Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, alhamdulillah wa salatu wa salam, wa ala ashraf al-anbiya'i wa al-mursaleen. Sayyidina wa maulana wa hadibina Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wa salam, wa ala ali wa sahbihi wa salam tasliman katira. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh dear brothers and sisters and welcome. Alhamdulillah, I believe this is session maybe 12 or 13 of Agenda to Change Our Condition. So alhamdulillah, we are going to continue with chapter three from where we left off last time. If you are new to this class, I invite you to check out MCC's Facebook page and their YouTube page. They have all their past videos on there and you can see what we've been doing here with this class. But just again, we are covering a text called Agenda to Change Our Condition by Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shaqqat. Here it is. I encourage you to get the text, inshallah. But I do have some accompanying slides that I used just to guide the discussion. So we're going to go ahead, inshallah, and screen share right now. So I'll go ahead and do that. Bismillah. Give me one moment. There we go. And Bismillah. So the last time that we spoke, we were still covering chapter three and the section that or the topic that we're covering in chapter three is called Practical Steps to Change Our Condition. And so this is now really, you know, a lot of times when we talk about wanting to better ourselves, you know, I speak to people all the time who really want a deep connection with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And of course, we know the basics. We know we have to pray more. We know we have to do the more they give. We know that we have to increase our general, you know, Ibada and our consciousness of Allah are remembrance of him. But sometimes there's other things that are much more practical day to day things that we can do. So this chapter is actually talking about those day to day things. It's giving each person an opportunity to really test the sincerity of their desires because you know, it's easy to say I want to be close to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. I want to be better Muslim. I want to do these things. It's on the tongue. We can all profess these things. But when it comes to action, this is where we really show our sincerity. So here is an entire chapter devoted to giving us practical ways where we can really do that where we can really change our state, our condition, our connection to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Again, Dennis, an incredible service by compiling this book, which has so many profound reminders and just it's just full of gems. And Alhamdulillah, we have covered so far up until now. Anyway, so many wonderful things and there's much more to come. But just to quickly recap, here's chapter three, the practical steps, right? So we covered, for example, and this is the first page that I have here covers. Sorry, there's a bit of a lag sometimes. So it's not coming up, but just bear with me here. Let's go back. Then it goes really fast. Okay, so here are the topics that are covered in chapter three. So they talk first about the five pillars and really coming to understand them and implementing them and making sure that we do them correctly. Active outreach, Dawah. How do we do Dawah as Muslims? What is our approach? Of course, every faith group or every political group or every, you know, group has their own way of outreach. But we, Alhamdulillah, as Muslims have a very unique and beautiful form of outreach, which we call Dawah or invitation. We invite people to learn about our Dean. Instead of, you know, going out and doing missionary type work or proselytizing to people, we invite them to learn, right? So learning how to do that in the best way possible, focus, you know, how to establish focus in general on what you want, you know, in your faith, in your practice, cooperation, learning to be someone who is a team player, a group, you know, who thinks about the collective, who thinks about the benefit to everybody in all of your actions, how to have a good character. So all of these things are kind of like kinship, families, we've covered so far in the previous sessions. So today we pick up on charity. So I'm going to go to that slide here. So here again, we did active outreach, we did focus, right? Cooperation, good character, and kinship families talked about the importance of keeping family ties, right? All of these things are very important for us to remember because in order to really cultivate and get as close to the prophetic example as possible, we have to take all of these messages very seriously and implement them.  So these are all again ways that we can do that. So for the next topic of charity, here's the content of that section, we should all commit to donating some portion of our wealth in addition to the zakat that we pay. Commit to some Islamic cause financially and support it on a regular basis. Also try to support any bona fide organization that solicits help. Regular spending in charity diminishes the value of the world in our hearts. This is one of the greatest means to prepare us to meet our Lord. The Prophet said wealth is not diminished by charity. So I love if again, you're paying attention to the phrasing here. Our understanding sometimes as human beings is that when we give away our wealth that we are losing, right? We are losing somehow because it's normal. We live in a time and place where we're doing transactions all the time and then we go and we get a bill later on if we're using our credit card or we see a statement maybe in our checking account. But there's something that suggests that we are at a deficit that we've lost our funds because we paid for something. So our brain kind of wires is wired to think of giving money as a loss. But the beautiful thing about zakat and about sadaqa is that it is never at a loss. And that's why when the Prophet said I miss telling us in very clear terms wealth is not diminished by charity. We have to believe that with absolute certainty that every time we give for the sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, it's actually going to be returned to us in ways that we cannot comprehend. And we should never think of it as a loss like we do in other cases, right? That it is actually the opposite. The benefit of giving for the sake of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala again is that if you're doing it for that pure intention and you know it's pleasing to your Lord, then you should just feel the sense of calm, this trust and the syaqeen, this certainty that inshallah Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will repay you at some point. And I personally have actually witnessed really incredible things that I can't explain other than to say subhanallah, you know, Allahu Akbar, this is a divine act because I have witnessed things that are just again inexplicable. For example, giving someone a payment of a very particular dollar amount and then you know, being in a position where I need money and the same day just a few hours later, the exact dollar amount that I had given away is returned to me.  I'm talking about dollars and cents here, very specific amounts that are just kind of mind boggling, you know, that how subhanallah did it happen that almost to the exact cent someone pays you something for something totally unrelated to what you just gave to someone else. This has happened to me personally. And I'm sure these things have happened to other people as well. So there are examples like this where Allah is showing us, of course, he's capable of everything and anything that he wishes. And in our mind, it's always, you know, it's amazing and it's incredible. And we should be in awe of him when these things happen. But the point is that this is confirmed for us in so many ways, if we're paying attention to the signs. And again, so many examples. So, and I'll actually I'll tell you one example that just came to my mind. I once worked at an organization and they gave me a payment amount and, you know, they gave me a check and I didn't look at the check, you know, I left the organization and I got into the car and I wasn't actually expecting anything from them at that time. So it kind of came to me as a surprise that they were paying me and I, you know, was very gracious of them. So I took it. I got in the car and as I'm about to or I opened it and I saw the amount and then I decided to, you know, I'm on my home. So I called my husband to ask him, you know, how he was doing and how the kids were just kind of checking in with him and letting him know I was on my home. And then I asked him what he was doing and he said he was actually making payments for our annual, you know, Sadaqah and just different things that, you know, he'd like to do at certain periods of the year. And that's what his task was that day while I was out and I didn't know that. So then he just started listing off like some of the organizations locally, Alhamdulillah, that we support and, you know, just kind of giving me an update of how much he was giving to each. And I was again amazed because he mentioned the organization that I had just stepped out of a few minutes before. And I asked, you know, he mentioned it, what he gave and I said, wait, say that again. And again, it was, it was a, you know, it was a number that was very random. He didn't, you know, he just kind of chose to give that amount. But it was the exact amount that I just received from them. You know, it was like SubhanAllah within minutes, all of this happened and he said that he had just made that payment. So again, these types of things should indicate or should prove to us that when we give for the sake of Allah, we're not losing, you know, he's at home making a donation and then Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is giving me the exact amount back in return as a payment for my service. So it's just these types of things we have to stop and think about the timing of these things and really the great wisdom of why these things happen, but also appreciate these words of our Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam who reminds us that wealth is not diminished. But what is diminished, right? What is diminished by giving charity? What is, well, he tells us right here or this, that our scholars tell us here, regular spending in charity diminishes the value of the world in our hearts. That's important because the dunya, the more we attach our hearts to the dunya, the worse off we are. This is why people have problems in this world because hubba dunya is a disease of the heart. It afflicts many of us and we have to purge it from our hearts because when we attach our hearts to the world, we have a difficult time dealing with the reality of the world. You know, people who have hubba dunya have a difficult time when they're afflicted with different trials and tests or calamities because they have attached themselves to the wrong thing. They don't want to leave this place and so anything that threatens that becomes very difficult for them. Health matters for you.  Nobody wants, you know, a diagnosis from the doctor that we know, you know, is likely to end either really, you know, a terminal for example diagnosis or something that we know that our health is in jeopardy. Nobody wants to hear that. But a person who is attached to the dunya and is afraid of death and is afraid of their meeting with Allah SWT will have a much harder time coping with the reality of their impending mortality. And this is why we have to stay away from things that attach our hearts to the dunya. So by purging or by giving our wealth away, we are inshallah, preventing our hearts from attaching to this dunya. You know, and mashallah, there are so many amazing examples. Just this past Friday, for example, I tuned into a broadcast on Celebrate Mercy, which is a wonderful organization dedicated to teaching about the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. But they do these programs on Friday called Friday Gems and they have different speakers and they had a speaker named Imam Soheb Sultan and he's from the Princeton community on the East Coast. He's a chaplain at Princeton University. But Imam Soheb, and I ask everybody to please make the offer him and his family. He gave possibly one of the most moving talks I've ever heard.  