title: Taxation in the United States

text: Organization of state and local tax administrations varies widely. Every state maintains a tax administration. A few states administer some local taxes in whole or part. Most localities also maintain a tax administration or share one with neighboring localities.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The Internal Revenue Service administers all U.S. federal tax laws on domestic activities, except those taxes administered by TTB. IRS functions include:


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The IRS maintains several Service Centers at which tax returns are processed. Taxpayers generally file most types of tax returns by mail with these Service Centers, or file electronically. The IRS also maintains a National Office in Washington, DC, and numerous local offices providing taxpayer services and administering tax examinations.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Tax returns filed with the IRS are subject to examination and adjustment, commonly called an IRS audit. Only a small percentage of returns (about 1% of individual returns in IRS FY 2008) are examined each year. The selection of returns uses a variety of methods based on IRS experiences. On examination, the IRS may request additional information from the taxpayer by mail, in person at IRS local offices, or at the business location of the taxpayer. The taxpayer is entitled to representation by an attorney, Certified Public Accountant (CPA), or enrolled agent, at the expense of the taxpayer, who may make representations to the IRS on behalf of the taxpayer.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Taxpayers have certain rights in an audit. Upon conclusion of the audit, the IRS may accept the tax return as filed or propose adjustments to the return. The IRS may also assess penalties and interest. Generally, adjustments must be proposed within three years of the due date of the tax return. Certain circumstances extend this time limit, including substantial understatement of income and fraud. The taxpayer and the IRS may agree to allow the IRS additional time to conclude an audit. If the IRS proposes adjustments, the taxpayer may agree to the adjustment, appeal within the IRS, or seek judicial determination of the tax.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: In addition to enforcing tax laws, the IRS provides formal and informal guidance to taxpayers. While often referred to as IRS Regulations, the regulations under the Internal Revenue Code are issued by the Department of Treasury. IRS guidance consists of:


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Trade Bureau (TTB), a division of the Department of the Treasury, enforces federal excise tax laws related to alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. TTB has six divisions, each with discrete functions:


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Criminal enforcement related to TTB is done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, collects customs duties and regulates international trade. It has a workforce of over 58,000 employees covering over 300 official ports of entry to the United States. CBP has authority to seize and dispose of cargo in the case of certain violations of customs rules.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Every state in the United States has its own tax administration, subject to the rules of that state's law and regulations. For example, the California Franchise Tax Board. These are referred to in most states as the Department of Revenue or Department of Taxation. The powers of the state taxing authorities vary widely. Most enforce all state level taxes but not most local taxes. However, many states have unified state-level sales tax administration, including for local sales taxes.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: State tax returns are filed separately with those tax administrations, not with the federal tax administrations. Each state has its own procedural rules, which vary widely.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Most localities within the United States administer most of their own taxes. In many cases, there are multiple local taxing jurisdictions with respect to a particular taxpayer or property. For property taxes, the taxing jurisdiction is typically represented by a tax assessor/collector whose offices are located at the taxing jurisdiction's facilities.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The United States Constitution provides that Congress "shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises ... but all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." Prior to amendment, it provided that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be Laid unless in proportion to the Census ..." The 16th Amendment provided that "Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." The 10th Amendment provided that "powers not delegated to the United States by this Constitution, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Congress has enacted numerous laws dealing with taxes since adoption of the Constitution. Those laws are now codified as Title 19, Customs Duties, Title 26, Internal Revenue Code, and various other provisions. These laws specifically authorize the United States Secretary of the Treasury to delegate various powers related to levy, assessment and collection of taxes.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: State constitutions uniformly grant the state government the right to levy and collect taxes. Limitations under state constitutions vary widely.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Various fringe individuals and groups have questioned the legitimacy of United States federal income tax. These arguments are varied, but have been uniformly rejected by the Internal Revenue Service and by the courts and ruled to be frivolous.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Commentators Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright contend that Federal tax policy in relation to regulation and reform in the United States tends to favor wealthy Americans. They assert that political influence is a legal right the wealthy can exercise by contributing funds to lobby for their policy preference.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Each major type of tax in the United States has been used by some jurisdiction at some time as a tool of social policy. Both liberals and conservatives have called for more progressive taxes in the U.S. Page, Bartels, and Seawright assert that, although members of the government favor a move toward progressive taxes, due to budget deficits, upper class citizens are not yet willing to make a push for the change. Tax cuts were provided during the Bush administration, and were extended in 2010, making federal income taxes less progressive.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The Internal Revenue Service estimated that, in 2001, the tax gap was $345 billion. The tax gap is the difference between the amount of tax legally owed and the amount actually collected by the government. The tax gap in 2006 was estimated to be $450 billion. The tax gap two years later in 2008 was estimated to be in the range of $450–$500 billion and unreported income was estimated to be approximately $2 trillion. Therefore, 18–19 percent of total reportable income was not properly reported to the IRS.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Although the United States as a whole is not generally viewed as a tax haven, among its 50 states there are some that individuals and companies use to store their wealth and avoid or evade taxes. This fact was mostly revealed in the leaked Pandora papers – 11.9 million documents that, beginning from October 31, 2021, exposed offshore accounts of world leaders and celebrities. In total the United States were revealed to shelter the second largest amount of money in the world.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Between the years 2011 and 2021 the assets managed in South Dakota by trust companies went from $75 billion to $367 billion. The assets are coming from all over the world – The South Dakota Trust Company has clients from 54 nations. Trusts are particularly popular in South Dakota because, in 1983, it revoked a law that prevented hereditary estates, allowing for the creation of trusts (serving to pass property onto one's children) that, while preventing the sale of the estate assets, also shield those assets from tax. Unlike in the precedent for this in the English common law where these trusts could only exist for 21 years, South Dakota enables trusts to exist indefinitely. Trusts in South Dakota also serve as shields from government inspections and can even protect an individual if they get divorced or file a bankruptcy. In addition to this South Dakota is also one of nine states in the United States with no income tax.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The state of Delaware is home to nearly 68% of the Fortune 500 companies. Corporation trust center in the city of Wilmington is the address to over 285,000 companies including Delaware entities of Google, Amazon, General Motors, Deutsche Bank's subsidiaries etc. This is because this state does not collect any local and state sales tax and the companies based there are not subject to any income tax on their intangible assets. Legally this tax haven can be used by holding companies that charge their subsidiaries trademark charges – thus moving their income (in accounting terms reducing their income tax base by expenses) to the company set up in Delaware where it is not subject to state taxes. Property such as a trademark is hard to put an exact number on which offers the companies a lot of leeway on how much money they move to Delaware. If companies don't conduct any business in Delaware, then they pay a lower franchise tax instead of the corporate income tax. Also because of its business-friendly usury laws the interest rates can go above the average there and therefore Delaware attracts financial companies. Delaware also offers benefits in terms of high secrecy levels (companies don't have to file their beneficiaries nor their officers and directors) and predictable judiciary rulings in conflicts between companies.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The state of Nevada has no state income tax, no personal income tax, no inheritance tax, and no franchise tax. This makes it a very widely used tax haven alongside of South Dakota and Delaware. Nevada also doesn't have an agreement with the IRS on sharing information, so some entities choose to incorporate here as to enjoy the benefits of high privacy. In addition, there are other laws on privacy and company officers’ liability that make Nevada business friendly.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: According to a 2011 study, the U.S. economy would become approximately $1.6 trillion larger or $5,200 wealthier per person, after a simplification of the complex U.S. tax system.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Before 1776, the American Colonies were subject to taxation by Great Britain and also imposed local taxes. Property taxes were imposed in the Colonies as early as 1634. In 1673, the English Parliament imposed a tax on exports from the American Colonies, and with it created the first tax administration in what would become the United States. Other tariffs and taxes were imposed by Parliament. Most of the colonies and many localities adopted property taxes.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Under Article VIII of the Articles of Confederation, the United States government did not have the power to tax. All such power lay with the states. The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, authorized the federal government to lay and collect taxes, but required that some types of tax revenues be given to the states in proportion to population. Tariffs were the principal federal tax through the 1800s.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: By 1796, state and local governments in fourteen of the 15 states taxed land. Delaware taxed the income from property. The War of 1812 required a federal sales tax on specific luxury items due to its costs. However, internal taxes were dropped in 1817 in favor of import tariffs that went to the federal government. By the American Civil War, the principle of taxation of property at a uniform rate had developed, and many of the states relied on property taxes as a major source of revenue. However, the increasing importance of intangible property, such as corporate stock, caused the states to shift to other forms of taxation in the 1900s.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Income taxes in the form of "faculty" taxes were imposed by the colonies. These combined income and property tax characteristics, and the income element persisted after 1776 in a few states. Several states adopted income taxes in 1837. Wisconsin adopted a corporate and individual income tax in 1911, and was the first to administer the tax with a state tax administration.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The first federal income tax was adopted as part of the Revenue Act of 1861. The tax lapsed after the American Civil War. Subsequently enacted income taxes were held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in "Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co." because they did not apportion taxes on property by state population. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, permitting the federal government to levy an income tax on both property and labor.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The federal income tax enacted in 1913 included corporate and individual income taxes. It defined income using language from prior laws, incorporated in the Sixteenth Amendment, as "all income from whatever source derived". The tax allowed deductions for business expenses, but few non-business deductions. In 1918 the income tax law was expanded to include a foreign tax credit and more comprehensive definitions of income and deduction items. Various aspects of the present system of definitions were expanded through 1926, when U.S. law was organized as the United States Code. Income, estate, gift, and excise tax provisions, plus provisions relating to tax returns and enforcement, were codified as Title 26, also known as the Internal Revenue Code. This was reorganized and somewhat expanded in 1954, and remains in the same general form.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Federal taxes were expanded greatly during World War I. In 1921, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon engineered a series of significant income tax cuts under three presidents. Mellon argued that tax cuts would spur growth. Taxes were raised again in the latter part of the Great Depression, and during World War II. Income tax rates were reduced significantly during the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan presidencies. Significant tax cuts for corporations and all individuals were enacted during the second Bush presidency.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: During 1936 the United States adopted the British system of deduction-at-source. This was extended to include dividends, interest, rent, wages and salaries paid by corporations. This system was short-lived as it was soon to be replaced by the system of information-at-source. As was found in Britain this proved to be one of the worst systems as it imposed a huge burden on revenue authorities to correlate large quantities of information. As had Britain, the United States returned to the deduction-at-source system thirty years after it was abolished.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: In 1986, Congress adopted, with little modification, a major expansion of the income tax portion of the IRS Code proposed in 1985 by the U.S. Treasury Department under President Reagan. The thousand-page Tax Reform Act of 1986 significantly lowered tax rates, adopted sweeping expansions of international rules, eliminated the lower individual tax rate for capital gains, added significant inventory accounting rules, and made substantial other expansions of the law.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: Federal income tax rates have been modified frequently. Tax rates were changed in 34 of the 97 years between 1913 and 2010. The rate structure has been graduated since the 1913 act.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The first individual income tax return Form 1040 under the 1913 law was four pages long. In 1915, some Congressmen complained about the complexity of the form. In 1921, Congress considered but did not enact replacement of the income tax with a national sales tax.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: By the 1920s, many states had adopted income taxes on individuals and corporations. Many of the state taxes were simply based on the federal definitions. The states generally taxed residents on all of their income, including income earned in other states, as well as income of nonresidents earned in the state. This led to a long line of Supreme Court cases limiting the ability of states to tax income of nonresidents.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The states had also come to rely heavily on retail sales taxes. However, as of the beginning of World War II, only two cities (New York and New Orleans) had local sales taxes.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: The Federal Estate Tax was introduced in 1916, and Gift Tax in 1924. Unlike many inheritance taxes, the Gift and Estate taxes were imposed on the transferor rather than the recipient. Many states adopted either inheritance taxes or estate and gift taxes, often computed as the amount allowed as a deduction for federal purposes. These taxes remained under 1% of government revenues through the 1990s.


