title: Race and sexuality

text: However, race play can also be used within BDSM as a curative practice for black individuals to take back their autonomy from a history of subjugation. One BDSM Dominatrix explains that raceplay provides her with an “emotional sense of reparations”. “Violence for back female performers in BDSM becomes not just a vehicle of intense pleasure but also a mode of accessing and critiquing power”


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: Wonder is the fourth studio album by Canadian singer Shawn Mendes. It was released by Island Records on December 4, 2020. Its production was handled by Mendes, Frank Dukes, Kid Harpoon and Scott Harris, among others. The album was preceded by "", a 2020 Netflix documentary capturing Mendes' off-stage life.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: Upon release, "Wonder" received generally favourable reviews from music critics, most of whom noted Mendes' vocal improvements, but were polarized over the album's production and songwriting, deeming them predictable and formulaic. "Wonder" debuted at number one in Canada and the United States. Three singles supported the album: "Wonder", "Monster" with Justin Bieber, and "Call My Friends", with the former two reaching the top 20 of the US "Billboard" Hot 100. The album's lead single, "Wonder," peaked at number 18 on the Hot 100, and reached the top ten in several other countries. The second single, "Monster," reached number eight on the US Hot 100 and topped the Canadian Hot 100. To promote the album, Mendes embarked on the , which commenced in June 2022 in Portland and was set to conclude in August 2023 in Dublin, before Mendes prematurely ended the tour in July 2022 due to mental health issues.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: In August 2020, Shawn Mendes got the word "wonder" tattooed on his right arm, which would later turn out to be the title of the album and its lead single. On September 30, 2020, the singer took to his social media to tease towards the project with the caption "WHAT IS #WONDER". Hours later, he went on to announce the title and release dates of both lead single and album, as well as release the interlude "Intro", the first track on the album. The album pre-orders were released to streaming services on September 30.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: In a statement, Mendes said of "Wonder": "It really feels like a piece of me has been written down on paper and recorded into song. I tried to be as real and as honest as I've ever been. It's a world and a journey and a dream and an album I've been wanting to make for a really long time. I absolutely love it. Thank you for being by my side for so many years. I love you all so much."


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: To promote the album, a feature-length documentary titled "" directed by Grant Singer was released on Netflix on November 23, 2020, chronicling the past few years of Mendes' life, including his rise to fame, his 2019 and the making of "Wonder". Mendes executive produces the film, which was honored as a special selection at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: Mendes revealed the album's tracklist through a Spotify canvas that was updated daily starting November 2, 2020. On November 13, Mendes revealed the tracklist on social media.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: "Wonder" was released as the title track and lead single from the album on October 2, 2020. Teasers for both the song and accompanying music video were released alongside the announcement. "Monster", a collaboration with fellow Canadian singer Justin Bieber, was released as the second single on November 20. "Call My Friends" was released as the third single alongside the album release on December 4.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 65 out of 100, which indicates "generally favorable reviews" based on 9 reviews.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: "Rolling Stone" writer Jon Dolan defined "Wonder" as a compelling mixture of "youthful passion" and "coming-of-age agony", characterized its production as "grandiose" with backing choirs and dramatic drums, with sentimental lyrics inspired heavily by Camila Cabello. "Vulture"'s Craig Jenkins found the album predictable, but praised Mendes for improving his vocals. He described it as a "headphone album, full of intriguing tones, lush textures, and unexpected twists", with "short and sweet" songs that lack the energy of his 2016 hit singles "Treat You Better" and "Mercy". Quinn Moreland of "Pitchfork" felt the album was "naive—and vaguely terrifying" while opining "it’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome." He also noted that "Wonder" is Mendes' "most musically adventurous album" but that "every song is plagued by the same problem: Production that attempts to compensate for lyrical blandness by forcibly inserting drama." He ended his review by saying that Mendes "has yet to make a statement that truly sets him apart."


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: Dubbing Mendes as the North American version of Ed Sheeran, "The Guardian" critic Alexis Petridis was favourable towards Mendes's vocal performance and the "important" teenage themes discussed on "Wonder", such as anxiety and toxic masculinity, but thought that it is deficit of personality, criticizing the "least appealing" production, and formulaic ballads with "ponderous-verse-into-epic-chorus" structure. Leah Greenblatt, writing for "Entertainment Weekly", asserted that the album sees Mendes "still discovering himself in real time", feeling free, expressing sexual tension and reflecting on early fame, and picked "Call My Friends", "Dream" and "Song for No One" as the best tracks. In a less favourable review, Helen Brown of "The Independent" wrote that "Wonder" chronicles "the struggles of the lonely touring musician missing his girl", and complimented the album's vintage-inspired sound, but deemed the songs unoriginal. Malvika Padin, writing for Clash, noted that the album is "ambitious" and "stocked full of emotions," but also wrote that it didn't always succeed, at times "feeling too shallow for it to be as impactful as Mendes intended it to be," but called the album worth a listen. Jon Caramanica of "The New York Times" complimented Mendes' "understanding [of] how to inflate his voice from whimper to peal," but felt that "his lyrics meander and stop short of true sentiment, and his rhythmic deliveries feel less cohesive" and that the record was "much less polished" in comparison to his previous two album releases. Writing for "Stereogum", Chris DeVille named "Wonder" Mendes' "best (or at least most interesting)" album while complimenting his growth as a songwriter, although he feels that at times the record "falls victim to the same overly broad fairytale love-story clichés."


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: "Wonder" debuted at number one on the Canadian Album Chart for "Billboard", earning the highest sales and digital song downloads and the second-highest on-demand streams for the week. It became Mendes' fourth Canadian number-one album.


title: Wonder (Shawn Mendes album)

text: "Wonder" debuted at number one on the US "Billboard" 200 with 89,000 album-equivalent units (including 54,000 pure sales), becoming Mendes' fourth consecutive US number-one album. It made Mendes the youngest male artist and second-youngest artist after Britney Spears to top the Billboard 200 with four regular studio albums. It also made him the fourth-youngest artist in history to log four number-one titles on the Billboard 200. The album's tracks earned a total of 46.92 million on-demand streams in its first week. In its second week, the album descended to number 25 on the "Billboard" 200 dated December 17, 2020, with 28,300 units sold. It sold 30,000 units in the week dated December 24, 2020, on the "Billboard" 200.


title: Hookah lounge

text: A hookah lounge (also called a shisha bar or den, especially in Britain and parts of Canada, or a hookah bar) is an establishment where patrons share shisha (flavoured tobacco) from a communal hookah or from one placed at each table or a bar.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In Western countries, shisha parlors are often owned and operated by people from the Arab world or the Indian Subcontinent where use of the hookah is a centuries-old tradition. Many shisha parlors incorporate such elements as Islamic decor and Arabic music or Indian music and have traditional decor, but some are simply bars without the eastern cultural elements.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In the United States and Europe, shisha parlors are most popular in college towns and urban areas and are regarded by some as a novel and chic way to socialize. Certain parlors offer modern hookahs with fruit bowls or other kinds of improvements over smoking hookah at home. Some people of Middle Eastern or South Asian extraction consider them a continuation of their own cultural traditions. However, shisha parlors nowadays often distance themselves from the eastern cultures by offering hookah and alcohol without the cultural elements. These bars differ from other bars only in the fact that they offer hookah.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Usually a disposable mouthpiece is provided for each user for hygienic reasons. When alcohol is not sold, shisha parlors derive revenue from sales of coffee, tea, soft drinks and snack foods.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Some shisha parlors have well-equipped kitchens and are more akin to bistros. In the broadest sense, any restaurant or nightclub can be considered a shisha parlor or club if it offers patrons hookahs, shisha and a comfortable place to smoke. Some offer Middle Eastern cuisine menu items.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In the United States, due to several state tobacco control laws, many shisha bars have made the transition from offering tobacco shisha to herbal shisha, which is tobacco-free and can legally be smoked indoors in areas that have restrictions on tobacco smoking. Although herbal shisha does not contain tobacco or nicotine, when burned it does produce harmful chemicals, including heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which can cause cancer and heart disease. These harmful chemicals are breathed in both by smokers and bystanders.


title: Hookah lounge

text: The origins of hookah are controversial, even though most agree that it started either in ancient Persia or the Indian subcontinent.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In the United States, establishments akin to shisha parlors first opened decades ago in the immigrant quarters of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, California as coffee and tea houses.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Many shisha parlors in the United States have elements such as glass tables, plasma televisions, and oxygen bars. Most bars in the U.S. require patrons to be at least 21 years of age to smoke shisha and 21 years of age to purchase (exceptions are Utah, Arizona, Alabama, and New Jersey: 19 years of age to smoke; New York and Vermont are 21 years of age).


title: Hookah lounge

text: Over the recent years hookah has become increasingly popular for teens and young adults.  As of 2014, one out of every five high school seniors in the U.S. had tried hookah, and likewise, one in five 18-24 year olds in the U.S. have smoked hookah in the past month.  It is not uncommon now to find hookah bars within short distance of college campuses and in the surrounding towns. This younger generation is often the target for hookah business establishments.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Laws about selling and use of hookah in the U.S. differ state by state.  Most states do not allow minors (under age 18) to smoke hookah and some states ban hookah smoking in public places. Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun to regulate hookah tobacco along with cigarettes and other types of tobacco. There is concern that even if FDA places health warning labels on hookah packages, they may not be seen by people who smoke in hookah lounges, since the tobacco is usually taken out of the packages before it is served.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Because of the harm of passive smoking, many municipalities, especially in North America and Europe have enacted smoking bans in public places. Sometimes, however, businesses can obtain special permits allowing smoking within; these permits are typically available only for shisha bars, cigar bars, tobacconists, and similar establishments where smoking is the focus of activity. They are less frequently available for places in which alcohol or food is served.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In some cases, the ban is against tobacco smoking specifically. When this is the case, a shisha bar may remain in business by replacing traditional, tobacco-based shisha with a tobacco-free mu‘assel.