But they gave him a prognosis of two years that he had, I think one to two years. Anyhow, Imam Soheb gave this wonderful just, it was so moving to see someone facing their own mortality with such grace and such dignity and masha'a Allah, the Bara'a Allah, speaking so eloquently and beautifully with so much faith about death. And this is someone clearly who has made peace with the decree of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. Now, if you're attached to the dunya, again, it's going to be very difficult to do that. So this is why we have to practice of charity, Sadaqah, because I can't very seriously because there's wisdom in it beyond just giving wealth and helping people who need it. Of course, that's also one of the main reasons why we give. People have rights over us and so we give to fulfill those rights. But it really, the other byproduct of giving often and frequently is that you are helping your heart disconnect and you're seeing the reality of this world for what it is, which is a place that we travel through. We are not permanent residents on Earth, right? That's not what we want. We're just travelers, inshallah. And so you kind of just lose that love for it. But this is one of the wonderful benefits of giving charity often. So I encourage you to please, you know, make the offer Imam Soheb and his family, but watch that talk or send it to people. It should be on the YouTube page of Celebrate Mercery or Facebook. Send it to anybody that you know who is currently struggling with a diagnosis or some other serious grave health issue and they are having a hard time or even grief. You know, grief is something that a lot of people grapple with and I know because I do grief counseling or spiritual grief counseling with people. So I know that it's very difficult for a lot of people who are going through loss, whether it's the loss of a parent or a spouse or a child, God forbid, or any family member to sometimes really cope with those things. But it's important to hear messages like Imam Soheb because this is someone again who has a different perspective that we need to hear more often. You know, death is something unfortunately that has been erased in our society so much and people are so uncomfortable talking about anything related to death. And the reason that is because we are stricken with a world that is so attached or, you know, it's just a time where people are so attached to this dunya that the thought of death repels so many people and they run from it. But this is not our way. The believer remembers death or we should remember death. We should think about these things and we should talk about it comfortably because we don't see death as an end. We see death as a transition to the soul's journey and it's actually a one step closer to our Lord. So we should welcome it because again, if we are happy to return to Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and be reunited with Him, He is also happy to meet with us. So we should yearn for that. Of course, you know, we should prepare for it and it's something very serious, but not to look at it as this end and then fall into despair which so many people do. So really important again to take charity and the benefits of charity beyond just money and transactions, but looking at all of these other incredible benefits that just getting in the practice of being a more giving person will have on your heart, inshallah. So it's a really important point. Now the next section is also something so Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala important and for us to talk about and I wish I had, I have Mashallah some really wonderful friends. One in particular comes to mind. She is a half of the Qur'an and she's a lover of the Qur'an. May Allah bless her. But she's the type of person that whenever the Qur'an is mentioned, you can see this light just shine upon her because she is so moved by the Book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. And it's really something that is her life passion. Mashallah may Allah increase her. But this chapter, I mean I wish she was here because I think you would have a much more fruitful discussion hearing from someone like her to really explain this chapter, but I'll try to do my best. I used to teach Qur'an back when I was teaching at the Islamic schools here locally in the Bay Area. And it was one of my absolute favorite times of my life because at that time I started my every single day alhamdulillah wa shukrillah teaching Qur'an and to who, to the young children. So it married the two things that I love so much in there, so dear to me, the Book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and children. So this chapter certainly spoke to my heart but let's look at what our teacher said here. She said that read the Qur'an in its entirety at least twice a year. At least once in Ramadan and once during the rest of the year. Try to read it with contemplation at least once a year. We should make it a habit to read those chapters. The Prophet's life set him encouraged us to read every day at their appropriate times. Yasin al-Murq and al-Waqya should be a part of a daily practical practice. If one is able one should see complete one should, excuse me, complete the Qur'an every 40 days, every month or every week as was the profound practice of our earlier communities. So let's just talk about that for a moment. You know, reading the Qur'an masha'Allah, you know, at least once in Ramadan. You know, we have Ramadan is coming up, right? It's just a couple of months shy, right? Ramadan. And so this is the time now where we have to really start to prepare our hearts for the regular recitation of the Qur'an. And so, you know, sometimes though, again, because of our own nefs and the nefs is remember lazy, it doesn't usually work with us. It works against us. We might just think of the Book of Allah SWT as only being for the month of Ramadan because it's the month of the Qur'an. And so, insha'Allah, there's, you know, we recited and we engage with the Qur'an during that month. But as this advice is very clear, that should be like a given, you know, it is the month of the Qur'an. We should just kind of give that it's due, you know, just like we fast and we give zakat and we're more charitable and we feed people and we do all those beautiful works. We should just understand that it's a given of Ramadan that we're going to read the Book of Allah SWT and insha'Allah, do akhatham, right? So that's, you know, let's put that aside. Now, the other part of the advice is that we should be doing it the rest of the year as well. So this is where all of us have to again go back and really hold ourselves accountable. If you've ever said that you really want, for example, khushu, right? So many people I've heard this over the years say, I wish I had khushu in my prayers, right? I wish I had more connection, more feelings. Sometimes I just, I don't feel it. And they're always talking about their feelings and their feelings and their feelings. And there's this idea which we should reject. The idea is that in order to establish a regular practice, I have to first feel something, right? I have to have this epic, you know, sort of a, you know, spiritual awakening or experience is high. And then that will motivate me into doing regular practice. There's some people who have that idea and they're waiting for that. And it's kind of like, well, until I feel that, you know, bolt of inspiration or jolt of inspiration into my heart, I'm just kind of going to, you know, do your, but not they kind of, you know, just have that understanding that something has to happen and then they'll suddenly, you know, change. Whereas when we understand this entire text, what it's really saying to us is, you know, you have to do the work. You can't expect the fruits, right? If you're not going to till the soil and get in there and harvest and plant your seeds and water and do all that, you can't expect fruits. That's the byproduct of your diligence, your persistence, your sincerity.  And one of the areas that I believe, and this is also what our teachers have have mentioned as well, is that there's been a disconnection or a disconnect from the book of Allah. And so we have to hold ourselves accountable and ask ourselves how often do I really engage with the book of Allah. And I know we've, I'm sure all of us have heard the khutbas and the lectures that talk about all the Quran's are collecting dust on the bookshelves. Well, that might not be as relevant anymore because now everybody's kind of moved to digital, you know, mediums and we have apps and we have all this other stuff. So let's talk about that. Do you have, you know, if Allah has made it so simple for us now, right? We don't have to go to the bookshelf to go and read the Quran. I mean, obviously, if you ask any Quran teacher, they would tell you that's preferable to use the actual physical must have. But beyond that, if Allah has made it easy for us to access his book through the phone, through our devices, which are in many cases, sometimes super glue to our hands, right? I mean, that's what it seems like because we don't put it down. But if that's the reality that we have such easy access to the book of al-Husbandah and, you know, we're not still reading it, then the problem is with us, right? It's not that we don't have enough time. It's not that we're, you know, too busy doing this or the other. It's that we lack initiative or we lack that desire and that should cause concern. Why?  You know, people spend hours. I always marvel and, you know, this is just a general observation, right? I think if you spend time reading fiction and getting involved in all of these different genres and books and self-help books, it could be you know, nonfiction science fiction, whatever it is that you're into. But if you make time to read those things, you have Kindle, you have all these other apps, you have all those other access to different books, and you make time for that, just think about your choices, right? It's kind of, it's definitely a downgrade, right? If you're going to spend hours doing that, but then you say or you claim or you maybe, maybe you don't even think of these things, but the reality is that you're not making time for the best book on Earth in existence, which is the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. The stories within the book, the treasures, the messages, the profound heart wrenching sometimes verses and heart you know, flooding the heart with inspiration verses are so much that the Quran offers, and every time you read it, it'll offer you something new. Why? Because we are always evolving. We're always in different phases of our life. So 10 years ago, we may have been in a different stage in our life than we are now. We've evolved inshallah. We've gained wisdom. We see things with a different eye. So when you go and you open the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala, you could read the tafsih or the verses and maybe a chapter that you memorize when you were 10 years old, suddenly it has this profound effect on you now that you're reading it at 30 or 40. But if you don't even bother to do that, then you have to again, hold yourself accountable. Why? Why is it that I am making time to escape into all these fantasy lands when the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala describes for me the greatest thing that my mind can't even fathom. When you read the verses of Jannah and you read these incredible stories that have happened that are real, we should be in awe of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and