title: Taxation in the United States

text: All governments within the United States provide tax exemption for some income, property, or persons. These exemptions have their roots both in tax theory, federal and state legislative history, and the United States Constitution.


title: Swadeshi movement

text: The Swadeshi movement was a self-sufficiency movement that was part of the Indian independence movement and contributed to the development of Indian nationalism. Before the BML Government's decision for the partition of Bengal was made public in December 1903, there was a lot of growing discontentment among the Indians. In response the Swadeshi movement was formally started from Town Hall Calcutta on 7 August 1905 to curb foreign goods by relying on domestic production. Mahatma Gandhi described it as the soul of swaraj (self-rule). The movement took its vast size and shape after rich Indians donated money and land dedicated to Khadi and Gramodyog societies which started cloth production in every household. It also included other village industries so as to make village self-sufficient and self-reliant. The Indian National Congress used this movement as arsenal for its freedom struggle and ultimately on 15 August 1947, a hand-spun Khadi 'tricolor ashok chakra' Indian flag was unfurled at 'Princess Park' near India Gate, New Delhi by Pandit Nehru.


title: Swadeshi movement

text: The government's decision to partition Bengal was made in December 1903. The official reason was that Bengal, with a population of 78 million, was too large to be administered; the real reason, however, was that it was the center of the revolt, and British officials could not control the protests, which they thought would spread throughout India. Reappointed George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston Viceroy of India (1899–1905), in August 1904, he presided over the 1905 partition of Bengal.


title: Swadeshi movement

text: "Swadeshi" is a conjunction ("sandhi") of two Sanskrit words: "swa" ("self" or "own") and "desh" ("country"). "Swadeshi" is an adjective that means "of one's own country".


title: Swadeshi movement

text: Indians started ditching British goods for Indian products, even though they were costlier. The impact was strong with British seeing 20% fall in its product sales. The trio of Lal-Bal-Pal organized several samitis, Bal Gangadhar Tilak led Ganesh Utsav as a means to popularize use and consumption of indigenous products from soil to sweets. Another notable figure in Swadeshi movement is V. O. Chidambaram Pillai in Tuticorin, who took over British India Steam Navigation Company and converted it into Indian-owned shipping company and named it Swadeshi Shipping Company in October 1906.


title: Song Yuqi

text: Song Yuqi (, ; born September 23, 1999), known mononymously as Yuqi (), is a Chinese singer, songwriter, record producer and dancer. She is active as a soloist in China and is a part of the South Korean girl group (G)I-dle, which debuted in 2018. She was one of the cast members for the Chinese variety show "Keep Running" in 2019 and 2021, and the main host on KakaoTV reality show "Learn Way" (2020–2021).


title: Song Yuqi

text: In 2015, Song attended the Cube Star World Audition Beijing Station, performing CLC's "High Heels" and G.E.M.'s "Bubble". She passed her audition and became a trainee of Cube Entertainment.


title: Song Yuqi

text: In February 2018, she played a girl singing in the street to people in a video Dingo drama "What if an idol trainee asks you to listen to a song? It's a reversal of voice, I wish I could debut | world temperature" (아이돌 연습생이 노래를 들어 달라고 한다면? 반전 목소리네 꼭 데뷔했으면 좋겠다 | 세상의 온도)


title: Song Yuqi

text: On April 8, 2018, Yuqi was revealed to be an upcoming member of Cube Entertainment's new girl group, (G)I-dle. She debuted with the group on May 2, 2018, with the lead single titled "Latata" of their debut album, "I Am".


title: Song Yuqi

text: In April 2019 Song was cast in a new variety show "The Gashinas". The pilot episode aired on May 19. In June 2019, Song was confirmed as part of the cast for "Law of the Jungle in Myanmar". In September, Song sang in a social travel reality show "Please Pay Attention Visitors" ending song, "Happy Seasoning".


title: Song Yuqi

text: In May 2020, Song debuted as a co songwriter and composer with "I'm the Trend". "I'm the Trend" is a song dedicated to (G)-Idle's fandom, Neverland, and was unveiled during her group's first online concert , on July 5, 2020. On May 29, Song was cast as the first performer alongside WJSN's Exy and Yeoreum in 1theK Originals' "The First Date". The show aim to build new friendship by sharing various games, missions, and quizzes by girl group members who have met frequently on various music broadcasts, but have not had the opportunity to get close to each other. For (G)I-dle's first single album, Song was credited for "Dumdi Dumdi" Chinese lyrics and guide alongside Z King. On September 17, KakaoTV launched an original entertainment "Learn Way", a program that captures the process of being reborn as an 'all-rounder' by meeting with expert mentors in various fields with Song as the host. The show was aired on September 20. In October, Song was cast in tvN's "I'm a Survivor" which features Park Eun-ha as the instructor and 6 entertainers who'll go through a survival training project. On November 9, it was announced that Song would participate in "G-Star 2020 with Krafton", an e-sports reality show where celebrities and streamers entered a special school that specialized in battlegrounds conduct episodes and talk related to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Series 3. On November 22, Song appeared on "Play Seoul", a program produced by the Seoul Tourism Foundation and KBS where influential K-stars can share with global fans their experiences in Seoul in real-time. The show aims to promote safe post-COVID-19 tourism in Seoul. Song introduced the hip alley ways in Seoul by visiting Euljiro and Itaewon for their cafes and restaurants. On November 30, Song will also appear in "Seoul Connects U", a variety travel show jointly planned and produced by MBC and Seoul Tourism Foundation. The program will show a time slip trip in the same space and at different times to global fans by linking the past and present of Seoul through photos of stars and fans in real-time.


title: Song Yuqi

text: On May 6, 2021, Cube Entertainment announced that Song would debut as a solo artist with single album "A Page" on May 13, which includes the lead singles "Giant" and "Bonnie & Clyde". On October 27, Song participated in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games theme song "Salute to the Heroes".


title: Song Yuqi

text: Song came to South Korea in 2016 and is known to have high-level Korean proficiency. Her Korean Proficiency level was certified in 2020 when she gained Level 5 out of 6 overall in the TOPIK test (222, 8 points below the level 6 score of 230). When asked about her language skills in KBS2's "Happy Together 3", she answered, "Kim Soo-hyun was my Korean teacher. I fell in love with him after watching the drama "My Love from the Star". I studied Korean with my mother with the drama."


