You folks who've been in the Ruby community for a while have watched the evolution of the sort of testing methodologies and frameworks. I mean, five, seven years ago, relative to where we are today, testing kind of sucked. We were still in the throes of discovering dynamic languages and, you know, hadn't really figured out how to make up for the loss of static type checking and stuff in the compilers. We were realizing we needed to do it. And I think now what we've done is we've sort of gone well past that into the realm of testing things that in the past, we didn't really test and we try to model user behavior with frameworks like RSpec and Cucumber and it's awesome. The thing is that the responsiveness of our applications, right, is arguably just another feature if you think about it in terms of the user's perception. So a slow application might as well not have any features at all. And so we're into the realm of load testing and what we're hoping to do here today is kind of take, there have been many, many people who have worked on the solutions associated that have got us to where we are today with functional and unit testing. And we're hoping to make a little small step forward in terms of load testing and we're going to sort of try to drop some knowledge here. We've got an interesting demo hopefully if everything goes well and we'll open it out. I guess I'll hand it off to you guys. So I'm an off-sky, but I think you, the load testing, or I'm sorry, unit and functional testing and review, you guys have really taken a step up and maybe more importantly, we can tie this to CI and continuous integration is wonderful. And I think there's, we can all agree that load testing is as critical as unit and functional tests. We've got to make sure our application limits, we have to actually care about the user experience. Further, it should also be tied to CI. The only way we can be confident about our stacks is it would be load test as part of every commit that we ever do as far as we're possible. Maybe most importantly is as an off-sky, nothing's more frustrating than a developer or a stack quality and a developer telling you, well, it worked on local, so surely it's an operational one. And then we get in fights. So luckily there are plenty of tools, maybe not as many as the unit and functional testing, but there are some. And some, you know, A, B, C, each of these with machine guns is a wonderful app from News app, the Chicago Tribune folks, where they spin up many testers, small micro instances to test some server. And you've seen this before, here's an output from A, B, lots of numbers, here's an output from Siege, lots of numbers. When you're looking at a lot of these, it's really, it's very hard to read those. And we get, maybe more importantly, we get some numbers, success errors, what have you. We can drive it via the CLI, so I can tie this into CI easily. But I'm not really measuring anything, I'm not going to hammer. I don't care how a Patrick responds, I'm fairly confident in a Patrick. I care more about going through a real user experience, maybe I'm out by the database, maybe IO or maybe log-able. You kind of do that unless, unless we actually test it. So then folks on things that's boring, there's HDKeeper, I love HDKeeper, there's also a lot of Bench which is a wrapper route in, the idea is let's wrap up connections and see where our connections fall, or our user experience falls off the table. Again, nice output, but the things that it adds is we get standard deviation, the idea that I don't care about the mean, I care about the users in the extremes, I care about the edge case. We get connections versus requests versus latency, that has one possibility. Yeah, so this is one of these things that hopefully we can, for those of you who haven't run into these things, maybe we can help you avoid a little bit of a conval. So connections is a great example of an area where you can go badly wrong if you don't really control sort of the whole stack of your testing. If you're trying to simulate user behavior, and this is something, for example, the HDKeeper professed really, really well, you want to avoid pooling connections, for example, reusing sockets, things that in fact, in many contexts, you actually want to do. I think Jeremy talked earlier about wanting to keep a connection alive as long as possible. Normally you want to do that, but if you're actually trying to simulate independent users, not only are you users not on local hose, they're also not going to be sharing a socket, except in very strange and rare circumstances. So it's an area where you want to make sure that you have control over what's going on. Do you want keep alive or don't you? Do you want to have separate connections being opened or do you want to reuse sockets? So perhaps one of the bigger problems is I'm bound by the tester.  So of course, let's distribute it. So auto bench moves back up, auto perk is a wonderful tool from IvoryCore, the speedy Google app, where let's just franchise out to many machines so we can have many testers to move on the server.  So here's an example of, in this case, we're running HDKeeper across eight boxes.  And again, you're trying to make sense of this and figure out, I've been architecture A after four architecture, I don't know. I don't know, I can't. It's confusing. You start looking at, they all run together after a while, and is that 1,414?  So all I care about is numbers, and the concept that I can go back to the chest and look for a real specific data, but I just want something I can iterate over, and I can pull it really quickly. So some folks have extended this idea. There's Funkload, there's Song, there's Jmeter, Dan's played with a few things. Yeah, well, not necessarily personally, but as an organization, we did look at both Song and Funkload. The short version is, or not Funkload, Jmeter. We didn't really want to do the Java stuff to do Jmeter, and we didn't really want to deal with all the XML stuff. But they're on the right track, and this reminds me again of the evolution of these kinds of tool sets. Again, if we look at performance and responsiveness as an app, as a usability thing, this is really kind of just an extension of what we already do with TBD and RSpec and Cucumbers. And these are going in the right direction. We want to distribute the load just like real users are distributed, and we want to be able to model actual user behavior just as we do with Cucumbers. We just didn't quite feel personally, I'm not casting stones. There's a lot of great work that's gone into this. We didn't feel like these quite fit our requirements for the RL pair. And as a, for example, I wanted to load Funkload. It's called Funkload. But the, I couldn't, I spent more time trying to drop the documentation, and I went back to running a TBD person. There's also some folks here starting to treat load testing as a service, or some post-it Jmeter providers. Blitz.io is one that, I don't know if you kind of did, and they provide these nice cars, response items, hit rates, lots of JavaScript. But perhaps the most important thing we always have to remember is the ultimate number we're caring about is how many users are in the box, and therefore how we're going to scale our stack. Which, from that data, we infer $1 per user. So it's so cheap, like we still haven't written a line of code, and this is so easy, and it's shocking how many people don't do this. And it reminds me again of where we were five, seven years ago depending on how early you adopted this stuff with all of our functional and unit tests. Now I think most people would be sort of, would view it as a violation of best practices if you didn't, some people would even say if you didn't start with the functional or unit tests. And I read all the time, people bragging about the latest benchmark of this Ruby server, or that Ruby server, or what node is doing, or whatever the hell. And so it's clearly important for people to kind of get off on it, but we're not at the stage where we're saying, look, you know, let's start off with one of our performance goals, and let's make sure that we have a testing strategy already in place from the beginning. And I'm saying that as, you know, somebody, we ourselves, it's all we sort of, I think maybe we do it a little earlier than a lot of people, but we're still not at the point where we're defining that really upfront, we're trying to hopefully get there. And while these tools aren't quite all the way there, we can identify it much like the testing problem. It's like a higher profit setting, let's make it better.  We have the EWSC in mind, it's public, it has all these tools, it has many more, I like GitHub, there's Shane, Becker, or I'm sorry, having Enix once put up a just recently a couple months ago about how you low tested on that interesting.  