reason or rather invested in this in this idea of solidarity except that what we found was a lot of differences historical differences um at which uh we're not sort of construed in any kind of a negative way it was more just you know an opportunity to learn about each other and that was that was really um unifying in a sense um but then to direct to to current events um and um sort of the the um the American but also sort of the global and protests um trying to highlight and advocate um for um try to highlight systemic and justice um there's been a lot of pacific peoples showing up in either american cities or where they live in new zealand and australia and then sub-countries other sub-countries aligning themselves to the black lives matters movement and why do you think that is well I think honestly first and foremost it's a movement for the recognition of the humanity of black people um and whether you're identifying as black or not I think there's something very compelling about people who just want some control over their their lives and livelihoods so I think that that is something that I I think is very apparent is resonating with people of all sorts in all different backgrounds I think that's a a huge part of what's drawing people out um and another part of it of course is that um though we might have very different histories we do have some similar experiences in the experience of colonization and even though New Zealand for example has a its own particular history as being formally part of the the british empire a lot of those european ideas about blackness and indigeneity and often those things together informed the ways that policies and security apparatuses were constructed and so the reality is that many of us though not necessarily having the same perhaps level of violence directed at us or the the same kind of frequency of violence directed at our own bodies understand the ways that people who have been colonized are um kind of consumed by the apparatuses that have been built around the colonization of the places where we live and even in a place where there wasn't say settler colonialism where there wasn't a whole population who came in and displaced native people there's still ongoing relationships that have to do with the extraction of resources the way that tourism comes in and reorders the society and it's often the case especially because of these deep-seated ideas about race and who belongs where and who has the right to kind of assert their own economic interests as well that we see people who are darker skinned and who fit closer to this this phenotype ideal that i've been talking about those are the folks on the bottom and those are the folks who most likely are going to have to deal with violence within those systems whether it's at the hands of policing or the military or some other some other force so i think when folks are coming out it's not only because of their own particular self-interest but also acknowledging the kind of larger questions of humanity but informed by their own experience in the various places that they've been for the last several centuries yeah it's super interesting and explain um i like what you said there about um communities that didn't have a massive influx of settlers because i was thinking um when i asked a big question about the sort of hashtag kongans for like lives matter assign that i saw and i was like trying to work out you know will they live in Tonga um and yet they feel um really motivated to align themselves and um here in Hawaii uh obviously uh oh so how long have you been here in Hawaii been here about 17 years here in Hawaii yeah would that make you a local i don't know you have to ask locals about that one i know that i'm not a local that's so so for follow the name of your project that is the Hawaiian word for black yeah is that right well to follow itself as a plant and it's a plant that lived across the entirety of the pacific in new zealand it's called poro poro um it's it has this name a very similar name across all of the pacific it was a convenient um it was brought here by pacific voyagers to hawaii and established itself but it's also a plant that has roots all around the world it lives in tropical and temperate zones and it's a night shade that produces little blackberries so um the the association of this plant with black people we believe probably has been around for some time but was kind of a slang kind of euphemistic reference um we see more of it coming after world war two and there was more sustained presence by people of african descent and larger numbers during the war the the war um and uh depending on who you talk to it's it's either a word that people embrace or it's something pejorative but the reason that my organization has decided to use this and lean into it is because of its long-standing history in the pacific and the fact that not only was this plant something that was valuable enough that voyagers took it with them um when it was established it was a plant that was used for medicine it has antibacterial properties supposedly and and was used traditionally to help with breathing any kind of breathing complaints and so we are interested in thinking about the medicine in popolo and thinking about the relationship between um a native hawaii and a pacific word and the the way that it points to blackness and the way that it points to the contributions of black people and um the fact that though this is a plant from elsewhere it has a home here and it has a valuable home and valuable contribution to make thanks akimi i love that there's something really spiritual and lyrical about all of that and we are about to go to a break and then when we come back i'm going to ask you about um being black and white and what that's like hello ha i'm lillian kimi coast of lillian's vegan world the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in honolulu hawaii i'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and i have lots of uh information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is so do tune in every second thursday from one p.m aloha back to east west inner insights i'm here today talking to dr akimi glenn about blackness in the pacific and uh just before the break i give her a warning but i'm gonna ask her about being black in hawaii so akimi what's that like well it's a big question of course i'm like with one of very many um our community here is a small one um we're between two and three and a half or four percent of the total population here in hawaii which means about 20 000 people give or take across the entirety of the state most of us are here on oahu um the most populous island of course but there's been kind of a growth in our community in the last several years i'm really curious to see the the current census ongoing what what our numbers are going to look like i think there's been an influx of people moving here especially from north america in recent years um you know frankly being black in hawaii is very different um being black anywhere is is a specific experience so um certainly in my experience i was lucky and have been lucky to live and travel across the pacific and and as a younger person lived around the world and moved to hawaii from new york city so certainly being black in honolulu is very different from being black in new york city where there is a very vibrant and rich and diverse kind of representation of african diaspora culture for sure i think one of