his creation and of the prophets and all of the extraordinary things that are to come. That's what the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala does is it prepares the heart for truth, instead of just falling into a fantasy land, a fiction written by human beings. So just call yourself out. Like what is it that I don't want to read the book of Allah, but I'll read other things. It's likely, again, you're enough, Shaytan, this is how he works. He likes to distract and get us all swept away with whatever trends are happening. The reason why is because we won't make time when we should for the most important thing is if we're too distracted. So you have to pay attention and ask yourself, how have I changed over the course of five, six, seven, eight? Just go back as far as you can. Even one year, ask yourself from last year to now, how have I changed in terms of my relationship with the book of Allah? Have I memorized more? Have I read more? Have I committed to reading more? Do I, you know, am I looking forward to Ramadan and actually engaging with it? Or am I kind of dragging my feet and thinking about it that way? All of those things are important internal conversations to have because I'll let you know where you are spiritually. But the bottom line is, as this advice tells us, we should be making a concerted effort throughout the year to read as much as possible every day. And for some people that might be a few verses, some people that might be a page, some people, mashallah, who do far more than that, who can do more than one juz, you know, mashallah, and they read very frequently because that's their commitment. So every one of us have a choice to make about how we use our time when it comes to the book of Allah swt. But the most important thing is to remember that it's not just for the month of Ramadan. This is a book that we have access to 24 seven every single day. And if we are truly sincere about wanting to be close to Allah swt, the least we can do is read His words, right? I mean, that's to show you whether or not your claim or your desire is sincere. If you're not willing to do that, then it's just lip service at that point. It's just words that you say, but the heart has to be moved to action. So, and then of course, the wisdoms here about reading the certain, you know, chapters that will, that there's great benefit to, right? So with the mulk, of course, we know it's a very night. This was the practice of the Prophet So I said, I'm to read it before sleep. So with a lot of many of the scholars say that if someone is struggling with risk, right, they they want to increase their sustenance to read surat al-waqia frequently. Surat Yasin, in general, this is a healing. It's the heart as they say, the heart of the Quran. You can read it for you can read it for many, many different benefits, but just making the practice of reading these surahs as often as possible, inshallah, until you you memorize and it's incredible the Book of Allah that how without sometimes even any intention or preparation you just by listening to verses frequently and often you find that you've memorized them. That's such a gift from Allah, right? That just listening to his words that they not only, you know, they penetrate the heart, but inshallah, they also seer into the into the mind and we memorize them. So that's all gifts from Allah, but we have to do the work, right? So, you know, and if one is able one should complete the Quran every 40 days, every month, every week. Again, that might not be where you're at right now, which is okay, but work towards that and I'll tell you from my own personal experience. Alhamdulillah for more than maybe 10, 15, I don't know how many years now. I really don't have the count, but it's been certainly more than 10, 15 years. I have alhamdulillah completed the, you know, the Quran once a year in the month of Ramadan. That's just been my commitment and alhamdulillah Allah has given me Tawfiq every year, inshallah may that continue. I mean, but this year and actually, well, in the past few years, I started to realize like I need to do more than one Khatm instead of just, you know, doing what I just said, which is only doing it for Ramadan. That was because, you know, typical excuses we all make motherhood, all work, all this stuff would get in a way. So I never would really be able to finish an entire Khatm. I would get close, but not really. So this year, alhamdulillah, I'm just giving this nasiha because it might work for you. I'm very blessed to have a group of beautiful sisters, Sahbah matters, the people that you interact with on a regular basis. They should inspire you and if you don't have that, you know, companionship may Allah give you good friends, good sisters, good brothers, but this group of friends I'm very blessed to have because what we did is after Ramadan we decided that we were going to commit to doing a Khatm together. So every month we have this rotation where we assign, you know, certain juz or chapters of the Quran to each other and then we rotate. So after, you know, every month it's the next set of chapters that we read. And the intention was that by the end of the year we would have, inshallah, finished an entire Khatm collectively because we're all reading from different parts. And so now collectively we do a Khatm every month, but by the end of the year individually we've all finished another entire Khatm. Actually just today I spoke to two of the sisters that are in the group and we were speaking about actually accelerating and increasing our reading for this particular month because the Ramadan is coming and we want to do more. So this is the benefit of doing these things with a group, because when we're left to our own devices, again the ego is strong and Iblis can distract us so we might not get very far. But when you do things like that where you commit to reading with your friends instead of book clubs, Oprah's book club or whatever other book club you have, where you get together and you discuss books that have really very little benefit to you. I don't want to discount book clubs, okay? That's not what I mean. But I'm saying if you had a choice, if you have very limited time and you can only do one book club, please do a Quran club. Get together with your friends and say, you know what, I want to start doing Khatm so let's do these together. It's a very simple idea. You just rotate five six chapters per month per person and inshallah you do a Khatm every month. So anyway, you know, do that. Do that instead of getting together and just talking about random books that you'll forget about as you move on to the next one. Whereas with the book of Allah it does imprint, it will impact your soul and more importantly, most importantly, it strengthens your connection to Him, right? So the advice at the bottom here it follows in the next paragraph is that we should also commit to memorizing some portion of the Quran every year and couple that with memorizing the 40 Hadith of Imam Al-Nawli. So this is also another objective we should all have. Alhamdulillah back 20 plus maybe 15 plus years ago in the group that I was involved with and studied with we did this. We actually had this kind of like a competition I guess you could say of memorizing the 40 Hadith. And Alhamdulillah I remember you know getting into it and the first maybe two or three Hadith Alhamdulillah committed to memory and then you know life happened and I know the Hadith but I don't have them all memorized. But anyway those first three Hadith that I memorized Alhamdulillah you know the brain is an amazing thing. You know we all know this if you've committed anything to memory that even if you don't visit something for a long time that you made it's still there right. So there's been times where I'll come across one of those Hadith that I memorized many many years ago and I always marvel at the fact that I can still recall it or I still remember what comes next and it's like wow this isn't something that I engage with every single day like the Quran right the Quran is different. We memorize the shorter verses for example of Juzama because then we go and recite them in our prayers but with the Hadith it's not always the case to be reciting them all the time but it's still incredible to me that after so many years of not engaging with those Hadith that they're still imprinted in my memory and I can recall them Alhamdulillah Al Shukrullah. So the benefit of memorization for the sake of Allah is that the gift keeps on giving and that you're not Allah will give you the gift of just being able to hold on to his words or the words of the Prophet SAW. Alhamdulillah again if we're sincere. So there's more that I wasn't able to type these, some of these sections are a bit longer so I can't fit everything on the slides but I'll read from the text. So after they mentioned the 40 Hadith of Imam Annoi, our teachers also say also reading the gardens of the righteous at least once a year is a cogent way of reminding ourselves of daily sunnah practices. We should all strive to retain what we have memorized from the Quran. Ibn Hajar Al-Haythami and others considered it a major sin to forget what one has memorized of the Quran. So that's also really important. If you've committed to memorizing parts of the Quran or you already have then the task at hand is to renew your memorization and to make sure you review and you're always reciting those verses and to not forget. And so that can happen in many different ways. Again, reading them in your prayers or just reading the verses or listening to them, listening to Qari and making sure that you can recite along. It is prohibited to derive rulings from either the Quran or the Hadith unless one has fulfilled the prerequisites of an independent jurist, Mujtahid or has studied what the rightly guided scholars have said about a particular verse or Hadith. So this is now just a general warning against taking your reading of the Quran to a different level that is not appropriate for you. Just because you are reading the Quran or the Tafsid or the meanings does not mean that now you are able to interpret those verses or use certain verses to establish rulings and to go out and start distributing fatwa to random people. We should know that that is completely unacceptable and wrong because that's not the role of every person. We have scholars who have done the training and they have gone through the requisite knowledge to do that so that is not our place but we can certainly read about the opinions of scholars and the rightly guided scholars of the past or the present who have arrived at certain decisions or conclusions and we can share those but not to take it into our own hands. We are commanded to remain humble in the presence of the book and the Hadith and maintain in our hearts the following three Quranic injunctions. So first, seeking refuge in Allah from Shaitan before we read anything from the Quran. So A'udhu Billahi Minash Shaitan al-Rajim taking that very seriously because you don't want to open the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and then just start reciting without saying that and your thoughts go all over the place and it just ends up not being beneficial to you for that reason, right? Do not be forward with our own understanding in the presence of Allah his book and his messenger Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, the sunnah and ask the people of remembrance if we do not know. So do not be forward again not to assume that we understand everything because there are some verses that we would need further analysis or the analysis of the scholar or the interpretation of the scholar to truly understand sometimes we can get a little too confident and that's what that's speaking to to not be overconfident, to be humble, to accept that language, most of us I would say the majority of us are very limited in our knowledge with the book of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala and English