RCR with Paul Brennan, reality check radio. Friday morning, time for our political panel here at RCR. Cam Slater, Marty Gibson and Olivia Pearson in the RCR house. Welcome all. Hello, Paul. Good morning. Nice to be here with my fellow... Panelists. Sound thinkers. Panel beaters. OK, so plenty to talk about. And let's launch into... Shall we start with polls again? Do you think? Yeah, look, I don't think we need to get into the numbers because the numbers are a foregone conclusion. But this week, we've had a one news poll and a news hub poll, both saying pretty much the same thing, that National Inact can't get there by themselves, that they're going to need Winston Peters in New Zealand first to form a government. There's absolutely no hope of Labour greens into party Maori getting even close to the required 61 seats. And even if they... The media like talking about... But they could form a coalition with Labour as well. Christopher Hick can spend a considerable amount of time in both the leaders' debates talking about the coalition of chaos. And of course, the media have picked that up as well. But if he wants to govern, he's going to need to have four parties. And two of those parties have got co-leaders. So you've got six leaders that are going to be... If that's a recipe for chaos, you can't find a worse one than that. A Hydra. Exactly. We've had three party governments before. They work OK. We're always going to have this problem as long as we have MMP, which is forever. So you'll hear people say, oh, we should have chosen STV. Well, we didn't. So let's just deal with reality. How's this for a bold... Well, it's not a prediction, but what if Act is out of the picture? Well, there's a distinct chance of that. And then I've talked about this and it really upsets Act people when you do. But with Seymour's, you know, cack-handed attacks against New Zealand First and Winston Peters, his vote has stalled. And in fact, it's probably going backwards a little bit. Whereas Winston Peters in New Zealand First vote has gone up. So, you know, there was a brilliant Tremaine cartoon yesterday, which has David Seymour holding a smoking shotgun and has stumps for feet. He's got stumps for feet.  What's Winston Peters done to upset Seymour so much?  The Patriots. The Patriots on the lawn. This is Tremaine in the New Zealand Herald. Yeah. You know, that is a watershed moment right there. They're talking about the people who went to Wellington and supported the protest and were there at the protest and backed the protest, Patriots. That's in the New Zealand Herald. Do you ever notice that when David Seymour was talking about reasons to have a strong economy, normally one of the first things out of his mouth is a really good reason to have one is that you get good pharmaceuticals. And I do wonder if that's the reason that he's shooting his foot off going after Winston Peters rather than doing what he was doing, which was working really well for him, which was pointing out what we could be doing better economically. You'd have to explain why, though, you'd go that way when everything surely points to that doesn't fly. Maybe he's getting sponsored by someone who really doesn't want people talking about it. Or do you buy Pfizer? Absolutely. I mean, for a Pfizer bank accounts. I mean, I can think of all sorts of great reasons to have a strong economy. You can provide better education. People's health gets better. You look after the environment better. Human flourishing. You get to afford things. Yeah. Yeah, you can eat good food. Having great pharmaceuticals certainly isn't the first thing to roll off my tongue when I think about a reason to have a strong economy. There's better ways to say that, like improved health outcomes. Yeah, he's very specific. Improved health outcomes is better hospitals, better treatment options. At the moment, the status quo, I'd much rather have a coalition of chaos as they keep. It's much more fun. Yeah. I'd rather have a coalition of chaos than a coalition of communists, which Labour greens into party Murray would certainly be. At the moment, the status quo is our government sleepwalking us into globalist totalitarian. So I want to see a coalition of chaos. I want there to be a massive spanner in the works. I want there to be a political fight for nationalism and the Kiwi way rather than calmly and quietly and civilly losing our sovereignty to supranational bodies overseas. Getting rogered in the point. How hard would it be for Luxon to say that when HIPKINS does come out and say it'll be a coalition of chaos? Just to say, hey, look, we're used to dissenting views being squashed by this government. You know, what you're saying is a coalition of chaos is just hashing out differences of opinion. He can't be seen to endorse Winston, though, Marty. That's the thing. Yeah, that's right. But what happens, though? What happens if the Nats get freaked out because it's Winston? We can only deal with Winston if act, you know, the road war. Could they go with the Greens? Could they go with the Greens in act? Well, if you look at the politics of Christopher Luxon, you could you have to be able to say, yes, you can't categorically say no way, can you? How would the net voters take that, though?  Of course, like a bucket of cold sick. And I tell you, net zero net carbon is Christopher Luxon's biggest issue. He cares about that more than he cares about the economy. So that phrase used, we're fixated on it. We're absolutely fixated on it. What a weird thing to say. Freudian slip. Well, given he presided over the, you know, the spreading of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for how many years burning thousands of millions of tons of jet fuel everywhere. So he probably knows a bit about that. Yeah, but he woke up. He woke up five in New Zealand, though, at the same time. Yeah, but they still burnt the jet A1, didn't they? They didn't stop doing that.  He's been standing in a puddle of his own making for so long that he's got mildew on the bottom of his trousers, up to the knees. Well, I mean, did you notice that Seymour described Winston as the least trustworthy person in New Zealand politics and said, we're not going to sit around the cabinet table with this clown? He then said that he wouldn't fight Winston Peters because it would be elder abuse. The guys are the guys and Winston retorted that David Seymour reminds me of a Chihuahua at the front gate, barking at every cat, human being or fellow dog that passes. Fellow dog. Oh, dear. But, you know, I mean, the polls, the polls, just to get us back on track for the discussion, the polls are emphatic. We're going to have a change of government. Right. And so now what we're doing is we're discussing what that government looks like. And I think there's a distinct possibility that New Zealand First may start taking votes off act. Acts clearly run out of national voters to take votes off now and they're stalled. And you're going to see a fair bit of the soft Labour vote. What remains of it go to New Zealand First 2, which, you know, you've got to hand it to Winston of all of, if you look at all of the campaigns so far, you know, and what have we got two weeks left to go? If you look at all of the campaigns so far, you've got Winston Peters is a standout campaigner. And it's not because I'm biased. I'm just looking at it analytically. So he had, you know, his horse ad.  That was so Northland. Yeah. But it's not the horse ad, Cam. It's the Southern Man ad. Yeah, that's right. But here's the thing, every time that they have a poll and we saw it on TV, one on the one news poll, we saw it on the news hub poll. They go, Winston's back in this. Guess what? The TV stations then ran. They ran Winston on his horse. At least he had his shirt on. Yeah, like Putin gone or gone or Putin, you know, but but the thing is, is he got. You know, free media, basically, that's what you get when you've got good pictures, when you create good pictures. Then you had Shane Jones singing this, you know, thing. And then his pirate shanty with a wig as well. With the wig, but it's spread everywhere. It's hilarious. And then you've got him getting again, free media as a result of the poll, as a result of the leaders debate on Wednesday night, where Hipkins attacked one of New Zealand First's candidates for saying something rather anodyne, really. And now it's all over the news that this candidate said something. And what's also all over the news is Winston Peters says, I back in one hundred percent handing an object lesson to David Seymour and how you handle comments from candidates.  And like some look what he did to Maureen Pew and who was the other guy. And there was another guy after that. Yeah, well, I mean, Winston's done that kind of thing in the past. Let's not let him off that. He's thrown people under the bus quite brutally in front of the media. Like Brendan Horan, but frankly, he deserved it. And Kim Coloni as well, I'm thinking back then. But but anyway, I mean, it's a new it's a new. She was one of his candidates that was very, very anti-co-governance and was very vocal about it. And OK, too embarrassingly for Winston at that time. That was twenty seventeen. OK. All right. But I mean, did anyone see the poll? You can. No, no, no, you segue to the next thing. Well, Dr. Alana Ratner sent a communique to the freedom movement photos yesterday. And I think her thinking is pretty sound and very much in line with my own. And I couldn't fault her very well written communique. She said in there, New Zealand first is no longer a one man band. It's senior leadership, board, candidates and members are mostly freedom people and that they get the reality of vaccine harms and its leader is ready to accept the baton and the responsibility the party has handed him. They are taking it to the government and the old media who have collaborated to shatter the country. With this absolutely crucial election, it's time to focus everyone on what's best for New Zealand. Minor party leaders who continue to tell their supporters that there is a chance of success are being very unfair to them and to everyone else. And she went on to say here come the emails. Yeah, she went on to say there is no loss of face and standing aside in order to achieve the best possible outcome for all freedom fighters and additional five percent of the party vote could be given to New Zealand first. Thus, there would be no wasted vote allocation of seats to other parties. Now, I mean her thinking is also in line with Guy Hatchard's thinking who made his case and he made six points of why he would advocate voting for Winston Peters. Those six are the inquiry into the COVID response. The freedom movement has