the challenges and one of the interesting things about being black here is because of our small numbers a lot of folks encounter us mostly through the media and through entertainment and um their ideas about black people and what we do and what we're into and our culture come through those kinds of mass media representations and so part of our work in the popolo project is also to give our larger community some alternative visions of what our lives are like and who we are who we're connected to and the work that we do yeah i um i also moved to hawaii from new york city uh and um i'm not black uh and uh i don't even really identify as a person of color because that is a that's more of an american framing um i would identify as a woman as i'm on new zealander but um my team looked up the stats and apparently hawaii is about roughly three-quarter seventy five percent uh made up with people made up of people who identify as some kind of as a person of color um and i was interested in um you know the experience of the black community relative to um to to that community um and then also your views on the state of race relations here in the state of hawaii and i'm asking that because um hawaii is often held up as this um paradise and there was a recent new york times article that said if you want to be less racist move to hawaii and i would welcome your your views and comments on all of that yeah um i think hawaii is certainly represented as a as a racial utopia and a melting pot and i think there are some wonderfully beautiful pieces of the local culture that have been about you know intercultural interactions and the creation of a new culture that we even call local um but all of that of course has been done in the context of the particular history of hawaii um hawaii only recently becoming part of the united states the overthrow of the the government here by business interests in the 1890s all of that is not only part of hawaii's history but part of american history and certainly the overthrow itself was was very much influenced and fertilized and and encouraged by white supremacist interests just yesterday or a couple days ago there was a a conversation on twitter with some black pacific scholars and folks were talking about um the fact that there was a kukaks clan chapter in fiji in you know not too long ago and a lot of people don't know that there was likewise a kukaks clan chapter here in honolulu um so these are pieces of hawaii's kind of hidden history that are just under the surface and have shaped our our current race relations and i think one of things that's really important in understanding how people conceptualize hawaii as a as a kind of racial melting pot it's in dark and stark contrast to the united states um so that idea of what you being this kind of peaceful utopia with all these different kinds of people living happily together is a foil to what has been happening in the united states for its entire history but certainly we see these these these opportunities to point to hawaii as an exemplar really pop up when there is undeniable racial unrest we've seen it in the last couple of weeks with people kind of saying well you know we don't have these problems in hawaii we do um they just look a little bit different because we have a kind of different community composition here um there are certainly there certainly is violence um there's certainly police involved deaths here but it's not the same the same uh communities that are directly impacted so that new york times article last year um i was one of the people that was interviewed for that discussion and got to talk with the writer of the article who was very interested not so much in the experience of us our community on the day to day but looking at some research that was coming out of u h ma noa looking at perceptions by white people of people of color to use that category here in hawaii and what they found was because of the composition of the community here some of the racialized ideas that people have in north america didn't have a clear analog when folks showed up in hawaii so it's mostly looking at transplants and their attitudes and this new york time science writer was really curious about that and wondering coming from new york himself and in a place that is certainly very racialized and has a history of segregation and violence and all of those things connected to race he was interested in looking for a place that um that doesn't have that his conclusion of course was that having mixed race people uh be almost 25 percent of the community here uh his idea was that mixed race people were actually solving the problem of race in hawaii and it was this idea of having people who had diverse genealogies in one place that kind of interrupted the ideas that white people would have about racializing or categorizing people in certain racialized ways that would inform policy and structures of society um but you know where i take where i took and still take some issue with that conclusion is that um the united states is also a history of mixed race people and diverse genealogies and communities and in my own family which which he did mention in that article my ancestors are from from africa certainly but also from the uk um from southern china and also indigenous american people but both of my parents were considered black because of the way that the racialization works in north america it just simply doesn't work the same way in hawaii or in the pacific even though we do this category of blackness the ways that people get assigned to it are different yeah uh no that i that explains a lot because i'm like i don't ascribe to to any of those um terms and i and i'm the mixed race but i am i'm still just trying to get over the fact that you uh told us about kkk alcove here and in pvm i'm pretty shocked by that but um but perhaps more interested in um uh your point about hawaii being used as a foil we compared to the us and then sort of you know and then its description of the utopia utopia relative to other places where the where racial relations aren't quite as harmonious but that doesn't detract us i think from the from the issues that are here um and uh when i first arrived um just a few years ago now um uh i i mean i've never really experienced any overt racism in the summer person but i was told a lot anecdotally uh that there is overt racism against the micronesian community here and i was interested in your view on that certainly um that's something that's impossible to look away from and i think for for someone like myself coming from a experience of being racialized as black in north america and under kind of an american understanding of what race means and the consequences um there are a lot of things that are happening in the micronesian community and to the micronesian community that are in parallel to the ways that black people have been racialized um ideas around criminality over policing um violence at the hands of police even vigilante violence uh one of the stories that i often try to bring up and remind people up here in hawaii is just recently a 16 year old boy named starski willey was killed by a neighbor in kulehi valley suspected of being um involved in a burglary and that story and the way that it was covered in our local news media was almost i mean it was out of the kind of black lives matter of playbook because it drew it drew on these ideas of this teen just kind of by virtue of the kind of boy he was the