translations or other language translations do not equate with actually understanding the Arabic and knowing the different roots and all of the meanings and there's so much nuance. We cannot compare ourselves to the level of scholars who dedicated their entire lives to studying the book of Allah and even they themselves will tell you that it's an ocean and that they're they don't have all the answers. So who are we to presume our understanding right and then the to ask right so if there are certain verses that we don't quite understand to do that do diligence to get the answers that we seek instead of assuming things taking our own interpretations or letting those thoughts kind of turn into doubts and then it affecting our faith in general but doing the necessary work to find answers inshallah and Alhamdulillah for our deen that doesn't shy away from that. People are not told not to ask questions. We are actually told the opposite to seek to learn to go out and ask of course in the best way in the best context but in other traditions they're not even allowed to ask so we should say Alhamdulillah that's not our faith right so that was the section on the Quran and of course there's so much more to say about the book of Allah but they're keeping it pretty concise here as general advice on how to change one's condition when it comes to these practical day to day things that all of us can be doing so taking up again a regular practice of the reading of the Quran is something all of us should be doing every single day at least one page or verses just something but you can't completely disconnect and unplug from the book of Allah and then expect to see all these openings it's just not that's just not going to happen now the next section or that's not likely to happen I should say the next section is the remembrance of Allah so this is again at the bottom of page 33 if you do have the text we're let me see the time actually here okay Alhamdulillah okay Alhamdulillah so in the remembrance of Allah this section we must be committed to a serious practice of the remembrance of Allah and be actively engaged in purifying and preparing our hearts for the inevitable meeting with our Lord vikr has a profound effect on the heart and should not be underestimated it must be done regularly even in small amounts a little that is constant is better than a lot without consistency the minimum vikr should also include a portion of the Quran every day and the prayers and orations that the Prophet s.a.w. was known to recite in the mornings and in the evenings and this is something we also have to be immensely grateful for that the Prophet s.a.w. left us with so many daily du'a from the moment we wake up when we go to the restroom we leave the restroom, we put on our clothes sit down and eat, we finish eating we leave the I mean and we should do our best to memorize those du'a to teach those to our children because what that is doing is putting them in a state of constant remembrance of Allah s.w.t if we just did the five prayers there's so many hours through the day hello are you there I have no idea what happened I think somehow I got disconnected from the broadcast but I hope we're still broadcasting I actually don't know if we are but let's see ok so our inshallah we're still broadcasting I apologize I don't know if my internet got disconnected or what happened but something did happen so let me bring the screen back up inshallah we'll just quickly resume from where we are I apologize for that little inconvenience there ok so we were talking about the remembrance of Allah so let's see here I don't remember what I was saying but I'll go back and read here it says the minimum that should include a portion of the Quran every day oh yes I was talking about the daily du'a's of the Prophet s.w.t and the fact that the fact that the Prophet s.w.t left us with beautiful du'a's to fill in those gaps between all of the five prayers and it's to put us in the state of constant remembrance because in the absence of that and the absence of the remembrance of Allah our nafs will start to fill the void with other things like I said with music you see people watching just spending hours and hours scrolling on tiktok videos or instagram snap whatever social media they're on disturbing toxic news from cable news or you know watching Netflix and all these other streaming services why because they're not preoccupied with something better so we have to think about how we use our time and that's why the remembrance of Allah is so important because it puts you and I love the way they phrased it you know the fact that we do it because it will prepare our hearts for the inevitable meeting with our Lord subhan Allah that's really it we need to be prepared because it is going to happen and if we've learned anything this year during covid we should have learned about the fragility of life the fact that at any moment someone can be taken and it's really in Allah's hands and nobody has any idea of when our time comes and that awareness and it's quite I mean subhan Allah it just speaks to how much we need to we need Allah subhan Allah and how much we are desperate for his mercy and his forgiveness because the very fact that he's told us that death is indiscriminate and that we have no idea when we will go that that doesn't put us in a state of fear and and just wanting to you know do our best is is a clear sign of how forgetful we are how we can fall into heedlessness so easily and how we really are at the mercy of Allah because if you really think logically about it it's like you know it's in many ways you know for example when you when you hear of someone with a terminal diagnosis like this brother that I mentioned earlier imam sahib sometimes you may imagine like wow how does it feel to know that you have a sentence already you know someone has given you a clear indication that you will not live past this age right like to know that your mortality is not only imminent but it's almost written in it on a date or a time frame that is tangible that you can you know understand we may just sit there and think oh my gosh how you know that's that sounds so terrifying but if you really think about it aren't we all in the same position in the sense that we are all terminal we all will die and the fact that we don't have the answer should make us even more nervous because at least the person who has some idea they have time they have time to get their order you know affairs in order they have time to you know fix situations that need to be fixed and prepare their family and prepare their hearts and to really work on their relationship with Allah so in many ways it can be a blessing in disguise but those of us who don't have that you know prognosis or who haven't been given that shouldn't we operate on a more you know kind of you know nervous or not fearful but you know just there shouldn't there be more urgency shouldn't there be a sense of wow I really need to get myself together because I don't know it could be tomorrow right because death is veiled from us we have no idea when our time is but if we really remember death often and we remember the lost prophet often then what that would do is it would as imam so hey beautifully said on Friday it would help us to live better you know that's the beauty of the remembrance of death that's the beauty of the remembrance of the lost prophet is that you are remembering not to get caught up in the sad dark space of death and morbid thoughts no it's to say you've given me this precious life gift of life and I want to you know live it to its fullest and take care of my family and my relationships and my loved ones and just be a good person that's what the remembrance of Allah and the remembrance of death should do which is why it's so important now if you did that every day if you read the book of Allah's prophet every day if you did the remembrance of Allah's prophet every day then when death comes will you be in that panic state that I'm certain millions of people have found themselves over the course of history because they weren't prepared may Allah protect us from that we should ask Allah's prophet for the best ending that we are protected from that type of an end that we're caught completely by surprise and we're not prepared and we're even doing something worse which is engage in sin may God protect us and that's our time and you see these I was just telling some friends earlier today on Amazon Prime there is a show I think it's only available until the end of this month but it is about people who've had near-death experiences and I really recommend you to watch it it's just really profound to hear people and you know we have to just believe that these people are not fabricating their stories they seem, I mean they have these are real true accounts of people who have had accidents really horrific, horrific near-death experiences but they are speaking openly you know years maybe sometimes after their trauma their traumatic experience about what happened to them the moment that they you know died in many cases their hearts flat-lined they lost consciousness completely for some in some cases 20 minutes imagine subhanallah nothing no brain activity, no heartbeat, nothing but they are describing these scenes that are just out of this world subhanallah literally and it's really moving to hear their accounts but it just reminds you that subhanallah this is you know death it's gonna come at any time for all of us and we have to be prepared for it and this is why the remembrance of Allah is so important and so they go on to talk about, I'm sorry let me see the time we have that little disruption ooh subhanallah, okay we're right at 9 o'clock so I'm gonna actually, I'll stop here there is more to share on this section that I don't want to just quickly summarize, I think we can just pause and we'll return inshallah in a couple of weeks continuing this section on the remembrance of Allah and then continuing with the next section so I'm gonna stop here so that I can see if there are any questions and bismillah just give me one moment I can pull up the screen okay bismillah so I'm gonna go to Facebook and sorry I'm trying to coordinate here there's too many tabs open I have to open up actually a Facebook tab so and brother salman if there are any questions on YouTube please let me know I have a hard time coordinating between the two but let me check with MCC okay mashallah so I don't see any questions in the Facebook page but let me go to YouTube and I'll try there and then if there aren't any questions inshallah we can just end and then we'll resume inshallah I have a hard time coordinating between the two sorry my volume came on okay so alhamdulillah I'm on YouTube and I also don't see any questions here but I thank you all for tuning in inshallah with the section on the remembrance of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in two weeks time and I invite you again if you don't have the text to get the text and to read ahead you're more than welcome to read ahead we're still on chapter three and that way you'll be ready for inshallah the next session but thank you again for your time may Allah protect and preserve all of you and your families inshallah we will end in dua bismillah