failed to unite, which it has. Many policies are in harmony with freedom voters attracting good candidates as Winston has done, who are patriots and who get the enormity of what we're up against. New Zealand first is evolving beyond just Winston. And that's I have to say personally, I mean, I'm not the greatest fan of Winston for for being such a political pragmatist over many issues over the years. So the party evolving beyond him is very important to me. And also I'd be with you on that, Olivia. I'd probably be about where you are on that, I'd say. Yeah, because we don't have any political satire like MacFarlane Gadsby. So what we were referring to before with Shane Jones with a wig on his head, singing a shanty, I mean, that's as good a satire as you're going to get in this flipping God forsaken country at the moment. Or all that is beyond Winston. Winston is there at the moment, but he's triple vexed. God knows how long he's going to be around. I want to see the party evolving way beyond Winston, attracting really good people because they are patriots and because they are nationalists. That's a very good reason for them to be a banner. Well, it's anti-establishment as well, isn't it? It's, you know, national and labor. You know, when they say, yep, yep, and unison, they're the establishment parties that they go parties. Yeah, absolutely. And the media is on board with the status quo. Well, I mean, you saw that in debate on Wednesday night. They are the status quo, Marty. There was a there was a quick fire, a quick fire question session. And the amount of times that Luxon and Hipkins agreed on something. No, not again. Was far more than when they disagree. And when they did disagree, it was just on the implementation of the same thing. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So like, national is the same as labor. They just wear different shirts. Well, the the the the the different the other cheek of the same ass. That's a little Oliver. We need we need to look at it. We need to go back to good old fashioned lists of hierarchy of values. If people could list the hierarchy of values of what we need to vote for coming up and globalism, foreign investment, anti foreign investment, diversifying away from the flip and poison of China and anti the who and the UN with all their globalism is very, very high on my my hierarchy of values here. You know, somewhere along the line, we stop being our own country and gave ourselves a way to pragmatism of the worst variety. And I'd like to see that back. And patriotism is huge. And can I just do a little spiel on patriotism? Because it's not a language that New Zealand speaks easily. America does. New Zealand doesn't so much. We often hear call it jingoism, right? You are uncomfortable with it. Yeah. But really, I want to just draw from I don't know if you're familiar with the scientific fiction list, Robert Heinlein, who wrote The Moon is a harsh mistress and a whole lot of other novels. What's the monkeys discover? They can vote themselves bananas that don't bother climbing trees. I think that's great. That's one of his. Yeah. Well, Heinlein gave an address to the graduates of West Point back in 1973. And his whole thrust of that was patriotism. And he said that the man who is not patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not sentiment, but the hardest of logics. Patriotism is the most practical of all human characteristics because it allows your nation to flourish. He said in that speech to the intellectuals who snare at patriotism as if it were just some mindless jingoism.  Now, I totally agree with that because I think it's now time for the freedom movement to truly rise up and be patriotic and think about their country and their countrymen and women and move to support the only party who will have a chance at taking the fight to the globalists. And that's New Zealand first is the question on, excuse me, on patriotism and the freedom movement. Do you think the freedom movement actually understand patriotism? Because if that's missing in their thinking, no wonder it's kind of all over the place. Yeah, good, good, good observation, Paul. It may be missing from New Zealand culture too much as a rule, because unlike the United States, as we've said before, we were we're not founded on being anti our government or we're not founded on a revolution. New Zealand has this very spookily comfortability with spooky comfortability with being kind of in love with our governments, thinking that they'll always act for us. But what we've seen in the last three three to 20 years is that they will not act for us. They will not act for us unless we force them to. So it's about time we actually learned to adopt the language of patriotism. And maybe that freedom movement would be more cohesive if they if there was an understanding of what patriotism was.  Well, that's that's what I mean and and and have a generic consideration rather than having doubts and feeling awkward about that. Yeah, that we care about our fellow.  If you don't like it, you know, Heinlein also said in that speech that patriotism is another way. It's a it's a polite way of saying women and children first. That's a nice way of putting it.  They we women, we do need men to stand up for us. I don't care what any feminist says. We need our men behind us to stand for us. We need that. We need it for our daughters. Well, that's what I found interesting about the wearing frocks when the young leaders debate with Lee Donahue. We don't want cocks and frocks doing it. Do we the young leaders debate with Lee Donahue? The only the only person standing up for women in a whole gaggle of women was a guy. Exactly. There was that. That was such a beautiful slice of reality on where we're at.  He did that with such dignity. And he's talent. Yeah, he is. He is huge talent. And again, I take my hat off to Winston for letting him stand as a candidate. Nine nine percent and he's in. You've got it. You've got to look at the reasons that some of the things have happened to us that we thought were happening for a certain reason. I've made the point before about, you know, the CIA and the Rockefeller sponsored feminism not to uplift women, but to create division and to moralize their most likely opponents. And and it's the same with with all of the sudden fixation. These same psychos have got on with indigenous people here and in Australia. It's to it's to leach away patriotism. It's not to help out of a country that you're constantly told is oppressive and has, you know, been the reason for all sorts of injustices. So, yeah, you take the name away, you try and change the flag. It's to make it easier to get that that globalist rule in there. You talk about patriotism just a moment ago. I want to play this clip. It's Alan Ballard speaking. I think at the 2030 conference, we need to be putting a lot more into the retail agencies that are working on that. And frankly, in the medium term, we're going to need to prepare for climate refugees on a scale that is far more than we have ever thought of from coming from the Pacific Island. We're talking about potentially millions of people as they suffer. Climate change impacts in very difficult ways. So millions are coming. No, they're not 15 minute 30s. You know, we're talking about on the debate, they're talking about have you got the political will to move people out of these cities which are prone to floods? Yeah, yeah, we do. And it's the same with the islands. But that's just scaring. That's that's just catastrophizing. That's it's based on nothing. Those elite beachfront properties aren't going to build themselves over. Do you think he really believes that? He's a bank. Yeah, I think he does. But when they hang on, that's a good point you raise there, Marty. Here's a bank. If he's a banker, they're in league with insurance companies and that. Our insurance cover for houses on the waterfront higher at the moment, or just the same as any old house that's still loaning money to people who want to buy putting. They are. I think they're still in hot demand beachfront properties, aren't they?  If you listen to these, you know, doomsayers, nothing they've ever predicted has come true. Well, if you really look at why the sea levels are rising on some of these islands, a lot of it comes down to fishing with parrotfish with dynamite that nibble up coral and shit out sand. And then we're also exporting sand. That creates the impression that the sea level is rising. But we've got we've got an old story in our family. My grandfather was a chief surveyor of the Wellington Airport when it was built in 1959. And there are people who refuse to move their houses because they had to get rid of houses to reclaim land to make the runway in the position it is. One person argued, well, there was a bunch of people arguing that if they filled that area in, it would raise the water level. Yeah, right. Yeah, maybe. You know, it's just fanciful that not a single prediction that they've ever made has come true.  There would be no ice in the North Pole. Well, there's still ice there. Yeah, still there. And they keep looking at a bit of Antarctica. They go, oh, you know, if we don't watch out, the Antarctic will melt. Really? So have you checked the temperatures of, you know, the average temperature on a daily basis in the South Pole? Has anybody looked I have? Probably about the same, is it? It never gets higher than minus 10. Now, I don't know about you, but when I was at school, water freezes below zero, right? And so if it's always minus 10, they aren't going anywhere. It's just not going anywhere. Winston even had a comment to make about that. He said he authorized or got the deal to do the ice core drilling. New Zealand did the ice core drilling in the Antarctic. And they did the core drilling. They pulled it up and and and it showed that bananas used to grow there. Oh, dear. So I don't know. All right, then it's tempting to say all these guys are just dumb. They're doing a terrible job. You know, again, as I've said before, maybe they're smarter than you think and they're doing a really good job. It's just you don't know what the job is or who you're working for. You don't know what the mission is. You can make a climate model say anything you want. And the fact is that the funding only goes to climate models that say a certain thing. Yeah, we know what the mission is. Mission is total control. What is the end game? Yeah, it's total control. Flood New Zealand with millions of of people. Well, how are they going to get here? Right?  