title: Song Yuqi

text: After appearing on various South Korean entertainment shows such as KBS2 "Happy Together 3", JTBC "Knowing Bros", MBC Every 1 "Korean Foreigners", and SBS "Running Man". She has also acted as a special MC on SBS MTV's "The Show" and hosted her own show KakaoTV's "Learn Way". Despite being a foreigner, Song was praised for her sense of entertainment and her fluent Korean speaking ability in commanding of sentences and vocabulary and the use of words that only the Koreans know. Korean media has cited her "Yoo Jae-seok-class sense of entertainment" and calling her "outstanding Korean skills that are different from those from other idol groups".


title: Song Yuqi

text: In 2021, Song was appointed as the ambassador for the International Day of the Deaf, jointly organized by Baidu and Listening Foundation.


title: Song Yuqi

text: In 2021, Song become one of the most in-demand endorsers among young consumers for her outstanding performance skills. In June, Song endorsed Momenten, a sugar-free sparkling alcohol brand, and Limeflare, a fashion and jewelry brand. On August 6, she was chosen to become the face of luxury sunglasses and eyeglasses Ray-Ban in Greater China due to her "brave[ness] in expressing her true self and full of positive energy."


title: Song Yuqi

text: All song credits are adapted from the Korea Music Copyright Association's database, unless otherwise noted.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Lysenkoism (, ; , ) was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. In time, the term has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.


title: Lysenkoism

text: More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.


title: Lysenkoism

text: The government of the Soviet Union (USSR) supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature. Lysenko served as the director of the USSR's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Other countries of the Eastern Bloc including the People's Republic of Poland, the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees, as did the People's Republic of China for some years.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Mendelian genetics, the science of heredity, developed into an experimentally-based field of biology at the start of the 20th century through the work of August Weismann, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and others, building on the rediscovered work of Gregor Mendel. They showed that the characteristics of an organism were carried by inherited genes, which were located on chromosomes in each cell's nucleus. These could be affected by random changes, mutations, and could be shuffled and recombined during sexual reproduction, but were otherwise passed on unchanged from parent to offspring. Beneficial changes could spread through a population by natural selection or, in agriculture, by plant breeding. In contrast, Lamarckism proposes that an organism can somehow pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring, implying that change in the body can affect the genetic material in the germ line.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Marxism–Leninism, which became an official ideological doctrine in Stalin's USSR, incorporated Darwinian evolutionary theory as its integral part. Initially, Lamarckian principle of inheritance of acquired traits was considered a legitimate part of the evolutionary theory, and even Darwin himself recognized its importance. Although the Lamarckian hypothesis was essentially abandoned in the West by 1925, it was still a part of the Soviet ideological doctrine. Besides the fervent "old style" Darwinism of Marx and Engels (which included elements of Lamarckian theory), two other factors prevented abandonment of the Lamarckian doctrine in the USSR. First, Ivan Pavlov, who discovered conditional reflex, initially announced that conditional reflex in mice can be inherited; his subsequent withdrawal of this claim in light of new evidences didn't lead to abandonment of Lamarckian doctrine by Soviet ideologists. Second, Ivan Michurin's work on plant breeding was interpreted by him as proof of inheritance of acquired traits, which bolstered anti-Mendelian theoretical views.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Soviet agriculture around 1930 was in a crisis due to the forced collectivisation of farms, and the extermination of the kulak farmers. The resulting Soviet famine of 1932–1933 provoked the government to search for a solution to the critical lack of food. Lysenko's attack on the "bourgeois pseudoscience" of modern genetics and the proposal that plants can rapidly adjust to a changed environment suited the ideological battle in both agriculture and Soviet society. State media published enthusiastic articles such as "Siberia is transformed into a land of orchards and gardens," "Soviet people change nature" while anyone opposing Lysenko was presented as a defender of "mysticism, obscurantism and backwardness."


title: Lysenkoism

text: In 1928, rejecting natural selection and Mendelian genetics, Trofim Lysenko claimed to have developed agricultural techniques which could radically increase crop yields. These included vernalization, species transformation, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and vegetative hybridization. He claimed in particular that vernalization, exposing wheat seeds to humidity and low temperature, could greatly increase crop yield. He claimed further that he could transform one species, "Triticum durum" (pasta wheat, a spring wheat), into another, "Triticum vulgare" (bread wheat, an autumn wheat), by 2–4 years of autumn planting. Since "T. durum" is a tetraploid with 28 chromosomes (4 sets of 7), and "T. vulgare" is hexaploid with 42 chromosomes (6 sets), Western geneticists at that time already knew this was impossible.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Lysenko further claimed that Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics occurred in plants, as in the "eyes" of potato tubers, though the genetic differences in these plant parts were already known to be somatic mutations. He also claimed that when a tree is grafted, the scion permanently changes the heritable characteristics of the stock. This would constitute vegetative hybridization, which Yongsheng Liu and colleagues note could possibly occur by horizontal gene transfer.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Isaak Izrailevich Prezent brought Lysenko to public attention, using Soviet propaganda to portray him as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. Lysenko's resulting popularity gave him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes, cited faked experimental results, and omitted mention of his failures.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's "new" methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself was from a peasant family, and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," and to decry the "wreckers" in biology, who he claimed were trying to disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. Furthermore, he denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology and concepts such as control groups and statistics in general:


title: Lysenkoism

text: Lysenko presented himself as a follower of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a well-known and well-liked Soviet horticulturist, but unlike Michurin, he advocated a form of Lamarckism, insisting on using only hybridization and grafting, as non-genetic techniques.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Support from Joseph Stalin increased Lysenko's momentum and popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivization strategy, saying that by opposing his theories, the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism. Stalin was in the audience when this speech was made, and he was the first one to stand and applaud, calling out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This emboldened Lysenko, and gave him and Prezent free rein to slander any geneticists who still spoke out against him. After the appointment of Lysenko as head of the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, classical genetics began to be publicly called "fascist science" and many of Lysenkoism's opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or executed because of their denunciations, although Lysenko wasn't directly responsible for this incident.


title: Lysenkoism

text: On August 7, 1948, at the end of a week-long session organized by Lysenko and approved by Stalin, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory." Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko. Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist," and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields such as linguistics and art in the Soviet academy at this time. Perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation were from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: as Tony Judt has observed, "It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess "their" calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."


title: Lysenkoism

text: From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.


title: Lysenkoism

text: In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his "Drosophila" fruit flies, was criticized as a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and promoter of fascism, so he left the USSR, returning to America via Republican Spain. In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience". Over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned, fired or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism and genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Due to Lysenkoism, crop yields in the USSR actually declined.


title: Lysenkoism

text: At the end of 1952, the situation started to change, and newspapers published articles criticizing Lysenkoism. However, the return to regular genetics slowed down in Nikita Khrushchev's time, when Lysenko showed him the supposed successes of an experimental agricultural complex. It was once again forbidden to criticize Lysenkoism, though it was now possible to express different views, and the geneticists imprisoned under Stalin were released or rehabilitated posthumously. The ban was finally waived in the mid-1960s. In the West, meanwhile, Lysenkoism increasingly became seen as pseudoscience.


title: Lysenkoism

text: In the 21st century, Lysenkoism is again being discussed in Russia, including in "respectable" newspapers like "Kultura" and by biologists. The geneticist Lev Zhivotovsky has made the unsupported claim that Lysenko helped found modern developmental biology. Discoveries in the field of epigenetics were sometimes raised as alleged late confirmation of Lysenko theory, but in spite of the apparent high-level similarity (heritable traits passed without DNA alterations), Lysenko believed that environment-induced changes are the primary mechanism of heritability. Heritable epigenetic effects were found but are minor as compared to genetic and often unstable.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Other countries of the Eastern Bloc accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees.


title: Lysenkoism

text: In Communist Poland, Lysenkoism was aggressively pushed by state propaganda. State newspapers attacked "damage caused by bourgeois Mendelism-Morganism," "imperialist genetics," compared it to "Mein Kampf" — for example, "Trybuna Ludu" published an article titled "French scientists recognize superiority of Soviet science" by Pierre Daix, a French communist and chief editor of "Les Lettres Françaises", who basically reworded Soviet propaganda claims, which was intended to create an impression that Lysenkoism was already accepted by the whole progressive world. The scientific community, however, opposed the introduction of Lysenkoism. Some academics accepted it for political reasons, with Wacław Gajewski being a notable and vocal opponent to forced introduction of Lysenkoism into universities. As a result he was denied contact with students, but was able to continue his scientific work at the Warsaw botanical garden. Lysenkoism was rapidly rejected starting from 1956 and the first department of genetics, at the University of Warsaw, was founded in 1958 with Gajewski as its head.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Communist Czechoslovakia adopted Lysenkoism in 1949. Jaroslav Kříženecký (1896–1964) was one of the prominent Czechoslovak geneticists opposing Lysenkoism, and when he criticized Lysenkoism in his lectures, he was dismissed from the Agricultural University in 1949 for "serving the established capitalistic system, considering himself superior to the working class, and being hostile to the democratic order of the people," and imprisoned in 1958.