Our next lecture has certain risks. It has more risks actually. It's called Plains and Chips and Saving Lives. It's how Soft and Hardware can actually play a key role in saving lives at sea and why Frontex doesn't like it. It's done by Trollafix, Nick and Ruben and what is following is actually a talk that's once again about a very serious moral and ethical dilemma. Since the death rate at the UPC border reached in historical record this year, in September one out of five people actually who left Libya on a fine wanky boat drowned in September. So the main reason for the increasing of this death rate is actually the crackdown on sea rescue operations by European authorities. Since no rescue coordination center clearly takes responsibility currently then the technical means of communication of course do play a key role in the efforts to coordinate rescues and in the future and that's what my friends here are going to explain you is that a civil society run maritime rescue coordination center could help to reduce the death of sea significantly. This talk focuses then on the Soft and Hardware components that are necessary to challenge European deadly border policy. So give them a warm applause. They will present us some potential solutions to fulfill this ambition. Thank you all. Yeah, thanks a lot for joining. It's great to have you all here because we need you all to solve this problem on the Mediterranean Sea we are going to talk about. My name is Ruben, that is Nick and this is Trollofix. We are going to talk about planes and ships and saving lives and especially how this comes together with people that are competent in IT technology that are competent in hardware technology and why this is so much needed currently on the Mediterranean Sea. Me personally I'm not a nerd at all so I have basically no idea about computers. I need my house nerds like Nick to help me encrypting my computer and my emails which is also pretty important in this time for Sea Rescue and I will tell you why shortly. So I'm basically giving you a short introduction into the situation on the Mediterranean Sea and afterwards those people who are much more competent in IT technology and hardware will talk about the solutions we need at sea for saving lives. So basically what is the problem? People are in distress at sea. This is a picture taken from our surveillance aircraft Moonbird. There's a rubber boat which is sinking and taking water. This is a situation we might currently have north of Alchoms which is a Libyan town at the so-called European border. I mean it's the Mediterranean Sea which is basically the border of the European Union. People start in Libya, try to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Why a boat? Because there's no safe and legal alternatives and so they are ending up in such kind of situations. If the talk is a bit chaotic at some points it might have to do with the fact that we are currently in operation with our ship and so there was not much time to prepare because still people are stranded on our boat but I will talk about that a bit later. So we have this situation with people in distress. So what would you normally expect that's going to happen? Well, if you are white and if you have a European passport and you get in distress some 100 meter out of a Yacht port in Germany that's going to happen. However, if you are not holding a European passport and if you are trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and you get in distress maybe that's going to happen because basically the reaction of the European Union onto distress cases at sea looks like this. There's simply nothing. So what we were thinking about some years ago when the death toll on the Mediterranean Sea was on the rise, what can we do if people try to cross the Mediterranean Sea and risk their lives in totally un-sea-worthy old fishing cutters? So we had the idea that there was a solution to this and so we also bought an old and un-sea-worthy fishing cutter which we then turned into the Sea Watch One which was the first rescue ship coming from Germany to the Mediterranean Sea. However, we called it Sea Watch for a reason. We didn't call it Sea Rescue for example because in our view it's not the obligation of the civil society to solve the problems. European state have caused by closing down their border and by denying any legal alternative for people escaping war, terror or other things for example in Libya. So we thought what we still need to do is we need to go there, we need to look into the situation and we need to make sure that no one drowns. So that's basically what we did and we sent down the ship to the Mediterranean Sea and pretty fast we found a lot of people in distress there and we had to deal with it. So in the first moment we were pretty overwhelmed but then what happened and that was really amazing was that the civil society actually acted. So a lot of new NGOs popped up and sent ships to the Mediterranean Sea and that was something I was honestly impressed by because if we think about the European Union with all the means they have with ships, with planes, with a lot of money, whatever, we would have never estimated that it would be some Berlin hipsters in their mid-20s to send the most effective asset to defend the human rights on the Mediterranean Sea and to rescue lives. So but it was not only the Juventa, it was also for example Lifeline, Doctors Without Borders, there were the people from Sea Eye sending ships, so in the end we had a whole civil rescue fleet that was carrying out rescues on the Mediterranean Sea and that worked pretty well. So the civil rescue fleet was able to save thousands and thousands of lives on the Mediterranean Sea and that worked pretty well also because the coordination with the rescue coordination center in Rome worked pretty fine because during that time also on the European side at least some people thought well if people get in distress at sea we should probably rescue them. That's also a normal thing. So could you imagine someone could have something against rescuing lives at sea? Well probably you know the answer already. There is that guys. I mean that guy was pretty prominent in the media this year by plucking civil rescue ships but it also started a bit earlier. That guy, you might also know him, was the first one starting with the huge criminalization campaign against the civil sea rescue. So back in 2016, end of 2016, early 2017 there was a lot of rumours spreading about the NGOs on the Mediterranean Sea. What are they doing? Are they maybe colluding with the smugglers?  For example there was the accusation that was widely spread that we would give light signals to the Libyan shore. I mean we have nerds here so probably you are pretty good in mathematics and in geometry. So what do you think about the argument that there is the possibility of giving light signals to the Libyan shore if you are far out of territorial waters of Libya? So basically already from a geometry perspective it's not possible to give that kind of light signals. Still this accusation was widely spread. And of course that helped to let our donations drop and make our work much easier. Another accusation I want to shortly talk about is the accusation that we would not destroy the boats we find. Because there was the accusations if we find a rubber boat in distress we have to destroy it and then it cannot be used again by smugglers so there was the accusations we would not destroy them. I have to prove that we do so. So that's how it looks like if we destroy boats. So basically we have a lot of these accusations and what do you think how this contributes to the fact that we need a lot of nerds to help us in carrying out our mission. Why can nerds make our mission much safer? Well because if we are able to document what we are doing at sea, if we are able to document the positions we are on, if we can have a video of whatever happens at sea, then we can prove afterwards that these accusations are false. And that's why it's pretty important to have hardware technology on board our vessel. So that's one thing. However the story continued so these kind of accusations were very effective and so we ended up in a situation where the Juventa was the first ship to be confiscated. It's still confiscated, it was confiscated already in 2017, it's in Trapani now and it cannot do its job anymore. And we thought okay we still continue but then this year a lot of other ships were confiscated. We have the case of the lifeline that was very prominently in the media. The lifeline is still confiscated in Malta. So it became much more difficult for the civil NGOs and there was a moment where no civil rescue ship at all was left in the Mediterranean Sea. And of course this has effects. So what happened basically was the people were still coming because I mean there was this argument of a push factor, sorry a pull factor, so there was the argument by the European states that only because there is civil sea rescue the people are coming over the Mediterranean Sea and then they get rescued by the NGOs and then they get brought to Europe. However when there was no NGOs anymore still people were coming but there was just no one anymore to rescue them. So the effect of this fact we have seen in a pretty trastical way in the September of this year because before we had this number any idea what this number means. So this number is basically the death rate we had shortly before the NGOs were pulled out of the area. So it was 1 in 44. So if 1 in 44 who tries to cross the Mediterranean Sea via the central med would drown. When we had the last rescue ship the Aquarius stopping the operations because their flag was taken away in September the number raised to 1 in 5. So in September when there was no civil rescue ship at all we had 1 in 5 drowning who tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea and to better imagine what it means if 1 in 5 drowns you can just count in the rows here and you will recognize that it's a pretty horrible situation. And for this reason of course we tried to continue sea rescue. These pictures are taken last week because even though sometimes it's hard times at sea we managed to get our ships at least some of our ships back into operation and also we got back into operation our planes which we use for air surveillance. This picture is taken a year ago but the aircraft just took off half an hour ago from Lampedusa to search the eastern part of the central Mediterranean Sea. And that led to a situation where we are able to act again. So on Christmas or the weekend before Christmas the first rescue as in months since months carried out by civilian rescue operations took place. Those people are by the way still on the sea watch. But actually we are able to operate however and that's also why we had a lot of stress the last days. Coordination is pretty difficult. We now have a lot of groups involved in search and rescue. We have a difficult situation at sea so it's sometimes not easy to understand what is going on so communication is pretty important. So what can we do to not let this situation up end up into chaos like we can see on this picture. We need you because their hardware and software can play a key role to make our operations much more efficient. So we'll start with the hardware. I mean if you have a ship at sea hundreds of kilometers away from the shore then there's no way to actually reach this ship by simple mobile phone. So satellite communication is the first and very important part of hardware technology we have to use to make our operations much more efficient and how this works we will later see in a live call if it works out actually. And on the other hand another pretty important part of the hardware components is that we need actually cameras and we need voice recording systems to be able to prove what is going on at sea so that's why we need you guys because that's something I can't do. Then there's another thing. This is a IMRSAT-C technology. This is a basic satellite communication system to communicate with ships at sea. It's obligatory on all ships and this is also a way to reach other ships than our own vessels because it's not only civil rescue ships on the Mediterranean Sea it's also merchant vessels or other ships that are just around. We can contact through that and why this is important and why we need you to help us solve some problems with this old Microsoft DOS technology that is combined with that. That's also something Nick is going to talk about. And last but not least what we also want to establish and that's pretty important is a civil rescue coordination center because in former times when everything was running kind of okay the rescue coordination center in Rome if they are aware of a case of