fact that he was truquis the fact that he was living in public housing all of those things pointed to the possibility of his criminality even though there was no evidence that this this young child was involved in any criminal behavior even the way that his his photos were represented in the news media there were some photos where his skin had been darkened um or where the contrast had been played with a bit or he was he was um shown in a hoodie or he was shown looking very defiant these are all kinds of visual representations of blackness and especially the association between blackness and criminality that get applied to um to micronesian people there's a wonderful news not news but a legal article written in the hawaii law review several years ago by um professor charles lorenz was not retired from richardson school of law where he talks about local kind implicit bias and he makes direct parallels between the ways that micronesian people are talked about in popular culture here in hawaii and especially in the law including ways that people have been given harsher sentences than others who've committed similar crimes and at sentencing the judge has mentioned i'm giving you this extra penalty because your micronesian and the rest of your community needs to be taught a lesson so we do have evidence of that and often when people um talk about some of the outrages that the micronesian community has been subjected to in these ways they say well they're the newest immigrants here and every new immigrant group has to kind of you know take their lumps until they get integrated into the society but the reality is um that's not the case necessarily and when we look at other small immigrant groups micronesians are about two percent of the population as well they're a very small group of people in terms of numbers um we have the same kinds of patterns that you see with black people on the continent and in other places um the levels of incarceration over policing but also just general attitudes about their worth um their contribution to society um even so far that that there are some people in certain public spaces who hide their micronesian identity so that they are able to be afforded more respect for care in dealing with co-workers or other people in the community so there there are a lot of parallels both culturally and structurally in the ways that those folks have been treated at the same time a lot of people who are here because of the compacts free association have come here for education for health care services for a better life just like everyone else and those stories are often not shared what we most likely hear in the in the public kind of discourse about micronesians here is that exact kind of racialization where it's focused on the criminality the strangeness of their culture their foreignness and their their kind of the ways that they're at odds with what we think of as local and what we think belongs here in Hawaii. Thank you for giving me extremely important points um intrinsically valuable in all themselves but also on the on the cusp of the um the negotiation of the compacts again between the U.S. and then Palau and the Federal States of my community and from our islands uh I have run over time and um I'm gonna have to get you on again because I didn't get to ask you about Tokulao so I'm gonna have to definitely do this again thank you so much for your time today and uh for showing your your views so freely with us and um and then if you're watching and you have any questions please follow up and we'll get Dr. Glynn on the show you've been watching East West Center Insights thank you very much for spending your afternoon with us Aloha


We all want to eat the kinds of foods that make us feel better and live longer, but there's so much conflicting information out there, so many nutrition opinions. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast, I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. It's my job to give you the information you need to make the healthiest choices possible. What's the best way to protect one of our most important senses? We start with the story of two very important plant pigments that help guard against age-related macular degeneration. Anyone who's ever gotten a sunburn knows how damaging the UV rays and sunlight can be. Imagine what those same rays are doing to the back of our eyeballs, our retinas.  Thankfully we have a layer of cells in our eye called the retinal pigment epithelium that supports and protects our delicate retinal eyesight machinery. This layer builds up yellow plant pigments from our diet, like zeaxanthin, which absorbs blue light and protects the retina from the photooxidative damage. The yellowing of the lenses in our eyes when we get cataracts may actually be our body's defense mechanism to protect our retinas.  Instead of trading one type of vision loss for another, instead of pigmenting the front of your eyes with cataracts, better to pigment the back of our eyes with diet. The pigment in the back of our eyes entirely of dietary origin, thus suggesting that the most common cause of going blind in the Western world could be delayed or even averted with appropriate dietary modification. Where in our diet do we get it? Well, the egg industry brags that eggs are a good source, but have an egg nearly every day, six eggs a week for three months, and the pigmentation in our eyes barely moves. And these were the high-lutein, free-range, certified organic eggs, not purchased at a supermarket, but at a local farm. Instead of getting the phytonutrients from the egg that came from the chicken that came from the corn and blades of grass, she pecked on, what about getting it from the source? A cup of corn and a half cup of spinach a day for three months. A dramatic boost in protective eye pigment. What's neat about this study is that they went back and measured the levels three months after the study stopped and the levels were still way up here. So once we build up our macular pigment with a healthy diet our eyeballs really try to hold on to it. So even if we go on vacation and end up eating more iceberg lettuce than spinach, our eyes will hold on until we get back. Yes, eggs can increase the azanthin levels in the blood. They also raise bad cholesterol levels and risk of heart disease. Therefore, an egg yolk-based dietary strategy to increase plasma Zazanthin cannot be recommended and an alternative cholesterol-free food source is desirable like goji berries, for example, which have up to 60 times more Zazanthin than eggs. Modest dose markedly increases levels in our body and inexpensive, effective, safe whole food strategy to increase Zazanthin in the bloodstream. But we don't need it in our blood, we need it in our eyes. So how about a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial? To preserve eyesight in the elderly in traditional Chinese medicine, people are often prescribed 40 to 100 goji berries a day. But here they just used about 15 berries a day for three months, but still found it could protect against loss of pigment and prevent the buildup of what's called soft rousin, which is just debris that builds up in the back of the eye, both of which are associated with age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in older men and women, affecting more than 10 million Americans. Note they gave the berries with milk in the study so the butter fact could increase the absorption of these crotinoid pigments. A healthier way to get the same effect would just be to eat goji berries with nuts or seeds, in other words, goji trail mix. In our next story, kale and collard greens play a starring role in the prevention of glaucoma. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of legal blindness in white women, but the number one cause of blindness in African-American women. That's one reason researchers chose a population of African-American women to study the effects of fruit and vegetable consumption on glaucoma risk. But the other reason is because they were specifically interested in foods with the highest concentration of those high-protecting phytonutrients like zeaxanthin, kale, and collard greens. But you'd be lucky if you could find one in ten white people eating even a single serving a month, whereas that was a no-brainer for African-Americans. What'd they find? Well, as I've stressed over the years, all fruits and vegetables are not the same. Whether you ever ate bananas or had one or more bananas every day didn't seem to matter much, but eating a couple of oranges every week was associated with dramatically lower risk. Not orange juice, though. You can drink orange juice every day and it didn't seem to matter. A similar finding with peaches, fresh peaches seemed to work, but canned peaches didn't. Similarly, vegetables in general, as a catch-all term, didn't seem to matter. For example, whether you ate a green salad twice a week, once a week, or zero times a week, didn't seem to matter when it came to reducing glaucoma risk. But you know how pitiful most people's salads are. White people take note, as you may need it even more. The lighter our eye color, the more greens we need to eat. Blue eyes let 100 times more light through, so people with blue or gray eyes appear significantly more vulnerable to damage compared to brown or black, with green and hazel somewhere in the middle. It's interesting carrots appear to be less protective in black women compared to white women. They suggest it could be differences in food preparation methods.  Why not just take a zeaxanthin pill? I don't know what exactly it is in these wonderful foods. That's working their wonders. So it may be better to just recommend folks eat them rather than supplements. And in fact, people that take calcium or iron supplements may be doubling, quadrupling, or even tuppling their odds of glaucoma. Better to just get most of our nutrients from produce, not pills. Finally today, we look at the best dietary treatments for eye strain.  In previous years, the rapid spread of computers in the home and workplaces led to an increase in ocular and visual problems, including eye discomfort, blurring of distant objects, eye strain, and visual fatigue. So-called near-work-induced transient myopia. That's when, after staring at a computer screen for a while, you look out the window and things start out all blurry. That's because our poor little ciliary muscles pulling at the lenses in our eyes are locked in this constant state of contraction to keep that near focus. Over the time, this can have long-term adverse consequences. Yes, we could waste 4 to 12 minutes an hour taking breaks staring out the window, but what if you've got nutrition videos to make? The effects of black current intake are due to displayed terminal work-induced transient refractive alteration in healthy humans. A double-blind placebo-controlled crossover study finding a significant improvement in refractive values in eye strain symptoms compared to placebo. Note what passes for currents in the U.S. are actually champagne grape raisins, not actual black currents, which were banned in the U.S. a century ago at the behest of the lumber industry for fear that they might spread a plant disease that affects white pine, which we hardly even harvest anymore. They are, however, currently making a comeback, though any anthocyanin rich berry might have similar benefits. For example, there was a previous study done on billberries. Why didn't I report on it when it came out? Because I can't read Japanese. Why not just take bilberry powder capsules? Because as we've seen over and over, when you test supplements, you're lucky if they have any of what it says on the label. Furthermore, even for products actually containing bilberries at all, labeling was often uninformative, misleading, or both. Something the herbal supplement market is infamous for. The largest study to date found that it appears that most herbal supplement labels lie. Interesting, bilberries gained notoriety during World War II when it was said that pilots in the British Royal Air Force were eating bilberry jam to improve their night vision. Turns out this may have been a story concocted to fool the Germans. The real reason the Brits were able to all of a sudden target Nazi bombers in the middle of the night before they even made it to the English Channel was likely not because of bilberries, but because of a top-secret new invention created to keep quiet called radar. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org slash testimonials which may be able to share it on social media to help inspire others. If you'd like to see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, go to the Nutrition Facts Podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. My last two books were How to Survive a Pandemic and My How Not to Diet Cookbook. Get ready this year for the launch of How Not to Age and of course all the proceeds for the sales of all my books goes directly to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit science-based public service region, signing up for free daily updates on the latest new nutrition research with bite-sized videos and articles uploaded nearly every day. Everything on the website is free. There are no ads, no corporate sponsorships, no kickbacks, it's strictly non-commercial, not selling anything. I just put it up as a public service as a labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition.


All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the worlds, the one and only true God, the most compassionate, the merciful, there is nothing like him whatsoever, yet he is the all hearing and the all seeing, and peace and blessings be upon our Master Muhammad, the final messenger of God, the Seal of the Prophets, the Commander of the Righteous, the Leader of the Messengers, and the Beloved of the Lord of the Worlds. In this Khutbah, inshallah, I want to continue the topic that I started during Ramadan, the month of the Qur'an, the topic of establishing the preservation of the Qur'an. I mentioned last time that in recent times there has been a renewed sense of vigor among some radical historical revisionists and some Christian polemicists to create certain shubuhat, certain doubts or suspicions in the minds of the Muslim masses, with the ultimate goal of convincing us that our sacred scripture is not preserved, and this is just indicative of the broader current of Zeitgeist, which wants to sort of tear down traditional religion and traditional morality, and replace the worship of God with the worship of the self, the worship of the nafs. We also mentioned how Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala perfectly reveals to us in the Qur'an the intentions and motives of those who attack the Qur'an. Now the underlying reason that has caused many Muslims to struggle with this issue is actually their own ignorance in the traditional sciences of the