Right, okay, so I'm told that it's time to start so Disc image builder is one of the things we've built out as part of working on triple O which is deploying OpenStack on OpenStack and I think it's sort of generally applicable for other people who want to deploy things with heat and perhaps with other other systems But since you can make a talk about any one of those I'm just going to talk about disk image builder in the context of heat deployed applications I'm a distinguished technologist at HP Converged Cloud I'm the triple O PTL and I recently got voted on to the OpenStack technical committee so All of this to say I really have no idea what I'm talking about and I hope you guys can help fix up any preconceptions as we We go through this talk This is you know the standard model talking about OpenStack You've got your applications on top of a lovely compute cloud and I have to use this slide in all of my talks I've used it in so many now that if I took it out It'd be a betrayal of this this continuity When we started working on triple O the basic concept was to say hey What if all of the components of your OpenStack deployment were just applications? so everything you do to make deploying applications in an OpenStack cloud better will make deploying OpenStack itself easier and better and more for more straightforward and To figure out You know what are our needs if these things are apps? What what do we need is a deployment infrastructure for this sort of application? It needs to be a repeatable process that goes without saying we don't want to deploy OpenStack by hand You need to be able to pull it without the internet if you're bringing up a data center You don't have the internet until you've brought up your firewalls which are part of what you're deploying And we need to deploy to bare metal. It's not something that heat itself knows how to do and And what and this is a scale thing right if you test one thing and then deploy another You're setting yourself up for a huge face plant at some point because what you've tested worked and what you deployed didn't and That becomes a real problem if new features are coming into your repository whether it's good or a package repository Faster than the time it takes to test and deploy Because that means you either have to start locking and not letting things in while you test and deploy Or by the time you finish the test run and ready to deploy What you deploy from that repository would now be different Obviously it needs to scale up and down and I don't mean deploy a cloud and then make it bigger and smaller I mean that we need to be able to deploy really big clouds but you also need to be able to deploy a little dev test environment with a couple of machines in the corner and And We also had this interesting problem that suddenly things that often in the cloud you might consume as API's like databases Suddenly become an application that you have to deploy and make it act like a cloudy thing So it has to be able to be thrown on to hardware with no sort of manual preparation and When we redeploy an image onto a machine we need to preserve the important persistent data the database Swift data stores our cluster affairs or CEP back-end volumes and This final thing was if P triple I was to be a success It had to be something that existing deployment communities could at Minimum interoperate with ideally it'll be something that everyone can consolidate round to have one set of tooling So we started saying okay, so how do we? Evolve on to what we need so heat obvious no brainer. It's the open stack service orchestration there Nova beer metal was coming along. We said we'll jump on that. We'll work on it. It gives us instances on physical machines Then we said, okay, so how we've got disconnect here Nova does disc images everything else in the universe deploying in terms of repeatable automation wants to run with packages so How do you get the sort of repeatable? Can roll back if you need characters it's out of a chef and puppet environment The answer that multiple organizations have come up with is you end up with a single custom package repository per commit that you're going to push through your chef or puppet infrastructure and you end up with that because Having a single lock held on a common app repository is actually a really bad idea because you end up this big backlog and you can't work on multiple problems at once so you want to fork it and That's a problem It's a bunch of work. It's complex and it's hard for people to really just quickly look at it and see what's going on So we said we don't really want to buy into that. That's going to be more Then we want when we bring it up cloud so we said golden images disk image builder, I mean, that's what I'm really here to talk about and Oh Wow, ah, yes, sorry. I just Miss read my own notes for a second. So the installation phase building a disk image that takes place with internet access We can pull packages down from package repositories. We can pull stuff out of git we can pull stuff out of pi pi and Once it's built into an image the deploy never needs internet access So unless you have a licensing server or something for some proprietary thing You'll have all the software already present on the disk image and Then final configuration takes place when you deploy it Things that are always going to be the same in your environment. You might bake into the configuration on the image itself things like File paths for where database is going to be are going to be pretty constant Whereas how much of your cache how much of your RAM goes to a database case you might auto configure that by looking at how much RAM is on the hardware you've been deployed to and And for folk that then want to use Jeff and puppet for their their main system administration Just bake that into the image as well And it can do configuration management and no longer needs to do software installation And CFN in it can happily deploy things By which I mean you run that as part of your Nova EC2 metadata and it can do arbitrary initialization code as Part of early boot so you boot up It comes up cloud and it hands off to CFN and it CFN and it says hey From the metadata this is where your puppet master is asked for a certificate Get hooked up and after that puppet can take over and do the the administration of your machine But we had this problem in triple O again that we we needed something that was going to be We didn't want to exclude half of the deployers in the world that we're using the the other choice of chef or puppet In what we put in upstream open stack So we did a minimal configuration management system It doesn't know how to do installation all it knows how to do is to collect data from a metadata source like EC2 or heat or potentially puppet master or chef server it knows how to Trigger some scripts to refresh the configuration on local machine and also apply config knows how to write templates and I've probably got extra slides for that so for added redundancy The point of the separation though is that you can take out the refresh config in the apply config and put puppet or chef in there and have that triggered from us collect config and Everything should still just work so Disc image builder builds an image by going through a set of hooks We create a root image. We do some pre-installation. We do some installation post-install finalization and so on each image build is parameterized by including elements so You can have an element for a particular piece of software you want to install or you can have an element for Bringing in some plugins for something so they can compose. They don't they should never replace each other and Each element includes one or more hook files in each of those sets of hooks are referred to before so the Ubuntu element For example has a script 10 case Ubuntu in root dot D Which is how it drags the data out of an Ubuntu reference cloud image and puts it into a case for you for disk image builder to to build things Elements can depend on other elements so you can create an element that just says I want to bring in these different packages and These other elements and that's my definition. I'm always going to use I don't have to always pass the same parameters and every time One of the things that configuration management systems do that we lose out by having our own thin layer Is that they provide abstractions between different operating systems and sometimes the difference is things between like apt and Yum different tooling to do the same basic job and other times. It's things like Different defaults for where files are and so on We don't have a really good answer for this other than if you're doing a Large variety of different software you might want to go down the route of bringing in puppet or chef as part of your your image It's why it's there is an explicit approach But for triple O itself what we've done is we've said hey, this is a common problem Let's just write a minimal contract and then each operating system we support can supply that contract So we have a script called install packages, which if you run install packages on a fedora image It will use yum if you run it on an app them a nabuntu image It will use apt and we have a translation file there that says these are what packages are named in the different distros So it just works finally For performance most of the things you install with disk image builder get cached in tilde dot image slash image create So the base image from your vendor the operating system Pi pi packages get cached yum packages get cached and this means the repeated image builds are pretty fast We do recommend you have a skid case or something similar as well But it's not strictly needed so With that sort of framework in mind We also create a temporary file system to build the image in so the build is entirely in RAM Of course if you're building on a machine with a low low RAM like for gig or something That's maybe a problem. It can be turned off, but it makes builds much faster We copy the contents of the base image the Ubuntu or fedora file system into the temporary file system We just able service startup because we're not interested in running anything. We just want to get the right files on this We override resolve.conf and proxy settings and you know, this is a moving list as we find things we need to override will override more For the duration of the build We install the software as needed and it's installed in the charoot So software that doesn't play nice with charoots, which occasionally exists does need special handling But I think we've had to do that once so far. So it's not really a high volume problem It's not something you should expect to run into Then we make a sparse raw image with a file system big enough for the contents of the tempfs we move the contents into the raw image and If you're doing a VM, which needs a bootloader we configure a bootloader Restore service startup restore the proxy Pack it down into a q-cow2. This is actually the longest time on most of the straightforward image builds I've got is doing the compression into a q-cow2 file.  