distress they would send the position to the civil rescue ship and they would coordinate everything so they would have their charts they would have all their screens and they would just deal with it and they would just only tell the civil rescue ships where to go and what to do. Since Salvini is in power this just doesn't happen and so we have to do it ourselves. That's why we think it's pretty important to have such a chart where we can plot all the distress cases where we can coordinate it ourselves. This is for two reasons one is to save human lives and one is also to monitor the human rights situation out at sea. So that's what Nick is going to tell you about what we need from the technical side. This comes into place again because this is very old technology and we need to combine it with new technology that looks like this so we can use it together and yeah that's basically the task we're going to talk about and so at this point I would like to hand over to get some more details about the technical solutions. Yeah hello I want to give you a short introduction how it's like to be this ship system administrator. I will spend two weeks in September on the on the lifeline and basically refurbished the whole ship's network. So a short introduction again the ship was built in 1968 as Cloupier and was built by the 40 Department of Agriculture and Fisheries of Scotland and in 2015 it was bought by Seawatch and then in 2017 it was bought by Mission Lifeline and is since operated by Lifeline. Well and as you can imagine in the last 50 years a lot of mechanics engineers and technicians botched around the ship work, repaired stuff and upgraded it so in some parts this feels like maintaining a legacy software project. The power supply there are two generators on the ship so in general the stability and availability of the power is not as reliable as on land so therefore all devices which are essential for navigation and communication are better rebuffered. Now I want to shortly cover devices sensors and data providers you will find on board so for navigation we have a gyro compass which is basically a compass which gives the orientation on the and gyro which gives the orientation of the ship in the waves because it's always changes of course. Then we have GPS receivers so this is the global positioning system so we always need to find our current position and we also have AIS transmitters and receivers. AIS is the AIS is the automatic information system so this is basically a transmitter which sends out the ship's name, the current position and the course and this is also for collision avoidance. Furthermore we have weather data which is fetched online and for communication we have standard radios and iridium, a visa uplink and LTE but I will cover that later and many of these devices need to be interconnected so the autopilot for example needs access to the compass data of course and to the gyro and GPS and the AIS. Some of the radios need AIS and so basically we have lots of devices on board and a huge network and everything is connected with various NMEA 0183 buses which is essentially RS 422 or NMEA 2000 which is essentially a canvas so we have multiple of these in the ship to interconnect all the devices we find on the bridge. So furthermore there's also an office on the ship so there are printers, white phones, a Wi-Fi network, Ethernet network and we have lots of laptops with Linux. Furthermore there's also there are IP cameras as Ruhm already told and audio recording setup and network storage because you might later need to prove what we did so we need to record all our positions and all the cameras, what the cameras recorded from deck and around the ship. So all of the computers on the lifeline are now provisioned with Ansible which is a fast replacement in emergency situations e.g. for example if the ship's the bridge computer with the navigation crashes or just falls down due to heavy waves so we can grab the media team's computer and make it a bridge computer within minutes. So furthermore Ansible has the great advantage that we sort of have a documentation and for a replacement cruise which happens every two weeks it's comprehensible how the computers are set up. Also documentation is essential. If you build something without documenting it it's virtually non-existent. Especially on a ship this can be very dangerous and for example in life threatening situation if you need a handbook of a broken device and you have no power and no internet connection this can be really dangerous. So you need to document everything. Here we see the storage compartment for the documentation which is the whole row of folders up there and so everything is ordered by letter and number and so on so it's easy to access everything because everything is on board. Also a labor printer is very helpful if you have a bunch of cables as you saw in the previous picture it's rather annoying to find out which cable belongs to which. And as there is no strength or storage compartment but rather many small spaces and under seat benches and beds and cupboards you need to be very organized to put everything in its spot at all times or you will spend most of your time searching for your tools and materials which is rather annoying to go up and down the small steps on the ship all day long. And also it's rather inconvenient if you wake up the ship's engineer because you need to access the compartment below his bed just to find out that the tool you are looking for was not there anymore because you put it somewhere else. So to give you an imagination I'll show you a short video hopefully. Okay. So yeah well I started also taking videos for documentation. To show the locations of these compartments because it's not really convenient to take pictures of write it down because then I can give the replacement cruise a virtual tour of the ship without being on the ship myself and also the others don't need to be on the ship and I can show them around and then they can immediately ask questions. So I took another video. The whole thing here with the switch, as I said, is currently still defective. Exactly. After that, the three minutes need to be heated up and then you can start here with the STBI Standby TX switch and then the antenna starts turning up. The opposite of this device is then over here. This is the remote processing unit that is basically connected here with a DVI cable and various other items. Here this thick cable that goes out here that is also what leads up to the mast. Similar to all these radio devices and so on. And also the two of them in front. Channel 12 is the harbour radio channel 16, the radio channel. Also these antennas lead to the mast and that's why these cable trees go off. Here it disappears in. All that is up here in this wood coating that is removable leads here to the devices. So there is also the laptop that, for example, is here. Yeah, okay. That's it. That's it for that. So basically I was, as the video is very recorded in German, I'm shortly going to explain what I told. Basically I showed the radios and the radar system in the bridge, which was located there. And also basically in the rest of the video, I would show how the cables go through the ship to which positions. And lastly, I want to quickly introduce a project Daniel made. Yeah, we've had some problems that the ship has multiple uplinks as already explained and we always wanted to select the currently best uplink. There are commercial solutions for this and there's a talk about why we didn't use it. It's called Das Boot 4.0 by Stefan Gehling and it was held at the MRM CDs this year and it's available via media CC CDE. So feel free to have a look at it. So we have three uplinks. The first one is LTE. Every one of you has in his phone or her phone. So it's very fast but it has limited traffic and it's only available in ports or close to the islands. Then we have Visaat, which is satellite base. It has a flat rate, it's lower than LTE and is available on C most of the times but it needs a dish and this dish always needs to be aligned with the satellite. So sometimes there are obstacles in the way. For example, the ship's pole and then we have to have no fix. And also in heavy sea sometimes we lose the link. And then we have Iridium, which is also satellite base but doesn't need a dish but just a regular antenna. This works mostly all the time but it's super expensive, like for a phone call three euros per minute and 16 euros per megabyte. So we use this. No. We build a set up, which basically is an APU board with an LTE modem which is shown here and it runs open WRT, an embedded Linux system for a Linux operating system for embedded devices. And we have two VPN endpoints in two different locations on land running open WRT as well. And we set up wire guard tunnels between all devices and then the uplink to be used is determined with OLSR, which is a link state routing protocol and maybe known to you from Fryphone because they also use to use it. So basically if Visaat or LTE are available, always the best link will be used and provided. And if LTE and Visaat are gone and will automatically drop to Iridium but due to limited bandwidth and the overhead, we don't use the wire guard tunnels then anymore. But actually the set up worked very well for the last months and the uplink availability also compared to the previous installs which also increased. Yeah. Hi, I'm Nick. Yeah. As I said, I'm working with SeaWatch. We already had to talk like two years ago about developing the search and rescue application, which was basically like an application to provide C2C communication organization. That means we basically had the problem that at this time we're like a lot of NGOs working in this area. And yeah, we basically wrote like a geographical information system to coordinate between all those ships and to basically track our ships. What we are like, yeah, the problem we're having at this moment is that we have still some assets in the rescue zone, but we don't have like a MRCC, that means like a rescue coordination center, which is coordinating those cases. So what we are basically thinking is all the assets that are MRCC, like a state-run MRCC already has, are already available. That means there are NGOs which are caring about emergency call telephone lines. So that means if people start from Libya right now, they are likely not called the Italian MRCC, so the Italian Rescue Coordination Center anymore, because it's super likely that they will pass on this information to the Libyans. So it's like more likely that, yeah, like voluntarily NGOs are called and they are like trying to manage those cases without human rights violations. That means they inform those ships which will, yeah, for example, not the Libyan Coast Guard, etc. So we also have like the assets already in place. That means as a maritime coordination center has the Coast Guard, etc., we already have ships which are like able to rescue. And last but not least, the Rescue Coordination Centers also provide like all the forensic stuff and also are like responsible for taking all the evidence. That's what we're doing right now for our ships. That means like with this application we're having running right now, we can track our ships all the time. That means, like for example, we had one incident where, yeah, like there was a rescue of the Libyan Coast Guard where a seawatch was also involved, where like more than, yeah, around about 30 people died. And the first accusation of the Libyan Coast Guard was that we were in that territory water. So it was like quite a fast thing to prove with our data, like there's also like more neutral data on it, but we could like see super fast and with that improved super fast and with that, that we were like never in the territory waters in this incident. So this kind of stuff is super important also to then give it away to other organizations, for example, Forensic Architecture, who then work with this data to, yeah, display it nicely and also pass it on to