You know, they're just it's just it's bollocks. Yeah, bollocks, bollocks, OK. No, but they'll they'll get here the same way that people are now getting across the American border. They're flown in. Yeah. So hang on a second. They're climate refugees and they're going to come here by a plane increasing the problem, which will cause OK. I mean, that's what we're up against. It's it's that the one thing they do not want is patriotic New Zealanders that stand for their individual freedoms. They're against that. And they're against the country standing up and saying, no, we're full. Sorry, you can't come here. Or it doesn't work like that, unless there is a true emergency. But we know that if they cared about our country, they would never have shut down Mastin Point oil refinery, would they? At least they wanted to starve us of. Here's the thing, right? They go on about global warming and global boiling and all that bollocks, right? Global bollocks. Where do people go for their holidays in the cold winter in New Zealand? That's right. They go to places that are tropical. You know, it has the Maldives closed up shop. And they haven't gone underwater. Issued snorkels to everybody when you arrive. Of course not. Right. Have the Dutch have the Dutch been subsumed by, you know, tsunamis of North Sea? Another six feet on the dyke. Yeah, exactly. We do mitigation is far cheaper than the bollocks that they're forcing out on us. And whoever dreamed up the idea that taxation would solve the climate problem. Well, it solves the government revenue problem. Is huffing the same sort of hope here when you're in hopeless debt? Yeah, but they're huffing the same sort of hope here and that a fair number of people out there are thinking there's going to be two million voters come out of the woodwork and all of a sudden and there's going to be 42 MPs from a party no one's ever heard of. Well, we got to that. OK, I had to come up sometime. All right. Well, there's one debate that we're sorry, Marty, I think you were about to say something. I want to. Oh, no, I was just saying. The solution always seems to involve printing billions of dollars as debt for our children and setting it on fire as a burnt offering to the to the climate fairies or turning up with a wheelbarrow load of it just to buy your next. It always involves the banks and money. One of the debates we didn't talk about was the Māori leaders debate and comments by John Tumahedi. Anyone have anything to say about that? Yeah, I've I've been interested in in in the stuff. As I said, not just as, you know, that Māori shouldn't have a say on on things that happen in New Zealand through our Māori lens. But my contention is that it's a remnant of of Māori culture as a slave owner owning culture to to think about certain people in a certain way. And it's interesting in the past, Willie Jackson has said, you know, the Māori party and us basically agree on where we want to go. We've just got different ways of doing doing it. And there was a very telling moment in that debate where Willie Jackson said it works. It's nothing to be afraid of. And besides, it's a process that began under national. So that's their take. John Tumahedi called it a halfway house between Māori and what is rightfully theirs. So he's basically saying co-governance was just a halfway step to the where we want to go, which is you'd you'd assume full governance. And again, that's that's this elite Māori idea where they see themselves as rangatira looking, ruling over tūtua or commoners and owning slaves, who, you know, if you look at a lot of their attitudes towards taxpayers in New Zealand, you know, you take the fruits of their labor without reciprocity. If you have a child with one, it it gains your mana. And, you know, what Ballantyne said after he was misquoted in that leaders debate this week was it's just those top elite. We call them the conspirators, the Māori separatists that separatists that want to base co-governance, come self-governance on a racial based future, and we don't want that. And so it's it's got to be taken out of the context that that we're given this argument that it's racist. If you oppose co-governance, I think it's some as I've said before, it's the visceral reaction of the people with a proud history of abolishing slavery to being treated like a slave. Yeah, we saw that we saw that to come up in a debate the taxpayers union had and that little communist weasel from the Herald Simon Wilson was calling Jordan Williams a racist because he was opposing co-governance. And to his credit, Damien Grant just unloaded on Simon Wilson and said to him, you know, it's not racist to debate a point. Yeah, it's not racist. You know, and actually had to make Simon Wilson back down saying that just because you debate something doesn't make it racist. And Jordan Williams is not a racist.  It's not racist to debate it. Yeah, it's a very important point, Cam.  We've just got to go and get it. The money, you know, the money that's there being the money that's in the assets that are in the hands of wealthier New Zealanders. And John Tommy, he said this as well. You know, if our poorest people are paying a certain percentage of their income and their assets in tax, then, you know, wealthy people should pay the same percentage of their assets. And, you know, the other side, Marty, or the other side always has more impetus and passion to fight for their communism because they have a whole system to loot. Whereas the conservative, you know, us holding up the conservative way of life is as hard. You've got to earn your way. You've got to struggle to feed your family and run a business and provide for people and pay your taxes. That's much harder to go in and loot something is easy. And Marama Davidson did have that. We seize the precious and we want it.  And but this is the thing that we can find discouraging. I think I know I know I do is that you're trying to uphold decent values for human flourishing. And then you get these looters that come in and they are far more passionate than we are in a way because they have a system to loot. They must be met by us with the same passion to hold our traditions in place. And that is a democratic form where we have individual rights. Well, and that's the problem that happens every time. But this is half the problem, Olivia. We're trying to have a reasoned rational debate, challenging ideas. And they're not about that at all. And you just have to listen to the words that they say. Yeah, I mean, the key question here, and this was raised during that that debate was, do you believe that that Maori ceded sovereignty to the crown? And Willie Jackson said, no, no. And John Tamahiri said, no. And Marama Davison said, no. Yeah, they've all taken oaths to the correct power structure. So we're having a debate. Was that disingenuous with a lie? And the one person who said he stood up for Shane Jones was Shane Jones. All right. And you know, but the thing is, is that we're trying to have a debate around these ideas and they're not interested in a debate. They're interested ultimately in using the point of the gun or the powers of the state to to to usurp democracy and return to tribal control of New Zealand. And there's no debate that that they're going to have. And we're wishing to have a debate with people that don't want to debate and are starting from a point of view that is a a heroic rewrite of really simple principles of the treaty, that they just deny history, they deny the actual words and have come up with a fanciful idea that Maori never ceded sovereignty, that they were an equal to Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. Yeah, and that is not in the treaty, the first Maori language treaty that's not in there. What's always a Maori version was different is the other thing that's and that's where Julian Batchelor does really well in his lectures, because he makes that point very clearly that he is actually upholding the original treaty in Maori. And that's the thing is when we're having a debate, an intellectual debate against unarmed people that are not capable of an intellectual debate on this, because for them, it's their starting point is that we never ceded sovereignty and so everything's stolen. So you're going to give it back to us. Yeah. Well, also, there's there's a commitment to telling the truth that can hobble you in all this sort of thing. So we're talking about climate change. Well, Antarctica is not heating up. It's not we're not dealing with people who are interested in the truth. They're interested in winning. Well, they're interested in looting a system. Yeah, off our dime. And and same with, you know, the whole climate change, climate alarmism, you know, you only need to see where the where the pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth Rock to see that that is no more underwater than it ever was when they landed in the 17th century in America. You know, this is lies in order to take over the businesses and the wealth and the assets that have been built over 400 years and in New Zealand, over 200 years of European settlement, they want it all. The Marys want them. The Maori Iwi, not the Marys, but the Maori Iwis are looting that system and where will it end? I guess I know the answer to that. You only need to look at South Africa to see with the ANC in charge. That's where it ends the Congo, Rwanda. I mean, it's important that we get them to spell out where it ends. Like when John Tamahiri said, look, co-governance is just a halfway house. Yeah, mission. Yeah, how's that going to work? OK. Yeah, let's have the let's have the chat. Why was John Tamahiri even in the debate? He's not a candidate. Yeah, how did that happen?  Why did he had been suffered a bereavement of some sort? So he had to step back. Yeah, right. I can see that on a two-year billboard to be in a debate. OK, all right. So that's that overseas. We've got a bit of time. Let's get into this Trudeau. Rota, the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons and the the Nazi Honka Yaroslav Honka, who was in the Waffen SS. It now it turns out in and slightly embarrassing. Yeah, so surely. OK, so the speaker falls on his sword. Apparently the the guy honka was from his district or something. And someone obviously figured out this was a good idea. But would you would you do that and and and present a guy like that in your House of Commons? Zelensky did the fist pump, by the way. He was totally. Yeah, but he's not a Nazi, right? But would you do that if you're the speaker and not tell the Prime Minister you were about to do that? It's just weird or Trudeau is in on it. And he's any through the speaker under the bus. And then he apologised if anyone in Canada was offended. He didn't apologise for his own speaker doing it. And the organisation for all this was under his office. As if they would not have had his permission. You know, right?  