This is not nova. We can trust these images If someone wants to root you by giving you a bad base image, they can just ship a bad binary They don't need to play monkey games with the file system by shipping you. We create our own file system as we go For a couple reasons one there were some really strange images They had like 10 gig file systems that we just couldn't unpack and develop as machines in a sort of reasonable time frame But also it gives people who want to run different file systems in their image the ability to do So if you want to run LVM if you want to run XFS or something It's not a change in the overall code flow. It's just a change for that one part of the one part of the process and Was it Steven Dake that did the heat? Rapper for disk image builder Yeah, so Steven Dake did a a really cool hack. He wrapped all of disk image builder and With with custom elements, so you throw your own elements and as parameters in a heat template So you can spin up a disk image builder VM build an image and it uploads it to glance at the end of it And it's about 18 lines of heat template. So it's actually really easy to use that as a service You don't need to have a dedicated machine. He will just spin up a VM for you in your cloud Do the build and upload it into the glance in that cloud So this is I guess all prelude so far. I've probably been boring people as we can tell by folk leaving So I'm sorry about that More Important, how do you actually use this so you need to export an elements path? You make a directory where you're going to put your elements your customizations for your images and the elements path tells disk image builder how to find your elements And it's a path so that you can reuse elements from multiple organizations and then just add your own in a new directory You don't need to run a fork of other people's repositories If you do need to replace an element with a fixed copy for example because it's a path the first occurrence of any given element name is what's used and Just put your elements first in the path Make a directory give it a read me because everyone needs documentation. I mean really you'll forget what it does if you don't give it a read me so Add any to be elements that you need to depend on to element depths and add any hook directories that you need All of the scripts that I mentioned before are just shell scripts or Python scripts whatever you like and They should do what you would normally do like install some packages tweak some some settings delete garbage that's left by the install process Things like license keys can be a bit interesting if you need your license keys to come dynamically You'll need to put that in your deploy time logic. So as configuration management scripts If you can apply the license image when you build the image, then you should do that as part of your actual direct hooks I didn't want this to become a manual So there's there's a lot more documentation out in the disk image builder repository and you can reach us on the dev list and so on So to create an image One line. This is the general format of it Discommit create dash a what architecture i386 amd64 arm le or whatever dash o and a file name so My alarm might my image and it will get doc q cal 2 appended to it and at the end of the process that file will exist And that's what you can upload to glance and then you provide one more image elements to build So for example, this is how we build a Nova compute node for triple o We take a bunto we this is for the dev test story. So this isn't production production. We make two changes to it We want to bunto we want i386 we want the file to go into triple o root to be called overcloud compute And we want Nova compute Nova KVM Neutron osculic config dash people interfaces and No dutch there is a typo. I'm sorry about that. I'll make sure that's fixed in the copy of the slides I put online It shouldn't be there so One of the things we found when people come along and they start contributing is they don't know what elements to use So they they read the docs and say hey, yeah, I want to do this thing But there's a whole bunch of stuff that can make your life easier so Ubuntu fedora or red hat Rel and there's a suzer element coming gives you that's the operating system. You're going to build We don't do windows builds today. There's some discussion going on about how we can make that happen. There's some interest in it I'm certainly very open to to come up with a good solution for that Although using wine in this does kind of scare me a little So the VM element is interesting we Historical reasons and perhaps we should change this but our default is to build just a single partition image an image of one file system Rather than of a full disk and that's what Zen wants because it wants detached kernel ram disk Image and it's what Nova be a metal once but it's not what most clouds want Which is a image with a VM in the boot block and they hand off through the Bioslayer rather than directly booting your kernel So most people will want the VM element to be included the source repositories elements this is Nice because you can you can just write hey get clone something in your rules, but if you use the source repository elements, it will make a case of it until the dot case image create and Rather than pulling the whole contents every time it just pulls down the incremental data and then copies that into your image So much much faster If you're building for Dora and you're like me and you really don't understand a sea Linux properly You'll want to put it into permissive mode. So disable a sea Linux Pip case is nice. It's not safe for concurrent builds because of bugs in pip But if you if you turn it on it creates a pip case every element element every image You build will have that case mapped into it at the beginning of the build and the case gets updated by the build so You don't down much download much from Pi Pi or from the OpenStack Pi Pi mirror very very quick If you're building concurrent images, though You need thread safety and then you should use the Pi Pi element which takes an actual local pip mirror and uses that instead and there's a An element that will create that for you or you can use the OpenStack and for a Pi Pi mirror project to build such a mirror DHCP all interfaces is something we hooked up. It just interrogates the Proc interface to find what interfaces you've got which ones have link and then add Stanzas to et cetera network interfaces and brings them up So most reference images only have eth0 in their configuration This lets you run if you've got four neutral networks attached. They'll all come up rather than you having to manually Fiddle the image to do that. Oh Without using file injection. You can use file injection, of course if you want to but I'm in the camp that considers file injection from a cloud to be an abstraction violation and not to be not to be done Pi Pi mirror is an element that uses the Pi Pi mirror project from OpenStack Infra, but it sets up a cron job So this is really useful if you're deploying infrastructure to maintain your infrastructure. This gives you an automatically maintained mirror It's a little meta, but I think it's still still worthwhile knowing at worst You can look at its code to see how to run your own mirror by hand Oscillate config refresh config and apply config. I touched on before they aren't needed but We think they're better than sliced bread and there's been some discussion with the heat guys about actually getting Oscillate config to replace CFN tools in the or at least CFN in it in the sort of recommended path for working with heat I'll supply config is really it's just moustache templates in a file system It writes them out to the files. They're going to end up on really really super easy for getting the exact config you want Finally and this is really Useful for be able to get onto an image-based upgrade process Use ephemeral this lets you map stateful files into stash mount stash state And if you're using a cinder block device, and you're not using boot from volume Then all you put all your state into the cinder block device Which is available from different hypervisors after your instance crashes or the hypervisor goes offline And If you're on no the bare metal using ephemeral partition to get the same basic feature set caveats around this If you're using boot from volume you still need to have a separate volume for state or when you deploy a new golden image To your volume you'll wipe out your persistent state. So you still need to keep the separation Now see I so when I spoke earlier. I said hey what you deploy Has to be what you tested this is really the point where I think golden images start to really shine the rest of it It's just it's just swings around about different ways to get in the software on the machine, right a Golden image encapsulates a full set of software So if you test a golden image in your CI system and you take that same image you can deploy that and it's an atomic unit So you get away from this whole problem of having to have multiple app repositories with different points in time or Any of the other sources shenanigans you can play to try and make that work like like locking so You upload a change to Garrett Jenkins builds an image for you You upload that image to glance and then you deploy a test cluster with heat you Upgrade the cluster to your new image and you do that to make sure that any data migration logic you've got Works and you run a functional test against the cluster You make sure your your tests that the cluster is up and alive are working properly now for different clusters that might take different forms It might be that you use just your monitoring system and then a load tester or you might actually have specific tests something like tempest if Tests pass great deployed approach You've done every single check you're going to do you now know that that image is ready to deploy You've got nothing else to do to get it ready for deployment Or if they don't pass go back and upload a new change to fix whatever failed so I've probably timed the talk wrong is my feeling but No, maybe not So this gives us a repeatable automated end-to-end process For deploying your application for deploying it without race conditions. You can deploy it without internet access So if you're in a secured environment Great Not everyone is but as I said we developed this for triple O where we did have that constraint You can deploy it to be a metal if you're deploying Hadoop Savannah uses disk image builders