We also tune the kernel, so you're not going to get blocked by a U limit, you're not going to get blocked by, I don't know, max backlogs and tied weight or max backlogs into. And this is a product we've been going through many, many iterations of stuff that we're going to present here. And this is a product of a lot of learning that we've gone through, packaged up into, this is the AMI that we basically use when we're going to spin up a box, that we're going to do load testing, so we thought we'd share that and, you know, you know, a little bit more of a load. So, mind you, by this kernel tuning, this is not a production server. This is a load tester where the kernel will not save you.  So, but the idea is, I want to make my stack fall before, so you just simply need more load testries. And you can get this from again, AMI's community repos. I'll take this up and see some repos on Spire IO, maybe some chef recipes of product for you to get that box for repos. And you should use it. And I think, once you use it, especially if you're in a cloud, you'll realize that AWS, lucky, they won't completely block you.  Let me give you an example. We went through a sprint before doing a minimal viable product where for about two weeks, I'm tweaking everything I can in the kernel. And we get to the point where we're doing very, we're getting very small incremental improvements and I've got numbers flying everywhere. And I started using my shit because three o'clock I could run a test and it was better than a tester ran it. And there's a moment of going like, well, then what am I measuring? How am I supposed to iterate over this? And what am I supposed to do? And here's an example. So same box, same stack, I didn't reboot anything. I didn't get into a better neighborhood. I got over twice the currency on my staff from Friday to Sunday. And I don't know what happened in those past two weeks, like what happened there. At one point, you thought you were a genius or something. And it turned out that you weren't. Yeah, exactly. This happens a lot.  You're in a bad neighborhood. Yeah, noisy neighbors. But my favorite last one. So like, yeah, I mean, I didn't thank you for that information. I can use as much as you as I have seen you. I can use as much bandwidth as I want this available. And you know, the thing is, is, well, these are real, by the way, this is a, these are real responses from the AWS support. The, I mean, we're not dating it.  And we're all competing for this resource. And we're doing it all on someone else's network. Which is fine. This is why we went into the cloud for the first place. We can spin down boxes, we can spin out boxes and we trade this convenience. But the thing to remember is, I'm talking about an expensive box. It's not cheap, like that benchmark I showed you. And I'm going to see what extra large, because I know I'm going to be CPU about, but I never get CPU about because I'm blocked by the NIC. I can get a big memory box, but I'm never going to actually use the memory because I can't get that many connections into the box. So I can stretch my resource and back to the dollar free user. There's a moment where you have to stop and think like, what's the point of getting a huge service? And how can you even know this? How can you know how you're going to scale or how much are you starting to cost? Unless you scale or unless you test it, unless we get some of this data. So ops are around for a reason. We know boxes to grade, we monitor, we maybe walk our logs and we see how much we've already caused users pain, like, oh great, like I've got a user sitting around forever for a response. And ultimately, maybe the thing that aggravates me the most is, we accept magic.  And that's, that's ridiculous. But it works. So we're going to get bots. Let's figure out, let's figure out how badly we're getting bots, and at least get some data. Like, I mean, at this stage, where let's, let's understand what's happening or and just see, see what happens. Basically, like we all, everybody, I don't know how many people here are like actively using cloud for their applications, right? So third, maybe the audience is currently getting bots. So again, one of the things that the good low testing, good agile, low testing strategy that's consistent with what we already do with our functional unit tests, at least gives you visibility into precisely how you're getting back or what likely are possible ways that that will happen. So I want to go back though. So now we're going to shift over into the developer part of the phone. What? Thank you for not letting me just ram one when no one could understand what I was saying. So I'm going to take a step back and, I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about this area. Oh, just paranoid now, that's all. One of the things we do really well with our functional unit tests, we model user behavior, we're getting better and better at that, we've got great frameworks to do that. We wanted to make sure that we could do that with our load tests as well. So one of the, one of the best ways to do that is to actually look at your logs or look at the cubes that you've already done if you're doing that kind of stuff and make sure that you're building out scenarios that in your load tests that aren't just, you know, your users aren't going to be sitting there refreshing the home page as fast as they possibly can, like you might do with sort of an AP type of test. So you've got some good potential data already there about what your users are doing, so to use it. Modeling behavior is a complex problem, but we already fortunately have programming languages that help us model complex problems. This is one of the issues, and again I don't want to get into knocking other approaches to this problem, but one of the issues that we ran into was you might want to, might think of it as almost premature frameworkization. I literally just made that up, but you can use it if you want. We're, instead of just saying let's just start with the basic, let's see if we can even just kind of script up in a dynamic language user behavior, you know, there's sort of this thing of okay we're going to have this configuration file and we just sort of ended up feeling like you know that's kind of premature for where we're at. Another issue when you're dealing with, certainly if you're dealing with what we have is you're sort of segregated the problem into our client apps and we have our APIs. A lot of you probably do the same kind of thing, and so we don't really need to, we sort of know that the client side of it's running, its scale is the scale of like a user in a web browser session. So all we really need to do is make sure our API scale and we'll be fine, and that means that we need, and if you're using REST APIs or even sort of just lightweight HTTP APIs, you really need to make sure that you have a solid HTTP file. And by that specifically we want to have low level control, and Jeremy earlier mentioned keep a lot as a great example of kind of low level control error handling, making sure that we're not accidentally reusing sockets when we're trying to simulate separate users. And then of course the thing that everybody, you know the big buzz, the event at IO stuff, we wanted to make sure that we were getting one of the nice things about having this segregated approach where you're just slamming an API instead of using some of that cucumber that's hitting like the web browser, is that you can run a lot more users perhaps on a single machine.  So basically, you know, up to a point we want to make sure that we're getting as much bang for each box as we can in terms of load, because that brings down the cost of running our load test, which in turn makes it easier to run them more often and make them part of, say, a continuous integration or deployment process. So we're praying for the booze. We actually for our, in our defense we use Ruby on in the actual implementation of our stack. But we decided that right now where things are at node is a little more baked in this regard. There's some really interesting work. I would I'm really interested in, for example, in telling our CRS work on cellulite IO in terms of helping Ruby kind of get to this point. But when we started this effort, we sort of felt like node was a little bit further ahead and things were a little more baked. In particular, it has a solid HTTP core library. And then we wrapped it with something that we call shred, which is a very REST friendly HTTP wrapper runs as it can run as a node library, or it can also run in the browser. So here is some just some quick I'm not going to necessarily go through this in detail, but to give you an idea of the kind when I say REST friendly, you know, we wanted to be able to use HTTP sort of, you know, in all of its glory meaning we want to be able to easily set headers and deal with all kinds of different possible response codes and so on. And so that's that gives us kind of the foundation that we need for scripting our scenarios. So the next piece of that was to actually starting encapsulating bits and pieces of user behavior, and we just did it as functions. So here's an example of a just us, we're just encapsulating a very simple business testing our SpireIO messaging service. And we're just encapsulating a subscriber right here. You can see that we're saying, okay, this is the test that's finished. So there's nothing complicated or fancy about this, we just embed right in the scripts, you know, where tests start and finish. And that gives us a great deal of flexibility in terms of how we set up our test scenarios. So Harlow denies appointing this term, but I think he actually did. Now he's inclined maybe to take the credit, but depends on how people respond I guess.  