Yeah, that that would have gone. Trudeau knew they just thought they'd get away with it. But now, of course, it's made a whole lot worse because what's funny is that, you know, Ukraine needing to be denazified has always been one of the main reasons for Russia doing the war in the Ukraine and saying that the Ukraine was full of Nazis.  So why would they be doing in your face display like that? They don't care. They're arrogance. They get the arrogance. You know, with the protest in Wellington, they said, if there's one Nazi in your rally, then it's a Nazi rally, right? And there's another one saying if there's one Nazi sitting at the table and another three people join him, there's now four Nazis at the table. Well, he was a Nazi in in Canada's parliament, promoted by Trudeau and Zelensky and. And all of them clapping like and all of them. I mean, my train train seals. The whole Canadian Parliament using those things that which ironically comes from our disinformation. There's something very wrong there. There's something very wrong there as a part of it. If there's if there's one Nazi flag there, you've got a Nazi rally.  And everyone felt comfortable doing a standing ovation. Yeah, but we know Trudeau's a Nazi. Look at the way he carried on. And if you read Adolf Hitler quotes, you can actually think, well, that is just Sinda Arten's playbook.  The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. I'm child poverty. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. Incredible, considering they were OK with those same precious children being an experiment for Pfizer. And the current Prime Minister refused to take the advice on the young ones. Right. Yeah, the messaging was too hard for Chippy. Yeah, he was one not to do that. And he did it anyway with Trudeau. Then it got a whole lot worse because his deputy PM, Christia Freeland, whose father is from that stock as well. Yeah. And she's a board member of the World Economic Forum, joyously celebrating Waffen-SS Nazi war criminal Yaroslav Hanka in their midst. According to emerging reports, not only she descended from Ukrainian Nazis, but she had family members who were also in the same Waffen-SS Ukrainian Galatian division as Hanka within the Wehrmacht. So, I mean, Poland and Jewish groups have denounced the Waffen-SS Galatian division for its role in mass murdering civilians and involvement in massacres during the war in Poland. We know how bad that was for just for historical context. Right. There's the SS and there's the Waffen-SS. Right. They were the elite elites. They were the top like first and they were going around doing the civilians. They had the SS logo tattooed on their bicep on the inside of their arm, right, with with their with their service number. Right. These these people were the top of the top. They were the elite special forces of the SS. And that's who they celebrated in Canada's parliament. I don't know if you saw it, but a couple of days before that happened in the House of Commons there, Trudeau to the speech in the anticipation of Zelensky arriving, where he's trying to say that we will always support Ukraine. By the way, Zelensky leaves with 650 million Canadian dollars. Anyway, just saying. But in that speech, if you look back at it, he there's something wrong. There's something up with him.  Which one? Zelensky or Trudeau? Trudeau. Well, I'm just waiting for the case.  And like he's possessed by this thing, it's freaky. Well, he must be getting close to resigning for to spend more time with his family. I mean, Dan Andrews has gone now. Ardern's gone. He won't have enough gas in the tank. He won't have enough gas in the tank. The other thing with that work on track, it's probably that the war for this is involved. You get a bit extra gas in the tank. The Russians came up morally on top of this, where Dmitry Peskov, who's the press secretary for Putin, said, such sloppiness of memory is outrageous. Western countries, including Canada, have raised a young generation that does not know who fought whom or what happened during the Second World War. And they know nothing about the threat of fascism. Well, he's probably right, actually. He's right. He is completely right. They it's only 80 years ago or so. Right. And now everybody's forgotten.  And here he's been celebrated in Canadian Parliament. It's just well, the polls are talking about the polls are talking about extra dining hooker now. Oh, good.  Have you seen that the polls are moving away from the Ukrainians? Have you noticed that? There's some kind of. Skizzle, not wanting World War Three next to author. Maybe that might have something to do with it. They're a NATO ally, aren't they? Because Zelensky's gone. He's a walking dead man. You can't get you can't survive after throwing 500,000 of your young men into the meat grinder and losing 25 million of your population. His own country hate him. Yeah. If Chris Hopkins was saying, look, we will fight until the last New Zealander is dead, you think? Most of what? Well, you want to take him out? Yeah. I mean, OK, well, can you be the one to start? Well, they did try that. They did try that a year and a half ago, right? Two years ago. But you can tell. All I will say is that I'm no friend of Putin. I do not like that man. And I think what he's done is reprehensible. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not in the context of a rupture, but I do understand. No, but I understand that for two years before that war broke out, he was petitioning the UN, the Security Council, saying we will not tolerate NATO advancement on our borders. We're just not going to tolerate it, and we will respond. He made a big deal with Zelensky signed, if we're to believe it. Boris Johnson turns up because old uncle Joe somewhere in there told him to and they rip it up. But I don't believe that that was signed for. It was in play and he was going to buy it. I've seen it reported that Zelensky had actually signed it. Well, possibly. I don't know that. I know that he had his. OK, for one thing, but still to blow that up to blow that up. But all the young people into the meat grinder. Yeah, yeah, Boris. That's on Boris's head because Zelensky for the sake of his nation and where there's people behind him wanted a peace deal. Yeah. And was talked out of it. I don't think anyone was signed. The Bidens have been shaking down the Ukrainians for years. So what you know, what's been going on there, right? Oh, back 2014, who doesn't want who to see what?  It's the bio labs, a special secret pleasure. How the people around us fail to realise what is really happening to them.  Well, yeah, that's right.  So yeah, we've got to start talking about how we've let people with personality disorders get to be in charge of it because they're promoted through media and propaganda to be something appear to be something that they're not. And they're they those types are attracted to wielding power over other people. Hence politics is a tool for the people of printing the money, ultimately, though. To to achieve their ends. And then there's class. Yeah, we won't go there. All right, we're coming up against time. What about just quickly back because this catches my eye, the traffic light system is being talked about again. And in this case, it's to introduce benefit sanctions. Who would use the traffic light system? Who can't read the room?  I mean, that that that term, that phraseology, that title has been completely discredited. I hate it. Has it has it been discredited? Maybe people feel safe and comfortable when it's used. Oh, it's a traffic light system. Minority. Oh, my God. Please give us a travel traffic light system, mummy. Well, I'll tell you how it works. It's the green, the compliant category meeting their obligations to prepare for a fine work. So there's no change to their benefit. People in the orange, which is some risk category, would have one or two breaches of their obligations and they face additional requirements and targeted support for the weekends. And the red light or high risk category have breached their obligations three times. And they'll face sanctions such as three strikes. Benefit, suspension, money management and mandatory community work experience. Managements. Please, Upston, Cam, you probably know her better than us. But yeah, that's never going to work. And it'll never work because the bureaucracy will work to rule, won't implement it, won't operate it. And everything will get changed. You know, all these wonderful motherhood and apple pie statements about how we're going to solve these problems and they come up with these fanciful things and they let the bureaucrats then implement it and it gets watered down. So it's never going to work. It's just fanciful to even think that it will. And they just really need to stick to simple stuff. But I don't think the National Party is capable of that. But using that traffic light system, it's like in those action movies, you've always got to have something that's counting down to an explosion. So there's always that counter going down and, you know, people get it that way. This is like the way they do the climate now. So it's orange if it's not that bad, but it's red if it's really bad. What if you're complying to everything? Are you in green? Are you? I missed that.  They do what I I tend to call beneficiary maths. And what they do is they work out how many dollars they get paid on a benefit. Then they divide that by how many hours they're going to work and look at the difference and arrive at the conclusion. Well, I'm only I'm only getting paid two dollars an hour to do this job. Why would I work for two dollars an hour? Yeah, that's a point. Did you see Winston Peters talk about Jobseeker, the Jobseeker will be limited at two years in your lifetime to be paid an unemployment benefit. I mean, that's that's very extreme and a good way. That's a Clinton, Bill Clinton. Well, just just I don't I don't know. I mean, I think it is. Yeah, but but, you know, the idea that limit because I I mean, I know people in my life will be sort of on the outskirts of my life. But they've been on a form of benefit for 30 years. And nice that we could help. Yeah. And they're too. They're rare and delicate flowers who are often artistic and they can't do a normal job anywhere. I mean, I've done every job from caregiving to selling to selling cars. I mean, I have done you name it, I've done it. Things I wouldn't even admit on air. Maybe we should play a game of bingo. You've been in the green zone all this time. Well, we're just the employed zone, you know, for pretty much most of it. Did you get to collecting them eventually? I did that. Yeah. But eventually, well, Bob Jones actually said I sent him a letter once and he mocked me for being a used car salesperson. I've been a used car salesperson.  