title: Lysenkoism

text: In the German Democratic Republic, although Lysenkoism was taught at some of the universities, it had very little impact on science due to the actions of a few scientists (for example, the geneticist and fierce critic of Lysenkoism, Hans Stubbe) and information exchange with West Berlin research institutions. Nonetheless, Lysenkoist theories were found in schoolbooks as late as the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Lysenkoism dominated Chinese science from 1949 until 1956, particularly during the Great Leap Forward, when, during a genetics symposium opponents of Lysenkoism were permitted to freely criticize it and argue for Mendelian genetics. In the proceedings from the symposium, Tan Jiazhen is quoted as saying "Since [the] USSR started to criticize Lysenko, we have dared to criticize him too". For a while, both schools were permitted to coexist, although the influence of the Lysenkoists remained large for several years, contributing to the Great Famine through loss of yields.


title: Lysenkoism

text: Almost alone among Western scientists, John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a communist, made an aggressive public defence of Lysenko.


title: Rettendon murders

text: The Rettendon murders (also known as the Range Rover murders or Essex murders) occurred on 6 December 1995 in the village of Rettendon in Essex, England, when three drug dealers were shot dead in a Range Rover on a small farm track. The murders were the subject of a major police investigation and various special operations, including Operation Century, which were undertaken to uncover the perpetrators and as many other details as possible. The murders have also been the subject of books and feature films.


title: Rettendon murders

text: On 6 December 1995, drug dealers Tony Tucker (38), Patrick Tate (37) and Craig Rolfe (26) were shot dead in a Range Rover on a small farm track in Rettendon. The bodies of the three men were found the following morning by farmer Peter Theobald and his friend Ken Jiggins.


title: Rettendon murders

text: A police investigation codenamed Operation Century produced no arrests or evidence leading to a criminal prosecution. A prosecution that was eventually brought in connection with the murders was based on police operations subsequent to the closure of Operation Century.


title: Rettendon murders

text: Two men, Jack Arthur Whomes of Brockford, Suffolk, and Michael John Steele of Great Bentley, Colchester, were convicted of the murders on 20 January 1998 after an Old Bailey trial, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The key witness was police informer Darren Nicholls from Braintree, Essex, who gave evidence against his former friends at their trial. Questions were raised over the reliability of mobile phone records used to corroborate the informant's testimony. Over the last two decades the pair have unsuccessfully challenged their convictions.


title: Rettendon murders

text: On 25 January 2021, after a Parole Board hearing, it was announced that Jack Whomes would be released from prison on licence after serving 23 years. His 25 year sentence was reduced by two years in 2018 due to his exemplary conduct whilst incarcerated.


title: Rettendon murders

text: During the investigation it was suggested that the murders may have been linked to the death of Leah Betts who died after taking an ecstasy tablet.


title: Katie Findlay

text: Katie Findlay is a Canadian actress known for portraying Rosie Larsen in the American crime drama television series "The Killing". From 2013 to 2014, Findlay portrayed Maggie Landers in The CW's teen drama "The Carrie Diaries". From 2014 to 2015, Findlay starred as Rebecca Sutter in the first season of the ABC series "How to Get Away with Murder". In 2017 she joined the cast of FXX comedy series "Man Seeking Woman" in the show's third season.


title: Katie Findlay

text: After appearing in two CBC pilots, Findlay was cast in the Fox sci-fi series "Fringe". She then played Emily in the television film "Tangled", and Rosie Larsen, the titular murder victim, in the AMC television series "The Killing". She has appeared on several television series including "Endgame", "Continuum" and "Stargate Universe". On February 27, 2012, Findlay was cast as Maggie Landers on The CW's teen drama series "The Carrie Diaries", a prequel to "Sex and the City". In 2012, she landed the role of Bonnie in the science fiction film "After the Dark".


title: Katie Findlay

text: In March 2014, Findlay was cast as Rebecca Sutter in Shonda Rhimes' ABC legal drama series "How to Get Away with Murder". The same year she was cast in the lead role in the psychological thriller film, "The Dark Stranger". In the fourth quarter of 2015, Findlay was cast as the role of Molly Callens in a new Hallmark Channel Christmas two-part movie, "The Bridge", based on the novel by Karen Kingsbury; the first part aired on December 6, 2015.


title: Katie Findlay

text: In 2016, Findlay was cast in the third season of the FXX comedy series "Man Seeking Woman", as the new love interest of Josh (Jay Baruchel).


title: Yu the Great

text: Yu the Great (大禹) was a legendary king in ancient China who was famed for his introduction of flood control, his establishment of the Xia dynasty which inaugurated dynastic rule in China, and his upright moral character. He figures prominently in the Chinese legend of "Great Yu Who Controlled the Waters" ().


title: Yu the Great

text: The dates which have been proposed for Yu's reign predate the oldest-known written records in China, the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, by nearly a millennium. Yu's name was not inscribed on any artifacts which were produced during the proposed era in which he lived, nor was it inscribed on the later oracle bones; his name was first inscribed on vessels which date back to the Western Zhou period (c. 1045–771 BC).


title: Yu the Great

text: The lack of substantial contemporary documentary evidence has caused some controversy over Yu's historicity. Thus, proponents of his existence theorize that stories about his life and reign were orally transmitted in various areas of China until they were eventually recorded during the Zhou dynasty, while opponents of it believe that the figure existed in legend in a different form—as a god or a mythical beast—during the Xia dynasty, and morphed into a human figure by the start of the Zhou dynasty. Many of the stories about Yu were collected in Sima Qian's famous "Records of the Grand Historian". Yu and other "sage-kings" of Ancient China were lauded for their virtues and morals by Confucius and other Chinese teachers.


title: Yu the Great

text: "Shuowen Jiezi" (121 BC) gives the earliest Chinese dictionary definition of "yu" : "a 'bug, reptile', from the 'animal trampling tracks' radical, a 'pictograph' ()".


title: Yu the Great

text: Sinologist Axel Schuessler reconstructs 's Old Chinese pronunciation as *"waɁ", and compares it to either Proto-Tibeto-Burman *"was" "bee; honey" or Proto-Waic *"wak" "insect" (further from Proto-Palaungic *"ʋaːk").


title: Yu the Great

text: Chinese sources uniformly asserted that Yu was the son of Gun (鯀) (lit. "big fish"), though they differed on Gun's origins. According to Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, Yu's father was Gun, grandfather was Zhuanxu, great-grandfather was Changyi, and great-great-grandfather was the Yellow Emperor, Changyi & Gun being mere officials, not emperors. Book of Han, quoting Lord Yu Imperial Lineage, stated that Yu's father Gun was a five-generation-descendant of Zhuanxu. The Classic of Mountains and Seas stated that Yu's father Gun (also known as "White Horse" Báimǎ) was the son of Luómíng, who in turn was the son of the Yellow Emperor.


title: Yu the Great

text: Yu's father, Gun, was enfeoffed at Shiniu of Mount Wen (), in modern-day Beichuan County, Sichuan Province; Yu was said to have been potentially born there, though there are debates as to whether he was born in Shifang instead. Yu's mother was of the Youxin clan (有莘氏) named either Nüzhi () or Nüxi (). His surname was Si, later Xia after the state he was enfeoffed with, while his personal name was Wenming (), according to the "Records of the Grand Historian".


title: Yu the Great

text: When Yu was a child, Emperor Yao enfeoffed Gun as lord of Chong, usually identified as the middle peak of Mount Song. Yu is thus believed to have grown up on the slopes of Mount Song, just south of the Yellow River. He later married a woman from Mount Tu () who is generally referred to as Tushanshi (). They had a son named Qi, a name literally meaning "revelation".


title: Yu the Great

text: The location of Mount Tu has always been disputed. The two most probable locations are Mount Tu in Anhui Province and the Tu Peak of the Southern Mountain in Chongqing Municipality.


title: Yu the Great

text: According to the Records of the Grand Historian, Yu was described as a credulous, hard working, quick witted person with moral.


title: Yu the Great

text: During the reign of Emperor Yao, the Chinese heartland was frequently plagued by floods that prevented further economic and social development. Yu's father, Gun, was tasked with devising a system to control the flooding. He spent more than nine years building a series of dikes and dams along the riverbanks, but all of this was ineffective, despite (or because of) the great number and size of these dikes and the use of a special self-expanding soil. As an adult, Yu continued his father's work and made a careful study of the river systems in an attempt to learn why his father's great efforts had failed.


title: Yu the Great

text: Collaborating with Hou Ji, a semi-mythical agricultural master, Yu successfully devised a system of flood controls that were crucial in establishing the prosperity of the Chinese heartland. Instead of directly damming the rivers' flow, Yu made a system of irrigation canals which relieved floodwater into fields, as well as spending great effort dredging the riverbeds. Yu is said to have eaten and slept with the common workers and spent most of his time personally assisting the work of dredging the silty beds of the rivers for the thirteen years the projects took to complete. The dredging and irrigation were successful, and allowed ancient Chinese culture to flourish along the Yellow River, Wei River, and other waterways of the Chinese heartland. The project earned Yu renown throughout Chinese history, and is referred to in Chinese history as "Great Yu Controls the Waters" (). In particular, Mount Longmen along the Yellow River had a very narrow channel which blocked water from flowing freely east toward the ocean. Yu is said to have brought a large number of workers to open up this channel, which has been known ever since as "Yu's Gateway" ().