title: Hookah lounge

text: In order to remain open, many shisha bars cannot sell food or beverages. Approximately 90% of the cities that have put a ban on smoking in public places have exemptions for shisha bars. The cities with these kinds of exemptions, typically, have more dense populations.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Hookah bars are a growing public health concern. Many hookah users do not understand the health risks that come along with the practice. Common incorrect beliefs include that shisha is not addictive and that the smoke contains fewer toxic chemicals and carcinogens. However, hookah smoke contains many of the same toxic chemicals found in cigarettes and it has not been shown to be safer. The tobacco contains nicotine and is addictive. The water does not filter out the carcinogens or other harmful chemicals are not filtered out. Hookah users breathe in many harmful chemicals, such as carbon monoxide, nicotine, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and aldehydes. Like cigarettes, breathing in these chemicals cause many health problems, such as cancer, heart disease, lung disease, periodontal disease, and low birth weight in babies whose mothers smoke it. It has been shown that waterpipe tobacco contains 27 known or suspected carcinogens, as well as significant concentrations of toxicants thought to cause addiction, heart disease and lung disease. Traditional charcoal-heated hookahs deliver nine to ten times more carbon monoxide than do standard cigarettes. There have been multiple published reports of acute carbon monoxide poisoning caused by narghile (waterpipe tobacco/hookah). Hookah smokers sometimes take in so much carbon monoxide, an odorless, poisonous gas, that they develop carbon monoxide poisoning.  Carbon monoxide poisoning causes dizziness, nausea and vomiting, irritability, rapid fall in blood pressure, and chest pain, and often must be treated in hospital emergency departments. This is sometimes known as “hookah sickness” Hookah smoking can also be harmful to non-smokers since hookah releases many harmful substances (including particulate matter, nicotine, and carbon monoxide) in the air that are breathed in by anyone in the area.


title: Hookah lounge

text: Due to the health concerns, many cities seek to create tougher restrictions for shisha bars, and some want them shut down altogether.


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: Lindsay Anne Shookus (born June 18, 1980) is an American television producer. She has been nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, winning four times, for her work on "Saturday Night Live".


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: Shookus's father, Robert, owned a manufacturers representative business while her mother, Christine, worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative. She has one older brother, Jeff, and one younger sister, Sara. She was raised in Williamsville, New York, and attended Williamsville South High School, where she was president of her junior and senior high school classes. She studied journalism at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1998 to 2002.


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: After graduating from college in 2002, Shookus was hired as Marci Klein's assistant on "Saturday Night Live". In 2008, she became an associate producer on the show and also had producing credits on 45 episodes of "30 Rock" between 2008 and 2010. She was named an "SNL" co-producer in 2010, and was named as a producer in 2012. She is head of the show's talent department, booking hosts and musical guests, as well as scouting potential cast members. She was named one of "Billboard"s 50 Most Powerful Music Executives in both 2015 and 2016. After 20 years at "SNL", Shookus left the show in 2022.


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: Shookus and friend Kristin O’Keeffe Merrick host an annual “Women Work Fucking Hard” networking event in New York, which spotlights female entrepreneurs and encourages women to help each other succeed in business.


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: Shookus met television producer Kevin Miller in 2002 and they married in 2010. Their daughter, Madeline, was born in early 2013. The couple separated in 2014 and later divorced. She dated Ben Affleck from 2017 to 2018, and again in early 2019.


title: Lindsay Shookus

text: During the 2016 presidential campaign, Shookus supported Hillary Clinton and was a member of the Emily's List Creative Council.


title: Narco-state

text: Narco-state (also narco-capitalism or narco-economy) is a political and economic term applied to countries where all legitimate institutions become penetrated by the power and wealth of the illegal drug trade. The term was first used to describe Bolivia following the 1980 coup of Luis García Meza which was seen to be primarily financed with the help of narcotics traffickers. Other well-known examples are Honduras, Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Mexico, Myanmar and Syria, where drug cartels produce, ship and sell drugs such as captagon, cocaine, heroin and marijuana.


title: Narco-state

text: The term is often seen as ambiguous because of the differentiation between narco-states. The overall description would consist of illegal organisations that either produce, ship or sell drugs and hold a grip on the legitimate institutions through force, bribe or blackmail. This situation can arise in different forms. For instance, Colombia, where drug lord Pablo Escobar ran the Medellín Cartel (named after his birthplace) during most of the 1970s and 1980s, producing and trafficking cocaine to the United States of America. Escobar managed to take over control of most of the police forces in Medellín and surrounding areas due to bribery and coercion, allowing him to expand his drug trafficking business.


title: Narco-state

text: Currently scholars argue that the term “narco-state” is oversimplified because of the underlying networks running the drug trafficking organisations. For example, the Guadalajara cartel in Mexico, led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who managed to combine several small drug trafficking families into one overarching cartel controlling the marijuana production in the rural areas of Mexico while trafficking Colombian cocaine to the US at the same time.


title: Narco-state

text: Over time the cocaine market expanded to Europe, leading to new routes being discovered from Colombia through Brazil or Venezuela and Western Africa. These new routes proved to be more profitable and successful than shipping from North-America and turned African states such as Nigeria, Ghana and (later on) Guinea-Bissau into actual narco-states. While cocaine was transported through Western Africa, the Taliban produced opium in the rural areas of Afghanistan using the revenues to fund their guerrilla war. Despite American and NATO efforts to impose laws on the Afghan opium production, the early 2000s incumbent Afghan governments shielded the opium trade from foreign policies as much as possible.


title: Narco-state

text: Ongoing discussions divide scholars into separate groups either claiming or disclaiming the resemblance between narco-states and failed states. Depending on which properties are assigned to the definition of a failed state, the definition is in accordance with the narco-state. While most narco-states show signs of high rates of corruption, violence and murder, properties that are also assigned to failed states, it is not always clear if violence can be traced back to drug trafficking. Obvious to say is that failed states are not consequently narco-states, but uncertain is whether all narco-states are also failed states.


title: Narco-state

text: It has been argued that narco-states can be divided into five categories depending on their level of dependence on the narcotics trade and the threat the narcotics trade in said country poses to domestic and international stability. These five categories are (in ascending order): incipient, developing, serious, critical, and advanced.


title: Narco-state

text: However, recent use of the term narco-state has been questioned by some for being too widely and uncritically applied, particularly following the widespread media attention given to Guinea-Bissau as "the world's first narco-state" in 2008, and should instead refer only to those countries in which the narcotics trade is state-sponsored and constitutes the majority of a country's overall GDP.


title: Narco-state

text: Afghanistan was very well known for its opium production. As of 2021, Afghanistan's harvest produces more than 90% of illicit heroin globally, and more than 95% of the European supply. Most of the opium were smuggled through Herat and Faizabad. The opium were mostly smuggled to the Golden Crescent countries such as Iran and Pakistan. Opium production and trafficking are known to have funded the Taliban's military activities and insurgency


title: Narco-state

text: The economy's reliance on drug trade and smuggling has led the country to be declared as Europe's only narco-state.


title: Narco-state

text: The drug trade in Bolivia gained its prominence in 1980s, when the demand for cocaine was booming across the Latin America. Bolivia's most lucrative crop and economic activity in the 1980s was coca, whose leaves were processed clandestinely into cocaine. The country was the second largest grower of coca in the world, supplying approximately fifteen percent of the US cocaine market in the late 1980s. Analysts believed that exports of coca paste and cocaine generated between US$600 million and US$1 billion annually in the 1980s (depending on prices and output).


title: Narco-state

text: In 1980, General Luis García Meza staged a coup and overthrew President Lidia Gueiler Tejada in a bloody coup d'état allegedly aided by drug cartels. The dictatorship of García Meza was very well known for its state sponsored drug trafficking activities. García Meza's regime oversaw Bolivia's 13-month period of isolation. The Reagan administration distanced themselves from García Meza's regime and halted some aid to Bolivia due to the regime's relationship with drug cartels. García Meza's time in office was short-lived as he was overthrown and replaced by General Celso Torrelio. García Meza was convicted in absentia for his human rights violations in Bolivia, as well as extradited from Brazil in 1995 and sentenced to serve 30 years in a Bolivian prison. His collaborator, Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, was extradited to the United States to serve his sentences for drug trafficking in a United States federal prison.


title: Narco-state

text: The 1980s coup was said to have been financed by Bolivia's most notorious drug baron, Roberto Suárez Goméz. Suárez Goméz was the founder of La Corporación, a Bolivian drug cartel tied to Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel. The organization was founded in the 1970s and mainly focused in Santa Cruz de la Sierra; it amassed $400 million annually. The cocaine shipped from the Bolivian Amazon to Colombia was valued at $9,000 per kilogram. In 1988, Suárez Goméz was arrested by the Bolivian National Police and sentenced to 15 years in prison; his nephew Jorge Roca Suarez continued his business until his arrest in 1990.


title: Narco-state

text: Since 1990, the phenomenon of urban violence has intensified. There are currently more than fifty criminal factions in Brazil.