It was quite a good job.  It was it was great. I got commission as well as a stipend, as well as a company car, as well as company laptop and battery paid for. It was actually not a bad job. But anyway, remember Billy T's workers often as well. Remember Billy Billy T's sketch, the used car sales sketch with the Markzware Zephyr and everything that's classic.   The next day they saw as hell and they never want to do that again. You've got to sort of do it so you just say to someone who's just getting started. OK, get your shoes on. Let's walk to the end of the street and back. You feel better. You feel good. Right. That's all. And that two year span in a lifetime could work in that way. Yeah, that seems fair enough, doesn't it? But if you look through Māori Faka Toki, there's there's all of these odes to the joy of hard work, you know, they could use that as well. Well, I mean, we're we're going we're going to come under harsh austerity because as far as in Irani, who's so brilliant, Paul, every week is pointing out the system is going to it's going to matter of when according to it's just a matter of when and then we'll get austerity measures and goodness knows what that's going to look like. I think we should get that over and done with now, but we need to deal with beneficiaries because, you know, yeah, I mean, a hand up turned into a flipping multi-generational lifestyle on the dole, didn't it? And I'm pleased to see that Winston has at least got the nuts to address that going forward because it's a very important one. You can't have people leeching off our off of its classic Marxism, you know, each according to their ability to each according to their need. It's like another person's need should not have a claim over my ability or your ability or anybody else with a falling birth rate and add to an already falling birth rate at twenty eight percent reduction in live births. No one's going to be there. There just won't be the population to support it. Thirty seven percent increase in people to disable to work.  And ever since Marie said that, I think about that every time I hear, you know, someone on the news saying, oh, well, you know, we've got this drop in consumer confidence. Normally that leads to an increase in unemployment, but we're not seeing that. That's why. Well, why is Auckland Airport in chaos? Someone tell me why an airport that's been operating for 50 years now all of a sudden can't handle the normal flow of traffic. I have I have no competence. And maybe they don't have enough people. Where are they? Thirty seven percent. Before we end, Paul, can we go to my fifty seven year old man who? No, I think that's a brilliant place to end. Let's do that. It's a nice positive story because everything's so dire. I know as we need it for all the Waffa Nessie stuff. Yeah, no, no, nothing's involved in this story. Fifty set three. So a former farm manager has written a book called A Journey Toward Literacy, proving it's never too late to learn. So during a 40 year farming career in the Deep South, Michael King Potiki devised an elaborate bag of tricks to hide the fact for all those years that he could not read that amazes me how people can do that. It's incredible.  No, that's a smart man. That's that is a very smart man.  And that's how he got around things so that they would read things. That's actually quite a good, simple one. Yeah. Yeah. And but but here he was saying that I was embarrassed of myself. And if they knew that I couldn't read or write, what were they going to do? Fire me. Would they say that there's no job? And so he was scared of it.  And he's 57. So that would have been when we had a world-class educational system. Right. So you can only imagine how bad it is now. And we were sent something the other day that said that 15 year olds, 35 percent of them struggled to read and write. 35 percent in the new education system. So it's it struck me as sad. But all I want to say is to Michael King Potiki, good on you for learning to read when it was of a value to him to want to be able to read to his grandchildren. That's very special. It is. I mean, really. And the whole world opens to you when you can read. And we don't think about it because all of us can. But think how shut down somebody is from and the mental gymnastics. One has to do to keep up the pretense. No, it's you think about that. You have to cover every track all the time. Even more, you think about we've just had six years where the most numerous numerous occupation in our parliament's been teacher or ex teacher, and it's gotten worse. Our literacy and numeracy has gotten worse. And yeah, it has real consequences in terms of kids rather than embarking on a challenging career that's useful to society. Ending up in jail or angry to get angry in poverty. Yeah, it's it should be an urgent priority. Yeah. And that guy, that guy was always employed even without being able to read. He was always employed. And there'll be others like him. But he's been limited. I mean, when I was at university, I bordered with a family where the husband and the family couldn't read functionally illiterate. And he was a B grade mechanic.  Of course. Yeah. And so his life, his entire life and that of his family has been limited by his inability to read. It's a disabling affliction. Is that an inability to learn or handicap or not wanting to learn or no, it's look, it's just a failure of the education system over decades. This guy, this guy said that he went to a teacher when he was 12 years old and said, I really want to know how to read. Could you please teach me? And the teacher said, no, you're too old. Oh, great. It was 12. No one left behind. Can you imagine it must have been humiliating for him to admit that to a teacher and ask that help and then get rejected? And then get rejected. I mean, mind you, anyone can learn to read at any time. There's that too. OK. Well, it's easier if you're young because you've got brain plasticity and learning to read it basically co-ops part of your brain that's used for hearing into your visual system. So there's a bit of messing around with your brain. That means that it's harder as you get older to do. Your reading and writing is not natural. It's a learning thing. Oral is natural. But no, but it gives you the ability to conceptually think and conceptually formulate. It doesn't come easy like just learning to talk to us. No, you've got to do it. And, you know, kids, it always amazes me when TV is so good, how into reading stories kids are. And if you read them a story, they'll ask you about characters subsequently in a way that they don't. If you if you if they're watching it's richer. And I've talked to a few home schooling parents on this program. And a few have told me because I've asked them, well, how do you do your curriculum? And really, they say if your kid can read and loves to read, that's kind of most of their education right there. It is. It is. There's no need to go to university when you can read.  We had a gaslighter of the week award. Maybe we should have another award for people who. Really impress. Like that chap, like a fifty seven year old man that decides, no, I'm going to read to my grandchildren. That's what I want. Hero sort of. No, I think it's a positive idea because gaslighters always focusing on the negative. And I think we really from games later. I think we really should celebrate people who have, despite adversity, broken free from the life that crappy useless teachers have sentenced them to. Yeah. And that's the reality of it. We've lied to ourselves for decades in this country, telling the world we have a world-class education system. And if you ever want proof that we don't, it's this man. Yeah, I used to write media for the Polytech in Gisborne and I wrote a lot of stories about people who were the first in their family to get a qualification. And and the joy that it gave them in the pride was was so touching and moving to to see it really affected me. And I I guess it drives me to be cross about the failure of the education system, generally. Well, I know when in a previous relationship, my stepdaughter, she was there under our care and it was me who picked up that she could not read. And I picked it up because I used to read to my kids and those beautiful girls when they're in my care. And I noticed that she was cagey and a bit, you know, she would get anxious, she would get really anxious. It turned out that she couldn't read. So I, you know, tabled that with her father and we sent her to Kit McGrath and sure enough, she was one of those kids that was such a people pleaser that she just fell through the system by being helpful, really lovely girl. And she ended up suddenly just being so relieved because the whole world opened to her and she is a lawyer now. Wow, yeah, cool for you. Yeah, I think that's a really good note to end on. Yeah, this week. Yeah, positive. Yeah, in the green zone, the green zone, not orange or red. All right. Yeah. OK, a traffic light system for success. Maybe we should adopt one political panel traffic light system. Well, maybe. Yeah, can you work out how we can integrate? I think it just needs to have two lights. We don't need to have an orange. It's red or green. You've got to say blue. Go or no, go. You either can or you can't. Yeah, that's what Yoda said. Isn't that what Yoda said? Yoda. Yeah, I mean, he said there is no. Do or do not. There is no try. Do or do not. There is no try. All right. OK, well, that was an interesting political panel for this Friday morning. Thanks to Marty Gibson. Thanks to Olivia Pearson. And thank you to Cam Slater. And we'll do it all again in a week's time. No problem. Thank you, Paul. Have a great week. RCR with Paul Brennan, Reality Check Radio.


Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode... More than a hundred years ago, reports described it as the most weird and gruesome apartment in the world. Why display an entire room full of grotesque items and open it to the public? Hell's Irish pub in Seattle has a creepy vibe to it, even if the displays and decorations inside aren't meant to be. Perhaps that's because the building started its life as a massive mortuary. Early one February morning in 1897, John Mars jumped out of bed from a sound sleep and while the smell of breakfast cooking downstairs wafted up to the second level of the house, he inexplicably grabbed his pistol and went on a shooting spree of his own family. But first, a four-year-old has a paranormal experience and the man he grew into over 60 years later is still unsure of what happened to him. We begin there. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, and to win our contests to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  When this occurrence happened, I would have been about three and a half years of age and I have never forgotten it. This would have been in 1951 or 1952. My understanding is that this particular house came as a job package with my father's employment. I can still recall some parts of the house and its general interior layout. At this time, my parents and my sister younger than myself, we were living at 36 Canal Street, Derby. I was never brought up with bogeyman tales or other happenings to cause some fear or to obtain obedience from me. Therefore, I cannot say that such imaginings were put into my head for me to invoke an event later. Despite my young age, I can recall this particular evening and event. The house was somewhat large and it had a semi-spiral staircase with a red-colored stair carpet on the treads and risers. At the top of this staircase was a landing which led to the bedrooms and bathroom. For whatever reason, I always used to ask my mother to leave the curtains open and occasionally the window partly open. It was one of these sash type of windows that opened and closed vertically. On the adjacent wall to the window was the door to the landing. This door was in the area of the foot of the bed and to the right of the bed. The side of the bed was a cross from this wall with the bed head on the wall behind me. There was a small table close to the head of the bed where I always had a tumbler of water, as often I would awaken overnight and have a drink of water which continues to this day. When in bed and before the forthcoming event happened, I sometimes would hear what I thought to be a voice of someone who was speaking very softly, something like a loud whisper. The way this voice spoke, it sounded to me as if this person was looking for someone, but in a more inquiring fashion. Sometimes I never heard this voice but it always came back even if eventually. There was just the one word spoke, but it was repeated. This sounded to my ears to be Jack? Jack? These two words would stop for a short while and then the same two words were softly repeated. Jack? Jack? This may happen three or four times and then stop as if the person had gone away. I had no idea as to which gender the voice belonged. All of this caused me no issues whatsoever and it certainly never frightened me. It was just there from time to time after I went to bed. The incident which I am about to relate I can well recall. My mother put me to bed and as per usual the curtains were left open and the window slightly cracked. I never heard the soft spoken words of inquiry and so I must have fallen asleep. Later I awoke to what sounded like two cats fighting outside. We had no pets but there were a couple of cats that came into the small garden. During all this screeching and wailing from these cats there was the sound of what appeared to me as being of empty tin cans rolling, falling onto a peeved surface and then rolling along this surface. I imagined that the cats had run into such cans and toppled them over. All of this certainly caused me no concerns. I had a drink of water and I must have gone back to sleep. I was awoken by a lady laughing. She was in front of the bedside table and between the edge of my bed and the wall where the door was located which in turn was adjacent to the window at the foot of my bed. The lady was nondescript in color being a dark gray. However, I could see some patterns and frills on her dress. This was bell shaped front and back but more so at the back and something that would be seen in the late 1700s to early 1800s. Her hair was pulled backward and in the fashion of a bun at the back of her head. She appeared to have long sleeves on her dress that had a lace or other frill material close to the wrists. There seemed to be something like a frill or a lace collar to her dress. This lady had a bracelet on her right wrist. However, the most significant detail of this particular lady to me was that she was laughing but more so by the way that she actually laughed. Her laughing was very loud and it could be best described as being in the form of what is sometimes referred to as hysterical laughter. She had both her hands over her face and partly on her forehead while she endlessly laughed. Throughout this laughing she was rocking forward and back up again from waist level. I do not recall if I was frightened but even at my tender age at the time I thought something was amiss. I left my bed and went into my parents' room, awoke them and told them that there was a lady laughing in my room. And this is my story of the lady at 36 Canal Street, Derby. Nothing frightening but I would love to know if something ever went awry in the history of this house long before we occupied it. Very many years later, I must have been around 17 or 18 at the time, I learned that this house had originally been built by a person that arrived in Derby from what is now Belgium. My understanding is that this person was associated with, or was, a founding member of the soft drink manufacturer, Burroughs and Sturgis of Derby. That would require investigative authentication which I have never performed. This newly learned piece of news at that time made me prick my ears up as it made me think, or should I say at least consider, was the voice that I sometimes heard when in my bedroom which caused me no alarm or other concern not be saying Jack Jack but in fact could it have been Jacques Jacques or even being the shortened form of Jacqueline in the French dialect. I wondered whether the person voicing Jack Jacques was actually looking for a Jack somewhere in the house so calling out softly to get a response from Jack to locate that person's whereabouts. Very many years later, I learned that my parents often heard talking elsewhere in the house and persons moving about in the house as well as furniture being shuffled about. However, there was never any evidence on inspection or investigation of any furniture that had been moved. There were neighbors, I never knew them of course, who always had visitors and they made some noises. However, these people left and I was informed that the noises and inaudible talking within the house persisted on. My mother was somewhat concerned and rather uneasy at times about this house. Apparently my father was not so inclined. This attitude of my father may have been related to the fact that during World War II he served in the RAF as aircrew in Bombers, which could be a physically and psychological terrifying experience in itself. Consequently he had little to no fears of noises or voices emanating from elsewhere in the house. In later life I cannot recall ever seeing or believing my father to be a fearful type of person. I recall when in this house and whether it was pre or post my experience of the lady, my aunt, my mother's sister visited us from Scotland. The only thing that I can recall was that my aunt, my younger sister and myself were in the lounge room one night with Radio Luxembourg playing loudly. My parents had attended some function at Nottingham and my aunt was babysitting my sister and myself. My aunt appeared to be rather distressed as I recall. My parents returned home and I can recall my father being the first to enter into the lounge room. Both my parents were very surprised that my sister and I were still up and about and also the radio playing loudly. The radio's volume was reduced and my aunt, who was now in tears, was speaking to both my parents and all on the far side of the room. I never heard one word of this conversation. I was told, again many years later, that my aunt was very frightened on this evening as she heard talking outside the lounge room along with other noises also, the above mentioned neighbors had since left. Therefore, to drown out these stories and voices, she had greatly increased the radio's volume and furthermore she would not venture outside this room to put my sister and myself to bed. I tried a number of times after learning of this incident to get my aunt to tell me her experience of that evening. She adamantly refused to talk about it and sadly I never found out directly from the person concerned what actually occurred. Apparently my aunt was always very frightened and alarmed about this house after her first visit before that mentioned episode. We eventually left Derby and moved to the village of Willington where my father originated. We lived at Willington until September 1962 when we moved to Stafford with my father's employment. Many years later, the subject of 36 Canal Street came into the conversation with one of my father's friends. My father went on to say to this friend that the person who moved into the vacated house at 36 Canal Street, Derby, when we left for Willington, once pulled my father to one side and asked him if the house was haunted. Apparently my father would neither confirm or deny this. This person then told my father that he and his wife had heard all manner of noises within that house, with people talking but their conversations were imperceptible. On one occasion, late one night when he returned home from work, a lady had passed this man on the stairs. This lady said something to him but he was very tired and unsure of what she had voiced and didn't realize this passing on the stairs until he was on the landing. Furthermore, and most interestingly, he told my father that his daughter, who was about six years of age, was very frightened in the house and that she had heard somebody calling out, Jack, Jack. Furthermore, this little girl had seen a lady laughing very loudly in her bedroom. In June of 1899, newspapers across the country trumpeted the story of New York City's newest site, something so strange and macabre it would have rated the highest attention even in the heyday of PT Barnum. Reported first by the New York Journal and then picked up by the newswires, it was the story of a hospital room that was being decorated entirely with human bones in order to present a specter of mortality that was intended to eventually rival such morbid monuments as the Paris Catacombs or Rome's Capuchin Cemetery. The masterminds of the project were a pair of doctors, Northway Meyer and Howard Nielsen, both on staff as anatomy demonstrators at Flower Hospital at 63rd and Eastern. It would later merge with other hospitals to become the New York Medical College and William Flater, the head nurse of the dissecting room. The trio had converted the anatomy lab into a veritable charnel house. A pyramid composed of bones from all parts of the human body surmounted by a skull were set on a long table as the room's centerpiece and were flanked by skulls hollowed into drinking cups atop what the newspapers described as tripods of tibiae. Next to this was a full skeleton enthroned in a large chair with his arm resting on the table and his gaze overlooking the pile. The room also included signs lettered with toe and finger bones. These spelled out the names of Meyer and Nielsen against a black background and noted the initials of the institute's proper name N-Y-H-M-N-C in large blocks, New York Homeopathic Medical College and Hospital. Various skulls and crossbones adorned the walls and garlands of bones had already been hung with additional planned so that the ceiling itself would be obscured by a sea of human remains. Finally, as one newspaper recount explained, up and down the walls, like ghastly white serpents, crawl coils of vertebra. Wire Service reports dubbed it the most weird and gruesome apartment in the world and said that if the feeling of dread for these specimens displayed can be overcome, the display is quite enough to excite the interest and imagination of the most case-hardened sightseer. Sensational it was, but the project was also not in the least controversial.  