disk images for example built with this image builder so you can deploy workloads and be a metal and Build your images during your CI don't build them as something after you've run your tests build them to run your tests on Not your unit tests your functional tests All your scaling logic for scaling up and down is kept in heat and here is one of the key key points every single node in the cluster is identical all of your Pro say say you deploy in Swift you've got Swift proxy and The Swift object store all your proxy nodes are now running exactly the same software the same kernel the same Swift version Every last little detail without you having to do any additional work. It's just an emergent property from this approach Persistent data. It's a bit of a work in progress. We want to make it nicer than I've described so far, but that's really I don't have an exact answer on how we'll make it nicer yet and For the integration with chef and puppet that I mentioned red hat have a proof of concept with with puppet So it's doable. We probably need to do some work to make it nicer and easier to do without changing any of the puppet rules at all so I We've got 10 minutes for four questions, or we can just go out to the parties demo Steve Did you prepare one earlier? right, so Steve Baker prepared one and I went to to run it against our Triple O test cloud and I found a configuration problem in our test cloud at you know an hour before I had to fly so No, I'm sorry. I Can certainly show you building an image from that by can't you it actually deploying for perhaps grab me later in the week I'll hopefully have that configuration thing fixed Then again, it's gonna be a busy week. So Something that comes. Oh, I'm sorry Hello, could you speak a little bit to the decision to treat the incoming base image as something that is not your concern And is that how is that working out? Is it the assumption that it always comes from the vendor? How does how do issues of trust play into that? Etc. Okay, so I guess I should start in that entire bit over we We don't want to run we don't want to be in the business of figuring out how to run operating system installers and Figuring out how to inject things into them. So that's sort of the first thing that that's a problem the operating system vendors already have themselves And because we want to be multi-vendor. We don't want to sort of have to figure that out again and again and again Secondly, I Don't think it's any more trustee trust worthy to take an image that event is created or to create take the binary packages A vendor is created plus an installer scripts and run the installer script If we can't trust the vendor to run their installer script themselves properly that's that's a real problem and and What we can be sure of though is that by taking an image that I've built and that they think has read run in a cloud is We're taking the configuration they recommend for running in a cloud We're just going to tweak that to put our software on it to run in a cloud So I think this is actually better than running the vendor installer because it's exactly we don't need to change our configuration When the vendor install says hello, we're going to add in I Don't know maybe we'll turn off tweak the VM right back settings in the image by default for VMs We'll inherit that automatically unless we actively go out of a way to disable it Whereas if we just ran their installer, which is designed to Install it a bare metal We'd have to go and copy that change that they're doing to keep up to date. So less maintenance for us But there's another aspect which is that if you want to edit an image you build so you can build an image and then you Can say well, we want really fast iterations We don't want to wait three minutes for an image build We want it in 15 seconds then that's doable with this skimmage builder take the Image you want to have as an iterative thing tweak it so that you don't keep it in a tab or you keep it unpacked on disk copy that in Turn off compression when you build the output There's absolutely no way you're gonna run a full operating system installer in that sort of time frame and Another point is that I consider is that Ubuntu's latest cloud installer actually does does a disk image copy So it's down to byte copy style thing So they're actually in the way from having users run package management based installers as well So there's I think we've kind of led the way on a change that I expect to propagate out Across the interest people go for more performance I think that's really I think that covers your question. Oh You ask how it's working out it's working out fantastic they build fast They're reliable the problems we have so far is that fedora seems to have some flaky mirrors that we find because we build a lot of images and DNS around Robin or DNS geo location, whatever it is every now and then picks a bad mirror and we have a failed build Yeah, so I think that's not something we should fix That that's something to say upstream. Hey, if you want people to use your mirrors, they need to be reliable Right. So you're having performance problems building images disk image builder Okay So I think we look at about three minutes for a Nullop build at the moment with compression And I think it's like 90 seconds to unpack do blah with this guy. Oh and copy it background So I'd like to make that a bit faster, but it's tolerable if you if that's not what you're seeing then there may be some other factors such as a package endpoints repo locations and and the syslinux Invocation for the master boot record manipulation so we get a lot of profiling data out from The run D thing the timings so you should be able to look at those timings and see where the time is going and then Either file a bug or or dig into it three Two One thank you


Every now and then when all my friends are offline on Discord, you know, I'm feeling a bit alone or sad, I like to look back on the school days and think, you know, wasn't it really that bad? Like, yeah, schools suck, but the ability to socialize and meet with new people made up for it, right? But then my brain gets slapped with a tsunami of memories. The ongoings in that asylum, they called high school, atrocities, not even the Geneva Convention could have saved us.  I know we all laugh at it from time to time because, you know, we think it's funny, but it's not a joke. This actually happens. I don't know if your school is the same, but at our school, you can tell the teacher or principal a thousand times, hey, this guy's harassing me. I need help, please, please help. They'd be like, well, he's saying that he's not. Yeah, that guy, you know, the one that's been in five fights since school started and we're only on the third day of school, he's saying that he's not harassing you, so sure word against his. I can't really do anything about it or to look like I'm picking favorites. And then when that person starts a fight with you and you try to defend yourself, suspended, doesn't matter how you defended yourself. He punched you and you knocked them out cold to stop them, suspended.  I'd even bet my entire YouTube paycheck, which as you guys know is about like $7, but if someone brought a toy gun to school and was trying to hack everyone in the school, a toy gun, that's right, a toy gun. If they brought a toy gun to school, that's right, YouTube. Can I get my money now? Can I get my money from my video now? A toy gun. Well, let's say you managed to subdue this perpetrator. You probably think you're about to get in a war. Some Medal of Honor. Those dreams will be crushed the next day when you find out you're suspended for defending yourself. And you think that'd be the worst part about school, right?  Oh my God.  Now, that's just some stuff you gotta deal with whenever you use a public restroom. Well, what the problem was is that there were these no-life thugs lined up outside of the bathroom, blocking the entrances like there was some sort of the defender of the stalls, warden, warden of the urinals. Like, I really wonder how cool those kids thought they were. Being an inconvenience to people that wanted to empty their bladder. That must have been like the peak of their existence. But that's still not the worst part. Sex, drugs, violence. You could have filmed a Hollywood movie. Now, once you paid the fee of squeezing through the herd of no-lives to get inside the restroom, you could see people smoking, people fighting or getting jumped. Dudes were in the bathroom getting their dicks sucked by some girl with no father. And as violent and crude as it was, it was also fascinating. You know, anytime I needed to piss, it was like getting a free 30-second short story before going off to my classes.  You see, there was this unspoken rule of the restrooms.  Only reason I knew these rules because I'd never seen anyone dropping meatballs in the bathroom. Now, not once in my high school career. So that's what I followed. Every time I used the restroom, it was to pee. Anytime I had to take a shit, no matter at what point in the day, I waited until I got home from school. Only once. And I never make that mistake again.  It was around third period. And I'm not sure why, but my stomach was absolutely killing me. So I asked the teacher, hey, can I use the restroom? And she was fine with it because class was almost over. She knew I wasn't the type of kid to start trouble or skip class just to skip class. So I go in the bathroom, head into a stall, and I'm just dropping napalm. I'm gonna keep it on, sorry. Meanwhile, I'm emptying my bowels.  Is something wrong with them? Are there like STBs on the toilet seat? Somebody's shitting in the bathroom. Somebody's shitting in the bathroom. Okay, I think I see why. Now, I don't know who the guy was, but he kept on shouting and laughing. And he kept saying it for a while until he finally left the bathroom. And I thought that was it. It's over. Oh, I mean, that's not so bad.  That ominous war horn can only mean that somebody's shitting in the bathroom. Somebody's shitting in the bathroom. Ain't no way. Let's go check it out, y'all. I hear hundreds of footsteps, thousands, maybe. Students and teachers closing in on the bathroom. And what's running on enough? Oh, somebody's shitting in the bathroom. We gotta investigate. Somebody really have to audacity to use the bathroom the way it was supposed to be. That is blasphemy. That is beyond blasphemy. They should total people like him behind bars. Better than that. Behind a tombstone. They get closer and closer until I hear a knock on the stall. Open up. Open up. What are you guys gonna do to me? Relax. Relax, man. We just wanna kill you, man.  The door unlocked and let the creeps in. The floor is getting old with all the squeaking. I keep getting my peace. Then I second our pardon for the mess I made.