And so we wanted to make sure that our tests are running all over the place. And so this, we've been working on this thing called Dolphin. And the reason we called it Dolphin was that we had the internal system that we had built was called Shark. So we figured it would be kind of cool to have dolphins attacking a shark. And the idea is that we run these pods all over the world. And we're going to run them. We're running them where today? So today we're running them from Tokyo, South Hollow, Brazil, Ireland, AWS East and AWS West. Now mind you, one of the great things about this is a pod is actually subscribing to the Spire IO service. So I'm not opening any ports to this pod. It's just a client and we're going to push data into that client. So the pods then work with an overlord through a mechanism I want to describe in a second. Right now what I'm going to do, the cool thing about the overlord is it basically controls all pods. I'm going to run and you can run, as a result, I can run the test and control the test from anywhere. I can control them from my Mac, even though I'm not really running or constrained to what my Mac can do as far as load testing. So what I want to do here is I'm just going to go ahead and tell all these pods that are all over the world to go ahead and start running these tests. And so with that segue, I will go back while that's happening. And then what we're going to do is we're going to come back over here. So this is the last test we ran. We're going to see the results show up here. But while that's running, I'm going to talk just for a second about the architecture that we're testing, just so you have an idea of what we're testing, and also then how the dolphin architecture works. So basically without going into a lot of detail, we put a lot of time in this diagram, but we don't really have time to go through it in detail. Basically it's a worker-based architecture, so we have workers. We use Redis as sort of our transport, if you will.  And we've got these dispatchers, and all the dispatchers, the dispatcher's job, and this again goes to the point Jeremy made in his presentation, all the dispatchers, their job is to sort of process those things as quickly as possible, either turn them to tasks or return an error, and then from there the workers go. And so that way we don't ever have sort of the equivalent, especially in combination with the use of event in IO there, we don't have any longer requests to block anything. Now, so let's see how we're doing with our test. It's still cranking away over here. So hopefully you'll be able to see the chart update in the background once the results are in. So a good use case for this is we're running an AWS because we have an AWS account, and it's trivial to spend up these instances. But in a case where we have a potential customer in China, I can have pods running on client machines on customer or consumer-facing networks. And there's very little overhead. You can just have a box there, and we can actually infer how much latency is happening through each network. Maybe more easy to see is I can do something, like obviously on AWS I don't have control over V2D routing, I can do any metric, but I might be able to do something as simple as, I don't know, put from AWS to AWS. Well, the demo goblins have attacked it. So I swear to God, we ran this about 30 times before the presentation. I'm going to give it just to see how we're doing on time, Toby. Five minutes, all right. We're going to just give all the pods a little breather, more of a superstition than an actual. So hopefully this time it will. We got eight, okay, go ahead. So we can do something as simple as actually understand the user experience. Like in the case of California, I can have enough pods to get a sample sample now on Roadrunner, and I can have a bunch of those on Comcast. And it turns out Comcast has a shitty connection to Northern California, but maybe it's great over to Oregon. So let's float them. Let's float this service. Let's get these guys where they get their service past this. And that's what's nice about this particular load testing tool is, again, very little overhead. I don't actually need any ports open on the machine. I'm a client tester, so for ops, this is actually really, really cool. And so again, we, the idea was to try to get our test agile, the ground, as you can see, is a little easier to read. The architecture here uses the cool thing here is we're using spire.io to actually test spire.io. We're using the message service to coordinate. So basically, the overlord sends a message out to any pods that happen to be listed on the channel, which the cool thing is we can just spin these pods up and we don't have to click and then they're not going to configuration file or anything like that. And then when a test starts, the pods just sort of raise their hands and say, yeah, I'm participating. And we know, okay, we've got X number of pods running. And then we just kind of go from there. Once the results come back in, instead of having Carlo write a wonky, plural script, sorry, Carlo, I'm sure it's beautiful. We actually munch the stuff together. And then we do one last step, which is how the browser updates, which is we actually send out another message to any clients, any dolphin clients who are saying, I'm interested in whatever load test results you have. And when this comes back, hopefully we'll actually see it. Okay, so does everybody see that looks different than the last graph? So the cool thing here is instead of now, instead of looking at these this thing with all these numbers and getting a headache, and it's believe me, I mean, when you're actually trying to do it in agile fashion, it is actually very easy to make a colossal mistake and be like, oh, architecture A is better. And actually, no, it isn't. It's much worse. It was like an order of magnitude worse, but you just got freaked out staring all the numbers. So this makes it much easier. I can look at it and go, Hey, this is weird. Why do you get faster and higher? So this is, by the way, this is concurrency on the bottom. And we can do different variations of graph. This one does. And then the response time for that particular scenario. So we can see, based on the region, the regions are color coded, we can sort of see, you know, hey, this is about where we're at. And there's not any one region in this particular run that looks terrible. South America, let's see, we got US East is a tiny little slow US West odd week. Everyone's like right there is very slow. So that kind of goes to that you are cocked with using a cloud. So you got to run a lot of these, which sort of makes, if you're in the cloud, which makes sort of the point that it's really good to be able to run a lot of them cheaply. And for ops, I guess, it's that we can keep from. It's easy. It's easy to tie into our CI environment. And the most important thing to load testing is you got to actually load test, you got to drop the pain to execute. Just like we have with functional unit testing. One last point that we actually wanted to, we're planning to release this as open source for those of you who might be interested about how we're doing this or looking at the code or playing with it. We need to quite get to the point where we're ready to do that for this conference, unfortunately. But if you're interested in ultimately down the road, kicking the tires on this, playing with it, maybe, you know, using it for your own purposes, please don't hesitate to let us know. We're at, these are all the things that you need to know about how to get a hold of us. So please, don't hesitate to, to, to, you know, pay us if you're interested in, in working on this project. Thank you. Thanks.