Qur'an, in fact their misapprehension as to what the Qur'an even is, the very nature of the Qur'an, the method and purpose of the Qur'anic revelation. Many Muslims have outright abandoned the study of traditional texts concerning the ulum al Qur'an, and have rather relied on amateur preachers and apologists to teach them about their scripture, and in fact they were miseducated by some of these preachers and apologists by certain mu'adh and certain du'adh who in their zeal to repudiate the Bible and draw a sharp distinction between the Qur'an and the Bible, they began to assert that the text of the Qur'an was uniformic in nature from its very inception, that unlike the Bible that has numerous textual variants, the Qur'an has no textual variants. This of course is not true, this is an inaccurate reductionist simplistic understanding of the Qur'an that has harmed our community. So what is accurate? What do we learn from our traditional literature written by our traditional Ulama? We learn that the Qur'an has never been a uniformic text, but rather a multi-formic text, and it does have textual variants, but these are not of the same kind as those of the Bible, specifically the New Testament. There is a major difference. The textual variants of the New Testament were deliberate changes made to the text by scribes, decades, and centuries after the Prophet Isa A.S., that were motivated by theological rivalries among certain early Christian groups. The textual variants of the Qur'an are traceable to the Prophet Muhammad S.A.S., and are a facet of the very revelatory nature of the Qur'an. In other words, Qur'anic variants are part of the revelation. That is a big difference. And it is the Alem, the scholar, not the amateur preacher who can explain these things to us with sophistication and with attention to nuance. We all need to seek out the Ulama, and this is something that the Qur'an commands us. Ask the experts of Scripture if you don't know. Now this is where the enemies of Islam come into the picture. These revisionists and polemicists, whoever they are, atheists, agnostics, some of them are Christian, they've taken notice of the average Muslim's ignorance of his own traditional literature and his claim of textual uniformity, and so they, the critics, they dip into our traditional literature, and they pull out isolated narratives that debunk the claim of textual uniformity, a claim that no real Muslim scholar ever made, and then they deceptively present these isolated opinions, or narrations I should say, to their audiences as evidence that the Qur'an is not preserved. But what the critics don't tell their audiences is that traditional Muslim authorities have always believed that the Qur'an was revealed in a multi-formic fashion, and that this has nothing to do with the Qur'an's preservation. All traditional authorities maintain that the Qur'an was preserved in light of its multi-formic nature. In other words, these critics weaponize our own literature against us.  So what do I mean when I say the Qur'an is multi-formic? I touched on this a little bit last time as well. It is well established in our tradition that the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, ala sab'ati ahruf, upon seven letters, literally, sometimes translated seven modes or seven types of recitational variations. These ahruf are revelation. They are by design. They're not by accident. Their origin is with the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, not after him. The essential purpose of these ahruf, these variations, is to fold the first is theological. The ahruf enrich our understandings of the Kalamah of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. By making the Qur'an a multi-formic text, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala opened up different meanings for us. We are enriched intellectually and spiritually by the ahruf. The ahruf give us a deeper engagement with the Kalamah of Allah. I'll give you examples, inshallah. The second purpose is practical. The ahruf are a means of tasir. They make the Qur'an's recitation and memorization easier for us. They give us options. There are multiple correct readings. There is recitational latitude. This is out of the mercy of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Again, this is by design, not by accident. The presence of the seven ahruf is something that is adumina dina. This is something that's well-known established in the religion, cannot be denied, and it's not some secret. It's mentioned in numerous hadith across multiple volumes, Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, An-Nisa'i, Musnad Ahmad, Mu'at-e-Malik, Musannath, Ibn Abu-Shaybah, etc., etc. Over 20 companions mentioned this on our hadith corpus. It is Mu'ta-Allah to love thee. It is mass-transmitted and it's very wording. Just one hadith, Imam Ahmad reports the famous hadith, the dispute between Umar and Hisham. So Umar and Hisham, Ibn-u-Hakeem, radiallahu anhu maa, they each read the same verse of Surat-ul-Furqan, and they read it differently. They went to the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi sallam. In fact, the hadith says that Saydina Umar dragged Hisham to the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi sallam. So you see the Muslims from the very, very beginning were very, very intent on getting the Qur'an exactly right and investigating readings that were questionable. The Prophet asked Umar to recite. So Umar recited and then the Prophet said Haqadah-un-Zilat, like this that was revealed. And then the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi sallam asked Hisham to recite. So he recited and then the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi sallam said Haqadah-un-Zilat. Thus it was revealed. But then concluded by clarifying, Inna haathal Qur'an-un-Zilat ala sab'at-i-ahruf, faqar-u-Mat-i-as-sara. Indeed the Qur'an was revealed in seven Ahruf. So read what is easy for you. And I'll give you specific examples in a minute inshallah. But if we don't know these things, that's on us, we need to fix ourselves. Our ignorance has opened the door for our enemies to deceive and beguile us. They're like sharks who smell blood in the water. Let us obey the command of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala when He says, Afalaya tattabbaruna al-Quran. Do they not deeply reflect about the Qur'an? Do they not ponder with profundity about the Qur'an? So we need to ask ourselves, are we doing this? Are we engaging with the Qalam of Allah at a deep level? Are we studying these ulum, these disciplines that are essential to understanding the Qur'an and fortifying our iman? We don't have to be ulama, but we have to know something. We have to know something. We have to be able to hold our own. Ignorance will not do. The Prophet ﷺ said, Al-Quran al-Hujjatul laka'u alaik. Or as he said, the Qur'an will be a proof for you or against you. And Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, radiallahu anhu said that this refers to the Yom al-Qiyamah. He said, salallahu alayhi sallim khayru kumman ta'alama al-Quran wa'alama. The best of you are those who learn the Qur'an and teach others. Are you engaging the Qur'an? Or do you find yourself inching farther and farther away from the Qur'an? Becoming more and more estranged from the Qur'an because you stumbled across some video on the internet of some profligate apostate or some bitter unbeliever or atheist who thinks that he has the