possible, yeah, law enforcement authorities, which deal with it. So what we're doing right now or what we're planning right now is that we want to take this application and make it more to a land sea organization, software and that's really important. We had the cases that there were boats in distress, especially like in the last month. And because of the situation that Italy is not feeling responsible anymore for those ships, we had the situation that commercial vessels, that means tankers and so on, had to rescue those people and they were, yeah, in the situation that they couldn't really get rid of the people as fast or like, yeah, so, yeah, how to describe it, they weren't allowed to go into Italy, which means that for example the SARS-5-1 ship was forced to have around about 80 migrants, I guess, for two weeks on board without like really being prepared for it while our ships were blocked in Malta. So what's happening right now, if migrants are in distress, that it's super likely that those ships will not rescue them. So we already also had the reports from migrants who said that they were seeing ships when they were in distress and they just passed by it. It's not clear if they saw them or not, but yeah, it's happening at this moment. So what we are trying to do is, as said, there's AIS, which is basically publicly available. So that means everybody can get this data and what we want to do is, now we want to have a database of every ship which is passing through this area. So now we also want to take commercial vessels into our application so that we can, if there's any incident, can afterwards see which ships were closed by and even if we have reports what the ship looked like, etc., we can maybe find out what ship it were and then look if we can provide information to law enforcement authorities to then maybe get forward with it. So that's the basic idea. So now can you go to the call? Yeah. So as you have seen now, what why we need this technique for, now we want to have a little practice test and we are all curious if it's going to happen. So what we are doing now is to call our ship which is currently stranded at sea with 32 people rescued already six days ago. Yeah, and it's pretty important because as you can imagine there's now negotiations ongoing, international negotiations, we are talking with governments, we are talking with cities, whether they take the people and then we have to be constantly in contact with the ship to find a solution for these people and that's why we need this technique and now we're going to see if it works out. Yeah, hello. Hello. Hi. Hello from SeaWatch3. Hi from the Chaos Communication Congress. How is the situation on board? Hello. So we are now 67 ish miles out of Malta. Hello. Yeah. On the 22nd of December, shit, just this week. Yeah, just today. We rescued 32 people at the stress at sea. We can hear you. And we have been drifting and moving in international waters since. Cool. So this is the people who survived inhumane treatment abuse. Can you see the audience? Can you see the audience? Maybe we can give to the audience. We can see the screen. All right. So normally you should see the audience here listening to you guys. However, if you can't see them, I can see them and I can refer. So is there any questions you guys want to ask to the ship? Then it's your opportunity now. Yeah, that's a question. Hi. I was wondering when are you planning to go to a dock somewhere? Like how does that work right now in the current situation? Because you have people on board, right? So you need to get them on to land, I'm assuming. So I just repeat the question because I don't know if it went. So we got the question was when are we going to dock? Yes. And how does it work? I hope you can hear me now. I have a big delay here. Our plan was to dock quite a while ago after we rescued the 32 people from the boat in distress on the 22nd. Actually, we went back on the 23rd towards north. But the thing is that no European state, especially not Martin, Italy, who are the closest ports of safety would grant us permission to go into port. So right now we are just waiting for any opportunity to go to a port of safety that is in vicinity of our current position. Someone else's question. Okay. Any more questions to the ship right now? So you're looking for a place right now, who are the parties you are talking to? Are you talking, are people on land talking to governments or are you guys on the ship directly communicating to ports? Who is talking to who for this? Yes. So basically the question was whether the ship is talking to us. I think at the moment that was the delay. I'm sorry for that. Now we have a huge delay here. So I think a lot of people are talking to a lot of people at the moment. Our head of mission is constantly in contact with the back of this, but also worth the... If someone has a question, raise your hand. There you already can see how difficult it is to get this kind of connection established. And that's also why we need you, because anything that improves this situation, that we have to delay, that we don't get the picture, that's what we need you for. And then we have the people talking to governments, driving speedboats to rescue people out of the maritime distress. That's all we can solve. But this, what is happening here right now, that's what you have to solve. Maybe there are commissions as well for this group here. Okay, we have two mics as well. Raise your hands. I can run. What was what happened with the medical emergency right now on the boat? Were they allowed to dock then? Or is it just with the docks on board? There is a medical emergency. We normally ask the closest MRCC that is able to provide a medical evacuation that is normally carried out either by a speedboat or by a helicopter. This happened, for example, last Friday when there was a medical emergency on the open arms, which is the ship from our partner organization Proactiva. There was a baby that was in severe distress and so Malta in the end sent a helicopter to fly the baby and the mother to Malta. However, it took quite some time and in the first place there was no authorization for even a medical evacuation. So even that becomes pretty difficult in these times now. Someone else's question. There are microphones, right? One and two. I can of course run around all the time. It's really good for my condition after last long night. So my question is what do you do when you aren't allowed to like go to a port and when there's are more people in I mean in danger on the sea? So is there a limit? I mean there will be a limit on people you can take on the board, but do you have a second boat where you pass the people on the sea? Because I mean if you can't like get them on the land that's a pretty good question. I mean that's what we are trying to solve at the moment and we don't really have an answer to this because normally the law of the sea is pretty clear that people have to be brought to a place of safety as soon as possible after a rescue. However currently as you see we are hanging around at sea skyping with the chaos communication congress but there is no solution where to disembark the people and also at the same time we have information about three boats in distress right at this very moment and there's our partner organization CI which carried out a rescue today morning. So yeah we are trying to coordinate with them and with them so the ship is back. Great. Yeah. Hi so I'm not entirely up to date about the situation of the singular european countries. The last thing which comes into my mind was that there was support from the Spanish government did that change in the past few weeks and months or are they still supporting NGOs like yours? Do you want to go on the ship? What did Spain say? So we for now no there is there was another rescue by open arms the organization for active open arms over 300 people were rescued and this is the ship that carries a Spanish flag so they headed naturally for Spain. Our flag is that of the Netherlands so our case is different. As we said that this is still ongoing the whole negotiation of what happens when we get our flag country I say for provided by them and then we can go there. So in this case this is Netherlands. And I think what is what is very important to say here is that Spain itself hasn't been very supportive. I mean Spain has its own rescue going on at the Strait of Gibraltar but there have been a couple of cities in Spain especially Barcelona where our partners from Proactiva Open Arms are based also who have been very supportive and so the Spanish government has bowed also I think to the pressure of the Spanish civil society who like really because Proactiva is pretty big there. So the Spanish government has bowed a couple of times but they wouldn't do this for anyone and they didn't do it for us even if we could have just handed over these 30 people we have on board to the through our Spanish partners at Open Arms and they could have taken them. I have another question. So it sounds like there's no real solution and you have to negotiate this on a case-by-case basis. Is that actually like how it is? That's how it is actually unfortunately. Number two question for people on board. First of all I really do hope the 30 people on board are okay and they get sort of somewhere to land safely. I'm curious about these negotiations. What kind of leverage can you apply to I suppose it's mostly shame governments into letting you dock. How do these negotiations work? I mean there's beside of shaming the German Interior Minister which we normally do on Twitter. There is the law of the sea and the law of the sea is pretty clear and we are currently living in a situation where basic rights abandoned by the European states which makes it pretty difficult but at the same time this law basis is still in place. So what we also try to do is to remember them about international conventions they have signed which basically state that there needs to be a port of safety as soon as possible and there is actually obligations for states also to make that happen. So that's also part of the negotiations. However as you said there is not much left as leverage and then to publicly shame them for just abandoning basic human rights at sea. But maybe in addition to that what we have seen and what was a lot of leverage was the seabrook movement. We have seen in Germany because when we had at the first of this kind of standoffs with the lifelines stranded at sea with more than 200 people in front of Malta. We thought okay if the governments are not reacting if Sehofer just doesn't do his job we will do it more from a grassroots way. So we talked to a lot of cities we talked to several federal states and for example Berlin then said well yes we would welcome them and Berlin was the first federal state to do it and many others followed so Hamburg Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, Thüringen, Brandenburg everyone all of a sudden said okay we would take some of those people and exactly the same thing is happening right now so we had quite some negotiations ongoing the last two days with German federal states and right now some of them again Berlin in the first place said that they would welcome these people and that even forced at the German Interior Ministry to make a very embarrassing tweet where they said that actually they are open for a solution but only if it's happening on European level because Germany already had taken I think 115 people that were rescued at sea so big applause to Germany the biggest and most rich country on the continent has managed to take 115 people not this month this year not this month not this week this year the whole year so yeah pretty embarrassing tweet by the Interior Minister and we now try to pressure him a bit more by also involving other European states and by trying to put pressure to at least take the 32 people where we think that should be possible By the way we have this expensive line open there I suggest to communicate