title: Yu the Great

text: In a mythical version of this story, presented in Wang Jia's 4th-century AD work "Shi Yi Ji", Yu is assisted in his work by a yellow dragon (黃龍) and a black turtle (玄龜) (not necessarily related to the Black Tortoise (玄武) in Chinese mythology). Another local myth says that Yu created the Sanmenxia in the Yellow River by cutting a mountain ridge with a divine battle-axe to control flooding. This is perhaps a reference to a meteorite stone—something hard enough to etch away at the hard bedrock of Mount Longmen.


title: Yu the Great

text: Traditional stories say that Yu sacrificed a great deal of his body to control the floods. For example, his hands were said to be thickly callused, and his feet were completely covered with calluses. In one common story, Yu had only been married four days when he was given the task of fighting the flood. He said goodbye to his wife, saying that he did not know when he would return. During the thirteen years of flooding, he passed by his own family's doorstep three times, but each time he did not return inside his own home. The first time he passed, he heard that his wife was in labor. The second time he passed by, his son could already call out to his father. His family urged him to return home, but he said it was impossible as the flood was still going on. The third time Yu was passing by, his son was more than ten years old. Each time, Yu refused to go in the door, saying that as the flood was rendering countless number of people homeless, he could not rest.


title: Yu the Great

text: Emperor Shun, who reigned after Yao, was so impressed by Yu's engineering work and diligence that he passed the throne to Yu instead of to his own son. Yu is said to have initially declined the throne, but was so popular with other local lords and chiefs that he agreed to become the new emperor, at age 53. He established a capital at Anyi (), the ruins of which are in modern Xia County in southern Shanxi Province, and founded what would be called the Xia dynasty, traditionally considered China's first dynasty.


title: Yu the Great

text: Yu's flood control work is said to have made him intimately familiar with all regions of what was then Han Chinese territory. According to his "Yu Gong" treatise in the "Book of Documents", Yu divided the Chinese "world" into nine "zhou" or provinces. These were Jizhou (), Yanzhou (), Qingzhou (), Xuzhou (), Yangzhou (), Jingzhou (), Yuzhou (), Liangzhou () and Yongzhou ().


title: Yu the Great

text: According to the Rites of Zhou there was no Xuzhou or Liangzhou, instead there were Youzhou () and Bingzhou (), but according to the "Erya" there was no Qingzhou or Liangzhou, instead there was Youzhou () and Yingzhou (). Either way there were nine divisions. Once he had received bronze from these nine territories, he created ding vessels called the Nine Tripod Cauldrons. Yu then established his capital at Yang City (). According to the Bamboo Annals, Yu killed one of the northern leaders, Fangfeng () to reinforce his hold on the throne.


title: Yu the Great

text: According to the "Bamboo Annals", Yu ruled the Xia Dynasty for forty-five years and, according to "Yue Jueshu" (), he died from an illness. It is said that he died at Mount Kuaiji, south of present-day Shaoxing, while on a hunting tour to the eastern frontier of his empire, and was buried there. The Yu mausoleum () known today was first built in the 6th century AD (Southern and Northern Dynasties period) in his honor. It is located four kilometers southeast of Shaoxing city. Most of the structure was rebuilt many times in later periods. The three main parts of the mausoleum are the Yu tomb (), temple () and memorial (). Sima Qian once "went to Kuaiji and explored the cave of Yu". The tomb faces east and west and has a grate gate, a canal and a pavilion for the Great Yu Tomb. In many statues he is seen carrying an ancient hoe (). A number of emperors in imperial times traveled there to perform ceremonies in his honor, notably Qin Shi Huang.


title: Yu the Great

text: Because no contemporary documentary evidence about Yu survives, there is some controversy as to the historicity of this figure. No inscriptions on artifacts dated to the supposed era of Yu, or the later oracle bones, contain any mention of Yu. The first archeological evidence of Yu comes from vessels made about a thousand years after his supposed death, during the Western Zhou dynasty.


title: Yu the Great

text: The Doubting Antiquity School of early-20th-century historians, for example, theorized that Yu was not a person in the earliest legends, but rather a god or mythical beast who was connected with water and possibly with the mythical legend Dragon Kings and their control over water. According to this theory, Yu (as god or beast) was represented on ceremonial bronzes by the early Xia people, and by the start of the Zhou Dynasty, the legendary figure had morphed into the first man, who could control water, and it was only during the Zhou Dynasty that the legendary figures that now precede Yu were added to the orthodox legendary lineage. According to the Chinese legend Yu the Great was a man-god.


title: Yu the Great

text: Archaeological evidence of a large outburst flood at Jishi Gore on the Yellow River has been dated to about 1920 B.C. This coincides with new cultures all along the Yellow River. The water control problems after the initial flooding could plausibly have lasted for some twenty years. Wu and coauthors suggest that this supports the idea that the stories of Yu the Great may have originated from a historical person.


title: Yu the Great

text: Yu was long regarded as an ideal ruler and kind of philosopher king by the ancient Chinese. Beichuan, Wenchuan, and Dujiangyan in Sichuan have all made claims to be his birthplace.


title: Yu the Great

text: Owing to his involvement in China's mythical Great Flood, Yu also came to be regarded as a water deity in Taoism and the Chinese folk religions. He is the head of the "Five Kings of the Water Immortals" honored in shrines in Matsu temples as protectors of ships in transit.


title: Yu the Great

text: His personal name eventually became a Chinese surname. The name was a simplification of minor kingdom 鄅, in modern-day Shandong. After its conquest by the state of Lu, its subjects adopted Yu as a surname.


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: Demetrius Flenory Jr. (born April 22, 2000) is an American actor and rapper. He rose to fame portraying his father, Demetrius Flenory of Black Mafia Family, in 50 Cent's "BMF" series adaptation.


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: Demetrius "Lil Meech" Flenory Jr. was born in Miami, Florida to Demetrius Flenory Sr. and Latarra Eutsey. His father Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory Sr. has been incarcerated since he was five years old.


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: In 2019, under the mononym "Lil Meech" (which is a tribute to his father, "Big Meech"), Flenory Jr. self-released his debut song "Bad Habits." Included in the music video is a half-minute recording of his father conversing from jail.


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: Flenory Jr. explains that he received a call from his dad in prison, in which he told him that rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson had the rights to the Black Mafia Family story and a movie or a TV series would be produced. Black Mafia Family would portray the true story of two Detroit brothers, Demetrius "Big Meech" and Terry "Southwest T" Flenory, who make a name for themselves as notorious drug dealers in the 1980s, becoming one of the most influential crime families in America. In the early 2000s, Flenory founded BMF Entertainment, a drug trafficking and money laundering operation that encompassed a record label, hip-hop magazine, and music promotional agency. The first casting call was set in Atlanta, and his father wished for him to meet Jackson so that he could get a sense of how the adaptation was being produced. After falling short of finding an actor, while present at the casting calls, the rapper/executive producer told Flenory Jr. that he wanted to move him to LA and enroll him in acting classes so that he could star in the series as his father. At the time, Flenory Jr. was in enrolled at University of Nevada, Las Vegas studying business. He described the experience as "intense" as he had been taking lessons "five days a week, (sometimes) two times a day, for two years." Jackson shared Flenory Jr.'s father, Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory was in constant communication with his son, Demetrius "Lil Meech" Flenory Jr. and creator Randy Huggins throughout the whole process of the show's creation. In the beginning of the show's creation, Huggin's didn't believe it was imperative for Flenory Jr. to portray his father.


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: When speaking about the experience to "The New York Post", Flenory Jr. explains: "At first it sounded crazy — I had never acted before. I was actually in school for business at UNLV, in Las Vegas. [Now] I want to act for the rest of my life. I feel like I found my calling. So, 50 basically brought acting to me. He's the reason that I’m acting. He helped me get the role, but I had to earn it and show the network [that I was the right choice]."


title: Demetrius Flenory Jr.

text: Flenory Jr. received positive reception on his role as his father in the BMF television series. The Face described the actor's performance as "brilliant" — despite it being his acting debut. The crime drama series had been renewed for a second season prior to the completed airing of the first season. In August 2021, Flenory was revealed to be a new addition to HBO's Euphoria portraying the character of Travis, a DJ and producer. Being a fan of the show himself, Flenory Jr. explained: “Euphoria touches on a lot of different subjects and it’s all real world things. I think it’s needed for the culture, that’s why so many people love it. I love it. I watched the whole first season and I can’t wait for the next. It’s the truth, it’s real, it’s what’s happening out there.”


title: Ikiru

text: The major themes of the film include learning how to live, the inefficiency of bureaucracy, and decaying family life in Japan, which have been the subject of analysis by academics and critics. "Ikiru" has received widespread critical acclaim, and won awards for Best Film at the Kinema Junpo and Mainichi Film Awards. It was remade as a television film in 2007.