title: Narco-state

text: Rio Grande do Sul, for example, is dominated by Os Manos founded by the owners and employees of Grupo RBS and state politicians.


title: Narco-state

text: The group's influence is demonstrated by the affiliation of three governors state, one former minister of justice, minister of the federal supreme court, judges, announcers, sports commentators, entrepreneurs, among other local public figures.


title: Narco-state

text: Beginning in the mid-1970s Colombian drug cartels became major producers, processors and exporters of illegal drugs, primarily marijuana and cocaine. The drug trade in Colombia was monopolized by four drug trafficking cartels: Medellin, Cali, Norte del Valle, and North Coast. However some guerilla warlords in the Colombian conflict were also said to be involved in drug trafficking in the country.


title: Narco-state

text: The Medellin Cartel was once the largest drug cartel operating in Colombia, led by Pablo Escobar which focused its operations in the city of Medellin. Most of the imported drugs are originated from countries like Bolivia and Peru which were later processed in Colombia. The Medellin Cartel gained prominence in the 1980s when the cartel amassed $60 million worth of fortune from drug trade sold to United States mainly focused on Florida, New York, and California. This condition has shocked the United States federal government and caused the federal government to make a deal with Colombian government to sign the extradition treaty between two countries. Escobar's business empire was known for its "reign of terror" as the cartel staged numerous kidnappings, assassinations and bombings around Colombia to ensure its business continuity. Pablo Escobar was shot to death by police in 1993; after the death of Pablo Escobar, the Medellin Cartel began to decline which eventually led to its disbandment. The disbandment of the Medellin Cartel has led to other three major cartels, especially the Cali Cartel, to seize the opportunity to expand their trade routes.


title: Narco-state

text: During the drug war, major Colombian cartels were known to be influencing Colombian politicians and warlords alike. In order to flex his muscle, Escobar went to politics and ran as candidate for the Chamber of Representatives under the banner of the Liberal Alternative. However Escobar's ambition in politics was later thwarted after his ill-gotten wealth was exposed in front of the representatives, which forced him to resign. This event become the root cause of the assassination of justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. In contrast to the Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel adopted a more subtle approach on influencing local politicians. In 1994, the outgoing president Ernesto Samper was involved in the Proceso 8000 scandal in which he was accused of being funded with drug money, allegedly from the Cali Cartel for his campaign in the 1994 Colombian presidential election. The scandal later caused the then US president Bill Clinton to cut Colombian aid, while later the US government revoked Samper's visa.


title: Narco-state

text: Guinea-Bissau, in West Africa, has been called a narco-state due to government officials often being bribed by traffickers to ignore the illegal trade. Colombian drug cartels used the West African coast as Jamaica and Panama increased policing. "The Guardian" noted Guinea-Bissau's lack of prisons, few police, and poverty attracted the traffickers. An article in "Foreign Policy" questioned the effectiveness of money from the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations designated to combat the illegal trade.


title: Narco-state

text: Honduras has been labeled as a narco-state due to drug trafficking involvement of President Juan Orlando Hernández and his brother Tony Hernández, who was a congressman. Tony Hernández was captured in 2018 in the United States and was accused of conspiracy of cocaine trafficking to the US in 2019. Also Fabio Lobo, who is the son of former president Porfirio Lobo, was arrested by DEA agents in Haiti in 2015. All of them are members of the conservative right-wing National Party of Honduras.


title: Narco-state

text: Since 2017, a sudden surge in crystal meth production and smuggling from Iran has contributed to a drug epidemic in neighboring Iraq and Turkey.


title: Narco-state

text: Illegal drugs trading pervaded in Lebanon since the 1960s. In 2014, Lebanese authorities seized 25.4m Captagon tablets at the airport and Port of Beirut. In April 2015, the European Council stated that Lebanon became a transit country for drug trafficking.


title: Narco-state

text: In April 2021, Greek authorities seized four tonnes of cannabis hidden in dessert-making machinery at Piraeus, which was en route from Lebanon to Slovakia. In the same month, 5.3m Captagon pills hidden in fruits imported from Lebanon were seized by authorities in Saudi Arabia. In May 2021, Lebanese authorities confiscated cocaine hidden in Makdous, destined to Australia. In the same month, Lebanese customs at Beirut Airport seized 60 tonnes of hashish, intended to be exported to the Netherlands.


title: Narco-state

text: Government corruption has been a problem in Mexico for decades. Drug cartels have been influential in Mexican politics, going so far as to pump large sums of money into Mexican electoral campaigns, supporting candidates sensitive to bribery in order to keep their businesses safe. As far back as the early 20th century, drug trafficking had been tolerated by the Mexican government. Since 1929, the dominant party of Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), forged ties with various groups in order to gain political influence. Among them were the drug traffickers. The ties between the PRI and the drug lords became so close that the PRI even went so far as to have an alliance with the drug traffickers and sanctioned their activities.


title: Narco-state

text: During the 1980s and 1990s the drug trade in Mexico accelerated. Before the 1980s most of Mexico produced marijuana and a small amount of heroin. Cocaine mostly reached the U.S.A. through the Bahamas and the Caribbean. After the U.S.A. shut down the routes that entered the state of Florida, Colombian drug cartels established a partnership with Mexican traffickers, finding new routes by which to smuggle cocaine over land into North America. A few small Mexican cartels merged into the Guadalajara cartel, led by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. The Guadalajara cartel trafficked the cocaine produced by the Colombian Calí cartel, while expanding marijuana production in rural areas of Mexico.


title: Narco-state

text: The U.S.A. established a special force, named the Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.), to fight a war on drugs within their own borders and beyond. The D.E.A. office in Mexico received extra resources to investigate the murder of one of their own agents, Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, who was abducted, tortured and murdered by a state police officer paid by members of the cartel. Their investigation confirmed the corruption that gripped Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. However, not only police officers on the payroll obeyed Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and his cartel. Investigations show transactions to high officers in the federal government, such as the Federal Directorate of Security and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police.


title: Narco-state

text: The beginning of the Mexican Drug War in 2006, initiated by Mexico's newly elected president, Felipe Calderón, was the first significant government effort to fight the drug cartels in Mexico. Calderón's predecessor, Vicente Fox, elected in 2000, had been the first Mexican president from outside the PRI. However, despite Calderón's efforts, the PRI was returned to power in 2012 with the election of Enrique Peña Nieto.


title: Narco-state

text: During the court hearing for the most wanted cartel leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, it was alleged that former president Enrique Peña Nieto had accepted a $100 million bribe from the drug kingpin.


title: Narco-state

text: On 1 December 2018, Mexico elected a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Despite presenting himself as being non-established, AMLO was a member of the PRI from 1976 to 1989.


title: Narco-state

text: Myanmar is the second-largest opium producing nation in the world, only behind Afghanistan. The opium trade network in Myanmar indirectly created a network that widely known as Golden Triangle, a term coined by CIA in the area around the Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand border. The opium production in Myanmar dated back during the period of Konbaung dynasty.


title: Narco-state

text: In aftermath of the Chinese civil war, some Kuomintang loyalists stranded in Burma became involved in opium trade in Burma, supported by the US government. Most of the opium produced by the former-Kuomintang soldiers was shipped south to Thailand. One of the most notorious figure in Myanmar drug business was Khun Sa, who was also trained by Burmese Army and the Kuomintang. Khun Sa operations said to have dominated the drug trade network in the Golden Triangle area giving him the title "Opium King". Khun Sa influence began to decline in 1990s and he surrendered himself to the authorities in 1996.


title: Narco-state

text: The international isolation imposed at North Korea has made the North Korean regime rely on illicit activities to support its economy, drug trade being one of the illicit activities that is used by the regime. The North Korean regime was known to have operated a drug trading activities varying from opium to methamphetamine. The regime drug trade network dated back in 1970s, when then leader Kim Il Sung sanctioned the creation of opium farm in the country. The methamphetamine trade was dated back around 1990s, the regime was known to have spreading the drugs to China Jilin Province as its important transshipment which was later shipped to countries such as Philippines, the United States, Hong Kong, Thailand, western Africa and others. In 2001, income from illegal drugs amounted to between $500 million and $1 billion. In 2003, the North Korean owned cargo ship "Pong Su" was intercepted importing heroin into Australia. The ship was suspected of being involved in smuggling almost 125 kilograms (276 lb) of heroin into Australia with an estimated street value of A$160 million.


title: Narco-state

text: As early as 1996, the Netherlands was labelled as a narco-state in a French government report. Since then, the question of whether the Netherlands is actually a narco-state has been asked many times and the answer depends strongly on which characteristics are attributed to a narco-state. In any case, the size of the drug sector in the Netherlands suggests that drug crime has been a persistent problem in the Netherlands for years and that the fight against it constantly poses complex questions to politics and criminal justice. In 2018, several police detectives stated in a report by the Dutch Police Association that the Netherlands "already exhibited a painful number of characteristics of a narco-state". Minister Grapperhaus of Justice and Security stated in a response that the Netherlands is not a narco-state. After the murder of lawyer Derk Wiersum and crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, the qualification of the Netherlands as a narco-state received new attention.


title: Narco-state

text: After the Nicaraguan Revolution, Sandinista National Liberation Front, led by Daniel Ortega, took the national government of Nicaragua from the Somoza dynasty. In 1980s the Sandinista government was accused of helping Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel by giving him access to a drug trafficking corridor that runs in Nicaragua as well. According to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Ortega was said to receive a drug money in order to influence the 2008 local elections in country. Another cable also stated that Nicaraguan officials returned from Venezuela with the briefcase full of cash with could indicates the government involvement with drug cartels.