Qur'an all figured out and he's caused you to doubt Allah and His Messenger. So be forewarned about such people. Do not befriend such people. Do not incline towards such people. Even if they come to you with smiles and giggles, listen to the words of Allah Allah says, The true sovereignty on that day, the day of judgment, will belong to the most compassionate Allah, and that will be a difficult day for the unbelievers. On that day, the wrongdoer will bite his hands. This is an expression of regret saying, Oh woe unto me, what that I had taken a path with the Messenger, Ibn Kathir, Imam al-Qurtubi and many, many others. They mentioned that the immediate occasion of this verses revelation was a man who was misled by his so-called friend away from Islam and away from the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. A man in Mecca from the Quraysh who was going to take a path, a sabil, with the Messenger sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. The sabil is al-Islam. He was going to become a Muslim or he had become Muslim and his so-called friend talked him out of it. And on that day the Qur'an says the wrongdoer, this man, will bite at his hands and say, Oh woe unto me, I wish I had taken a path with the Messenger, Oh woe unto me, I should not have taken so and so as a friend. Fulan means so and so in Arabic. According to the tafsir, this friend was a mushrik and a mustahazi named Ubey ibn Khalaf but he's not named here in the ayah because there are people like him in every generation. In other words, Ubey is just an archetype who manifests throughout history as different people. The Qur'an is teaching us a universal lesson. The man who was misled by his so-called friend continued speaking in the Qur'an. Laqad al-galna ni'ani dhikri ba'adi idhjaani wa kana shaitan ulil insani khadula. Indeed he caused me to go astray after the dhikr, after the Qur'an has reached me. And I let it slip through my fingers. Indeed Satan is a forsaker of man. Laqad al-rasood, Ya Rabbi innakaw mittakhadu haathal Qur'an amahjura. And the Messenger will say, Oh my Lord, my people have deserted and abandoned this Qur'an. This is what happened. A believer entertained the rantings of an anti-Muslim polemicist, an obstinate degenerate and that degenerate caused the believer to abandon the Qur'an and leave Allah on his Messenger. And on the Day of Judgment the former believer will have no one to blame by himself because he should have sought out the truth about the Qur'an. He should have sought out the experts and masters of the Qur'an. He should have heard both sides of the issues. One of the names of the Day of Judgment in the Qur'an is Yom al-Hassra, the Day of Regret, the Day of Ya-Laitani, the Day of Ya-Wailata, the Day of Oh I should have, the Day of Oh if only I had, the Day of Ah, what was I thinking? May Allah SWT save us from such regret and warn them Yom al-Hassra and warn them of the Day of Regret when the matter will be settled yet they are in oblivion and they do not believe. Our faith in Allah and his Messenger is not blind. It's not without evidence. Our faith, our conviction is based upon and fortified by knowledge. If the foundations and fortifications of the fortress of our convictions are weak then sheytan will send his minions to attack us and they will win. They will tear down the walls and rip up the floor of our fortress. In the Qur'an, what was the first piece of advice that Luqman al-Hakeem, Luqman the sage, Luqman the wise gave to his son. He said, Ya'bunaya, la tu shrik bil la, inna shirkala ghulamun azeem. Oh my dear son, do not associate with Allah SWT. It is the gravest of wrongdoing. Now how many times in the Qur'an do we find Allah SWT commanding us to obey our parents, to be grateful to our parents, to honor our parents. This is a sustained command in the Qur'an in Sunnah. Wa qadarabbuka alla ta'budu illa iyahu wa bil walidani ihsanah. God and parents, God and parents. Yet Allah SWT says, wa injahadaka ala an tu shrikabi ma leisa lakabihi ilm fa la tuti'ahuma wa sahibhum afid dunya ma'rufa. But if they, your parents, strive to make you associate with me what you have no knowledge of, then do not obey them. But keep their company in this world with courtesy. Don't just obey somebody in religious matters, even if it's your parents without knowledge, let alone some bitter internet troll who's seeking popularity and wealth. There is no taqlid in Aqidah. You have to know what you're worshiping. Our knowledge of Allah and his messenger in his book must be discursive to a certain extent. In other words, we have to be able to explain why we believe that the Qur'an is the word of God. Again, we don't have to be Ulama, but we have to know something. We have to be able to hold our own. Wallahu mustaan. The Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he said faqihun wahidun ashaddu ala shaitan min alfi'abid. A single jurist, a single faqih. And here it is likely that faqih means any Muslim with a profound understanding of the religion, not technically a trained jurist in the early literature to have knowledge of fiqh meant to have a deep understanding of the religion. A single faqih, a single Muslim who has a deep knowledge of the deen is more severe on Satan than 1,000 ignorant worshipers. Now the Qur'an is preserved according to the Qur'an itself, but can this claim be substantiated by evidence? Or is this just a circular argument? The short answer is absolutely. It is substantiated by evidence. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala commands the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in the Qur'an. Say, this is my path, my deen. I call to it with clear sight. The Qur'an is Imam al-Qurtubi. A la basira means ala yakin wa haqh with certitude and truth. Ibn Kathir says yakin and burhan, certitude and evidence. This is my religion. I call you to Allah based upon evidence and evidence must be sought. So what is the external evidence of the Qur'an in the first century of the hijrah of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam? In other words, what percentage of the Qur'an is attested in manuscripts, physical manuscripts, that are dated to the first century Hijri? So I'm not talking about Sira. I'm talking about the Qur'an, our primary text, perhaps a comparison with the New Testament will help put things into perspective. Now Jesus, peace be upon him, was speaking and teaching the Gospel in the late 20s and early 30s of the first century of the common era. So how much of the 27 book canon of the New Testament is attested in extant manuscript witnesses that are dated to the first century CE? What percentage of New Testament manuscripts that we have today are dated to the first century CE, the century of Isa alayhi sallam? The answer is zero percent, literally zero. There is nothing from the first century of Christianity. What about the Qur'an? There are over two dozen confirmed first century Hijri that is 7th century CE manuscripts of the Qur'an extant right now and many others waiting to be identified and this number is only going to increase as more manuscripts await to be analyzed with their paleography and orthography and radiocarbon dating. So how much of the Qur'an is attested in manuscript witnesses from the first century Hijri? The answer is the entirety of the Qur'an. We have 100% of the Qur'an in extant manuscript witnesses from the first Islamic century before 700 of the common era. This is a fact. It's time for these radical historical revisionists and highly bitter Christian polemicists to simply come to terms with this. Now I want to explain, I only have a few minutes left, the multiformic aspect of the Qur'an that I referenced earlier. This is a manifestation of the beauty, the magnificence and utter uniqueness of the Qur'an. There's nothing like the Qur'an. Let's start with the classic example again. In al-Fatiha, Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala Maliki yawmidin and Maliki yawmidin. We talked about this last time. Allah is both owner and king of the day of judgment. But what's the difference? You see a king may rule and set laws over a kingdom, but he may not necessarily own anything. An owner may own something but may not necessarily rule over anything. Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala is both owner and king. He rules and owns everything. These variants complement each other. And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam recited it both ways. How do we know this? How do we know that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam recited it both ways? I mean, we've known this for 1,400 years. But the radical skeptic will say, how do you know he recited it both ways? This just seems like Muslims are trying to cover up a discrepancy in their book. This can be answered using common sense. We don't need to rattle off as I need, chains of transmission for this. The Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam recited it both ways is as factual as saying, Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. Or Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. People can question these things if they want and there are always people who are going to question these things. But let's ask a basic question. How many times did the companions hear the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam recite Al-Fatiha? Let's think about this. The five daily prayers were mandated in the eighth year of the Meccan period. Al-Fatiha must be recited in every prayer cycle. Everybody knows this. So the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam led the Sahaba in prayer for 15 years, 15 times 354 the lunar year comes out to 5,310 days. Actually did the math on this. Three of the daily prayers are audible in their first two cycles, Fajr, Maghrib and Isha. So they would have heard the Fatiha six times a day from the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So 5,310 days times six recitations a day is nearly 32,000 recitations of Al-Fatiha. The Sahaba heard the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam recite Al-Fatiha 32,000 times over the course of 15 years. And this is not counting the times the Prophet recited Al-Fatiha in Sulaatul Juma or Sulaatul Eid or outside of prayer and conversations and lectures and sermons. Did the Sahaba really get this wrong? Was there really a difference of opinion as to whether the Prophet said Maliki Yomedin or Maliki Yomedin? Did they really transfer this uncertainty to their students?  He obviously recited it both ways. The Quran was and continues to be a mass transmitted living tradition. It was constantly heard, recited and memorized every day since its inception by dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of people. Imam al-Siyuti quoted Zaid Ibn Thabud who said Al-Qira'ah sunnah, recitation is sunnah. In other words, it is from the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. All of this is Talaqee, the recitation of the Quran was passed down verbatim from teacher to student, teacher to student until it reached us. In our contention, that recitation is inherited, is supported when we look at other verses in the Quran. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, Qulillahumma malika al-mulkitu adil mulkimantaja All ten kananak al-Qura'ah said, Malika al-mulkir, it's unanimous. Why? Why didn't the six Qura'ah who read Maliki Yomedin and al-Fatiha read this as Malik al-mulk? The meaning is sound, it's contextually valid and it's incorrect Arabic. Why didn't anyone choose this reading? It seems to me that they did not have that choice. They were not authorized to read this word in this verse as Malik. There is no recitational latitude in this verse. Why? What makes sense? It makes perfect sense that the Qura'ah were constrained by the living oral transmission of the Quran. They handed down recitational tradition of the Quran. They were constrained by the sunnah of Qura'ah. Let's look at another example of how the multi-form texts of the Quran enriches our understandings of our theological convictions. In Surat Maryam, verse number 34, Allah SWT says, This is how Ibn Amr and Asim and Yaqub read this verse. These are three of the 10 eponymous and canonical reading traditions. This vowing of the texts was taught to them by their teachers. It is talaqee through transmission, through naqal. The word qawl here is in the accusative, qawl al-haq, meaning the aforementioned statements about Isa al-Salam is the true account, the Christological teaching found in the preceding ayat presents the true Isa al-Salam.  He's not the son of God. Wa ja'alani mubarakan aina ma kuntu wa awsani bi salati wa zakati mad-dumtu haiyyah that Jesus is mubarak, he's blessed, he's not mal'un, he's not accursed, as Paul says in the New Testament in Galatians.   It is the word, the qawla of truth about which they are vainly disputing. Now this verse is also read. Iqa Isa ibn Maryam qawl al-haqil ladhi fihi amtarun with qawl in the nominative. This is a reading of the seven other eponymous and canonical reading traditions, including Nafir. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam recited it both ways. This difference is by design, not by accident. This enriches our understanding. So now the verse means such was Jesus the son of Mary. He is the word of truth about which they are vainly disputing that Isa al-Salam is the word of al-haq, the word of Allah which is an honorific title. It's takrimi as Imam al-Razi says. If someone is known for their generosity, we can say he's generosity itself. That Jesus peace be upon him was totally truthful in his speech. Why? Because all of his speech was wahi, was revelation. He only spoke the words of God. Therefore he's called the word of God as a way of honoring and praising him. Why does the Quran praise him in such a way and emphasize his truthfulness? Probably because the New Testament ascribes to Jesus false prophecies. That is to say falsifiable predictions and blasphemy while the Talmud describes to him deception and sorcery. So in this honorific way, Isa al-Salam is the word of God. Not in the Neoplatonic or Trinitarian sense where he's the pre-eternal logo so emanated from the very being of an ontologically or hypostatically superior deity. The Quran says, This is negating illa and ma'luliyah. In other words, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala did not cause or beget a person or son from his own being in pre-eternality nor was Allah an effect of any logically prior cause. So we see how the qaraat which are derived from the ahruf, you see how they enrich the meanings of the ayat. This is an aspect of the uniqueness of the Quran. I think I'm out of time. Insha'Allah ta'ala. We'll continue next time. Insha'Allah ta'ala. We'll say this. I ask forgiveness from Allah. I ask forgiveness from Allah. He is the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful. Tubu ila Allah. Ya Tawab, Tub'alina.