And folks, this is Jacob Filinin for Tom O'Brien. He will be back tomorrow. Today we're seeing a little bit of a bounce back on the major indices. We have the Dow up a bit. NASDAQ still down a little. S&P 500 up a little bit. SPY, the dollar has made quite a move up. Now we broke that 102 level and we'll see if we can stick up there from the 101. Last Friday, we were just kicking over the 101. So it seems like the dollar is rallying a bit. Obviously, gold is taking a step back quite a bit. And then we have the ESMini up just a bit. It's a nice green line right there for you all. So what is going on this week? We have a lot of earnings. Obviously, Schwab knocked it out of the park. Let's see if we can get Schwab up for us. It's top one. So with Schwab, the Justin earnings left about 20% to $0.93 per share, while revenue rose 10%. A lot of this is being driven by higher returns on loans. Net interest incomes by 26% to $2.77 billion. Trading revenue declined 7% to $892 million. Bank deposits tumbled 30%. I think we all kind of expected that. And that was down to $325.7 million. And total assets fell 21% to $535 million. And Schwab also decided to pause its share by back program in light of the recent banking events. So that was a nice bump up. We also had, let's see here, M&T, they popped up similarly due to the same kind of reasons. The higher interest rates are just returning a lot back on their lending. Now, if we're looking at, let's see here, State Street is a custodian bank. They're holding onto these kind of just assets in general. And they manage them. This fell pretty grossly. They're down 10% today on the earnings. Generally speaking, though, it seems like the banks are poised for some nice bump up, I would suppose. I think Bank of America, we're going to see something similar. What they're talking about. At least the market views this as well.  But you're getting a nice increase back up. Some high volume earlier today, about 1.30 PM. And they're saying their forecasts are pretty solid as well. Now, I want to take a look at this here. This is from Morgan Stanley. And of course, we're going to increase this a little bit. Oh, man. So this is the S&P 500 sector returns. You see, financials have a real high increase, at least on the one week, right? They're very heavily weighted. So this is all your banks. Energy as well. We know that. Industrial as materials. Consumer staples, obviously going down. Interesting technology. Definitely like in fintech as well. This is seeing a huge hit. Utilities. And of course, we know real estate. It's pretty interesting. We can read through a little bit what Morgan Stanley had to say. This is throughout the week in the first quarter. Earning seasons is underway with the large US banks releasing results last Friday. And obviously, we have some still coming up. Current analyst estimates are tracking operating earnings per share, operating EPS of 49.54, representing year-over-year growth of 0.4%. And a quarter over quarter decline of 1.6%. At the sector level, these estimates suggest a change in leadership. The boost from the energy sector looks to set to fade due to normalizing commodity prices. And that's a huge thing to keep in mind as well. Even with the decrease of oil production with OPEC, this might be meeting a strict up-and-demand on the larger global scale on it. So the current estimate of 7.6% year-over-year earnings growth for energy sector represents a sharp deceleration compared to recent quarters. So kind of act accordingly regarding that. Other things we have to look forward to tomorrow, Goldman Sachs. Let's take a look here. Probably see something similar with the other, got it right here, up modestly today. And then Lockheed Martin, which will be interesting. I am eternally interested to see how these defense stocks operate, especially in this world. I personally think that everything's essentially priced in, even dealing with the Ukraine war. But we'll see how they report. And then Netflix. And everyone online, take for that what it is, seems to be really interested in Netflix. And we might see a bump up on that. I'll be watching it. I'm not going to take any position, honestly. I think these prices are huge. But we'll see what happens and how that returns. Also, we have Tesla. That's going to be Wednesday. What's interesting about Tesla, too, is Elon, via SpaceX, is having a rocket launch right before earnings. And obviously, SpaceX and Tesla are not integrated business-wise. But I think what's important to keep in mind on the broader scale is it seems like the kind of hotshot meme investors do see them as integrated. So whenever SpaceX does super well, Tesla roars. And it's more of like this getting exposure to Elon Musk as an individual, I think, than people investing just because of Tesla. Tesla's up. Just a little bit. We'll see what earnings has to do with them. IBM is down. They have earnings. And then ASML will be interesting. They do the EUV. They're based in the Netherlands. They do the EUV chip etching. But it seems like there's going to be a deceleration of chip orders. So the delivery might get pushed out to a year. I was reading some analysts saying, just keep posted for that because it'll be interesting to see. And these guys are probably going to ramp up quite a bit with the kind of changing global developments. Then, of course, Thursday, Bank OZK, Blackstone as well. That Procter and Gamble and Freeport-Mac Moran on Friday. And I want to take a look at this. Just on a year today. Well, let's do it on a yearly. Just because I'm curious. So we'll see if this gets any kind of push out whatsoever. It seems like it's flirting with that $45 area. It had some low volume on that test, excuse me, high volume on that test rejecting it. So we'll keep posted for our earnings for Freeport-Mac Moran. When we get back, we'll talk a little bit about Apple. They're doing something crazy regarding Apple payment. We'll talk a little bit about Walmart and how they're pivoting away from their current kind of retail onto some other things such as health and fintech. So stay tuned and we will be right back. Currencies, commodities and bond markets are as important as ever right now with how they're driving the volatility in equity markets across the globe, which is why it's a great time to try out Teddy Kegstad's Tiger Forex Report. Teddy Kegstad breaks down the forex markets every Monday using his 30-plus years of experience as a trading veteran of futures, forex, stocks and options. Teddy releases his weekly Tiger Forex Report every Monday morning with coverage of all the major currency pairs, including the Dollar Index, the Euro Dollar, Pound Dollar, Dollar Swiss, Dollar Yen, as well as many more, and he also has weekly coverage of the crude oil market and the 30-year T-bonds as they both influence forex markets tremendously. When you sign up for the Tiger Forex Report, you also gain instant access to Teddy's 60-minute Webinar Archive. He just hosted Forex Strategies and Fundamentals What is Behind the Tiger Forex Report. For all the details and to start your 30-day Tiger Forex Report subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN Educating Investors. A frequent contributor to TFNN


Guru Nanak, a saint, a poet and a messenger of God, he gave the message of one God who dwells in every one of his creations and constitutes the eternal truth. He set up a unique spiritual, social and political platform based on equality, fraternal love, goodness and virtue. On the occasion of Guru Nanak's 550th birthday anniversary, the Ministry of External Affairs and its missions and posts abroad, in collaboration with the Indian community, undertook commemorative activities such as kirtan, park, langar, stamp and coin release, photo and book exhibitions, lectures and seminars and LED projections of Sarbat Dapala in selected countries. On his 550th birthday, thousands gathered to practice his teachings. In the talks organized by the missions, it was discussed how Guru Nanak's biggest message was of one God. He always said that there is only one supreme creator and protector. He focused on being human. Apart from celebrating, the other motive of the events organized by the missions was a true display of how followers of Guru Nanak still spread love and brotherhood in this world through simple and honest living.


Debrief meetings are a great way to improve the relationship with your client after a project is done but also to learn a lot about how you can communicate the value of what you do as a service designer. Now what is a debrief meeting? A debrief meeting for me is a meeting where you after the project has ended you ask your client how would you describe the value that we generated and how would you describe the activities that we did and I can guarantee you if you ask these questions you'll hear answers that you never thought of before because your client will find other ways to describe the value of what you did other than you use to describe what you do hope that makes sense. So debrief meetings are for me a vital part of a service design project even after the service design project has ended and now in the selling service design with confidence scores Marlene asked a great question and she asked you know Mark after the project is done how do I find like a natural moment to call up a client and say that I want to sit down and ask some questions about us well that's a great question because it can be awkward if you if you don't make it into a seamless experience and a trick to trick or if you design the journey the way you could do this is to make sure that after the project you'll always have something to share with your client so after three months make sure that you have like a research paper maybe you have a photo book of the highlights of the project I don't know maybe you do a free bonus workshop or something like that but make sure that after the project has the official project that has ended that you always have something to share with your client because that will give you like an excuse to sit down after three months and have this conversation about how they would describe what you did and the value you created so it was a great question by Marlene if you're not doing debrief meetings yet you're missing missing out on a huge opportunity to learn a lot about how you can communicate how you should communicate the value of what you do and you'll really be surprised and clients often find this really fun and helpful and most of them are really eager to share this so are you doing debrief meetings leave a comment down below and what's your experience with them which questions do you ask in these debrief meetings I hope this was helpful if you want to know more by the way about selling service design with confidence scores where Marlene has this question check out the link over here and thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video and that's somebody in Roller Skates bye-bye