title: Narco-state

text: The dictatorship of Manuel Noriega owned a state sponsored drug trade network which gave Panama a reputation of being a narco-state at the time. Noriega was well known to be involved in illegal drugs and arms trade which was dubbed as his "cash cow". Between 1981 until 1987, the Noriega regime have a cordial relationship with the United States due to mutual interest in which Noriega government helped arming the Contras in Nicaragua in which the US ignored Noriega illegal activities in exchange. Noriega involvement in drug trafficking grows rapidly in 1980s which reached its peak in 1984. The conflict in Colombia and Central American countries gave Noriega opportunity to transport cocaine to United States. Noriega regime also made an alliance with the Medellin Cartel. However, in 1984, Noriega began to reduce his drug operation by targeting Jorge Ochoa and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela money laundering operations in order to clean his reputations which gave him positive image among American government elites. In the late 80s the United States relations with Noriega regime deteriorated after Noriega was accused for selling intelligences to Cuba. It was also reported that Hugo Spadafora, Noriega most prominent critic who was assassinated by his regime reported Noriega drug operations to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The United States would later invade Panama and captured Noriega, ending his regime. Noriega was later trialed in three countries; France, United States, and Panama and eventually died in 2017.


title: Narco-state

text: Suriname has been labeled as a narco-state due to President Dési Bouterse and his family involvement in drug trafficking. Bouterse was sentenced "in absentia" in the Netherlands to 11 years' imprisonment after being convicted of trafficking of cocaine. His son Dino Bouterse has been arrested twice in three different countries and currently serving 16 years imprisonment in the United States on charge of drug trafficking.


title: Narco-state

text: Syria was labeled as a narco-state by the United States for nearly a decade until 1997, during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon when they controlled the cannabis cultivation in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, and were the Middle East region's main source of hashish. During the Syrian Civil War, mass production of drugs within Syria began, and officers fed their men fenethylline, which they called "Captain Courage." Several shipments containing tonnes of amphetamines were seized in different countries smuggled from Syria, those shipments had sometimes millions of pills of fenethylline, which production in the country started since at least 2006. In November 2020, two drug shipments of hashish coming from Syria were seized by Egyptian authorities, the first shipment which arrived to Alexandria, included 2 tonnes of hashish, while the second shipment had 6 tonnes and was found at the Damietta port. The port of Latakia became under scrutiny of European and American police, as being favored by smugglers. In May 2021, Turkish security forces used UAVs to stop 1.5 tonnes of marijuana being smuggled out of Syria. According to the Centre for Operational Analysis and Research (COAR), Syrian seized drugs in 2020 had the value of no less than $3.4bn.


title: Narco-state

text: The "New York Times" reported in December 2021 that the 4th Armoured Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, oversees much of the production and distribution of Captagon, among other drugs, reinforcing Syria's status as a narco-state on the Mediterranean sea. The unit controls manufacturing facilities, packing plants, and smuggling networks all across Syria (which have started to also move crystal meth). The division's security bureau, headed by Maj. Gen. Ghassan Bilal, provides protection for factories and along smuggling routes to the port city Latakia and to border crossings with Jordan and Lebanon.


title: Narco-state

text: The United Kingdom has been called the first narco-state: thanks to the Opium Wars, the UK became a powerful force in the traffic of illegal drugs in the mid to late 19th century.


title: Narco-state

text: More recently, Venezuela has been labeled a narco-state, due to the relations between some Venezuelan government officials to drug cartels and criminal factions all across Latin America. For example, former vice president of Venezuela Tareck el Aissami has been accused of supporting drug trafficking and helping Mexican drug cartels. El Aissami has been sanctioned by the United States since 2017. The nephews and sons of Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro are also being accused of financing drug trades and being involved in the Narcosobrinos affair. In November 2017, the United States's UN ambassador Nikki Haley accused Venezuela of being a "dangerous narco-state".


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is an expansion pack for the 2016 turn-based tactics video game "XCOM 2", released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on August 29, 2017. Versions for Linux and macOS were released on August 31, 2017, and a Nintendo Switch port was released on May 29, 2020.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: "XCOM 2" is a turn-based tactics video game. A defense team known as XCOM must repel and resist an alien invasion. The "War of the Chosen" expansion makes changes to "XCOM 2"s campaign structure and adds new enemies, story elements, new hero characters, modifiers, and more behaviors for characters.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: The expansion introduces a new set of enemy aliens called the Chosen, three elite alien-human hybrid warriors tasked by the Elders to defeat XCOM and recapture the Commander; The Assassin, who relies on stealth and melee attacks; the Hunter, that uses a long range rifle that fires bullets that track their targets; and the Warlock, who uses psionic powers and can take control of several of the player's units at once. As the game progresses, the Chosen gain new exclusive abilities over time, and eventually become able to launch a direct attack on the Avenger. The Chosen continue to appear occasionally during missions even after being defeated, and can only be killed for good once their base is destroyed as well.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: The game also introduces three rebel factions that antagonize each other, but grant special hero classes once their allegiance is earned; the Reapers, specialized in sniping and stealth, the Templars, who employ unique psionic abilities, and the Skirmishers, former ADVENT soldiers with exclusive equipment and tactics. Each faction also provides covert ops missions in which soldiers can be deployed to obtain extra resources, delay the Avatar project, or gather info about the Chosen's strongholds, as well as other benefits. Other new features include a revamped strategic layer and the "Bond" system, in which pairs of soldiers develop special abilities that are accessible when both are deployed during a mission, however, when a bonded soldier is killed, their partner may temporarily enter a "berserk mode", ignoring any player orders and attacking targets at random, or they may panic, becoming uncontrollable and fleeing from battle. For research, breakthroughs and inspirations are made to increase the speed that researchers work at, sometimes instantly being able to complete a project.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: The expansion also adds a neutrally-aligned zombie-like enemy type called the Lost, former humans created during the invasion that will attack both ADVENT and XCOM in battle, along with new ADVENT units with exclusive abilities.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: Other new features include a daily challenge mode, as well as the ability to create posters featuring your custom characters that will appear inside the game world.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: Six of the voice actors new in the expansion are known for their roles on "": Denise Crosby, John de Lancie, Jonathan Frakes, Michael Dorn, Dwight Schultz, and Marina Sirtis.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: The plot remains mostly unchanged from the original game except from a few cutscenes. One of them introduces three factions who also oppose the alien occupation; the Spokesman orders the commander to join forces with them to bolster the resistance's efforts. As the game progresses, XCOM is occasionally attacked by the Chosen, three elite alien warriors with orders from the Elders to recapture the commander. Despite being killed in battle, each Chosen is revived and returns to attack on a later occasion. Should XCOM successfully locate and destroy a Chosen's stronghold, they are destroyed permanently.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: The final mission also remains the same, except that each Chosen who was not killed permanently will appear to fight the Commander's avatar and his forces. After the Elders are defeated, a new cutscene after the original ending shows the three new factions emerging from the shadows. One of them, the Templars, notice the glow coming from the sea and points out that a new conflict will soon begin.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: "War of the Chosen" was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017. It was released on August 29, 2017.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: An add on for the game called "Tactical Legacy Pack" was released on October 9, 2018. It features a series of missions set between the events of "XCOM: Enemy Unknown" and "XCOM 2", new items, new maps and the option to play the game using either the original "XCOM: Enemy Unknown"'s soundtrack or an all-new soundtrack based on "", the first game of the original "X-COM" series.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: "XCOM 2: War of the Chosen" received "generally favorable" reviews from professional critics according to review aggregator website Metacritic.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: "IGN"s reviews editor Dan Stapleton praised the amount of variety "War of the Chosen" added to the mission objectives and campaign of "XCOM 2". Although he found there to be some balance issues, he thought that both the Hero classes and the Chosen were great additions. "Game Informer" reviewer Ben Reeves was impressed by the amount of content included in the expansion, noting that it could almost have been a standalone game.


title: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

text: "Eurogamer" ranked the game 46th on their list of the "Top 50 Games of 2017", while "Polygon" ranked it 17th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017. Readers and staff of "Game Informer" voted it for "Best Strategy Game". It also won the award for "Best Expansion" in "PC Gamer"s 2017 Game of the Year Awards; and was nominated for "Best Strategy Game" at The Game Awards 2017, and for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year" at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. It won the award for "Game, Strategy" at the 17th Annual National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers Awards, whereas its other nomination was for "Game Engineering".


title: Internet culture

text: Internet culture is a culture based on the many manifestations of computer networks and their use for communication, entertainment, business, and recreation. Some features of Internet culture include online communities, gaming, and social media. Due to the massive adoption and widespread use of the Internet, the impact of Internet culture on society and non-digital cultures has been extensive. The encompassing nature of the Internet culture has led to the study of different elements such as social media, gaming and specific communities, and has also raised questions about identity and privacy on the Internet.


title: Internet culture

text: The cultural history of the Internet is a story of rapid change. The Internet evolved in parallel with rapid and sustained technological advances in computing and data communication, and widespread access as the cost of infrastructure dropped by several orders of magnitude. As technology advances, Internet culture changes in response; in particular, the introduction of smartphones has increased access to the Internet.