Search for a home on any device, anytime, anywhere. Private Property, a home for everyone. Welcome back to WinnerHome on Afternoon Express exclusively on SABC3. Private Property has stuck to its promise of providing us with advice on the different aspects of property on estates. Joining us in the loft today is Lepoy Mohakle, she's head of Home Loans Digital at Nedbank and she's going to chat to us about how to finance property on an estate. Welcome to our loft. Thanks for having me. So let's first start with why estates are becoming so popular. Are you guys seeing on your Home Loan Digital platforms are people applying for loans to move on to estates? I would say yes. We've seen far more home loan applications for development loans, which is your residential estate living loans and your vacant lands as well as your building loans. So I think it's also because of the accessibility and the convenience of it all. You know, a lot of these home loan applications are coming from your first time home buyers, but mostly couples. So people who are starting a family or whose family is getting a bit bigger, they're moving into that estate living purely to have access to certain schools that are in the estate. And of course, I mean the convenience of having your gym and a restaurant and the spa all in one space just makes it absolutely ideal. So there's a lot for us to understand there. I mean, there are three different ways that one can buy on estates and almost get them loaned for. Am I understanding that correctly? Yes, you're correct. So essentially, there are three different ways. The first is to get a vacant land bond. So that is just to acquire the land where there's no building on it and then perhaps build at a later stage. You can get a tent if you're ready. Point you can like like me. I can buy the land, but I can't buy the home. So I was going to build a tent. Absolutely, absolutely. And then the second option is to get the land as well as a building package at the same time. So that's what we often term as a building loan. And it comes almost like a plot and plan as well. I'll tell a little bit about that later. And then the last way is if there is an already existing property that you have your eye on in a particular state, then you just buy it as a normal home loan. OK, amazing. And then what about sectional titles? I mean, a lot of people are trying to buy intersectional titles. They like the sort of affordability of it all. And they understand that as a sort of plug and play kind of system that they like, is there a different way to finance those? That's actually a very good question. So sectional titles are really accessible. You're right. And particularly in places like Hau Deng and the Western Cape, where you've got urban areas like Cape Town in Johannesburg, it's quite ideal for for clients who want to apply sectional titles. There isn't really a different way of applying for a home loan for a sectional title, but just be aware of the fact that it's part of your shared use. So you don't just buy the building on its own. You're buying the opportunity to actually share in some of the amenities that are around it, I guess. Yeah. So the idea behind buying an intersectional title is that you avoid the transfer duty. No, not necessarily. Oh. So if you're buying a fully completed building or unit with an intersectional title and you're buying it from an existing seller, then transfer duties will apply. OK. However, if you're buying it directly from the developer, then there will be no transfer duties. So find these deals soon while these developers are building these new plots, buying early so that all these sort of duties get avoided and you get to save yourself a bit of money. Absolutely. And the developers have really great packages that they can offer to customers and the banks can actually facilitate that as well. Stunning. Now, you mentioned you wanted to expand a bit more on building and those kinds of loans because that's a very specialized way of the loading from a bank to build. How does that work? So building loans work slightly differently to your normal home loan in the sense that the bank does not pay out the money at once upon registration. So what usually happens is you'll come to us as a bank and say, I'd like to apply for a home loan, but I want to build on it. So I don't have a complete building yet. OK. The bank will say, yes, you're good for it. And then once the bond registers, they will start making what we call progress payments. And they pay out as and when the building gets completed. So for example, your builder will have started the foundations, for example. And then the bank will issue a first drawdown of those payments. And then when the builder gets to, for example, window level, then another progress payment goes out up until that building is completely finished and you as the client are happy with it. OK, let's just quickly ask you something that's slightly off the books a little bit. But I mean, when you're trying to buy on an estate, do banks look into where you're trying to build this property or buy the property as a way of affording a bond or to build? Or is it purely just about the person that's going to be paying it off? So we look largely at the individual. So what your previous credit behavior was like, how you pay your debts, how you service your income versus your expenses. But we do also look at the area in which you want to buy property. So we'll look at things like, is it close to certain schools or parks? Is there a functioning sewage system, which would surprise you a lot of the time? Sometimes there isn't. So those are some of the things that we look at, yes. So buying in the right kinds of estates could also help you in that process too, which is awesome. Absolutely, yes. The bank has very good relationships with a lot of the developers. So they would do due diligence with the various developers and make sure that the development caters for suitable lending. Amazing. Thank you. As a new time in a sort of young person trying to enter into that buying of the property market, I've learned a lot from you today. So thank you very much. It's my pleasure. Sure. Well, there you have it, the lowdown on how to finance your dream property on an estate. The other option is, of course, to win your dream home. No finance needed. And you can only do that if you enter the Winner Home grand prize competition on the Private Property website, in which you stand a chance to win one of the multi-million-rand homes currently being finished by the design duos on the Isle of Africa estate. All you have to do is log on to privateproperty.co.za, click on that Winner Home logo, and answer a very easy question. Now it's time for us to take a quick break. When we return, it's time for those duos to stop lounging about.


UPU is the organization that handle that case, delivery to all global villages. That is the important for our cooperation to know each other what kind of help that we can render support to our organization. It's like INCB, we have technical expertise on a kind of dangerous substance that popping up in the internet world and then looking for a customer from that net site and we know pharmacology and toxicology of this substance. We can support UPU by just like information exchange so UPU can protect first-line officer in that world because postal officer have to examine the package. If they don't know what is the dangers of this newly synthetic substance, they themselves can export to this little drug. So we can exchange information and then any kind of cooperation to introduce this drug syndicate can be done and we can prevent this drug to reach the consumer market. Because now the world drug problem from our point of view has evolved already because in the old time the drug user purchased drugs from the butcher, right? They want to deliver a drug to you but now with the era of internet trade, they can order every kind of drug from every corner of the world that they need to use it. And then this drug is sent by package postal service, expert postal service around the world. So with this kind of cooperation between INCB and UPU, we hope we can counteract in some way to provide safeguard to our citizens not to export to this kind of drug. That is the prevention of drug use. That is the key component that we want to enter. If there is any illicit trade also, we can have information sharing between police and enforcement officer and then postal service to make some just like law enforcement or less this drug syndicate by information sharing. That is the thing that global village have to move to work in cost cooperation. That is my opinion.