And we are live. Welcome everybody to another episode of China, Hawaii and you. I am your host, Andrew Zimmerman. And we've been talking a lot today about, or at least over the course of this program, to a lot of different people regarding Chinese. Learning Chinese is something that, as everybody knows, it's fascinated me. But this is actually the first time that I've gotten to talk to a professional Chinese teacher. And that makes me really happy. So we wanted to tell everybody about our guest, Cindy Ning. I'm going to try to introduce her, and then I'm going to let her go over anything that I missed. Cindy is the associate director of the StarTalk program at UH Manoa, which is an intensive Mandarin learning program. The goal of it is to make people completely proficient in anything that they might want to do. So whether that's just tourism or business or maybe even going on to higher education. So we'd like to welcome Cindy. And did I miss anything in your introduction there? Can I tweak it a little? Sure, no problem. I tried my best. That's fine. I'm the associate director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And one of our projects this year is the StarTalk. It's the year-round StarTalk program. It's the first time that the National Security Agency is trying a year-round StarTalk. They're usually just summer programs. But this is a year-round program. And I am the principal investigator of that program. But everything else? OK, well, I've been very sorry. I must have mixed that up in my head. I'm very sorry about that. But that's very exciting. I didn't know the NSA was getting into this. I mean, you don't have to really think part about why. But it's definitely very exciting to me that these kinds of programs, intensive programs, exist within the United States. Because up until maybe 20 or 30 years ago, the only way that you could get into an intensive program without going to China itself was being in the military. Well, the StarTalk program aims to start much earlier. So actually, ideally, a professional say that earlier you can start the better. And in part of our conversation we were having before this program came on, is that Hawaii finally has an immersion, a Chinese immersion program at Marino School. And that begins at kindergarten. I applied for a job there. And by the time the kids get to like third grade, and I think they're up to fourth grade now, they sound like little native speakers. It's wonderful. So the earlier you can start, the better. And the StarTalk program actually begins in high school. So if the summer programs we dip down to as low as intermediate school, but this year-round program begins with juniors in high school. So before they would become involved with the military. And trying to become proficient is a huge undertaking. You need thousands of hours in training. So even a little bit is better than nothing. And then to get to proficient. So the different levels of proficiency to get to a level where you can handle your job or do negotiations, that would take a really long time. So we're aiming for this pipeline now. So we have an immersion program in, say, Marino School. We have StarTalk programs that try to get more students interested and get teachers better at teaching and develop better materials. And Hawaii is really lucky because we also have a flagship program at the University of Hawaii in the Chinese department. And the flagship program is the one that tries to take people who are already at quite high level and push them to a professional level so that they can use Chinese in their careers once they graduate. So we have a pipeline going. You know, that's really, really exciting. That's one of the things that I want to talk to you about. And we will get into, because there's a really big jump that you could make between having a conversation like what you had, what we had just before the show, right, where we were speaking Chinese for about 10 minutes without a problem. But there is still such a big gap when it comes to, are you professionally useful? Right, you know, when you're in a professional setting, even missing a word or two is sometimes lethal to your understanding of what maybe a client's requirements are, or even just making a good impression. And it seems to me that that kind of gap is, it seems almost what it certainly seemed at the time when I was first learning, completely unreachable and impossible. Do you ever get students that are just kind of fallen to despair about like, oh, no, I'm never going to get through this? I guess. Most of the time, students aren't quite as ambitious as you are. I mean, you know, we have lots of students who are taking foreign language for maybe because it's a requirement at college. Maybe they think when I travel, I would like to be able to use some of it. So what's required for traveling is much less challenging than trying to be proficient in a career. So most of our students, I think, aim for that travel level, intermediate. In the proficiency ratings, it's called intermediate, where you can actually use the language to manage daily needs. So you can order something to eat. You can figure out how to get from point A to point B. You can rent a hotel room. You can go shopping. That's all travel level proficiency. And most people aim for that. And lots of people manage to get there for that. And I think that's the level at which you and I were conversing just before the show started. You seem very comfortable with the language. It comes easily.  To go to the next level, it's true. You may be already at the next level, I don't know. But to go to the next level, the next level up is you can narrate and describe. So if somebody were to say, oh, I slipped and I fell and I have to go to the hospital now, and somebody says so exactly what happened, you can tell a story. So you can tell stories in past tense, present tense, future tense. That's the next level up. And at that level, you can handle most professional things. So in your career, you would get rather good in a certain arena, talking in a certain arena. The next level beyond that takes a lifetime. Because if you're trying to become more like a native speaker in all arenas, so you can talk about science, you can talk about sports, you can talk about politics and belief systems, you can try to convince somebody that they're wrong and you're right. That just takes a lot more training, dedication, ambition, all of that. So for the people who have said that, that is their goal. Their goal is to try to reach that level. I've never met anybody that said, I can't do it. Because if you have that kind of dedication, determination to begin with, you get there. Yeah, no, I definitely can relate to the struggles of not really knowing how much longer it's going to go. And I think coming to peace with the journey, and like you said, accepting that it's going to be a lifetime and there's always going to be the odd word here and there as you don't know. That's a really important thing if you're trying to reach the heights of it. But I remember when I first got to Shanghai, I was very timid and really fumbling over my own words when it came to even just getting a boba, right? And I was very proud of myself when I memorized the words, Jin Junil Na, like bubble tea. And all of that culminated when I statistically remember on my very last conversation in Chinese within China, he was in a taxi on the way to the airport. And the guy, he looks over to the back of it and he says, I say, and are you American? Yes. And I was like, OK, all right, we've got this conversation so far. We can handle whatever's going on. He's going to ask me some basic cultural questions. He's going to maybe talk about our food or what I liked about Shanghai. But no, what he said was, what do you think of Biden pulling all of the American soldiers out of Afghanistan? And my very first thought that I was thinking, I was like, this was not in the textbook. OK. Yeah. But I gave my best shot at it, and it was actually a really interesting conversation. I remember meeting a surprising number of really big historic history aficionados. Like, you would think that they had PhDs and they were taxi drivers just because it paid more. Man, the economy of this place is something that I'll never understand. But hopefully that does give you some impression of how far my Chinese did end up knowing. And I was shooting for graduate school at the time, but some circumstances had to change, and I ended up back here. So I would like to go back and hopefully use a little bit more, maybe professionally. But if it's not professionally, I don't mind. I have plenty of fun talking in cantinas and restaurants and just the odd Chinese person on a hike.  So that was some very interesting talk story. But I do want to get a little bit through StarTalk. The very first thing that I want to do, though, and this is maybe a little bit off topic, but I think it's very relevant, is the loss of the Confucius Institute. And I wanted to talk to you about how you feel that impacted the status of learning Chinese within the university context. Because almost all Confucius Institutes across the United States are gone. The one at my university that sponsored my trip to Nanjing in 2017, which was the first time that I really got interested in this, they're now gone. Like I said, I think the Department of Defense is getting pretty thorough to make sure that they're all out. But I wanted to ask you, how did that impact UH Manoa's status of learning Chinese? Because I'd understand that people were quite shabuda. Like they didn't really want to let it go. Of course not. It was a little bit unexpected. It was not that there was no warning, because we knew that the situation, the tension between the US and China had been growing. And of course, the suspicion was that, since these institutes were funded by the Chinese government, even though it was by the Chinese Ministry of Education primarily, that somehow they were spy institutions. And we've always dealt at the University of Hawaii, we've always dealt with it by saying, everything we have is completely open. You're welcome to come to anything we do, any event, any classes we teach, any exhibitions we hold, it's all open to the public. So you can see for yourself if there's anything untoward. In what we're doing. So we ran for 13 years. And what I find was so ironic about that whole situation was I think that the goal of the Confucius Institute and the goal of something like a Star Talk was exactly the same. It was to create more interest in learning Chinese. It was to create more knowledge about China. It was to improve the level of Chinese language instruction we were giving. So what particularly struck me was towards the end and the Confucius Institutes quite unlike what the news media was saying was not dictated. What we did was not controlled by China at all. So every Confucius Institute comes up with its own program. Every Confucius Institute decides what it wants to do and then it writes a proposal and sends that proposal into Confucius Institute headquarters and says, OK, this is what I want to do. Do you want to fund me? And very seldom they'll say there was a couple items that we had asked for that they said they weren't going to fund. Actually, I remember it was only because they said you're not applying to the right place. We fund activities. We don't fund material development. If you want to do material development, go to this other unit in our organization. So every Confucius Institute decided for itself how it wanted to proceed to improve Chinese language education. So for example, a difference between Hawaii and Idaho, say. Hawaii has some of the earliest, the oldest Chinese language schools in the nation. And Hawaii has maybe 100 Chinese language programs. There's Chinese language being taught after school on weekends in the DOE, in private schools, at the universities. There's Chinese language programs everywhere. So we decided very early on we didn't want to compete. We didn't want to compete with anybody that was already existing. So what we wanted to do was we want to supplement. We wanted to enhance. So that's very different from some other Confucius institutes where there was nobody teaching Chinese. And so the Confucius Institute was offering the first classes that had ever been in that state. And some of the US government concern about that situation was if the only Chinese that's being taught here is being taught by a PRC government funded group, what kind of assurance do we have that this is not propaganda? And what we've always argued, I think what all of the Confucius institutes have argued is we're at such an elementary level. You can't get to propaganda when they're talking about let's learn the numbers. Let's learn the colors. You can't get to that. And for a place like Hawaii, the University of Hawaii, the center of the Chinese studies, we have 49 faculty specialists. We're offering 150 classes in Chinese. What the Confucius Institute did was such we didn't affect the Center for Chinese Studies program at all. I think a lot of the faculty never even knew we existed. It was just one program in this huge enterprise. So from our point of view, the fear that this is propaganda and that our