title: Internet culture

text: Initially, digital culture tilted toward the Anglosphere. As a consequence of computer technology's early reliance on textual coding systems that were mainly adapted to the English language, Anglophone societies—followed by other societies with languages based on Latin script—enjoyed privileged access to digital culture. However, other languages have gradually increased in prominence. In specific, the proportion of content on the Internet that is in English has dropped from roughly 80% in the 1990s to around 52.9% in 2018.


title: Internet culture

text: From a psychological perspective, electronic and digital culture is highly engrossing. Excessive neglect of the traditional physical and social world in favor of Internet culture became codified as a medical condition under the diagnosis of Internet addiction disorder.


title: Internet culture

text: Since the boundaries of cyberculture are difficult to define, the term is used flexibly, and its application to specific circumstances can be controversial. It generally refers at least to the cultures of virtual communities, but can also extend to a wide range of cultural issues relating to "cyber-topics", e.g. cybernetics, and the perceived or predicted cyborgization of the human body and human society itself. It can also embrace associated intellectual and cultural movements, such as cyborg theory and cyberpunk. The term often incorporates an implicit anticipation of the future.


title: Internet culture

text: The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest usage of the term "cyberculture" in 1963, when Alice Mary Hilton wrote the following, "In the era of cyberculture, all the plows pull themselves and the fried chickens fly right onto our plates."


title: Internet culture

text: This example, and all others, up through 1995 are used to support the definition of cyberculture as "the social conditions brought about by automation and computerization." The "American Heritage Dictionary" broadens the sense in which "cyberculture" is used by defining it as, "The culture arising from the use of computer networks, as for communication, entertainment, work, and business". However, both "OED" and the "American Heritage Dictionary" fail to describe cyberculture as a culture within and among users of computer networks. This cyberculture may be purely an online culture or it may span both virtual and physical worlds. This is to say, that cyberculture is a culture endemic to online communities; it is not just the culture that results from computer use, but culture that is directly mediated by the computer. Another way to envision cyberculture is as the electronically enabled linkage of like-minded, but potentially geographically disparate (or physically disabled and hence less mobile) persons.


title: Internet culture

text: Cyberculture is a wide social and cultural movement closely linked to advanced information science and information technology, their emergence, development and rise to social and cultural prominence between the 1960s and the 1990s. Cyberculture was influenced by those early users of the Internet, frequently including the architects of the original project. These individuals were often guided in their actions by the hacker ethic. While early cyberculture was based on a small cultural sample, and its ideals, the modern cyberculture is a much more diverse group of users and the ideals that they espouse.


title: Internet culture

text: Numerous specific concepts of cyberculture have been formulated by such authors as Lev Manovich, Arturo Escobar and Fred Forest. However, most of these concepts given by the following authors focus only on certain aspects, and they do not cover these in great detail. Some authors aim to achieve a more comprehensive understanding distinguished between early and contemporary cyberculture (Jakub Macek), or between cyberculture as the cultural context of information technology and cyberculture (more specifically cyberculture studies) as "a particular approach to the study of the 'culture + technology' complex" (David Lister et al.).


title: Internet culture

text: The cultural antecedent of digital culture was amateur radio (commonly known as ham radio), which at this point in time was electronic, not yet digital. By connecting over great distances, Ham operators were able to form a distinct cultural community with a strong technocratic foundation, as the radio gear involved was finicky and prone to failure. The area that later became Silicon Valley, where much of modern Internet technology originates, had been an early locus of radio engineering. Alongside the original mandate for robustness and resiliency, the renegade spirit of the early ham radio community later infused the cultural value of decentralization and near-total rejection of regulation and political control that characterized the Internet's original growth era, with strong undercurrents of the Wild West spirit of the American frontier.


title: Internet culture

text: At its inception in the early 1970s as part of ARPANET, digital networks were small, institutional, arcane, and slow, which confined the majority of use to the exchange of textual information, such as interpersonal messages and source code. Access to these networks was largely limited to a technological elite based at a small number of prestigious universities; the original American network connected one computer in Utah with three in California.


title: Internet culture

text: Text on these digital networks usually encoded in the ASCII character set, which was minimalistic even for established English typography, barely suited to other European languages sharing a Latin script (but with an additional requirement to support accented characters), and entirely unsuitable to any language not based on a Latin script, such as Mandarin, Arabic, or Hindi.


title: Internet culture

text: Interactive use was discouraged except for high value activities. Hence a store and forward architecture was employed for many message systems, functioning more like a post office than modern instant messaging; however, by the standards of postal mail, the system (when it worked) was stunningly fast and cheap. Among the heaviest users were those actively involved in advancing the technology, most of whom implicitly shared much the same base of arcane knowledge, effectively forming a technological priesthood.


title: Internet culture

text: The origins of social media predate the Internet proper. The first bulletin board system was created in 1978, GEnie was created by General Electric in 1985, the mailing list Listserv appeared in 1986, and Internet Relay Chat was created in 1988. The first official social media site, SixDegrees launched in 1997.


title: Internet culture

text: In the 1980s, the network grew to encompass most universities and many corporations, especially those involved with technology, including heavy but segregated participation within the American military–industrial complex. Use of interactivity grew, and the user base became less dominated by programmers, computer scientists and hawkish industrialists, but it remained largely an academic culture centered around institutions of higher learning. It was observed that each September, with an intake of new students, standards of productive discourse would plummet until the established user base brought the influx up to speed on cultural etiquette.


title: Internet culture

text: Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia, opening the door for public participation. Soon the network was no longer dominated by academic culture, and the term eternal September, initially referring to September 1993, was coined as Internet slang for the endless intake of cultural newbies.


title: Internet culture

text: Commercial use became established alongside academic and professional use, beginning with a sharp rise in unsolicited commercial e-mail commonly called spam. Around this same time, the network transitioned to support the burgeoning World Wide Web. Multimedia formats such as audio, graphics, and video become commonplace and began to displace plain text, but multimedia remained painfully slow for dial-up users. Also around this time the Internet also began to internationalize, supporting most of the world's major languages, but support for many languages remained patchy and incomplete into the 2010s.


title: Internet culture

text: On the arrival of broadband access, file sharing services grew rapidly, especially of digital audio (with a prevalence of bootlegged commercial music) with the arrival of Napster in 1999 and similar projects which effectively catered to music enthusiasts, especially teenagers and young adults, soon becoming established as a prototype for rapid evolution into modern social media. Alongside ongoing challenges to traditional norms of intellectual property, business models of many of the largest Internet corporations evolved into what Shoshana Zuboff terms surveillance capitalism. Not only is social media a novel form of social culture, but also a novel form of economic culture where sharing is frictionless, but personal privacy has become a scarce good.


title: Internet culture

text: In 1999, Aaron Peckham created Urban Dictionary, an online, crowdsourced dictionary of slang. He had kept the server for Urban Dictionary under his bed.


title: Internet culture

text: In 2000, there was great demand for images of a dress that Jennifer Lopez wore. As a result, Google's co-founders created Google Images.


title: Internet culture

text: In 2005, YouTube was created because people wanted to find video of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl in 2004. YouTube was later acquired by Google in 2006.


title: Internet culture

text: Since 2021, there has been an unprecedented surge of interest in the concept of the metaverse. In particular, Facebook Inc. renamed itself to Meta Platforms in October 2021, amid the crisis of the Facebook Papers.


title: Internet culture

text: Manifestations of cyberculture include various human interactions mediated by computer networks. They can be activities, pursuits, games, places, and metaphors, and include a diverse base of applications. Some are supported by specialized software and others work on commonly accepted Internet protocols. Examples include but are not limited to:


title: Internet culture

text: The Internet is one of the most popular forms of communication today with billions of people using it every day. This is because the Internet is full of a wide variety of tools that can allow for information retrieval and communication, which can occur between individuals, groups, or even within mass contexts. It has created a culture that many people are involved in which has led to countless positive and negative impacts.


title: Internet culture

text: The Internet provides an array of tools for people to use for information retrieval and communication in individual, group, and mass contexts.


title: Internet culture

text: The creation of the Internet has impacted society greatly, providing the ability to communicate with others online, store information such as files and pictures, and help maintain government. As the Internet progressed, digital and audio files could be created and shared on the Internet, and became one of the main sources of information, business, and entertainment, leading to the creation of different social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat. Communicating with others has become easier in the modern day and age, allowing people to connect and interact with each other. The Internet helps people maintain our relationships with others by acting as a supplement to physical interactions with friends and family. People are also able to make forums and talk about different topics with each other which can help form and build relationships. This gives people the ability to express their own views freely. Social groups created on the Internet have also been connected to improving and maintaining health in general. Interacting with social groups online can help prevent and possibly treat depression. In response to the rising prevalence of mental health disorders, including anxiety and depression, a 2019 study by Christo El Morr and others demonstrated that York University students in Toronto were extremely interested in participating in an online mental health support community. The study mentions that many students prefer an anonymous online mental health community to a traditional in person service, due to the social stigmatization of mental health disorders. Overall, online communication with others gives people the sense that they are wanted and are welcomed into social groups.


title: Internet culture

text: With access to the Internet becoming easier for people, it has led to a substantial number of disadvantages. Addiction is a notable issue, as the Internet is becoming increasingly relied on for various everyday tasks. There are a range of different symptoms connected to addiction such as withdrawal, anxiety, and mood swings. Addiction to social media is very prevalent with adolescents, but the interaction they have with one another can be detrimental to their health. Rude comments on posts can lower an individual's self-esteem, making them feel unworthy and may lead to depression. Social interaction online may also substitute face-to-face interactions for some people instead of acting as a supplement. This can negatively impact people's social skills and cause one to have feelings of loneliness. People may also face the chance of being cyberbullied when using online applications. Cyberbullying may include harassment, video shaming, impersonating, and much more. A concept described as "cyberbullying theory" is now being used to suggest that children who use social networking more frequently are more likely to become victims of cyberbullying. Additionally, some evidence shows that too much Internet use can stunt memory and attention development in children. The ease of access to information which the Internet provides discourages information retention. However, the cognitive consequences are not yet fully known. The staggering amount of available information online can lead to feelings of information overload. Some effects of this phenomenon include reduced comprehension, decision making, and behavior control.