title: Ikiru

text: Kanji Watanabe has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for thirty years and is near his retirement. His wife is dead and his son and daughter-in-law, who live with him, seem to care mainly about Watanabe's pension and their future inheritance. At work, he's a party to constant bureaucratic inaction. In one case, a group of parents are seemingly endlessly referred to one department after another when they want a cesspool cleared out and replaced by a playground. After learning he has stomach cancer and less than a year to live, Watanabe attempts to come to terms with his impending death. He plans to tell his son about the cancer, but decides against it when his son does not pay attention to him. He then tries to find escape in the pleasures of Tokyo's nightlife, guided by an eccentric novelist whom he has just met. In a nightclub, Watanabe requests a song from the piano player, and sings "Gondola no Uta" with great sadness. His singing greatly affects those watching him. After one night submerged in the nightlife, he realizes this is not the solution.


title: Ikiru

text: The following day, Watanabe encounters a young female subordinate, Toyo, who needs his signature on her resignation. He takes comfort in observing her joyous love of life and enthusiasm and tries to spend as much time as possible with her. She eventually becomes suspicious of his intentions and grows weary of him. After convincing her to join him for the last time, he opens up and asks for the secret to her love of life. She says that she does not know, but that she found happiness in her new job making toys, which makes her feel like she is playing with all the children of Japan. Inspired by her, Watanabe realizes that it is not too late for him to do something significant. Like Toyo, he wants to make something, but is unsure what he can do within the city bureaucracy until he remembers the lobbying for a playground. He surprises everyone by returning to work after a long absence, and begins pushing for a playground despite concerns he is intruding on the jurisdiction of other departments.


title: Ikiru

text: Watanabe dies, and at his wake, his former co-workers gather, after the opening of the playground, and try to figure out what caused such a dramatic change in his behavior. His transformation from listless bureaucrat to passionate advocate puzzles them. As the co-workers drink, they slowly realize that Watanabe must have known he was dying, even when his son denies this, as he was unaware of his father's condition. They also hear from a witness that in the last few moments in Watanabe's life, he sat on the swing at the park he built. As the snow fell, he sang "Gondola no Uta". The bureaucrats vow to live their lives with the same dedication and passion as he did. But back at work, they lack the courage of their newfound conviction.


title: Ikiru

text: Death is a major theme in the film, which leads to the protagonist Watanabe's quest to find the meaning of life. Initially, Watanabe looks to nightclubs and women to live life to the fullest, but winds up singing the 1915 song "Gondola no Uta" as an expression of loss. Professor Alexander Sesonske writes that in the nightclub scene, Watanabe realizes "pleasure is not life," and that a goal gives him new happiness, with the song "Happy Birthday to You" symbolizing his rebirth. Because Toyo is young, she has the best insight as to how to live, and is presented as the "unlikely savior" in Watanabe's "redemption."


title: Ikiru

text: Author Donald Richie wrote that the title of the film, meaning simply "to live," could signify that "existence is enough." However, Watanabe finds existence is painful, and takes this as inspiration, wanting to ensure his life has not been futile. The justification of his life, found in his park, is how Watanabe discovered how "to live." In the end, Watanabe now sings "Gondola no Uta" with great contentment.


title: Ikiru

text: "Ikiru" is also an "indictment of Japanese bureaucracy." In Japan after World War II, it was expected that the sararīman (salary man) would work predictably in accordance with an organization's rules. The scene where the mothers first visit the city office requesting a playground shows "unconcern" in the bureaucrats, who send the visitors on a "farcical runaround," before asking them for a written request, with paperwork in the film symbolizing "meaningless activity." Despite this, Watanabe uses the bureaucracy to forge his legacy, and is apparently not disturbed when the bureaucracy quickly forgets he drove the project to build the playground.


title: Ikiru

text: Japanese health care is also depicted as overly bureaucratic in the film, as Watanabe visits a clinic in a "poignant" scene. The doctor is portrayed as paternalistic, and Watanabe does not stand up to his authority.


title: Ikiru

text: Author Timothy Iles writes that, as with Yasujirō Ozu's 1953 film "Tokyo Story", "Ikiru" may hold a negative view about the state of family life in modern Japan. Watanabe has lived with his son for years, but they have fallen out of any true relationship. His son, Mitsuo, sees Watanabe as a bother, and regards him as only an obstacle to his obtaining the money from Watanabe's will. The children fall short of their responsibility to respect their parents.


title: Ikiru

text: Urbanization may be a reason for negative changes in Japanese society, although a reason for Watanabe and Mitsuo's drift is also Watanabe's preoccupation with work. Another reason is Watanabe not being with Mitsuo during a medical treatment when the boy was 10, which fits a pattern in Kurosawa's films of sons being overly harsh to their fathers.


title: Ikiru

text: The film marked the first collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and screenwriter Hideo Oguni. According to Oguni, the genesis of the film was Kurosawa's desire to make a film about a man who knows he is going to die, and wants a reason to live for a short time. Oguni was an experienced writer and was offered ¥500,000, while co-writer Shinobu Hashimoto was offered ¥150,000. Initially, Kurosawa told Hashimoto that a man who was set to die in 75 days had to be the theme, and that the character's career was less important, with the director saying criminal, homeless man or government minister would be acceptable.


title: Ikiru

text: The screenwriters consulted Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", and Oguni envisioned placing Watanabe's death halfway through the film. Kurosawa dictated the scene where Watanabe is on the swing, and mentioned the beginning lyrics of "Gondola no Uta." Since none of the men were familiar with the song, they consulted their eldest receptionist on the rest of the lyrics and the song title.


title: Ikiru

text: Kurosawa renamed the draft "The Life of Kanji Watanabe" to "Ikiru", which Hashimoto found pretentious, but Oguni supported. The screenplay was completed on 5 February 1952.


title: Ikiru

text: In Japan, Toho released the film on 9 October 1952. The film was also screened in the 1954 Berlin International Film Festival.


title: Ikiru

text: In the United States, the film was shown for a short time in California in 1956, under the title "Doomed". It opened as "Ikiru" in New York City on 29 January 1960. The film poster featured the stripper seen briefly in the film, rather than Watanabe.


title: Ikiru

text: The film won critical approval upon its release. Bosley Crowther, writing for "The New York Times", called it "a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond," which he deemed "anti-climactic." Crowther praised Shimura, saying he "measures up through his performance in this picture with the top film actors anywhere," and complimented Miki Odagiri, Nobuo Kaneko and Yunosuke Ito. "Variety" staff called the film "a tour-de-force," by "keeping a dramatic thread throughout and avoiding the mawkish."


title: Ikiru

text: Roger Ebert added it to his list of Great Movies in 1996, saying, "Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us." In his Great Movies review of "Seven Samurai", Ebert called it Kurosawa's greatest film. In 2008, Wally Hammond of "Time Out" praised "Ikiru" as "one of the triumphs of humanist cinema." That year, "The New Yorker"'s Michael Sragow described it as a "masterwork," noting Kurosawa was usually associated more with his action films. The scene featuring Watanabe on the swing in the playground he built has been described as "iconic." Writer Pico Iyer has commented on the film's depiction of the postwar Japanese healthcare system, and historian David Conrad has remarked on its portrayal of Japanese governance at the moment Japan regained its sovereignty after a 7-year American occupation.


title: Ikiru

text: In 1972 Sight & Sound critics poll named "Ikiru" the 12th greatest film of all time. "The Village Voice" ranked the film at number 212 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. "Empire" magazine ranked "Ikiru" 459th on its 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time, and 44th on its 2010 list of "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema." In 2009 the film was voted at No. 13 on the list of "The Greatest Japanese Films of All Time" by Japanese film magazine Kinema Junpo. In 2010 "Ikiru" was included on "Time"s All-Time 100 best movies list. In 2012 the film ranked 127th and 132nd on critic's and director's poll respectively in "Sight & Sound Top 250 Films" list. Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker." The film was included in BBC's 2018 list of The 100 greatest foreign language films. Conversely, in 2016 "The Daily Telegraph" named it one of the 10 most overrated films. The film has a 98% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 44 reviews, with a weighted average of 8.76/10. The site's consensus reads: "Ikiru is a well-acted and deeply moving humanist tale about a man facing his own mortality, one of legendary director Akira Kurosawa's most intimate films".


title: Ikiru

text: Kurosawa believed William Shakespeare's play "Macbeth" could serve as a cautionary tale complementing "Ikiru", thus directing his 1957 film "Throne of Blood". "Ikiru" was remade as a Japanese television film that debuted on TV Asahi on 9 September 2007, the day after a remake of Kurosawa's "High and Low". The "Ikiru" remake stars kabuki actor Matsumoto Kōshirō IX.


title: Ikiru

text: "Anand", a 1971 Indian Hindi film, was loosely inspired by "Ikiru". In 2003, DreamWorks attempted to make a U.S. remake, which would star Tom Hanks in the lead role, and talked to Richard Price about adapting the screenplay. Jim Sheridan agreed to direct the film in 2004, though it has not been produced.