Hey everyone, in this video I'm going to be talking about how the discard phase isn't real. When the narcissist discards you, when they leave you, they make it seem like it's so serious. Like they're walking out on you and you're never going to see them again, but it's really just an act. It's an illusion. You think they're gone, you think they're not coming back again, but in most cases they always come back with the Hoover. If it's not a few days, there might be a few weeks or months. At some point they come back again. The discard phase is an illusion. It's really just an act. They will always find some way to pop up in your life again. Just when you think that you've got rid of them, maybe they'll drive past your house. They'll show up where you work. They'll always find a way just to say, peekaboo, here I am.  It's like you can try and move on. You can go no contact with them. You can change your phone number, your email address, you can delete your social media accounts, but they always find some way back into your life.  Or you go to the grocery store and there they are, they're shopping as well. It's like no matter what you do, you just can't get rid of them. They're everywhere. They're just always there. So yes, the discard phase isn't real.  Of course they want you to think that it's real because then they get supply when they know that it's hurting you.  But then before you know it, a few weeks, a few months later, there they are again. It's like you just can't get rid of them. So when the narcissist acts like the discarding you, just remember it is an illusion. It isn't real.  Because trust me, there's really no better feeling when you know that you've gotten rid of them. When you know that they're not coming back. When you know that you're free, you think that you had a good time while you were with them. At least in the beginning you might be thinking back to the love-bombing phase, thinking that you had a good back then, thinking that they treated you right. But trust me, your life is gonna be so much better. When you get these individuals out of your life, you will be so much happier. You'll feel so much more free. Life is so short and it's meant to be enjoyed, not endured. And you all deserve to enjoy it.   That's why even when they were there, they were always so paranoid and hyper-vigilant. They were afraid that you were gonna leave them. And a lot of the times, they're just beating you to the punch. It's like they want to leave you before you leave them. So yeah, I just wanted to share that with you. The discard phase isn't real. It is an illusion, but you shouldn't stress too much over that because you're not really losing anything anyway. All you're losing is a problem. So yeah, I hope that message is helpful for you and do check out my website www.narksviver.co.uk. And if you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at coaching at narksviver.co.uk or you can message me on Instagram at narksviver YouTube. So yeah, thank you all for joining me tonight and there will be more videos tomorrow. So have a good day or night depending on where you are and I'll talk to you soon.


Right now, like, I'm trying to get on the field anyway. I can't help the team. So, right now, Nick was in that position, so I'm still focusing on it. I mean, a lot of movement in the NFL. There's a lot of movement. A lot of window dressing and stuff like that, you know what I mean? It's not quite as simple as college. You know what I mean? So, getting used to that and slowing the game down for sure is the biggest challenge. Yeah. Really, I mean, I try and think of a key word and then focus on that throughout practice. And today was efficiency. The rookies were out here a couple of days early and, you know, it's hot. We're getting a lot of reps and, like, later on in practice, your technique starts to, you know, fall off a little bit and that's when you need to be most efficient. So, that's what I was focusing on today. I mean, it's still early days with the first stock and Caleb took care of it first and then I'll be next. But really, right now, just like, they're probably helping me more than I'm helping them. I'm just watching them and seeing how they operate. There's going to be a lot of snacks, you know? I'm sure a lot of weekend dinners and whatnot. Yeah. Just about the other day, he knows camp, so he knows, like, by 7 o'clock, I just want to chill with my fiancé. And I told my mom, I told her there's two, like, two or three days throughout the week off FaceTimer because it used to be, she wants to call me every day for two hours a day. So, I gave her, like, a two to three day limit and she took that hard.  He didn't say anything. And I think, you know, sometimes that's the best piece of advice. First and foremost, like, my effort, you know what I mean? Especially when it's, you know, when the practices are long, I don't want to be, you know, the one in the back of the pack. And then I'm just working on polishing my game, you know? I'm a perfectionist and I need to manage my expectations and whatnot, but, you know, the goal is to win every rep. I'm just fortunate enough that we were able to get in during OTAs. You know what I mean? A lot of, the rookie last year didn't have that. And, you know, that makes it a lot harder. So, and I stuck around here for the month and a half we had off and got familiar with the facility and coaching staff. Yeah. Yeah, no doubt. I think, you know, the first couple of weeks, I mean, really probably the first year is just a good impression. Whether that's out in the field or in the meeting room, you know, being prepared for meetings and taking the second before answering a question to make sure I'm composed and I know what I'm talking about.