Flater, who performed the actual labor of assembling the bones and was noted as the artist who eccentric inspiration is accountable, was quick to provide a defense. It was meant to be didactic, a kind of learning aid, he explained. Our bone room is intended to serve as a practical aid to students of anatomy, he told reporters. Human bones of every description can be found grouped about in artistic confusion, he continued, and this would allow the anatomy lecturers to quiz students in novel ways on their knowledge of the parts of the human body. Flater's explanation struck many as a bit hollow. Was there really academic value in instructors pointing at bones hanging on wire from the ceiling as a means of a pop quiz? The scholarly value of the room was not the only issue of debate, though. There were also questions about the exact provenance of the bones.  No doubt the medical school had bones stored away, but whether they had quite so many was another matter, and one theory that made the rounds during the meeting of a local medical association involved the distasteful idea that the trio had stolen or otherwise obtained them from the Potter's Field or Popper's Cemetery on Hart Island. For a long time, Hart Island has been New York's naughty secret. A mile-long island at the eastern end of the Bronx, Hart has served many functions throughout its history, including acting as a Civil War prison camp, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and a Shutter Island-style psychiatric hospital. But most notably, it has acted since the late 19th century as a dumping place for New York's impoverished dead and holds the distinction of being the world's largest popper's cemetery with over a million interments. The first burial was in 1869 and the volume eventually grew so high that the dead were placed in large mass graves, three layers deep, with a level of sod between each layer. Pits for children, for instance, were so vast that they held up to 1,000 burials. By the time the room at Flower Hospital was being decorated, there had already been 110,751 burials on Hart, so there were potentially plenty of bones to be obtained there. Bodies were delivered to the island by a boat named the Fidelity, captained by Edward McAvoy, who had received several demerits for misconduct while in the Navy. He would sail the East River to pick up bodies from the City Morgh and Harlem Hospital, among others, and twice weekly during the winter and three times a week during the summer, drop them off on Hart. The Fidelity could hold up to 100 corpses, which were covered over on the deck by tarps so that passing boats would not be able to see the grizzly cargo. On the island they were received by Superintendent de Burials, John Bopp, who then processed them with a team of 50 convicts from Riker's Penitentiary. It was a nauseating spectacle, and as a crew member from the Fidelity told a reporter in 1900, it's all the same after you're dead, but if you want to know the advantage of passing away among friends, take a trip to Hart's Island on burying day. It would have been scandalous to the hospital if it were to turn out that the trio had been obtaining bones from the graves on Hart Island for their project, but the suspicious past of Meyer and Nielsen meant that the question would not go away easily. The pair had already come under media scrutiny in 1894, when The New York Times carried a story about how they were using narcotics to place stray dogs into commas in order to experiment with a potassium solution as an antidote to morphine poisoning. Meyer at the time was known by his true first name of Oscar. Although, when he went into professional practice, he adopted instead his middle name of Northway, apparently in order to avoid confusion with the Oscar Meyer Wiener Company, which had been founded in 1883. At the time, neither of the two were even properly physicians, having yet to graduate medical school, and they instructed the paper to omit the title of doctor, since, as they described it, they were simply students with an inquisitive bent. They would administer morphine intravenously to the dogs until they fell into a coma, very quick for a small mongrel, up to four hours for a large dog, and follow that with a solution of Permanengate of Potash. The validity of their experiment was questionable, but at least none of the dogs died, or so they claimed. Not surprisingly, the weight of both public and private opinion was falling heavily against Meyer, Nielsen, and Flater. The latter was vehement in his insistence that not only was the display ethical, it wasn't even intended to be morbid. If the bones present a sight most gruesome, he argued, it is because of the nature of the subject and not because I had any idea of arranging such an effect. Despite the claims of the trio that the room was simply a means to put the remains of the dead to good and practical use, the hospital's governing board eventually mandated that not only would they cease adding to the display, they would remove what had already been constructed. Such a spectacle might be fine for the Catholic bonehouses of 7th century Europe, but modern New York would not tolerate it. And with that, amid suspicions of grave robbing and professional misconduct, America lost its one and only attempt at a fantastic charnel house. Coming up, Kel's Irish pub in Seattle has a creepy vibe to it, even if the displays and decorations inside aren't meant to be. Perhaps that's because the building started its life as a massive mortuary. And early one February morning in 1897, John Mars jumped out of bed from a sound sleep, and while the smell of breakfast cooking downstairs wafted up to the second level of the house, he inexplicably grabbed his pistol and went on a shooting spree of his own family. These stories are up next when Weird Darkness returns. If there is a definitive go-to Irish pub in Seattle, Washington, it's Kel's in the Pike Place Market. Just about any local you ask who doesn't live the tea total life has spent an after-work happy hour on its post-Ali patio or a drunken St. Patrick's Day or two in this creaky, spooky, old-fashioned bottom floor bar. Perhaps partaking in the city's largest collection of single malt scotch. But not everyone who hangs out at Kel's knows that there is a great reason why it is so creepy in there. Kel's is in the ground floor of the Butterworth building, as in E.R. Butterworth, who built Seattle's first mortuary inside this building and who basically invented the modern funeral as we know it. In the very words, mortuary and mortician for that matter, Kel's occupies the former stables and funeral wagon garage. Half a block east from Kel's, the Greco-Roman sandstone arches at 1921 First Avenue were, as Seattle Met's editor-in-chief James Ross Gardner wrote in 2012, a passageway of sorts from this life into the next. Beginning in 1903, when Butterworth and Sons moved in to this snappy new building after bouncing around from the old Masonic Temple at Second and Pike to another location on Second and then another on Third, E.R. Inc. had a monopoly on the death industry in Seattle. For the first few decades that followed, just about everyone who died in Seattle sailed through this building's archway. Many of the dead came through without names or identification. The era in which Seattle was settled saw epidemics of tuberculosis, diphtheria and Spanish flu, likely among others, and without proper burial services available. The case before Butterworth and Sons, dead bodies would regularly just appear on the streets of downtown Seattle. It got so bad that the city started offering undertakers $50 per body that they could take off the streets as a community cleanup effort. Butterworth saw an opportunity and took it and it would make him a very wealthy man. He hired John Graham, the English architect whose firm would later design the Space Needle to plan out his grand five-story mortuary with a 200-mortar chapel, a crematorium, a columbarium for storing funeral urns, a casket showroom, and an elevator, the very first on the West Coast, used for transporting bodies up and down this marvelous palace of death. Butterworth had Graham draw up eight different blueprints before he presented one that was to Butterworth's liking. The building was done up in the Bozar style of the era, with four sculpted lion heads on the facade, facing First Avenue from three stories up. The aforementioned space that Kells now sits in held horses and herces concealed in the alley to hide the unsightly bodies from public view. The floors above were tricked out in mahogany, bronze and brass fixtures, elaborate stained glass, and general Victorian filigree. The spacious chapel had pews of Flemish oak, a choir loft and a new fangled system of light signals that a choir, should the family hire one, could follow to start or stop singing. Some of the services offered for Butterworth and Sun's funeral packages were the transport to the body to the mortuary, washing the body, dressing the body, embalming, newspaper death notices, limousine and hearse service, casket with optional crushed silk interior, fresh flowers, burial permit, air sealed vault, and musicians. There was nothing like it in the United States, Gardner said of Butterworth and Sun's, maybe nothing like it in the world. Edgar Ray Butterworth never meant to work as an undertaker to begin with. Born in the Boston suburbs in 1847, he found himself working as a cattleman on the plains of Kansas when he encountered a grieving settler while