title: Ikiru

text: A British remake titled "Living", adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Oliver Hermanus, and starring Bill Nighy, was released in 2022.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered or toughened glass is a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering puts the outer surfaces into compression and the interior into tension. Such stresses cause the glass, when broken, to shatter into small granular chunks instead of splintering into jagged shards as ordinary annealed glass does. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass is used for its safety and strength in a variety of applications, including passenger vehicle windows, shower doors, aquariums, architectural glass doors and tables, refrigerator trays, mobile phone screen protectors, bulletproof glass components, diving masks, and plates and cookware.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass is about four times stronger than annealed glass. The greater contraction of the inner layer during manufacturing induces compressive stresses in the surface of the glass balanced by tensile stresses in the body of the glass. Fully tempered 6-mm thick glass must have either a minimum surface compression of 69 MPa (10 000 psi) or an edge compression of not less than 67 MPa (9 700 psi). For it to be considered safety glass, the surface compressive stress should exceed . As a result of the increased surface stress, when broken the glass breaks into small rounded chunks as opposed to sharp jagged shards.


title: Tempered glass

text: Compressive surface stresses give tempered glass increased strength. Annealed glass has almost no internal stress and usually forms microscopic cracks on its surface. Tension applied to the glass can drive crack propagation which, once begun, concentrates tension at the tip of the crack driving crack propagation at the speed of sound through the glass. Consequently, annealed glass is fragile and breaks into irregular and sharp pieces. The compressive stresses on the surface of tempered glass contain flaws, preventing their propagation or expansion.


title: Tempered glass

text: Any cutting or grinding must be done prior to tempering. Cutting, grinding, and sharp impacts after tempering will cause the glass to fracture.


title: Tempered glass

text: The strain pattern resulting from tempering can be observed by viewing through an optical polarizer, such as a pair of polarizing sunglasses.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass is used when strength, thermal resistance, and safety are important considerations. Passenger vehicles, for example, have all three requirements. Since they are stored outdoors, they are subject to constant heating and cooling as well as dramatic temperature changes throughout the year. Moreover, they must withstand small impacts from road debris such as stones as well as road accidents. Because large, sharp glass shards would present additional and unacceptable danger to passengers, tempered glass is used so that if broken, the pieces are blunt and mostly harmless. The windscreen or windshield is instead made of laminated glass, which will not shatter into pieces when broken while side windows and the rear windshield have historically been made of tempered glass. Some newer luxury vehicles have laminated side windows to meet occupancy retention regulations, anti-theft purposes, or sound-deadening purposes.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass is also used in buildings for unframed assemblies (such as frameless glass doors), structurally loaded applications, and any other application that would become dangerous in the event of human impact. Building codes in the United States require tempered or laminated glass in several situations including some skylights, glass installed near doorways and stairways, large windows, windows which extend close to floor level, sliding doors, elevators, fire department access panels, and glass installed near swimming pools.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass is also used in the home. Some common household furniture and appliances that use tempered glass are frameless shower doors, glass table tops, glass shelves, cabinet glass and glass for fireplaces.


title: Tempered glass

text: "Rim-tempered" indicates that a limited area, such as the rim of the glass or plate, is tempered and is popular in food service. However, there are also specialist manufacturers that offer a fully tempered/toughened drinkware solution that can bring increased benefits in the form of strength and thermal shock resistance. In some countries these products are specified in venues that require increased performance levels or have a requirement for a safer glass due to intense usage.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass has also seen increased usage in bars and pubs, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia, to prevent broken glass being used as a weapon. Tempered glass products can be found in hotels, bars, and restaurants to reduce breakages and increase safety standards.


title: Tempered glass

text: Some forms of tempered glass are used for cooking and baking. Manufacturers and brands include Glasslock, Pyrex, Corelle, and Arc International. This is also the type of glass used for oven doors.


title: Tempered glass

text: Most touchscreen mobile devices use some form of toughened glass (such as Corning's Gorilla Glass), but there are also separate tempered screen protectors for touchscreen devices sold as an accessory.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass can be made from annealed glass via a thermal tempering process. The glass is placed onto a roller table, taking it through a furnace that heats it well above its transition temperature of to around . The glass is then rapidly cooled with forced air drafts while the inner portion remains free to flow for a short time.


title: Tempered glass

text: An alternative chemical toughening process involves forcing a surface layer of glass at least 0.1 mm thick into compression by ion exchange of the sodium ions in the glass surface with potassium ions (which are 30% larger), by immersion of the glass into a bath of molten potassium nitrate. Chemical toughening results in increased toughness compared with thermal tempering and can be applied to glass objects of complex shapes.


title: Tempered glass

text: Tempered glass must be cut to size or pressed to shape before tempering, and cannot be re-worked once tempered. Polishing the edges or drilling holes in the glass is carried out before the tempering process starts. Because of the balanced stresses in the glass, damage to any portion will eventually result in the glass shattering into thumbnail-sized pieces. The glass is most susceptible to breakage due to damage at its edge, where the tensile stress is the greatest, but can also shatter in the event of a hard impact in the middle of the glass pane or if the impact is concentrated (for example, the glass is struck with a hardened point).


title: Tempered glass

text: Using tempered glass can pose a security risk in some situations because of the tendency of the glass to shatter completely upon hard impact rather than leaving shards in the window frame.


title: Tempered glass

text: The surface of tempered glass does exhibit surface waves caused by contact with flattening rollers, if it has been formed using this process. This waviness is a significant problem in manufacturing of thin film solar cells. The float glass process can be used to provide low-distortion sheets with very flat and parallel surfaces as an alternative for different glazing applications.


title: Tempered glass

text: Nickel sulfide defects can cause spontaneous breakage of tempered glass years after its manufacturing.


title: Tempered glass

text: Francois Barthelemy Alfred Royer de la Bastie (1830–1901) of Paris, France is credited with first developing a method of tempering glass by quenching almost molten glass in a heated bath of oil or grease in 1874, the method patented in England on August 12, 1874, patent number 2783. Tempered glass is sometimes known as "Bastie glass" after de la Bastie. In 1877 the German Friedrich Siemens developed a different process, sometimes called compressed glass or Siemens glass, producing a tempered glass stronger than the Bastie process by pressing the glass in cool molds. The first patent on a whole process to make tempered glass was held by chemist Rudolph A. Seiden who was born in 1900 in Austria and emigrated to the United States in 1935.


title: Tempered glass

text: Though the underlying mechanism was not known at the time, the effects of "tempering" glass have been known for centuries. In about 1660, Prince Rupert of the Rhine brought the discovery of what are now known as "Prince Rupert's Drops" to the attention of King Charles II. These are teardrop-shaped bits of glass which are produced by allowing a molten drop of glass to fall into a bucket of water, thereby rapidly cooling it. They can withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, but the drops will disintegrate explosively into powder if the tail end is even slightly damaged.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Sayyid 'Ibrāhīm Ḥusayn Quṭb ( or ; , ; "Sayyid Quṭb"; 9 October 1906 – 29 August 1966), known popularly as Sayyid Qutb (), was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic scholar, theorist, revolutionary, poet, and a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed by hanging. He is considered as "the Father of Salafi jihadism", the religio-political doctrine that underpins the ideological roots of global jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIL.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Author of 24 books, with around 30 books unpublished for different reasons (mainly destruction by the state), and at least 581 articles, including novels, literary arts critique and works on education, he is best known in the Muslim world for his work on what he believed to be the social and political role of Islam, particularly in his books "Social Justice" and "Ma'alim fi al-Tariq" ("Milestones"). His magnum opus, "Fi Zilal al-Quran" ("In the Shade of the Qur'an"), is a 30-volume commentary on the Quran.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: During most of his life, Qutb's inner circle mainly consisted of influential politicians, intellectuals, poets and literary figures, both of his age and of the preceding generation. By the mid-1940s, many of his writings were included in the curricula of schools, colleges and universities.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Even though most of his observations and criticism were leveled at the Muslim world, Qutb is also known for his intense disapproval of the society and culture of the United States, which he saw as materialistic, and obsessed with violence and sexual pleasures.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb has been described by followers as a great thinker and martyr for Islam, while many Western observers (and some Muslims) see him as a key originator of Islamist ideology, and an inspiration for violent Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda. Qutb is widely regarded as one of the most leading Islamist ideologues of the twentieth century. Strengthened by his status as a martyr, Qutb's ideas on "Jahiliyya" and his close linking of implementation of "Shari'ah" (Islamic Law) with "Tawhid" (Islamic monotheism) has highly influenced contemporary Islamist and Jihadist movements. Today, his supporters are identified by their opponents as "Qutbists" or "Qutbi".


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadhili Qutb was born on 9 October 1906. He was raised in the Egyptian village of Musha, located in Upper Egypt's Asyut Province. His father was an Upper Egyptian landowner and the administrator of the family estate, but he was also well known for his political activism, holding weekly meetings to discuss the political events and Qur'anic recitation. At this young age, Sayyid Qutb first learned about melodic recitations of the Qur'an, which would fuel the artistic side of his personality. He eventually memorized the whole Qur'an at 10. A precocious child, during these years, he began collecting different types of books, including Sherlock Holmes stories, A Thousand and One Nights, and texts on astrology and magic that he would use to help local people with exorcisms ("ruqya".) In his teens, Qutb was critical of the religious institutions with which he came into contact, holding in contempt the way in which those institutions were used to form public opinion and thoughts. He had a special disdain, however, for schools that specialized in religious studies only, and sought to demonstrate that local schools that held regular academic classes as well as classes in religion were more beneficial to their pupils than religious schools with lopsided curricula. At this time, Qutb developed his bent against the imams and their traditional approach to education. This confrontation would persist throughout his life.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb moved to Cairo, where between 1929 and 1933 he received an education based on the British style of schooling before starting his career as a teacher in the Ministry of Public Instruction. During his early career, Qutb devoted himself to literature as an author and critic, writing such novels as "Ashwak" ("Thorns") and even helped to elevate Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz from obscurity. He wrote his very first article in the literary magazine "al-Balagh" in 1922, and his first book, "Muhimmat al-Sha’ir fi al-Haya wa Shi’r al-Jil al-Hadir" (The Mission of the Poet in Life and the Poetry of the Present Generation), in 1932, when he was 25, in his last year at Dar al-Ulum. As a literary critic, he was particularly influenced by ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), "in his view one of the few mediaeval philologists to have concentrated on meaning and aesthetic value at the expense of form and rhetoric." In 1939, he became a functionary in Egypt's Ministry of Education ("wizarat al-ma'arif").