students are getting a skewered stream of information about China just didn't make any sense. At the elementary levels, all we're talking about is colors and dates and stuff like that. And then in our Confucius Institute, we never got to the higher levels. And if American students are interested in debating philosophy and political science, they go to the Center for Chinese Studies, which are the way the courses are taught by US citizens. So anyway, so from our point of view, the Confucius Institute was never a problem. And we always try to, if anybody said, we have doubts, we would say, well, come and visit us and look at whatever you want to look at. And we'll talk to you about whatever you want to talk about. Anyway, but it didn't work. The situation, the tension between the US and China is still so sad. It's so sad that there is so much tension between the two countries. And what is ironic is, so when the Confucius Institute closed, to be fair, the University of Hawaii tried very hard to soften the blow for, especially for the Chinese people who were working. Like we had three instructors from our partner institution, Beijing Foreign Studies University. And I'm trying to remember five, five TAs, five graduate students. So they tried very hard to make sure that these people were taken care of, that their next steps were in place and stuff like that. But for about a month every day, I had people in my office crying, like, what did we do wrong? What happened? I mean, we had been named a model Confucius Institute, and the Chinese government had just given us a million dollars to renovate our space to make it more worthwhile of being such a Confucius Institute. The University actually paid the money back to the Chinese government. So anyway, that was all very sad. But then almost right after the Confucius Institute closed down, StarTalk picked up. So the amount of money we're getting from the Confucius Institute was almost immediately replaced by StarTalk because they have the same goal. Both the Chinese government and the American government want more people to be more functional in Chinese. That's a really, really interesting story. And thank you very much for sharing. I wanted to say one thing about that and then we'll go into StarTalk bearing in mind. We do have eight minutes left in the show. So I remember when I went into Nanjing. This was a trip sponsored by the Confucius Institute. I was kind of shocked that we didn't have to pay anything for it except for the airfare. And I remember talking to some people beforehand. And you get the obvious talk about, like, ooh, you better watch out for the propaganda or ooh, you better not say something bad about Xi Jinping or kind of pull some kind of faux pas or something like that. But I will admit to you, and maybe this isn't a good thing to say, that I kind of was hoping for when I got to China to learn about, for lack of a better word, an alternate history. I kind of did want to say, I was looking forward to hearing teachers say on a white board, like, here's top 10 reasons why Tiananmen Square never happened or maybe like, or maybe not something quite that obvious, but maybe something around American imperialism or maybe some colored history around Taiwan. And I went in to the classes in Nanjing with my ears particularly perked up for that kind of stuff. And for three weeks, absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. There was like cooking classes and like Tai Chi. And we went through the numbers and the colors and people put basic sentences together because everybody's level was like HSK1, roughly. I was a little bit higher, but not too much higher at the time, unfortunately. And I was kind of dumbstruck by the end of it. I was thinking, damn, I was promised so much propaganda. Where was it? But yeah, that stuff made me particularly sad. And I ended up actually writing a couple senators about my experiences and why I supported it.  I don't know, but whatever it's done is done. We have a little bit of time to talk about StarTalk now. Let me just follow up what you're coming with one observation. And that is why many, very often Chinese people say Americans don't understand us at all. In the situation where you were brought to China, China is all about harmony. It's not going to introduce any controversial topics. They don't want to have an argument with you. They are going to try to make you have as pleasant as an experience as possible. On the other, let me just give you a little anecdote from another era. Peking University is one of China's best. And they are an exchange partner of ours. And when President Bill Clinton went travel to China, he visited Peking University. And he wanted to have an opportunity to talk to the students. The students who were in the lecture hall with him were handpicked. And they were talked to ahead of time. And the Western media always says, oh, China is going to clamp down and control the flow information. No, they were talked to because they didn't want the students asking anything that would make Bill Clinton uncomfortable. So they were said, OK, you're not going to ask him anything about Monica Lewinsky. You're not going to ask him anything about the problems he's having with the US government. Just stay high. Stay on the level of how do our two countries get along better. So anyway, so the thing about harmony, China is looking for harmony. So it wouldn't have shoved any propaganda at you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's a very interesting story. Thank you very much. We are right about out of time. There's two questions that I have time for, OK? The very first one is what are the qualifications for applying as a teacher and as a student into the program? This is a viewer question. Start off program? No qualifications. We are not looking for elite. We are not looking for, you know, in fact, if you have had no other opportunities to learn Chinese before, we're interested in you. The current program, we already have 60 students enrolled. And so we're going to be whittling down as the program goes by. But if you're very interested, email me at CYNDY at hawaii.edu. And I'll be happy to talk to you about whether we could fit you in. Oh, yeah. And then what about the teachers? Do you think that like non-natives could ever make it as teachers? Definitely. There's a role for non-native teachers because you have an insight into the student learning process that native speakers do not. So I think that the ideal program has a mix of native and non-native. I agree with you completely. And then we have time for one last question, OK? One last question, which is, from 1 to 10, how would you rate my Chinese? Well, I haven't heard enough. All right. For the viewers, I said from 1 to 10, how would you rate my Chinese? Chinese is quite good. I'd say above five. But in order to see how much above five, I need more data. All right. Well, hopefully I'll be able to come down to the university and pay you a visit because I would very much be interested in continuing this conversation. It's something that I hope you can tell is something that I'm very, very deeply passionate about. So we would like to thank everybody for tuning in. Thank you very much for the viewer questions. I'm sorry we didn't have time to quite get to them all, but we had a really, really interesting conversation. And I also wanted to very much thank Cindy for coming in and sharing some of her experience and expertise in Chinese education. Thanks for the opportunity. Yes. Thank you very much, everybody. Mahalo. OK.


se me lenaya fubara on the same day presented the twenty-twenty-twenty-four appropriation bill to five members of the State House of Assembly loyal to him. This came a few minutes after the demolition of the State House of Assembly complex. The twenty-seven members of the House loyal to the minister of the Federal Capital Territory is on weekend will recently defect from the People's Democratic Party to the all-progressive congress we are now present at the city. Take a listen. This excellence also commissioned consultants who went into the structure and came up with an advice that it was no longer habitable and not very conducive for business. On the strength of that advice, the government had decided to demolish the structure and also provide a fitting place for members of parliament to transact their business. The rapidity at which we commenced today will tell you that we are prepared to do it. We didn't request and ensure that this will be fit for legislative business. Joining us now is the publisher of Kristina reports, Goswyl Jumbo and former APC spokesperson Darlentine Wauju. Also joining us in the publicity circuitry, APC University, Chibikei Kinga. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to post politics. Hello. Hello. Good evening. Darlentine, the drama or the tragic comedy that is happening in rivers is so disturbing now. So what would you tell our viewers about what is happening in rivers? Thank you very much, viewers. Unfortunately, my state again is experiencing another round of crisis. But this time, we are aware that all these actions of the government is as a response to the pains of the defection of the 27 members of the House of Assembly who joined APC in the last 48 hours. You are aware that they have had intractable problems in PDP, which culminated in the defection of 27 House of Assembly members to our party, APC. The government led by Governor Senfubara being very pained and hiked by that development went for the palm of flesh by the demolition of one of the relics of the states, the river state as an assembly complex. Unfortunately, that complex had been in existence and is one of our relics. There was no need for that demolition. Taking into consideration that such huge funds, humongous funds that will be expanded in the destruction and reconstruction of this edifice could have been channeled to other sectors yearning for investments. And these funds would have been plugged into those areas that will help create the enabling environment that will create jobs, that will improve on the education sector, improve on the agriculture sector. And then look at some of the major challenges we have had in the state under development and poverty, ravaging poverty. So the funds that will be now expanded in demolition and rebuilding of this edifice could have been channeled to those areas for the greater good of the reverse report. So as a party, we are unhappy with it, that's why we are opposed to it, but the impunity is by the day getting more expanded and as a party we condemn it in all its entirety. It is just natural that as an APC stalwart, you would condemn it. And to any sensible Nigerian, this is condemnable, but having said that, if the tables were to be turned, people in your party too probably wouldn't have done any better. How would you respond to that? Well, I do not think so because APC as a party in reverse state, in the build up to the 23 elections, did prepare very well to OSHA in people who rented government. Government that will be saddled with the responsibility of ensuring the economic and social survival of these citizens. But unfortunately we do know that PDP is known for these type of prices where they try to continuously recycle problems within the state and enhance under development. As a party, should APC take over the reins of governance in reverse state, APC will OSHA in the best government and the government that the people have been for over the years. Would you now think that your remark now comes with a change of irony? It was the PDP characters in reverse that helped you people win the presidential poll in reverse. It was the executive of the APC that if you want to claim the credit for APC, the executive council of the APC that did it for the APC was suddenly demonstrated a couple of days ago for a care taker executive to come into place. I guess with the view that your national secretary announced that the 27 members will be jettisoning the party. So what will be your response to that? Well, I will speak the truth and nothing but the truth. I will