then okay hi my name is Friedrich Beckmann I'm from Seebrücke Augsburg we met with Seebrücke Augsburg the CSU Fraktion from Augsburg last week and we will meet Oberbürgermeister Griebel on 11th of February and we wanted to or what we are doing is we explain the idea that the city of Augsburg will ask the Ministry of Interior in Bavaria to say we are ready and we are welcoming people in distress which are on boats such that they can leave the boat and they could you could enter Malta Haber and they will just fly over based on paragraph 23 so on humanitarian reasons and do you think that would help if Augsburg would say yes that's a bright idea we are ready to take a number of people like 100 500 whatever um so that you can leave actually the the ships ships oh sorry uh could you and like as Ruben already said the Seebrücke movement and the whole the whole thing of Solidarity Cities is pretty much our our biggest hope it's and I think this also goes together with the civil MRCC that um the only the only solution that can be provided or that looks like promising here is that the civil society takes over because the states are not gonna we've seen this for like almost four years now out here that the states are just going out of the zone are not doing the rescues are not taking the people are actually hindering rescue operations so the only um the only promising solution is that the civil society really steps in and there we need like a lot of creative heads to um to to find ways to operate to keep us operative and to operate a distribution um like the Seebrücke movement did without and and parallel to the to the state authorities okay so um I just heard we are a bit over time so um I would like to thank a lot to the ship I hope you're doing well um I think we're on the ship all a bit tired and exhausted but uh and we would love to be actually on the congress but uh we're doing very well and also our guests are we have a we have a big deck that looks any bit like a tea house at the congress uh there is a lot of music and conversation and singing and dancing and kind of nice things going on uh so although we are a such a rescue ship we're not actually equipped for staying for having guests for longer time on board uh we tried to make best of the situation it's been seven days we have wonderful people on board that's who have been through horrible unimaginable things and we still managed to somehow dance together so we're tired and it's hard but it's also cool we just learned there's one more question yeah we can take one more question if the counter is going probably we're there number one please shoot okay so uh first thank you for the work you do and my question is practicality set aside would your ships theoretically be able to leave the Mediterranean and enter non-mediterranean european ports if there would be an opening that is mainly a political question i mean uh the thing is non-mediterranean you did ask non-mediterranean ports of european countries or of other countries than european countries or both yeah for example we well we could do this and there has been a discussion and actually malta told us to go to russia or some that there has been a couple of people saying to us you've you've got a dutch flag so go to russia we could do this yes but it would take ages it would take up to two weeks to go from here to Rotterdam and another two weeks to go back so it would keep us out of this ison farm longer than we want to and secondly we would have to go through the bay of bisque which is now in winter quite a rough place to be on the seas and it would not be very nice towards our guests who are on our off deck outside in a tent in a huge tent actually to go on the bay of bisque i mean the the mediterranean is treacherous enough every now and then going in the worst waters like the atlantic at this time of the year is would just be irresponsible and yeah yeah and besides staying out of sarzone and what christ mentioned the rough weather are the reasons there is also high cost of doing such a thing be very costly to do that so there are many many many reasons why we also the law says you have to go to the next to the closest port of safety and not to some port on the other end of the world or on the other end of the continent yeah golfer biskaya wouldn't advise to do currently actually my experience i know it had guys i think we're gonna close the session here because their counter was going running and it costs a lot of money of course i would love to thank you there on the on board and thanks here to troller flex thank you all thanks to troller fix nick and robin and thanks to the walk force setting up the video link


What does C-Strux say? How did he react to it?  It messed him up? Yeah, it messed him up. He was like, man, you don't know how much it means for you to call me. I thought, you know, I thought you didn't know what I'm saying? Playing. Playing. Playing, you know what I'm saying? You hit me right... Right there. You know, we both there with the kids. The call, they would make them so happy if you'd be there with these kids to get that call, man. They seen that. They seen that. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. When you was locked up, you used to... You knew he was messing with the music, but you didn't know he had stuff. Right. No, I didn't know.  And when I seen him with Rick Ross, man, it was just like a whole another level. How did that happen? I heard about it when he was going, I'm like, how in the hell did Rick... I know he was a big guy, so Rick was a big guy. And I'm like, maybe that's how it made him connect, you know? It was a model, an Instagram model from Instagram. Okay. And she put up a post, trying to be funny, like, name this rapper. I had my big brother, Totten the Chopper.  Everybody laughing and giggling, like, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, you know, Rick Ross seen it. Yeah, yeah. You know, in the comments, he seen it. He said, oh, yeah.  You see, Struggs record, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I see you grinding, big boy. He said, I'm gonna come do something with you. That's God. That's favor. See, favor ain't fair. See, it was a lot of niggas that wanted to get a feature from Rick Ross. And to be honest with you, for the way God will do it, man, he don't go by standards and set rules, man. You feel me? Like, it'll push you up the line. It don't matter. DJ Khaled might have wanted a verse that week. It didn't matter. God said, nah, we gonna put, we gonna put, DJ Khaled gonna get his, but we gonna put C Struggs up there. You see what I'm saying? Favor ain't fair, man. That's dope, though. That's a dope story. So how did he reach out to him? Caled him. He just called him. He's like, send me your number. I'm gonna call you about 15 minutes later. And it called. It called. What does C Struggs say? How did he react to it? It was like, wow.  It messed him up. Yeah, it messed him up. He was like, man, you don't know how much it means for you to call me.  Playing, playing, playing, you know what I'm saying? You hit me right. Right there. You know, we both there with the kids. The Cal, they were making on, they were made them so heavy you'd be there with these kids. To get that call, man. They, they seen that. They seen that. But you can't, you can't make this up. Go ahead. That's why sometimes, you know, always, I always say our life is not our own. So many people watch our lives and change because of it. You know what I mean? We can look at an instance of how she was making fun of him and somebody else who didn't even comment but saw that and felt, you know, a certain way because of it because they might be in that same situation being bullied in a certain way but then see how something good came out of it. And that could have motivated that person as well. So a lot of times, you know, when we live our lives and we might be affected badly by something, but people are watching you constantly and watching to see how you react, how you overcome. That's why, another reason why we love this platform so much because a lot of people are stuck on YouTube, on their phones all the time and going through situations.  Everybody goes through something and when you're going through things, you think you're the only one who's going through it. Nobody else would ever understand what you're going through no matter what you're going through. But to actually have people come on the platform and say certain things about things that they've been through and how they overcame it and then that could actually help someone who is listening. You know what I mean? I agree 100%. We was going through something during that time, you know, right before that, Rest in Peace, my nephew, Tory Struggs, Tito, you know, a C Struggs son, he had a drowned accident in 2014. I've seen that. I've seen that.  Wow, and it's crazy how it happened. So how, he was how 14? How was it? It was 6. It was 6. It was 6. It just happened in 2014. In 2014. And he basically, how did that affect C Struggs, which is so, we know it was terrible or horrific. Yeah, it knocked the fight out of him for a few weeks, months, but after that, he came harder than ever. He was like, hey, this it. Ain't no looking back, you know? Man. And it gave him the motivation he needed to get where he needed to be at, you know? Would you say that that was the most difficult thing he had to face in his life? Yes. Yes. Going through his own medical condition at that time. And then going through that too. Oh man. It made him a monster in the studio.


T F N N headline news update good afternoon folks we have the Dow industrial trade now down 90 that is like is off 98 S&P's are off down 24 gold gold contract down $7.40 trade at 1637 an ounce we have silver flat $19.14 an ounce light sweet crew down a buck $57.86 33 cents a barrel notes and bonds a 10-year note trade now down 14 ticks $1.1018 a 30-year down 27 at $1.2012 and King dollar King dollars up 780 6 6 trading 111 539 the euros at 98 the yen is out here at a price point of 148.63 and the British pound is 114 to 1 US dollar now it's gonna get a little tricky here this week and the reason being folks okay is that Friday okay had a heck of a run no doubt but the bottom line is that you had a monster contraction of volume so that tells me we're going south now that being said bottom line you can see that you know we're backing down slightly you're down at the spies down 260 you only you have 52 million shares so now you're backing down with light volume the end the x100 we take a look at the end of the year so of course we have the Fed on Wednesday and that's gonna rule everything you have that the cues bottom line that's an inside day down 330 37 million shares now that's light volume but now we're going to go to the dollar so the dollar folks I suspect was looking like in the dollar man is that this thing is going to go after its trend line this is a great man mr. Bud Ralph's rest in peace bottom line is that this trend line now is hitting let me make this again one more time what happens when you break a trend even with conviction which we did the markets they love to go back up and test the underside of the trend line and the price always changes on the trend line because it depends what day it is because you know the longer to get extended out the further that the price could go in this particular case we're looking at one I think it's to 112 550 so it's about a thousand ticks from where we are right now okay here we go got it okay so we're talking 112 480 so you're 900 ticks away from it but looks to me like coming right into the Fed speak that's we're gonna get right up to that level if we get up to that level you're gonna see this market back down the backs of it so this is cool if it backs down today with light volume we back down tomorrow at light volume guess what whatever this Fed says it would be saying we go topside if we come down with heavy volume different ballgame man total different ballgame stay right there folks to come right back