title: Internet culture

text: First and foremost, cyberculture derives from traditional notions of culture, as the roots of the word imply. In non-cyberculture, it would be odd to speak of a single, monolithic culture. In cyberculture, by extension, searching for a single thing that is cyberculture would likely be problematic. The notion that there is a single, definable cyberculture is likely the complete dominance of early cyber territory by affluent North Americans. Writing by early proponents of cyberspace tends to reflect this assumption (see Howard Rheingold).


title: Internet culture

text: The ethnography of cyberspace is an important aspect of cyberculture that does not reflect a single unified culture. It "is not a monolithic or placeless 'cyberspace'; rather, it is numerous new technologies and capabilities, used by diverse people, in diverse real-world locations." It is malleable, perishable, and can be shaped by the vagaries of external forces on its users. For example, the laws of physical world governments, social norms, the architecture of cyberspace, and market forces shape the way cybercultures form and evolve. As with physical world cultures, cybercultures lend themselves to identification and study.


title: Internet culture

text: There are several qualities that cybercultures share that make them warrant the prefix "cyber-". Some of those qualities are that cyberculture:


title: Internet culture

text: Thus, cyberculture can be generally defined as the set of technologies (material and intellectual), practices, attitudes, modes of thought, and values that developed with cyberspace.


title: Internet culture

text: Cyberculture, like culture in general, relies on establishing identity and credibility. However, in the absence of direct physical interaction, it could be argued that the process for such establishment is more difficult.


title: Internet culture

text: One early study, conducted from 1998-1999, found that the participants view information obtained online as being slightly more credible than information from magazines, radio, and television. However, the same study found that the participants viewed information obtained from newspapers as the most credible, on average. Finally, this study found that an individual's rate of verification of information obtained online was low, and perhaps over reported depending on the type of information.


title: Internet culture

text: How does cyberculture rely on and establish identity and credibility? This relationship is two-way, with identity and credibility being both used to define the community in cyberspace and to be created within and by online communities.


title: Internet culture

text: In some senses, online credibility is established in much the same way that it is established in the offline world; however, since these are two separate worlds, it is not surprising that there are differences in their mechanisms and interactions of the markers found in each.


title: Internet culture

text: Following the model put forth by Lawrence Lessig in "", the architecture of a given online community may be the single most important factor regulating the establishment of credibility within online communities. Some factors may be:


title: Internet culture

text: Many sites allow anonymous commentary, where the user-id attached to the comment is something like "guest" or "anonymous user". In an architecture that allows anonymous posting about other works, the credibility being impacted is only that of the product for sale, the original opinion expressed, the code written, the video, or other entity about which comments are made (e.g., a Slashdot post). Sites that require "known" postings can vary widely from simply requiring some kind of name to be associated with the comment to requiring registration, wherein the identity of the registrant is visible to other readers of the comment. These "known" identities allow and even require commentators to be aware of their own credibility, based on the fact that other users will associate particular content and styles with their identity. By definition, then, all blog postings are "known" in that the blog exists in a consistently defined virtual location, which helps to establish an identity, around which credibility can gather. Conversely, anonymous postings are inherently incredible. Note that a "known" identity need have nothing to do with a given identity in the physical world.


title: Internet culture

text: Architectures can require that physical identity be associated with commentary, as in Lessig's example of Counsel Connect. However, to require linkage to physical identity, many more steps must be taken (collecting and storing sensitive information about a user) and safeguards for that collected information must be established-the users must have more trust of the sites collecting the information (yet another form of credibility). Irrespective of safeguards, as with Counsel Connect, using physical identities links credibility across the frames of the Internet and real space, influencing the behaviors of those who contribute in those spaces. However, even purely Internet-based identities have credibility. Just as Lessig describes linkage to a character or a particular online gaming environment, nothing inherently links a person or group to their Internet-based persona, but credibility (similar to "characters") is "earned rather than bought, and because this takes time and (credibility is) not fungible, it becomes increasingly hard" to create a new persona.


title: Internet culture

text: In some architectures, those who review or offer comments can, in turn, be rated by other users. This technique offers the ability to regulate the credibility of given authors by subjecting their comments to direct "quantifiable" approval ratings.


title: Internet culture

text: Architectures can be oriented around positive feedback or a mix of both positive and negative feedback. While a particular user may be able to equate fewer stars with a "negative" rating, the semantic difference is potentially important. The ability to actively rate an entity negatively may violate laws or norms that are important in the jurisdiction in which the Internet property is important. The more public a site, the more important this concern may be, as noted by Goldsmith & Wu regarding eBay.


title: Internet culture

text: Architectures can also be oriented to give editorial control to a group or individual. Many email lists are worked in this fashion (e.g., Freecycle). In these situations, the architecture usually allows, but does not require that contributions be moderated. Further, moderation may take two different forms: reactive or proactive. In the reactive mode, an editor removes posts, reviews, or content that is deemed offensive after it has been placed on the site or list. In the proactive mode, an editor must review all contributions before they are made public.


title: Internet culture

text: In a moderated setting, credibility is often given to the moderator. However, that credibility can be damaged by appearing to edit in a heavy-handed way, whether reactive or proactive (as experienced by digg.com). In an unmoderated setting, credibility lies with the contributors alone.


title: Internet culture

text: The very existence of an architecture allowing moderation may lend credibility to the forum being used (as in Howard Rheingold's examples from the WELL), or it may take away credibility (as in corporate web sites that post feedback, but edit it highly).


title: Internet culture

text: The field of cyberculture studies examines the topics explained above, including the communities emerging within the networked spaces sustained by the use of modern technology. Students of cyberculture engage with political, philosophical, sociological, and psychological issues that arise from the networked interactions of human beings by humans who act in various relations to information science and technology.


title: Internet culture

text: Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Manuel De Landa, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Pierre Levy, David Gunkel, Victor J.Vitanza, Gregory Ulmer, Charles D. Laughlin, and Jean Baudrillard are among the key theorists and critics who have produced relevant work that speaks to, or has influenced studies in, cyberculture.


title: Internet culture

text: Following the lead of Rob Kitchin, in his work "Cyberspace: The World in the Wires", cyberculture might be viewed from different critical perspectives. These perspectives include futurism or techno-utopianism, technological determinism, social constructionism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory.


title: Federation of South Arabia

text: The Federation of South Arabia ( "") was a federal state under British protection in what would become South Yemen. Its capital was Aden.


title: Federation of South Arabia

text: It was formed on 4 April 1962 from the 15 protected states of the Federation of Arab Emirates of the South. The State of Aden, formerly Aden Colony, joined the Federation on 18 January 1963. In June 1964, the Upper Aulaqi Sultanate was added for a total of 17 states. A team was sent to the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. The Federation was abolished on 30 November 1967, when its status as a British protectorate came to an end, along with that of the Protectorate of South Arabia, and they became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.


title: Federation of South Arabia

text: The Federation issued its own Adeni postage stamps from 1963 to 1966. Most of its issues were part of the omnibus issues common to all the Commonwealth territories, but it did issue its own definitive stamps on 1 April 1965. The set of 14 included 10 values, from 5 to 75 fils, each depicting the arms of the Federation in a single color, while the top four values (100 fils, 250 fils, 500 fils, and 1 dinar), featured the flag of the Federation.


title: Federation of South Arabia

text: The stamps referred to above are those listed in the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalog. A number of other stamps have also been issued and are listed in Stanley Gibbons and other widely used stamp catalogs. It is possible, or even likely, that some of the stamps of South Arabia were not issued primarily for postal use.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The Beatles Anthology is a multimedia retrospective project consisting of a television documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book describing the history of the Beatles. Beatles members Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr participated in the making of the works, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the "Anthology" project, while John Lennon appears in archival interviews.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The documentary series was first broadcast in November 1995, with expanded versions released on VHS and LaserDisc in 1996 and on DVD in 2003. The documentary used interviews with the Beatles and their associates to narrate the history of the band as seen through archival footage and performances. The "Anthology" book, released in 2000, paralleled the documentary in presenting the group's history through quotes from interviews.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The initial volume of the album set ("Anthology 1") was released the same week of the documentary's airdate, with the subsequent two volumes ("Anthology 2" and "Anthology 3") released in 1996. They included unreleased performances and outtakes presented in roughly chronological order, along with two new songs based on demo tapes recorded by Lennon after the group broke up: "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", both produced by Jeff Lynne.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: Approximately coinciding with the release of the "Free as a Bird" single and "Anthology 1" album (the first of three double-CD albums), "The Beatles Anthology" series of documentaries was broadcast on ITV in the United Kingdom and ABC television in the United States in 1995. The "Anthology" series takes a form similar to that of the "Anthology" book, by being a series of first-person accounts by the Beatles themselves, with no external "objective" narration. Footage in the "Anthology" series features voice-over recordings of all four Beatles to push the narrative of the story, with contributions from their producer, road manager and others. As well as telling their story through archival footage, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr appear in interview segments recorded exclusively for the series; John Lennon appears only in historic archival footage.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The series, which included over 5000 hours of planning and production, is composed of numerous film clips and interviews that present a complete history of the band from the Beatles' own personal perspectives. When it aired on ABC, the series comprised six hour-long programs, aired on three nights in November 1995. The series was later released as eight expanded episodes on VHS, laserdisc and as a boxed set of five DVDs (4 discs with 2 episodes apiece and a disc of extras).