recall that in the build up to the 23 elections. One of the heavyweights in PDP chief Nies Oweike, the governor as he then was and today the minister of the FCT mobilized his supporters to give a support, to give the proper support to the president Ahmed Polatini in the election, which helped with the support of we, the leaders of APC in reverse state, a couple of us who supported with Nies Oweike with deliver the president. That is correct. But that's not to say that the entire PDP in reverse state are people who are progressively minded. A couple of them have resorted to their old ways of trying to create more crisis and return development. So the national leadership of our party and my work did not at any point in time contemplate that 27 assembly members were defecting and that was the reason for instituting a caretaker committee. Rather, what was the issue was that APC leadership at the state, particularly the party executive, have had intractable challenges, disagreements that have gone beyond their control, wearing the party now had two leadership structures at the party, one led by one, a make-up decay and then another led by a later effort. Both of them commanding some troops in the executive, which was now split into two and had created problems and made it impossible for the party to progress. It was on the basis of that that the national executive committee, we see that this power to the national working committee from the second to the third of August to have to manage the party. And then they saw that there was reason after factions of the parties led their delegations to meet the national chairman. It was in that situation that the party, the national executive party found that there was an absolute need for them to reject the party which led to the institution of the caretaker committee that we have today. And the timing was such that it was a couple of days just to the defection of the 27 members. And it was just a couple of days too to the very, very interesting synch song of the minister of the federal capital to be on your mandate. Don't you think the coincidences are a bit of... And it is even alleged now by APC traditionalists in rivers that the interim executive committee is actually made up of loyalists to former governor Wike. How would you want to respond to all those? Well, some of them speak from both sides of their mouths. I am a foundation member of APC. I was there from day one and I was the leader of APC in Iqarelo Kokokne where the former minister of transportation hails from. I was his leader until such a time I left. I can tell you that there is no one in APC who can say that he is more a traditionalist to APC than myself. Let me say for purposes of respect to the former minister of transportation. Apart from him at his own level, I do not think that there is any other person who can assume that he played more roles, better roles than myself and a few others in the party. Reason being that we fought for this party, we have stood for this party and we are disenchanted with the divisions that have trade this party over the years. And there is need for us all to today look for a possible way to reject the party. But I can tell you that in the most recent, our governorship candidate Toye Ko whom I support so strongly till tomorrow, I believe that Toye Ko is better prepared, was better prepared and is still better prepared to do the job of governancy. Unfortunately, politics has its own way. So I can tell you that I was part of the delegation that Toye Ko as the governorship candidate and leader took to the national chairman and national working committee of the party to ask the national chairman and the party to intervene to reject the party and that as a member of this committee my membership was drawn from the fact that I was part of Toye Ko's delegation to the place. Chieftonio Kocha also had his own faction and then Magnus Sabe and a few others also led a group of SDP members even though they were former members of APC who went to SDP. They also went to the national chairman and national working committee to ask that everybody be brought together so we can have a new start and that's where we are today. So that is the politics of APC which is not so much the issue in contention now. The issue in contention now is that the Appropriation Bill for 2024 in your state has been officially presented to a group of parliamentarians that is officially less than a quorum of the state as of assembly. I guess they are working on the junction they got yesterday that the Edison EAS faction is the recognized faction of the legislature. And what will be your response to that same inauguration? Yeah, that is what we woke up to see this morning. It is all choreographed. Like yesterday APC as a party in the state did grant a press conference wherein we allotted reverse people. So did they men. By S.P.A.T., which Danago, just Danago go, granted was purposely done to prepare the way for the Edison AHA led as of assembly to receive the budget from the governor today. I know that a four or five member as of assembly is an aberration to democracy where we have 32 members minus one deceased. If assuming without considering that they wanted a few members to be there, they have their laws, they have their house rules. Okay, okay. I'll come back to you. Let me talk to Dalyntin Wajju now. Dalyntin Wajju, are you there? Yes, please. What is your take on this melodrama happening in your state? Sad but funny? Unfortunately, this is not what we desire. But I think that the government of PDP in river states is orchestrating all these challenges to have an easy way out. To advance checks and balances because that we have the majority of fans of assembly. It is our responsibility to check the arbitrariness like what you have seen today. Today they have exposed themselves because this government and this party PDP are interested in ensuring that they do not follow due process. And without due processes, these are anti-democratic actions that retard development and is an unfortunate development. And we ask that all world meaning Nigerians should and those who believe in democracy, transparency and accountability should speak up. Let me quickly get to one of our participants, Goswil Jombo. Goswil Jombo, are you there? Yes, good evening. Good evening, Goswil Jombo. What is happening in your state? What is happening in a state that is ordinarily one of the iconic states of the federation? And where, even if one were to look into the history of Nigeria for centuries, are you guys have been interacting with modernity and westernization? What is happening that has gotten to the level of this vandalism and share? Go ahead, please. Not much like my friend and brother Chibi K. Kendiya. He was with us in government house and he worked with me so we came in directly. We know he can relate to the things that we say in this evening here. From the point where it was clear that our elder brother, Nesom Wikie, who is now the FCT minister, from the point it was clear that he was going to become the governor. We expected a day like this to come. His style of politics, his brand of politics, his modus operandi, his SOP. It is what is playing out. The key actors in the drama that is playing out in River State are people who underwent his tutelage, who were groomed by him. So we don't expect anything different from what we are seeing. The only parts, and for us as spectators who are watching the whole drama from the sideline, we think the complaints from the APC are hardly hold water. The APC in River State is supporting the PDP. The APC in River State is also criticizing the PDP. So which one are we taking? On which side are they? We have appointed the former governor as a minister in the government. The former governor is now a minister in the government at the center. He has a son who is now the governor of the state. And a lot is happening around him. So there is criticism or endorsement. It doesn't hold water much. For me, as a media person, a public affairs analyst, when I look at the things that are happening, I think it is the process of educating River State from the confusion that the political actors have put it in the past couple of years, eight years and thereabout. And like I said in the program here, sometime ago, River State is in a state of affairs, especially the economy of the states, especially the way and means of the survival of the subsistence of the good life of the people of River State. It has been in suspension. And at the point where the prime governor decided to look at what are those indices that if stimulated can jumpstart, reactivate the economic life of River State, that is where the crisis broke out. And there are all kinds of rumors flying out, money that should be paid here and there, the decision on whether to pay pensioners or not to pay them, whether it is the waste of resources or not and all of that. And there reactivated the Songhai firm, the banana firm, the H.A. firm, the Bori shoe factory and several other economic stimulants that were in place. And at that point the disagreement started. The issue of the demolition of the house of assembly that happened today, fine, there are different sides to it. On the one side is an edifice that one of the landmarks and then there is also the issue of the integrity status of that facility. The former governor himself said it on record that that building is fall out and needs to be fixed. And then after the explosion and the fire incident that happened October 30th, there was also indications from experts that that building needs to be rigid. So and then we saw the demolition today. Maybe the governor is taking that drastic measure. So, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way. As a media person, you are looking straight into my eyes and you are telling the world that as a media person it was probably because of the reports of professionals that that structure may have been defective that they sent caterpillars there today not because of the defection of the 27 members. Yes, I don't see any connection to the defection of anybody. People have always been defecting. In 2015, all of us that were serving in the river state government, all of us were moved to the APC. No building was demolished. And then all along, even recently, just early this year before the election, a lot of defection happened. Even after the election, the defection happened. But you know, but as a journalist, God's way, God's way, God's way, God's way, as a journalist, but you know the facts are different. When you moved in 2015, you moved to the sitting governor. In this instance, the 27 of moved without the sitting governor and you know, will control the executive powers of the state. So, the facts are not similar. Do you know that? No, no, not the facts, the circumstances are, the facts are different, we are talking about the circumstances, in that case a governor moved his officials, the functionaries in his administration to a new party, in this case the government is splitting up some people who decided to express their constitutional rights of association decided to move from one party to another. So tying it to a government looking at a public facility, a public structure and based on whatever the findings that the experts deployed to run integrity tests on that facility are advising. Okay, a jumbo. I don't see the connection. Okay, let me quickly ask you this before I go to another person.  