that being that gave us existence that emanated his existence unto us and allowed us to exist through him, Azzawajal, that he is the one that necessarily exists and our, he's the one who necessarily exists and our existence is wholly dependent on his ijad, on him giving us existence and then his imdad allowing us to continue that existence. And he, Azzawajal, has emanated onto us his mercy by bringing us the modes and the means by which we continue our existence and he has given us his particular mercy, al-Rahim, the one that has given us that particular mercy of giving us a complete faith. That anything that we add to this faith that we try to add to this faith is an imperfection. Any sort of progress that we try to make that is not in lines within the bounds that Allah has set for us is an imperfection and it's not progress, it's regress. It is working backwards that no matter how hard we try to make progress, if it is not in line with the sunnah of his Habib sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, it's not progress. If it is not in line with the guiding, the guidance and the teaching of Nur al-Huda sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, the light of guidance sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, when the entire world was in darkness and he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam came and illumined the world and when he illumined the world, people that had the darkness in their hearts were illumined, these people who were for a lack of better words misguided, that these were people who would bury their children alive, who didn't know good character, who didn't know what perfection was, how to be a morally perfect person. These people who were rough in course became the most merciful people to mankind.  The only person to bring them out of that darkness was he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. That place which was called the Hijaz, it was called the barrier between the two relevant portions of the world, the east and the west, that it would not have been difficult for the Persians or the Romans to come and conquer these people, but they had no interest in conquering these people. It would do nothing for them. It was a barrier. Nobody wanted to go to the Hijaz and he sallallahu alayhi wa sallam came, and the Hijaz became the center and the pivot of the world, that without him we would not have known what mercy was, and without him we would not have known what true justice is. And for us, as believers, as Muslims, we have been given a complete guidance. Allah says, This is the last verse in regards to the rulings that Allah has given us. It's the last verse revealed. And some say it was the last verse revealed period, no other verse after this was revealed.  It's also your social conduct.  It is a three-dimensional relation. It's not just one-dimensional within yourself. This is not just personal worship. And it's not just two-dimensional, you and the other. It's not just social conduct. It's not just your civic engagement. It's also your vertical relationship with Allah Azza wa Jalla. That if you do not put things in their place, and that's the definition that has been given to us from our ulama, from a unbroken chain, that if we want to know what justice is, it's to put things in their proper place. If we want to know how to be people of justice, it is to put your body in its proper place. When the time of prayer comes, you make the sajda. That's justice. And when the time comes to show another mercy, that is putting things in its proper place. There is no better role model of justice than he, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. He was the most merciful to mankind. If you want progress, it is to follow his way, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. If you want justice with your Lord, Azza wa Jalla, it is to respond to his call. Often we ask, why doesn't Allah answer our dua? Why does he not answer our call when we call upon him? And we don't ask ourselves the questions, why aren't we answering his call when he calls us, Azza wa Jalla? Where are we when we call on him, Azza wa Jalla? He answers. But not if our dealings are haram, and our wealth is haram, and our provisions is haram. Our food is haram. Our social conduct is haram. As the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, he has been provided with complete haram. The haram runs in his veins. How could he be answered? If we do not make progress to that perfection of him, no progress, whether it's technological or whether we think it's some ethical progress that we're making, or some societal progress that we're making, or some civic progress that we're making, no progress is progress unless it's an alignment with what he taught Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And no one can be a balanced being, a person of adhan, of justice. No person can be a person who has their complete mizan, that their scales are balanced, unless they're following his balance, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. No matter how progressive you get in the way that you speak to your others, speak to the other, no matter how progressive you are in your technology, no matter what your iPhone can do, no matter what your computers can do, if it does not bring you to him, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and his guidance, and from him, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, to your Lord, Azza wa Jalla? This is not progress, it's regress. And so we are people who want progress. We are people who want to be more perfected human beings, and progress is to move from an imperfection to a perfection. So if we move away from that perfection, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, we will never be people who become perfected. لقد كان لكم في رسول الله أسوة الحسنة. In the messenger for you, لقد كان لكم, for you. He Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam wasn't sent just for the pious or the impious. He wasn't just sent for those who pray and those who don't pray. He Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was sent for all people, كافة للناس, بشيرا ونذيرا. He was sent for all people, كافة للناس, all times and all places, that every message that was coming was coming for him, for him Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, to complete his message. He was sent for those people who came before him as well. He was the Imam of the rest of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, right? He was the Imam of those of those messengers and he led them Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam وَعَلِهُمُصَاتَ سَنَا أَجْمَعِينَ upon all of them be peace and prayers. He led them in prayer. He came after them but he was their model of conduct. He was the sign of progress. That every prophet, they came with the same creed, the same beliefs that they taught and then the practice that they taught was for the time and place and when he saw Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam came into being. That all other practices were done away with. Allah had abrogated them. Whether or not those messages remain sound or not, whether the message of the Bible and the Torah remains sound or not, doesn't matter. Whether we still have the message or not, it does not matter. He saw Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam has came to replace that, Aleyhi Wasallam. And Allah chose him.  And those who want to be people of balance and of justice, then they should know that justice is by putting things in their place, by putting your character in its place, by putting your anger in its place. Sometimes it's not good to be angry and sometimes it's good to be angry. Sometimes it's good to be kind and sometimes it's not good to be kind. You don't want to be kind to somebody that is stealing or that is coming into your home and harming your family. That's not the time for, that is not the time for kindness. To be a person of, of, of justice is to show them harshness, but on the, on the reverse. For example, Imam, Imam Malik, Rahmullah Ta'ala, he was, he was, he was, he was bathing and somebody came and stole his clothes, right? Yeah, they're in bathrooms 1,000 years ago in their, in their homes. And Imam Malik, Rahmullah Ta'ala, somebody came to steal his clothes. He put things in this, in this, in their place. When that person came to steal his clothes, he wrapped himself, he dried himself and ran after him, right? He ran after him, Rahmullah Ta'ala. And he said, I want you to know that you're not stealing. I've gifted this to you. This is a gift to you. I do not want to sin of stealing on your hands. That's justice, putting things in their place, putting kindness in its place. This is justice. And when things are out of their place, things fall, fall into, fall into imbalance, injustice. And then this order within ourselves and within, within the cosmos and the order within creation, it shifts away from that which Allah commanded. And then we see those things that bring difficulty to ourselves and to others. And we become people who have wronged themselves and shown in, showed injustice to themselves. And Allah says in the Qur'an, commanding His servants, قليا عبادية الذين أسرفوا على أنفسهم.  You are under His sovereignty. Before you can become a good citizen, you need to be a good person. And a good person starts with belief in Him, Az-Zawajal, and belief in His message, As-Salaam, and good social conduct and to fulfill His rights and your own rights and the rights of others. يا عبادية الذين أسرفوا على أنفسهم لا تقنتوا من رحمة الله.  