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: Part 1 of the series drew 17 million households, meaning an average of 27.3 million viewers, which was much better than usual for ABC at the time, but behind most broadcasts of "Friends" on NBC, which in its second season was averaging 29.4 million viewers per episode.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: In promoting the series, ABC identified itself as "A-Beatles-C" – an homage to the mid-1960s "77 W-A-Beatles-C" call sign of the network's flagship NYC AM radio station – and several of the network's prime-time sitcoms replaced their regular opening credit themes with Beatles tracks.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: To accompany the "Anthology" series, three albums were issued, each containing two CDs, two cassette tapes or three vinyl LPs of mostly never-before-released Beatles material (the exceptions being the Tony Sheridan-era material), although many of the tracks had appeared on bootlegs for many years prior.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: Two days after the first television special in the series had aired, "Anthology 1" was released to stores, and included music recorded by the Quarrymen, the famous Decca Records audition tapes, and various out-takes and demos from the band's first four albums. It also included the song "Lend Me Your Comb", omitted from the collection "Live at the BBC", released the previous year (1994). The song "Free as a Bird" was included at the very start. Some 450,000 copies of "Anthology 1" were sold in its first day of release, the most sales for an album in a single day ever. The band's first drummer Pete Best, replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962 before the Beatles recorded professionally for EMI, received his first substantial Beatles royalties from this album, for the inclusion of early demo tracks on which he played.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: "Anthology 2" was released on 17 March 1996. The second collection presented out-takes and demos from the Beatles' sessions for "Help!", "Rubber Soul", "Revolver", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Magical Mystery Tour". These included selected early demos and takes for Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever", previously available only to bootleg collectors. The new song "Real Love" – which, like "Free as a Bird", was based on an unfinished Lennon recording – was also included in the two-CD collection.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: "Anthology 3" was released on 28 October 1996. The third collection featured out-takes and demos from "The Beatles" ("White Album"), "Abbey Road" and "Let It Be", as well as several songs from Harrison and McCartney which later became post-Beatle tracks.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The three album covers, when laid side-by-side, become one long painted collage of various peeling posters and album covers representing the different stages of the Beatles' career. This was the work of Klaus Voormann, who also created the album cover for "Revolver" in 1966. The "Anthology" covers required Voormann to recreate elements of his cover for "Revolver" within the collage. During the music video for "Free as a Bird", the "Anthology" collage appears as posters on a shop window as the camera pans quickly across the street. The design also adorned the VHS, laserdisc and DVD releases, again to be properly encountered by laying the cases side by side. Upon the release of "Anthology 3", HMV stores made available a limited edition cardboard sleeve designed to hold all three CD volumes of which each side of the sleeve make up half of the collage.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: All three albums were made digitally available on the iTunes Store on 14 June 2011, alongside a new "Anthology Highlights" album which featured a selection of tracks from all three albums and reached number 184 on "Billboard"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s United States Top Current Albums chart.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: In October 2000, "The Beatles Anthology" book was released, which included interviews with all four band members and others involved, plus rare photos. Many of the interviews quoted are from those featured in the documentary films. The book is designed as a large-format hardback, with imaginative artwork throughout, and several visually vibrant and colourful spreads featuring graphics relevant to the proceeding chronology, photographic arrays and a variety of text styles and layouts. The book went straight to the top of "The New York Times" bestsellers list. In 2002, the book was released as a large-format paperback.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: During early 1995, as work on "The Beatles Anthology" continued, Yoko Ono and McCartney recorded an avant-garde piece called "Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue". Ono provided vocals and McCartney played bass, while Sean Lennon, Linda McCartney, and McCartney's children played various instruments. The piece was broadcast on Japanese public television in memory of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The track "Carnival of Light", recorded during the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" sessions, was intended to be released on the "Anthology 2" album, but was vetoed by George Harrison.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: It was reported that McCartney, Harrison and Starr worked on a new composition called "All for Love" in March 1995, intended as a track on "Anthology 3", but the effort was abandoned. No version of the song has reached the public.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: Each of the three "Anthology" albums was accompanied by a promotional CD sampler sent to radio stations shortly before the official release dates. These CDs have since become highly sought collector's items. Even rarer is a vinyl version of the sampler for "Anthology 2", which was only sent to college radio stations and featured a different cover (though the contents were the same).


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: In October 1996 there was a strictly limited release from EMI, a slip case cover to house all three CD volumes, which have since become extremely rare, fetching high prices among collectors.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: The success of the "Anthology" albums was parodied by the release of the Rutles' "Archaeology" some months later. Delays in the release of the third volume of the Beatles' series ultimately meant that the Rutles' parody arrived in shops on the same day as its inspiration.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied "The Beatles Anthology" in an "Al TV" special. He said he had a copy of a fictional "Anthology 17", which he claimed would not be available to the public for a while. He played for the audience a track of Paul McCartney brushing his teeth and Ringo Starr shaving before "The Ed Sullivan Show".


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: "The Beatles Anthology" was also parodied on the short-lived "Dana Carvey Show", which was being aired on ABC around the same time that "Anthology" was being televised on the network.


title: The Beatles Anthology

text: On "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" the host had the remaining Beatles adding music and doing backup singing to a fictitious vocal track of John Lennon's answering machine message.


title: Scattergories

text: Scattergories is a creative-thinking category-based party game originally published by Parker Brothers in 1988. Parker Brothers was purchased by Hasbro a few years later, which published the game internationally under its Milton Bradley brand. The objective of the 2-to-6-player game is to score points by uniquely naming objects within a set of categories, given an initial letter, within a time limit. The game is based on a traditional game called "Categories".


title: Scattergories

text: In 1989, Milton Bradley published a "refill" pack for Scattergories. It consists of 18 cards with 144 new categories and contains 6 new answer pads.


title: Scattergories

text: In 2008, Winning Moves Games USA published Scattergories The Card Game. It is a fast-playing, portable game of Scattergories. (It is not a booster pack.) The game includes a deck of letter cards, a deck of category cards and 2 "I Know" cards. Players turn over the top card in the letter deck and category deck and the first person to shout out a correct answer takes a card. For example, if an "S" is turned over and "The Beach" is turned over...if someone slaps the "I Know" card and says "I Know! Sand." That player claims either card and turns over a new letter or subject card (depending on what they claimed.) The game ends when one entire deck is exhausted. The player with the most cards wins.


title: Scattergories

text: In January 2010, Puzzlewright Press published "Scattergories Word Search Puzzles" by Mark Danna, a former associate editor at Games magazine. Sanctioned by Hasbro, this book provides Scattergories players a way to play a solitaire version of the game with the following variations: write down two answers, not just one, for every category; instead of coming up with unique answers, try to match answers, which are hidden in a word search; score bonus points by matching answers hidden in the word search grid's leftover letters. There are no rounds. Players try to beat their most recent or their best score. Categories in the book are based on the ones in the board game but have modifications. There are 60 puzzle games in all.


title: Scattergories

text: In 2010, Winning Moves Games USA published "Scattergories Categories" which is a twist on classic Scattergories play. Instead of finding answers that all start with one letter, Scattergories Categories focuses on one category per round and players race to find a unique answer starting with each letter in the category key word, which is related to the category in some way. As the game box shows, if the category word is "CAMPING TRIP" players have 2 minutes to find a word that starts with a C, then an A, then an M, and a P... and so on. Players get 1 point for each unique answer and the first player to 25 points wins. The game contains 250 word challenges on 125 cards for players 12 and up.


title: Scattergories

text: In 2019, Winning Moves Games USA published "Scattergories 30th Anniversary Edition. It is a classic reproduction of the original 1989 edition. It includes all original categories and components, including the mechanical timer with three different time settings, 6 folders, 6 answer pads, and multi-sided oversized die.


title: Scattergories

text: Scattergories became an NBC game show in 1993 hosted by Dick Clark. It ran right after "Scrabble" and featured Chuck Woolery as a regular panelist.


title: Scattergories

text: Scattergories was released to the iTunes App Store in 2015. The game was developed by Magmic and licensed through Hasbro.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: Icahn Enterprises L.P. is an American conglomerate headquartered at Milton Tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. The company has investments in various industries including energy, automotive, food packaging, metals, real estate and home fashion. The company is controlled by Carl Icahn, who owns 88% of it.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In 2006, the company sold the Sands Atlantic City hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey and several of the adjacent lots for $274.8 million to Pinnacle Entertainment.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In April 2007, the company sold its American Casino & Entertainment Properties to an affiliate of Goldman Sachs, for $1.3 billion. In September 2007, American Real Estate Partners, another entity controlled by Icahn, merged with the firm and changed its name to Icahn Enterprises L.P.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In February 2016, Icahn Enterprises purchased Trump Entertainment Resorts, which owned the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City. The company sold the casino to the owners of Hard Rock Cafe for $50 million in May 2017 - which represented a recuperation of just 4 cents on the dollar. Also in February 2016, the company acquired Pep Boys.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In January 2017, the company acquired Federal-Mogul. In June 2017, the company acquired Precision Auto Care, a chain of over 250 vehicle repair shops. In August 2017, the company sold the property formerly known as the Fontainebleau Resort Las Vegas for $600 million. The company had acquired the property in 2010 for $148 million. In October 2017, the company acquired American Driveline Systems. The company had 89,034 employees as of 2017.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In October 2020, Carl Icahn announced his son Brett would succeed him as chairman of Icahn Enterprises and CEO of its investment subsidiary Icahn Capital LP.