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: In the early 1940s, he encountered the work of Nobel Prize-winner French eugenicist Alexis Carrel, who would have a seminal and lasting influence on his criticism of Western civilization, as "instead of liberating man, as the post-Enlightenment narrative claimed, he believed that Western modernity enmeshed people in spiritually numbing networks of control and discipline, and that rather than building caring communities, it cultivated attitudes of selfish individualism. Qutb regarded Carrel as a rare sort of Western thinker, one who understood that his civilization "depreciated humanity" by honouring the "machine" over the "spirit and soul" (al-nafs wa al-ruh). He saw Carrel's critique, coming as it did from within the enemy camp, as providing his discourse with an added measure of legitimacy."


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: From 1948 to 1950, he went to the United States on a scholarship to study its educational system, spending several months at Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado. Qutb's first major theoretical work of religious social criticism, "Al-'adala al-Ijtima'iyya fi-l-Islam" ("Social Justice in Islam"), was published in 1949, during his time in the West.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Though Islam gave him much peace and contentment, he suffered from respiratory and other health problems throughout his life and was known for "his introvertedness, isolation, depression and concern." In appearance, he was "pale with sleepy eyes." Qutb never married, in part because of his steadfast religious convictions. While the urban Egyptian society he lived in was becoming more Westernized, Qutb believed the Quran taught women that 'Men are the managers of women's affairs ...' Qutb lamented to his readers that he was never able to find a woman of sufficient "moral purity and discretion" and had to reconcile himself to bachelorhood.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: It was clear from his childhood that Qutb valued education, playing the part of a teacher to the women in his village:


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "Syed Qutb from a young age would save up his money for a man called Amsaalih, who used to sell books around the local villages. He would have a big collection of books, and another small collection specifically for Syed Qutb. If Syed never had the money, he would tell him that I don't have the money now, so let me borrow it and I'll give it you next time you come around. And Amsaalih would let him do that. At the age of 12, he had his own library collection of 25 books, even though books were really expensive during that time. He would imitate the scholars by reading the books, and then give lectures to the rest of the village. If any women needed any information, they would wait till Syed Qutb came back from school, and ask him to share the knowledge he had to them. In many occasions he would be shy because he was a young man, but in some occasions he would go and teach the knowledge he had to the people who asked him."


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Time in the United States, pursuing further studies in educational administration, cemented some of Qutb's views. Over two years, he worked and studied at Wilson Teachers' College in Washington, D.C. (one of the precursors to today's University of the District of Columbia), Colorado State College for Education in Greeley, and Stanford University. He visited the major cities of the United States and spent time in Europe on his journey home.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Before his departure from the United States, even though more and more conservative, he still was "Western in so many ways—his dress, his love of classical music and Hollywood movies. He had read, in translation, the works of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and had immersed himself in French literature, especially Victor Hugo".


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: On his return to Egypt, Qutb published "The America that I Have Seen", where he became explicitly critical of things he had observed in the United States, eventually encapsulating the West more generally: its materialism, individual freedoms, economic system, racism, brutal boxing matches, "poor" haircuts, superficiality in conversations and friendships, restrictions on divorce, enthusiasm for sports, lack of artistic feeling, "animal-like" mixing of the genders (which "went on even in churches"), and strong support for the new Israeli state. Hisham Sabrin, noted that:


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "As a brown person in Greeley, Colorado in the late 1940s studying English he came across much prejudice. He was appalled by what he perceived as loose sexual openness of American men and women (a far cry from his home of Musha, Asyut). This American experience was for him a fine-tuning of his Islamic identity. He himself tells us on his boat trip over "Should I travel to America, and become flimsy, and ordinary, like those who are satisfied with idle talk and sleep. Or should I distinguish myself with values and spirit. Is there other than Islam that I should be steadfast to in its character and hold on to its instructions, in this life amidst deviant chaos, and the endless means of satisfying animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins? I wanted to be the latter man."Qutb noted with disapproval the openly displayed sexuality of American women:


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs – and she shows all this and does not hide it."


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he enjoys as art and in his own artistic works.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "Jazz" music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. The American's intoxication in "jazz" music does not reach its full completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as coarse and obnoxious as the music itself. Meanwhile, the noise of the instruments and the voices mounts, and it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree… The agitation of the multitude increases, and the voices of approval mount, and their palms ring out in vehement, continuous applause that all but deafens the ears".


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb concluded that major aspects of American life were primitive and "shocking"; he saw Americans as "numb to faith in religion, faith in art, and faith in spiritual values altogether". His experience in the U.S. is believed to have formed in part the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards Islamism upon returning to Egypt. Resigning from the civil service, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s and became editor-in-chief of the Brothers' weekly "Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin," and later head of its propaganda section, as well as an appointed member of the working committee and of its guidance council, the highest branch in the organization.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: In July 1952, Egypt's pro-Western government was overthrown by the nationalist Free Officers Movement headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Both Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood welcomed the "coup d'état" against the monarchist government – which they saw as un-Islamic and subservient to British imperialism – and enjoyed a close relationship with the movement prior to and immediately following the coup. Nasser would go to the house of Syed Qutb and ask him for ideas about the Revolution. Many members of the Brotherhood expected Nasser to establish an Islamic government. However, the co-operation between the Brotherhood and Free Officers which marked the revolution's success soon soured as it became clear the secular nationalist ideology of Nasserism was incompatible with the Islamism of the Brotherhood.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Nasser had secretly set up an organisation that would sufficiently oppose the Muslim Brotherhood once he came to power. This organisation was called "Tahreer" ("freedom" in Arabic). It was well known that


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: the Brotherhood were made popular by their extensive social programs in Egypt, and Nasser wanted to be ready once he had taken over. At this time, Qutb did not realize Nasser's alternate plans, and would continue to meet with him, sometimes for 12 hours a day, to discuss a post monarchical Egypt. Once Qutb realized that Nasser had taken advantage of the secrecy between the Free Officers and the Brotherhood, he promptly quit. Nasser then tried to persuade Qutb by offering him any position he wanted in Egypt except its Kingship, saying: "We will give you whatever position you want in the government, whether it's the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Arts, etc."


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb refused every offer, having understood the reality of Nasser's plans. Upset that Nasser would not enforce a government based on Islamic ideology, Qutb and other Brotherhood members plotted to assassinate him in 1954. The attempt was foiled and Qutb was jailed soon afterwards; the Egyptian government used the incident to justify a crackdown on various members of the Muslim Brotherhood for their vocal opposition towards the Nasser administration. During his first three years in prison, conditions were bad and Qutb was tortured. In later years he was allowed more mobility, including the opportunity to write. This period saw the composition of his two most important works: a commentary of the Qur'an "Fi Zilal al-Qur'an" ("In the Shade of the Qur'an"), and a manifesto of political Islam called "Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq" ("Milestones"). These works represent the final form of Qutb's thought, encompassing his radically anti-secular and anti-Western claims based on his interpretations of the Qur'an, Islamic history, and the social and political problems of Egypt. The school of thought he inspired has become known as Qutbism.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb was let out of prison in May 1964 at the behest of the President of Iraq, Abdul Salam Arif, for only 8 months before being rearrested on August 9, 1965. He was accused of plotting to overthrow the state and subjected to what some consider a show trial. Many of the charges placed against Qutb in court were taken directly from "Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq" and he adamantly supported his written statements. The trial culminated in a death sentence for Qutb and six other members of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was sentenced to death for his part in the conspiracy to assassinate the President and other Egyptian officials and personalities, though he was not the instigator or leader of the actual plot. On 29 August 1966, he was executed by hanging.


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Qutb held that belief in matters that cannot be seen (or are imperceptible) was an important sign of man's ability to accept knowledge from fields outside of science:


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: "The concept of the imperceptible is a decisive factor in distinguishing man from animal. Materialist thinking, ancient as well as modern, has tended to drag man back to an irrational existence, with no room for the spiritual, where everything is determined by sensory means alone. What is peddled as 'progressive thought' is no more than dismal ".


title: Sayyid Qutb

text: Beginning from 1948, Qutb's ideological orientation would radically shift to an Islamist worldview, when he penned his first Islamist treatise "al-‘Adāla". Qutb would later denounce the literary works he published during the 1940s as "un-Islamic".