And what is the dua of our our mother and father, آدم عليها السلام and حوا عليها السلام when they slipped. They didn't sin but they slipped. What they they they acknowledge that they slipped. They put things in their place. They said ربنا ظلمنا أنفسنا. Oh my Lord, we have wronged ourselves. We have shown injustice to ourselves. Right? And if you don't forgive us and you don't have mercy on us, we would be lost. They put things in their place. They were people of justice. They were people of complete balance. And if we're not people of balance, we can't expect. We cannot expect the society around us to function. The way that Allah wants it to. We cannot and the way that Allah wants it to is the way that's best for us. Allah is more merciful to me than myself. It's part of the mercy of Allah. He revealed the Sharia and didn't leave us to just figure it out. He revealed laws to us and he did not leave it to us to figure it out. Every every few decades there's some new there's some new mode of operating. Every few decades one thing is appropriate and then the next ten years from then the same things that were appropriate ten years before is not is not appropriate anymore. And people are lost looking for what how do we come to find a balanced society because they have turned away from the dhikr of Allah and the mention of Allah and they've turned away from the laws of Allah Az-Zawaj and they turned away they're turned away from the conduct of our Habib Salaam, the messenger and Allah has promised us in the word of Allah is true. We believe that the word of Allah is true. Those who turn away from my remembrance my mention they will have a constricted life and that is a reality and that's a fact. And until we orient ourselves back to him have complete tawajjuh to him. As Imam Sheikh Ahmed Zarrukh says, this path of ihsan and being an excellent person is to have complete sincere orientation towards Allah that if someone has sincere orientation towards Allah will they ever be a person who cheats in their business? Will they ever be a person who harms their family? Would you ever expect domestic abuse from somebody who has who's straight with Allah? It would not happen. They know that one day Allah will take them into account. Would you expect oppression and injustice from a leader that believes in Allah, truly believes in Allah and his messenger Salaam, who knows that one day I will be taken into account that what I do to these people and the trust that Allah has given me to be in charge of these people that if I do not fulfill the trust the way Allah Az-Zawaj wants then one day he is going to be under, I'm going to be under his control and I will have to answer to him the way these people answer to me. And you might not be a politician. You might not think that you have any sort of circle of influence. Everyone, so the Prophet Salaam said that everyone is a shepherd. Everyone has a flock to take care of.   You will be lost until you allow that, right? Each leader needs their advisor and if you're a leader of yourself and he or Zawajan and the Prophet Salaam is your advisor and they are the only ones that will give you completely sincere advice with absolutely no portion for themselves, no ulterior motives. So if we want to be people of balance and of justice, we should remember that Allah Azawajan has commanded us to be people of justice and he has defined that justice, that justice has been defined as putting things in their place and that starts with us recognizing that we're under his command Azawajan and under the guidance of the Prophet Salaam and that we have rights to him Azawajan and rights to ourselves and rights to those amongst us and that we have other people have the right to be safe from our harm and the right to be safe from those actions that come from us that make them uncomfortable. We are speaking about in the first khutba, it's very simple. It's a tried and tested.  And I do not mean just this life. You will not have comfort in your life that comes after as well. You might find comfort here, but you will have no comfort in life if you turn away from, if we turn away from the guidance that Allah has sent for us. We will never see things put in their place unless we put ourselves in our place. We will never see justice unless we do justice to ourselves and justice to our Lord Azawajan. So may Allah make us people of justice and mercy. May Allah make us the people of mercy. May Allah make us the people of mercy and may Allah make us people who are who are the conduits of mercy and the conduits of good, not just to ourselves and not just to our Lord, but to others. May Allah make us the people when they see us, they see the light of guidance in our faces. May Allah Azawajan make us the people that when people look at us, they say that I want to be this person. May Allah make us the people that when we depart, people are saddened that we depart and when we come, people are happy that we're there. We are happy that that guidance is shown to, that guidance is shown to them through us. We want to be people who have, who fulfill the responsibilities that Allah has given us. We ask Allah that He allows us to fulfill those responsibilities. We ask Allah Azawajan to never lose trace and never to lose sight of the, never to lose sight of the, of the, of the, of His commands and His prohibitions and to never lose sight of His Habib, Salaam, and the Sunnah that He was sent with. We ask Allah Azawajan that we're consistently on that Sunnah and we are never leave that dhikr. That's following that Sunnah is a dhikr and if we leave that dhikr, we ask Allah that if we leave that dhikr from, for a single moment that Allah reminds us and that if we do not see that reminder that Allah does not make our life constricted in this world or the hereafter. We ask Allah for His pardon and His mercy. We ask Allah for His pardon and His mercy. We ask Allah to be our source of solace. We ask Allah Azawajan to be our source of solace and peace.


Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean a weekly webinar from Code Pink's Latin America team Today my guest is journalist Ben Norton from the Grazo Thanks for having me Leonardo So I kind of wanted the bulk of the interview to focus on rain the responsive assistant to Nicaragua plan But for our audience who hasn't been following the country. Can you talk a bit about the attempted coup in the Nica Act of 2018? Absolutely. So the important thing to go to keep in mind with Nicaragua is that this is one of the only country and I say this I've been living actually here in Nicaragua for this year and and I was here last year as well on the anniversary of the revolution Nicaragua is is one of the few countries left in Latin America that has a socialist government and it's a democratically elected socialist government like in Venezuela and in the Discourse of the US government Nicaragua is part of the so-called Troika of tyranny John Bolton the former national security advisor used that language It has since been echoed by other members of the Trump administration Now why who are the three members of the Troika of tyranny? It's Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua the three remaining leftist governments in the region And in the case of Nicaragua this the government is the Sandinista government people might have heard That in 1979 there was a revolution against a us-backed dictatorship of samosa and the Revolutionaries who overthrew the right-wing dictatorship 20 years after a very similar revolution in Cuba Here in Nicaragua they they call themselves the Sandinistas And the Sandinista front of national liberation, which is the their political party is the democratically elected governing party in Nicaragua And there's a long history I don't have time to get into but they had the revolution in the 1979 and then there was a us terror war Through the contra death squads against the government in the 80s There was a blockade similar to venezuela And they they lost power through democratic elections in the 90s. There was a neoliberal era but then in 2006 The Sandinistas came back into power through elections And since then since 2006 the Sandinistas have continued to win all of the elections and govern the country under president Daniel Ortega And they have a you know a leftist political and economic model. They have free They free education. They have free health care and the health system here is absolutely incredible We need to keep in mind that Nicaragua is the second poorest country in latin the entire western hemisphere It's right after Haiti. So Nicaragua is very poor in terms of numbers But it's very rich in terms of social services. It's very rich in terms of government services that that provide again, um, basically free education and free health care and the health care is incredible because If you look at other countries in central america, which are more similar to nicaragua, which are quite poor countries There's nothing even remotely Similar to the model of free health care here in nicaragua The government has has invested a huge proportion of its of its budget in in health care So, you know, they've made a lot of strides in fighting illiteracy in vaccination programs and public health And of course the u.s. Government has seen nicaragua as this this Bastion that has an anti-imperialist foreign policy nicaragua strongly supports Venezuela and Cuba nicaragua is part of the alba alliance Nicaragua has a very activist foreign policy in supporting national liberation movements and anti-colonial movements It's very close to russia So the u.s. Has targeted nicaragua for many for decades to overthrow the government and install a more compliant puppet regime that will privatize the economy impose neoliberal policies and will vote in support of israel will will vote in against venezuela at the united nations etc and two years ago in 2018 There was a coup attempt and unfortunately a lot of people outside of nicaragua, especially in the u.s. including people on the left Many portrayed it as a as an attempted uprising as a revolution, which is insane because That these were i mean the protests are always mixed they have a variety of different groups But the main groups leading it were right-wing Neoliberal groups that were backed by the u.s. Government by the national endowment for democracy Which is an arm of the cia created by the ronald reagan administration in the 1980s And one of the co-founders said explicitly that the the national endowment for democracy the n.e.d Did in the 1980s what the cia had done covertly? 