title: Icahn Enterprises

text: In November 2020, Icahn Enterprises reported third quarter losses of $714 million, compared to a loss of $49 million the same quarter the previous year.


title: Chris Sharma

text: Chris Omprakash Sharma (born 23 April, 1981) is an American rock climber who is considered one of the greatest and most influential climbers in the history of the sport. He dominated sport climbing for the decade after his 2001 ascent of "Realization/Biographie", the world's first-ever redpoint of a consensus graded route, and ushered in what was called a "technical evolution" in the sport. Sharma carried the mantle of "world's strongest sport climber" from Wolfgang Gullich (who held it for almost a decade from the early 1980s), and passed it to Adam Ondra (who held it from 2012).


title: Chris Sharma

text: In 2008, Sharma redpointed the world's first-ever consensus route with "Jumbo Love", and in 2013, became only the second-ever person to climb a route with "La Dura Dura". Sharma is also known for soloing the world's first-ever ("Es Pontàs" in 2007), and ("Alasha" in 2016) deep-water solo routes. Sharma became one of the most commercially successful climbers in his sport, and was noted for his "King Lines" – being iconic routes that inspired him to spend the months and even years needed to climb them – some of which feature in the award-winning 2007 climbing film, "King Lines".


title: Chris Sharma

text: Chris Omprakash Sharma was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, the only child of Gita Jahn and Bob Sharma. His parents were devotees of the yogi Baba Hari Dass, and adopted the surname Sharma when they got married. He went to Mount Madonna, and attended Soquel High School for a year. Sharma started rock climbing when he was 12 at the Pacific Edge Climbing Gym, and he described himself as "one of the first climbing-gym-generation kids".


title: Chris Sharma

text: From the outset, Sharma was considered prodigy in the climbing world. At age 14, he won the adult 1996 US Open Bouldering Nationals, and a year later aged 15, he freed Boone Speed's project "Necessary Evil" in the Virgin River Gorge, the hardest sport climb in North America at the time. The following year, Sharma won silver at the biennial UIAA World Championships at Paris, and gold at the Kranj leg of the UIAA World Cup, both for lead climbing. Still 16, he suffered a serious knee injury that sidelined him for over a year. Aged 18, Sharma moved to Bishop, California, and began a US bouldering revolution with his 1999 film "Rampage", and in February 2000, completed the first ascent of "The Mandala", a world-famous boulder problem.


title: Chris Sharma

text: On 18 July 2001, aged 19, Sharma completed the extension of the route "Biographie" in Ceüse in France, and named it "Realization"; the route was the first consensus in the world, and has since become an important route in the history of sport climbing, with "Climbing" magazine noting that "technical rock climbing jumped in its evolution". It was the first confirmed increase in grades since Wolfgang Gullich's ascent of "Action Directe" , a decade earlier. Sharma's ascent of the route was captured in Josh Lowell's 2002 film, "Dosage Volume 1". Days later, Sharma won the Munich leg of the IFSC World Cup in bouldering, only to be disqualified on testing positive for marijuana.


title: Chris Sharma

text: After "Realization", Sharma considered quitting climbing and went on Buddhist pilgrimages. However, a trip to Mallorca, Spain to meet Miquel Riera, a pioneer of deep-water soloing, led him to "fall in love with climbing all over again". Sharma largely abandoned competitions, to focus on "King Lines", a term he adopted for iconic routes that motivated him. In 2004, Sharma solved the boulder problem "Practice of the Wild" , and in 2005 solved the dramatic roof of "Witness the Fitness" , followed by redpointing "Dreamcatcher" , regarded as one of North America's most iconic sport climbs. In 2006, he made an early repeat of "La Rambla" , and in 2007, after 50 attempts, stuck the crux dyno of "Es Pontas" in Mallorca, the world's first-ever DWS route. Some of Sharma's climbs from this era are in the iconic and award-winning 2007 climbing film, "King Lines".


title: Chris Sharma

text: In 2007, Sharma moved to Lleida, a town near the Spanish Pyrenees, in Catalonia, Spain, and over the next five years, created an unprecedented series of new to sport climbs, predominantly in Catalonian limestone crags (namely Oliana, Siurana, Santa Linya and Margalef), starting with the classic of "Papichulo " in May 2008. In September 2008, Sharma made a trip back to the United States and climbed the world's first-ever consensus route when he freed Randy Leavitt's bolted route, "Jumbo Love" in Clark Mountain in California.


title: Chris Sharma

text: Sharma said that after climbing "Jumbo Love", he needed to change his approach. His previous breakthroughs had been on routes established and bolted by other climbers who had given up on them, and now he needed to find his own limit saying: "I wanted to push myself to the next level. Where is that? I had to discover it. That was a big process in itself. So I bolted all these routes [in Spain]. And a lot of them ended up being that next level". The period saw Sharma bolt and free numerous new extreme -graded "King Lines", including "Golpe de Estado" (2008), "Neanderthal" (2009), and "First Round First Minute" (2011), each a major project in itself and since regarded as important classics, with Sharma saying "That's the thing about being on the cutting edge. You have to invent it".


title: Chris Sharma

text: In 2011, Sharma invited the then 19-year-old climbing prodigy Adam Ondra, to try an Oliana route he had bolted in 2009 called "La Dura Dura", which Sharma himself had given up on saying "I never saw myself being able to climb it.", and "I figured it would be for the next generation". For the next year, the two climbers worked the route in a collaborative process that saw Ondra make the first ascent in February 2013, and Sharma make the first repeat in March 2013. "National Geographic" called their collaboration a defining moment in the sport of rock climbing, when the title of "world's best climber" had begun to pass from one generation to the next. Both Ondra and Sharma declared the collaboration to be a very positive experience with Sharma saying post his March ascent: "It was a healthy process for both of us, we fed off each other's motivation and through him, I think I became a better climber myself". Their collaboration was documented in "Reel Rock 7" (2012), and "La Dura Complete" (2013).


title: Chris Sharma

text: At , "La Dura Dura" would hold the rank of "world's hardest climb" until Ondra climbed "Silence" at in 2017, and while Sharma would put up several more "King Lines" over the next 5 years, it marked the high-point in terms of his hardest route. In 2015, he freed "El Bon Combat", considered at the time to be close to , and in 2016 he soloed "Alesha", the world's first DWS route. One of Sharma's last known projects was a potential route in Oliana beside "La Dura Dura" called "Le Blonde", named in memory of Patrick Edlinger; it remains unfinished.


title: Chris Sharma

text: Sharma is widely considered one of the greatest and most important rock climbers in the history of the sport. Sharma took on the title of "world's strongest sport climber" in 2001 from Wolfgang Gullich (who dominated in the decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s), and passed it on to Adam Ondra (who dominated after 2012). In 2003, the "LA Times" called him the "greatest natural rock climber in the world". In 2007, Melissa Block on NPR's "All Things Considered", introduced him saying "Chris Sharma is hailed as the world's best rock climber, a pioneer who has mastered some of the most spectacular and difficult routes in the history of the sport". In 2016, "Outside" said "Sharma shaped modern rock climbing. Whatever he thought was cool, we followed. Bouldering. Projecting hard sport routes. Deep water soloing. In 2022, "Climbing" said: "The pioneering American sport climber is among the best to ever tie in, and was arguably the world's strongest rock climber for almost 20 years".


title: Chris Sharma

text: Sharma is noted for a "humble softly-spoken meditative disposition" (who often leaves it to others to grade his routes) coupled with a "highly aggressive and dynamic" climbing style. In 2016, "Climbing" said: "Over the past three decades, Sharma has cultivated a mellow Southern California persona, but in reality, he's one of the most competitive, focused, and driven athletes out there". His demeanor has been ascribed to his Buddhist raising; the "LA Times" called him "the Karma Climber". He has credited Zen meditation techniques with helping him on routes, or when seeking direction and motivation. Sharma was also known for eschewing any gym-based training (including fingerboards or cross-training) or dieting, preferring to climb as his sole method of training.


title: Chris Sharma

text: Sharma is credited with developing the commercial potential of extreme sport climbing, with "Climbing" saying "Not only did Sharma have the guns to become the first human to climb 5.15, he had the genius to see the potential, coupled with the commitment to spend months and years of his life proving it", and calling Sharma "arguably the highest-paid pro climber in the world". "Outside" added, "Before Sharma figured out how to balance elite performance with making a living, "professional climber" was an oxymoron. Sharma's commercial appeal, and becoming one of the most filmed climbers, was attributed to his focus on "King Lines", which Sharma described as: "It's not enough to do something hard; it needs to be in an amazing position, a route that asks you to pour your heart and soul into climbing it".


title: Chris Sharma

text: Sharma is the founder of the rock climbing gym Sender One, headquartered in Santa Ana, California, which he opened in 2013 as a business partnership with Walltopia, who was a sponsor of Sharma. In 2015, he opened a second gym, Sharma Climbing BCN, in Barcelona in Spain, and in 2021 he opened a third gym, Sharma Climbing Gava, on the outskirts of Barcelona.