traveling with his team. The man, whose wife and newborn child had both just died, had no lumber available for coffins on the prairie. Butterworth had said built a coffin for the guy with wood taken from his own wagon. Everyone in turn of the century Seattle knew E.R., who also served in the state legislature, and his oldest son Gilbert, respectively, by E.R.'s signature long goatee and his son's high classic cheekbones and all-around good looks. They trusted the Butterworths with their family members who'd passed on. Although it is unclear whether folks did because they wanted to or because they didn't really have a choice. As for its modern day incarnation as Kells, it has ghosts. Everyone who even vaguely follows that sort of thing will tell you this. The most cited one is a young girl of about eight years old with blonde or red hair. She supposedly shows up most when the traditional Irish music is going, appearing in the main room or on the stairs. Its less famous ghost is Sammy, who will show up in the mirror on the back wall. People say you'll see a man's face in the mirror looking right at you, but if you turn around to check him out, he vanishes. Turn back around to face the mirror, he's right there again grinning at you. There are also ghosts that never show their faces, according to local legend. There is a small ornate whiskey bar in the back corner of the restaurant, just a little corner bar that's easy to miss, but if you keep an eye on it, the candles all around the bar will allegedly light up on their own. Glasses are known to break on their own, silverware will levitate, and disembodied women's voices are heard. That same stairwell in the back where the little red-haired girl hangs out is supposedly home to lots of other spirits too, who turn up in photographs via orbs. Or maybe it's just dust. Mercedes Caraba, who once ran the now defunct full disclosure market ghost tours, told KUOW in 2009 that she spotted a pair of muddy, dirty hands pressed up in the windows of the first avenue entrance to the building. The area is just kind of inarguably deathy, said Caraba, with a Duwamish burial site nearby and a 19th century settler's graveyard a block away. That said, this building hasn't been a mortuary or a funeral parlor for a really long time. In 1923, E. R. Butterworth moved his business to the western slope of Capitol Hill, at the northeast corner of Melrose Avenue and Pine Street. The new building was even more souped up and deluxe, with a crematorium and columbarium, fireproof vaults, and even bigger chapel and drawing rooms. Hurses equipped with Cadillac motor equipment with special designed bodies, pioneer historian Clarence Bagley wrote of it in 1929, in addition to funeral furnishings from the most simple to the magnificent. E. R. passed the business on to his sons. Who passed it on to theirs? And it remained in the family until New Orleans-based chain Stewart Enterprises bought Butterworth Funeral Home in 1998, making it one of the longest operating family-owned businesses in Seattle history. The last Butterworth to run it was E. R.'s great-grandson, Burt Butterworth Jr., who was the one who sold it. Kells moved in to the former livery in 1983, and not much of the grandiose Victorian interior of Butterworth and Son's remains there, or even inside the building's upper floors for that matter. Other than the bar, the building has been more or less empty as long as anyone can remember, except for the ghosts, if you count those. Its deathly superstitions are still being kept alive by the building's current owners, though. Since 2005, the Butterworth block has been owned by the McElise family, which also owns Kells, and the same year it was purchased, Karen McElise saw something in the pub's kitchen that she still can't explain. He was a tall man who looked like he was part black with a suit jacket on, she reported to The Seattle Times. He had very thin hands. He walked to the end of the bar and just kind of faded. Whether it's Halloween or St. Patrick's Day, if you're in Seattle and you feel like having an otherworldly experience, you just might want to spend it at an Irish pub and try your luck. Mrs. Emma Mars and her sister-in-law, Ida Mars, were preparing breakfast the morning of February 13, 1897, in their home at 129 South Upper Street, Lexington, Kentucky. Around 745, Mrs. Mars sent the servant girl upstairs with a bowl of warm water so her husband John could wash up. When she entered the room, John jumped out of bed with such a peculiar expression on his face that she quickly set the water down and hurried out of the room. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard a pistol shot from the bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Mars and their two children, John Jr., age 5 and Helen, age 15, slept in two beds in the same room. John Mars Sr. had shot his son in the forehead as he lay in bed. The shot startled Helen awake. She saw what had happened and started screaming. John fired two shots at Helen. One missed her, the other went through her neck. Helen ran from the room as Emma and Ida approached the room.  Ida Mars entered the room just as John Mars smashed the head of his wounded son with the pistol. He turned the gun on his sister and fired. When the shot missed Ida, he threw the pistol at her head, knocking her to the ground. The boy was still crying in pain. Mars drew a straight razor and with a wild, maniacal laugh cut his son's throat from ear to ear. He then did the same to his own throat, severing his windpipe and jugular vein. Carrying the gunshots, neighbors forced open the door and rushed in. In the bedroom, now quiet, they found a gruesome scene. The young boy lay on the bed, shot, beaten and slashed. John Mars lay on the floor in a sea of blood. In the hall, Helen was wounded and unconscious. Ida was in a state of shock and Emma was suffering from nervous prostration. John Mars had a history of mental illness. At age 22, he was courting Emma Davis and asked for her hand in marriage. When she refused, he became infuriated and swore he would kill her if she did not marry him. Mars was judged insane and committed to the Eastern Kentucky Asylum. After six months, the doctors determined him cured and he was released. Emma then agreed to marry him and they settled into a happy marriage. John had a successful career with M. Kaufman and company, Clothears, and owned a great deal of real estate and interest in several building associations. He belonged to the Knights of Honor and the Odd Fellows and was a deacon at the Central Christian Church. Around Christmas, 1896, John was taken violently ill, having peculiar headaches. Since then, he had not been in his right mind. He was given to spells of melancholy during which he would discuss suicide. Dr. Joseph Bryan examined John and advised the family to commit him to the asylum again. The night before the murder, he said to his wife and sister, I'm not afraid to die, but I can't bear to leave you all. I want my children to go with me. Thinking he was joking, one of them responded, why, what are you going to do with your wife and sister? Oh, you must come too, he said. I want all of you. The Mars family was one of the oldest and most prominent families in Kentucky. The funeral for John Mars Sr. and John Mars Jr. on February 14 filled the Central Christian Church with 1,500 mourners and many more stood outside, blocking the streets for blocks. Father and son were buried in the same grave. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find The Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The lady laughing in my bedroom is by Jeff James from My Haunted Life 2. New York Charnel House was posted at Empire Delamorte. The Bo Arts Butterworth building is by Meg Van Huygan for Seattle Curb Bed. The act of a madman was written by Robert Wilhelm for Murder by Gaslight. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we are coming out of the dark, I will leave you with a little light. 1 Peter 5, verses 6 and 7. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand that He may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. And a final thought. Value yourself and know your worth. You are as important as everyone on this earth. Every human being has a purpose. Your life has value. It is not worthless. You are beautiful and special. Be proud of who you are. Live your life to the fullest and reach for the stars. Harry Bridgeman I am Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week. And while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.


We go over to the NQs and take a look at the NQs folks. The NQs earlier in the day were the best performing industry. That being said, they hit those NQs pretty hard. We got to a price point, you know, they're only down $36, 36 points, which is not a lot. There's no doubt about that. What we do have, however, from the highs to the lows, you've got a different animal. We bought $84.27 at 9.40 this morning and they just sold it right down. In fact, they're selling it right down into the strength that was out here on Friday. So bottom line, big number. If we go take a look at the S&Ps, you know, they sold them down slightly, but not like the NQs. And the NQs like to lead the market higher and are lower. At the close out here, what we did get inside the S&P is a monster trade on the way down. 98,000 contracts, which took the S&P down five points, $31.40 to $31.25. That was in the last 10 minutes. So no doubt that is a decent number. Other than that, you actually traded sideways out here today. You're at highs, folks, and we had light volume. Gold contract, gold contract out here trading at $14.65, bottom line that was flat market out here, silver $16.64, light sweet cruise down at $0.22 trading, $58.98, notes and bonds to get the 10-year note, up three ticks, $129, 30-year bond up 10 at $157.31. Now what both of those did, folks, is that they had rejected lower price on Friday. They came down, yet they had lighter volume than the way we went up on Tuesday. Tuesday we had a huge sign of strength inside the note and bond market. So they did come back into that sign of strength.  The note and bond market, folks, is going to have to build cause for higher price. That's how that normally works when you take a hit with volume, even though if it's not higher volume than what you're going into. King dollar, what King dollar is doing out here, folks, that King dollar right now is down at $65.6, we're at $97.635. King dollar, folks, is looking to go to the $97.107 area. Have a great night, folks. Have a safe night. Come back. Join us tomorrow morning. Larry Pezzavento kicks us off awesome program, 9 to 10 Eastern Standard Time. Have a great one, folks.