25 years before so and the n.e.d. Still does that work today out in the open the n.e.d. Funds opposition groups in venezuela and cuba and other countries So in nicaragua there was a very violent coup attempt and of course the police did kill some people i mean With any of these with as with venezuela with the guarimas the violent coup attempts there You know there is technically violence on both sides So then people will try to both sides the issue and say it's brutal repression by police what they ignore what they totally obfuscate on purpose is that that that violence returned by the security forces Is is it is either proportional or actually not not only proportional the the opposition violence is much worse So we see terror attacks. We saw of course in venezuela We saw them use bombings and such and in in nicaragua basically what they did is the same kind of model The the guarimba model venezuela was borrowed here and they built things called tranques Tranques were massive barricades to to block off traffic and to prevent people From being able to to operate normally and have a normal life in the country It really devastated the economy and it blocks the the transit of goods throughout central america for months This began in the spring in in in april of 2018 and went on for several months until july the anniversary of the revolution So in this time period the opposition they targeted sandanistas They burnt down sandanista houses and radio stations They would actually mark the houses of sandanistas, which is terrifying I I know friends who were attacked. They tortured sandanistas I interviewed a sandanista activist his father and his brother were murdered and not only were they murdered by the The the the golpistas the kumangers not only were they murdered Their bodies were set on fire after and then the golpistas threw their bodies the sandanista activists bodies in the garbage So, I mean just absolutely horror horrifying. I mean a kind of civil war scenario Where the right-wing opposition is trying to overthrow the government? They were unsuccessful because ultimately the opposition is very small in nicaragua And there is a very hardcore base of around two-thirds of the country 50 50 to 60 of the country that support the sandanistas and the opposition only has a support around 10 Maybe 15 percent. It's being generous poles can consistently show that the sandanistas have around 60 support And the opposition has between 10 15 percent So the opposition couldn't they couldn't succeed in overthrowing the government and by july 19th Which is the anniversary of the revolution the coup attempt had totally died out So of course as with venezuela after the 2014 and 2017 coup attempts the guarimbas The u.s. government turns toward its other form of warfare economic warfare sanctions So after the failed coup attempt here in nicaragua the u.s. Congress passed the nica act And we should keep in mind that the nica act which by the way is is a hilariously redundantly named Act because the a and nica act already stands for act. So it's like the the nick act act But anyway, the the nick act was already written by members of the right wing florida neoconservatives You know, these are the exile the right wing exiles from cuba venezuela nicaragua other countries who went to miami And they were already lobbying there even before the the coup attempt and they had this legislation that was prepared But the coup attempt and the media propaganda allowed them to push through this legislation Which put very brutal sanctions on nicaragua and of course the u.s. government frequently says Oh, well, they're targeted sanctions. I always say targeted sanctions on particular government officials But of course what they don't mention is that these sanctions prevent the nicaraguan government from having access to international finance So it's a kind of it's a defacto blockade that prevents nicaragua from accessing international financial institutions And then since the nica act was passed and I mentioned that unfortunately It was passed in the congress without any opposition And it was passed on a voice vote like some of these, you know, it wasn't an actual A vote on paper so that that helped helped them push it through but there was no opposition to it Which is very tragic considering that you know, there are some More left-wing members who speak up on issues like yemen But unfortunately when it comes to nicaragua and venezuela, there's no opposition And but anyway, the point is that after the nica act was passed The trump administration has continued to impose more and more sanctions And this this brings us to the lead up to the election in 2021 next year about a year from now And the trump administration, it's very clear And even if the biden somehow manages to win it's it's clear that either administration they're already planning on Another coup attempt in the upcoming year of 2021 and i'm sure we'll talk about that today Absolutely, so the latest news in this attempted regime changed by the trump administration in nicaragua Has to do with this rain plan responsive assistance in nicaragua You recently wrote an article about it. Can you explain to us what this plan is and what it entails? Absolutely, so Rai and this is just a latest regime change scheme And I should mention that this is really under the ages of the u.s agency for international development usaid Like I mentioned the national endowment for democracy the ned these groups are very similar They have origins at the end of the cold war and the u.s government realized that they could basically kind of outsource the cia Color revolution apparatus that it developed during the cold war And a lot of the work that the cia did then they could just do it openly in the name of democracy promotion Because it's basically serving the same role. So so usaid is similar This is a group that claims to be humanitarian It claims to be the humanitarian arm of the u.s government, but it's another cia cut out It works closely with the state department. It works closely with intelligence agencies and even more recently I reported at the gray zone on a a new USAid strategy document that talks about how they're talking about working Embedding with the military and embedding with special operations forces and helping with drone assassinations So this is the so-called humanitarian wing working with the military in venezuela last year In february during the coup attempt on the columbia border with venezuela USAid played a crucial role working hand in glove with the pentagon and the mike panpeo state department To try to overthrow the the government using aid so-called aid is a weapon a regime change weapon so It's more of the same And we should also keep in mind that the usaid strategy targeting nicaragua the USAid under trump. It's become even more explicitly this right-wing institution The current coordinator the de facto director of usaid is named john barça He is the son of cuban american Exiles who voluntarily left because of the revolution And they were of course very elite rich exiles and who resettled in miami and john barça who was born in the u.s He was never been to cuba, but he's he has that background and is a diehard anti-communist He hates cuba. He hates nicaragua. He hates venezuela He's the head of this so-called humanitarian wing of the u.s government So it's very clear what the priorities are but i should also mention that usaid has historically been linked to more democratic forces With with a capital d, right? They so it's not necessarily like this is just the trump administration if joe biden wins And becomes president these programs are going to continue because they continue under obama and with in the case of biden There will be even more neoconservatives who will be overseeing his his foreign policy so These are bipartisan policies, but anyway that all of that said The the strategy document was released. I have it here And you can find it at the graze on i published a report That there is a 93 page document that that is a strategy document for responsive assistance in nicaragua r a i n And there was a 14 page section of it that was that was published And why was it published? Well, I did some investigation And it turns out that on linked in You know openly and linked in democracy international, which is another it's an it's an extension of usaid It's an it's a regime change organ of the u.s government funded by the u.s state department And by the u.s congress ultimately the this group democracy international posted a job application on Linked in calling for someone who can be a senior level technical expert in democracy human rights and governance So what they're really looking for is they were looking for someone here inside managua the capital of nicaragua Who can be their point person a liaison who can help? coordinate the coup attempt the the regime change attempts here on the ground in venezuela and What happened is apparently I it seems pretty likely that someone in nicaragua who supports the san anistas Applied for this job and then was sent this 14 page document outlining the strategy and published it So they're in local media outlets. There was a big scandal and people were talking about it Now let's talk about what the document actually says I'm not going to summarize the whole thing people who are interested can look it up on the gray zone dot com gray with an a But what are what are the goals of this regime change scheme? Well, very clearly they say they want transition And in 14 pages they use the word transition 102 times so transition we want transition transition That's that's a nice word for regime change and they spell out three different scenarios for regime change Which would be hard regime change soft regime change and prolonged regime change So hard would be a military coup an overthrow of the government a soft would be Something similar to what happened in brazil where there's a parliamentary coup a political coup or The the government loses the elections in 2021 and then a prolonged prolonged regime change scenario is the coup attempt fails the san anistas Freely and fairly win the election coming up next year and then they they they continue the regime change attempt over the long term those those are the scenarios spelled out by the document and there's more there's more Details but now what's the goal ultimately of the u.s. Government because this isn't even just my opinion They state very explicitly why the u.s. Government wants to overthrow the san anista government here in nicaragua They say that one of the top quote mission goals Is and i'm quoting exactly from the document quote transition to a rules-based market economy And that's based on quote protection of private property