So apart from the structure that was demolished, billions of Naira worth of valuables were also crushed with that building because somebody believes that that building must go down to prove that he is in charge in River State. I think we need to step back from any judgmental posture. The governor has not said that he is bringing down that building because he wants to show that he is in charge. By the way, is he not in charge? Is he supposed to overemphasize that? Is he even supposed to say it by whether words or actions? You know, I don't think anybody is showing anything. For me as a development engineer, when I see that experts have looked at the building and they think, okay, look at all the buildings that collapse in Lagos and several lives that were lost. So would we want that kind of thing again in River State? We need to, I think we need to be objective here as much as we want to tap into politics. Let's look for the facts that objectively, dispassionately tied together the two issues. Let's not integrate them literally. At least this fact should not be controversial and that fact is the fact that the constitutional federal republic of Nigeria at the level of the state envisages that there will be three co-equal arms of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. As we speak now, in River State, the physical infrastructure that should serve the legislature has been crushed. Do we agree on that? You see any interference with the operations, the functions of the legislature as the governor at any time going to disrupt the sitting of the legislature. It has never happened. Neither of the factions sitting, whether the AHA-led faction or the Amihuli-led faction has been disrupted by the executive arm, the seats. I think the one who look at the issue of the building that is, I think it's about making sure that they have a building that is safe for them to be able to sit down there that will not have a situation where 32 lawmakers, you remember the Soliso plane crash that several people died. Let me go to your colleague. I'll be back, I'll be back.  Darlington, hello? Yes, I'm home. Yes, please.  And he believes that the demolition could have been instructed by the professional recommendation of experts who visited post the arson and probably this thing was demolished based on the report. How would you want to respond to that? Okay, thank you very much. I think that I've listened to the rationalizations of Gospo. Gospo is an interest-side party. He's coming under the cloak of a public analyst. That's not correct. If you watch his narrative and the trajectory he has taken, the analysis, you'll find out that he is pure and simple, a supporter of PDP and the government at the state. So that's why, irrespective of what the recommendations or exceptions he has made for the reasons, for demolition, for the reasons for the actions of the governor, he cannot stand. But let me correct an impression. Mr. Gospo, the last time I worked in government was in 2011. So for you to come on air to say that we were in government together and I worked with you on that yes or we can. Yes or we can. Yes or we can. It was government for eight years. I did not work with him. I did not step into that government house. That is the truth. But the truth here is that all the actions that have taken place in the riverside in the recent days are all governmental conspiracy and all governmental propaganda. Girls too was taking a complete control of governance in riverside. We are not interested in supporting checks and balances. The government wants to run a solo government. A situation where a government will support a five man committee in the house of assembly to the child ring of the larger constituents. It's most appalling and you support the fact that the government which had shut out 27 members and their constituents and are dealing with only four or about five members is most challenging and I do not think that as APC in riverside we will support that. That is why we are against it. We are not interested in the divisions they have had in their party as PDP. They should continue to have their divisions because that divisions had come through us before and the capital has on it and then got government. So now that they have their own division we are interested in ensuring that we take their members as much as they did last time to us. And then we will come to the government. Okay, let me give the gentleman a fair opportunity to respond to the two points we've made. Goswil Chibikay is saying that you know what he was not in the government house in 2015 that it was the last time he worked there was in 2011. And that he believes that you have a vested interest but feigning the pretending to be an innocent public analyst. How would you want to respond to those accusations? Okay, first of all there is no misrepresentation of facts about a working relationship. I started working in government house from 2008 and then I was made the chief secretary to the deputy governor January 2013. So from 2008 to 2011 we worked together. I was in the media department of the deputy governor's office and he was in the office of the chief of staff. So there is no misrepresentation of facts when I say we work together in government house. Just that I did infuse the dates when we work together. He can remember we were all there in government house. So there is no misrepresentation of facts here. As per his assertion that I am pro PDP, pro the government and all of that. I quit politics on the 27th of January 2016 and I've never involved myself in politics. My name is not on any party register anywhere in the world. I remain a political, I remain neutral, I remain objective. And I am able to give the analysis I am given because I am not connected to the situation. I am not in the arena, I am a spectator and by the side. Let's not fabricate situations that do not exist. If you say the governor is trying to assert his authority, is trying to subsume and masculate the lawmakers. Let's bring the facts. The M Edison, the AHA faction has been sitting. The Martin's, Amiulis faction has been sitting and the governor has not interfered with that. Tell me he has interfered and then I will agree with you. But Gosswheel, I know Gosswheel. The governor now ignores the decision of a competent court of law. So the governor ignores that. The court has said that this is the recognized speaker of the reverse status of assembly. So who else is the governor supposed to present the project to? But Gosswheel, I just wanted to respond to this. I know Gosswheel.  It must have been from your analysis. And the demolition from your analysis as earlier posted is perhaps on the recommendation of the professionals that visited. I guess... No, I think you referred to me not to impute words I have not said. I don't know how the fire in the house of assembly occurred. Just like everybody heard about it. I wasn't even in Portugal. I was in my hometown of Bonilla Island as at the time it happened. So I wasn't anywhere around that facility. So I don't know how it happened. You know, whether it's a coincidence, whether it is not, is what I don't know. And I have never said I know. So tying me to it, I mean it doesn't, an incident happened. And the governor as the chief security officer of the state, you know, asked to come in and, you know, inspect the place. And probably from what the commission of information was saying earlier today, you know, as assembly experts to make an assessment of the building, which anybody will expect the responsible government to do. And now that's based on that recommendation that that building is faulty. And he decides to bring it down to put up a new edifice that is structurally resilient, you know, and safe enough for the lawmakers to sit. What is the bad thing about that? So for me, let's not criticize for the sake of criticism.  Let's also understand that this whole thing may even be actually the activities, you know, at the back end of who, who, who, what if, what if is the APC government that's actually, you know, giving the guiding light to the governor on what to do. We may never know this is politics. This is reverse state. The politicians, they are hardly neither here nor there. And I said it on this program the last time you invited me that reverse state has always been PDP. When I know my friend and brother, Tbk Ikenga, he was PDP. He was not APC. I was not even a member of APC. Okay, let's give him, let's give him, let's give him a fair chance to, to respond to some of the, some of the subtle allegations he made.  When he knew you, you were in PDP. Now he suits you, you are, you are talking as though any member of the PDP is, should be seen as a political villain. How would you want to respond to that? Well, he should also tell us why he ran away from politics because it became very hot and he could not participate for that. He could not stand the heat, that's why he ran away. But let me tell you, I was in PDP, all of us were all in PDP and we moved with Rotimi and Mechi to APC. That's why I did say that I'm a foundation member of APC from 2013 and I'm still in APC till date. The point being made here is that the government, the government and party PDP in River State are not doing, are not involved, are not taking programs that are people who rented. They are chasing vendetta. They are after personal egos, petty politics. The government and PDP should today concentrate on delivering the goods and services that river people yearn for and not to go back to the days of campaigns that campaigns are over. They ought to continue to take on good governance, take the people out of poverty and usher in the present. Chibike, let me even ask you, your namesake, you know, former governor Chibike and Mechi, what is the status in your party now in River State? Well, former governor Chibike and Mechi and former minister of transportation is still a member of APC to the best of my knowledge up to today. So, if you still a member of the APC, this interim caretaker committee that you, that the national secretariat has instituted in River State, where does this die role now in the newly constituted caretaker committee? Well, I was drafted from the former faction which was loyal to him because I was part of those who went with Toye Ko, our governorship candidate to see the national chairman. It was on the basis of that I was selected. Like I said the other time, so now we have all become one, no more factions. So, the level I am now in the party as a public secretary I can no longer discuss factions. I believe that APC is one today in River State and our interest is to try to win elections and take over the rest of government from PDP in River State. Goswil, let's wrap up with you. It's not looking good. If you are a bona fide media person and you are generally, as you have claimed, you are generally a non-partisan or a political on these issues, you will agree with me that what is happening now in rivers does not quite paint a good portraiture of governance in any state, not to talk of rivers. Do we agree on that? Okay, first of all, before I respond to that, let me clarify.  I didn't run away from politics.  God spoke to me to quit politics. So I obeyed and quit politics. Nothing else to it. There was nothing hot. It's our state. We are here. There is nothing happening anywhere. We are all here. That is one. So let me clarify that. Secondly, I'm not on trial here. God's reasonable as a media personality. My reputation is consolidated. So I'm not on trial here. Then coming back to what you say, yes. The picture is not good at all. Whether anybody wants to say his APC or PDP or neutral or whatever, what is happening in rivers state, it's not the best. It's not what should happen. We should have a state where after the politics has been played, governance should now be mainstreamed. The economic well-being of the people of the state should now take the center state. And then the various levers and streams of government should be able to link up with themselves and harness whatever support they can muster for the governor who is the leader of the park, the team lead for governance in the state. To be able to deliver on the promised deliverables to the people. That's why we leave it. The time is quite... Everybody should come together and support the government to be able to make life better for the people of the state. That's my position. Thank you very much. I agree with you that it is not looking well. Thank you very much gentlemen. We really appreciate the sacrifices you've made to add value to the program today and enlighten our viewers about what is happening in your state. We wish you all the very best and we pray that reverse will go in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.