rights Okay, so they want a neoliberal government that will overthrow the socialist economic policies that will privatize the economy That will privatize education and healthcare and then they also say what what what is their other goal? They're one of their other top so-called mission goals is quote rebuild institutions and quote reestablish and and dismantle parallel institutions And they specifically target the military and the police So what they mean by that is they want to quote reestablish The military and the police they want to create new military and new police forces That purge all of the nationalists and the san anista loyalists who support the san anista revolution Basically, this is a model This is modeled after the debathification program in iraq after the u.s. Government invaded iraq and overthrew the government They understood that there would be elements of the government They would be sympathetic and supportive of the old government who want to restore the bathist government So they had a policy of debathification Removing anyone who had been involved in the previous government anyone who had Nationalist sensibilities and then create a new technocratic regime of puppets who will be subservient to the u.s That's exactly what they want to repeat in nikaragua removing all the san anistas And not only that they say in the document. They want quote transitional justice measures That's code word for lawfare. This is a term that's become more prominent. We saw in bolivia where The u.s. Government and right wing oligarchs here in nikaragua in venezuela in bolivia in brazil they they used the language of justice and legal mechanisms to wage political warfare or lawfare, right We saw this with sergio sergio moro Who is the right wing justice minister very closely linked to the ci and fbi Who worked hand in glove with the u.s. Government and the lava jato operation in brazil to overthrow the workers party government So we're seeing a hybrid war There's the lawfare element the economic warfare element with sanctions and the the political warfare through an attempted coup and They spell it out very clearly in this document Yeah, I mean it's such to me. It's really kind of stunning how brazen they are about their attempts to regime change You've been going so far as to basically advertise on linkedin for someone to draw up these plans And and I think a couple days ago. We had uh, joe biden called daniel or tega president or tega a dictator So this is as you said a total of bipartisan consensus There's basically no opposition to attempted regime change in nikaragua or venezuela or cuba In the u.s. Political establishment and for nikaragua I mean we have to like mention that under president or tega if you talked about it a bit But nikaragua has cut poverty in half. They've nearly eliminated the literacy. They've seen a huge increase in Women holding public offices that they've addressed the gender pay gap And the country has become much more economically equal now than it was prior to the sunday's that's coming back into power You know, and you also mentioned why the u.s. wants regime change because basically because nikaragua is one of three socialist governments Can you talk a little bit more? I mean this has been throughout what you've been saying You've been drawing some of these parallels between What the u.s. Is doing in but nikaragua venezuela and and bolivia as well Absolutely, so what's interesting is that you mentioned a really important point the role of women in nikaragua The sunday's just have very highly emphasized the role of women in society And that also models what the chavistas have done in venezuela The vice president delcio rorygues in in venezuela is a woman and the vice president here in in nikaragua rosaria morillo is also a feminist and strongly supportive of women's rights and she has really prioritized and the sunday's to front has prioritized Women's representation. In fact, nikaragua is in the top five countries in the entire world For representation of women in government It's it's there. There's a law saying that half of government positions have to be filled by women And they take it very seriously The lifeblood of the san anista front is what's called who in the san anista the the san anista youth And the the juventud san anista is largely women if you go to a lot of their events They really emphasize the role of women in society. They're very empowered and it's it's very interesting because In the right wing governments in latin america They you don't in any way see that kind of representation But you will see That that some of these forces will try to demonize nikaragua and venezuela also because You know, unfortunately they they have very restrictive abortion laws And they'll use that just that one particular aspect of society to try to portray nikaragua and venezuela as anti-woman because For a variety of complex historical and cultural reasons. These are pretty religious catholic and christian societies and Abortion is not a popular policy the vast majority of people don't support abortion including the working class base Of the san anistas and the chavistas So yes, it's true that nikaragua has very strict anti-abortion laws But that's only one small part of laws concerning women But you'll hear a lot of feminists in the us. You'll hear even right wing forces and other parts of latin america Will criticize nikaragua for that So we need to keep in mind the larger picture of women's representation in nikaragua, which is absolutely impressive You also mentioned poverty. They've the government has made poverty Reduction a major priority and nikaragua is the fourth most equal country in latin america Which people might say well, you know fourth is not that high But consider again nikaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere The only country poorer than it is hady and we've seen the horrific, you know neocolonial oppression of hady So the fact that nikaragua has been able to accomplish that with very few resources is incredible And and part and parcel of the poverty reduction, which is extremely important Is the nikaraguan government's emphasis on the camp campesino movement working with the peasants working with the farmers The government has really heavily prioritized that in the neoliberal era. There was more privatization of land There there were you know, and especially before the revolution in 79 in the samosa dictatorship era There were many elite not many there was a small handful of elite families Who controlled the vast majority of the land in the country? Especially up in in the in the coffee areas and the in the mountainous areas like hinotega and matagalpa And you also had elites who who were from european descent Who were dominating the land there and the government has really prioritized giving land back to peasants and in fact nikaragua is has the second highest rate of state ownership of Of capital and land in latin america after cuba It's slightly over 50 of the capital and land in nikaragua is publicly owned So they've really prior to prioritize that it's very impressive what they've been able to accomplish And i and i'll have to say that you know, i've been to on duras last year with my colleagues in the graves and we went to on duras Which is neighboring in central america. It's neighboring nikaragua and the the comparison is night and day Honduras is absolutely It's plagued by violence It had it actually had the highest murder rate in the world after a us backed coup in 2009 For several years it had the highest murder rate a great victory of the us coup regime And the poverty is just so It's so striking So the fact that you have a government that cares for for poor people is incredible And then i mentioned earlier we can't we can't underestimate the importance of nikaragua's foreign policy I will say that nikaragua's relations with china for a variety of historical reasons are very complex But excluding that that contradiction that historical complexity there nikaragua is a strong voice on the international stage For anti imperialist movements And national liberation movements supporting the sovereignty of foreign countries that are under siege nikaragua has joined with venezuela and cuba and russia and china and other countries In opposing sanctions and economic warfare and calling for new forms of multilateral institutions and new economic relations So and i mentioned that the alba alliance Nikaragua is still part of the alba alliance created by ugo chavez in venezuela And we can't underestimate how much the u.s. government even above other Priorities one of its top priorities Is destroying these other economic alliances that were developed and the alba alliance is Unfortunately, it's much weaker now than it was 10 years ago But nikaragua still remains a member and is still committed to To inter south integration south south integration trying to work with other countries in latin america To integrate their economies instead of just subordinating their economy to the superpower in the united states Yeah, I think that's a really important point to bring up in terms of why the u.s. wants regime changes against cuba venezuela nikaragua And one of the reasons is of course as you mentioned that these three countries are leading the hemisphere and in countering us I'm any countering us imperialism denouncing it at every turn I'm also really glad you brought up the issue of feminism and how it's being used to kind of Undermine the ortega administration the ortega government because we saw something similar with environmentalism Happen with the the moralist government in bolivia so there's kind of this Attempt by the state department and by all these u.s. Imperial forces to present a sort of woke imperialism And to present regime change is something progressive when it's obviously everything, but Uh switching tax a little bit I'd want to talk a little bit about the pandemic a few months ago Nikaragua was in the corporate media spotlight over its corona virus response Despite the fact that it was doing and continues to do Significantly better than its neighbors. Can you tell us a bit about how nikaragua has responded to the pandemic? absolutely Nikaragua took a response that is the specific response needed for its Material conditions the the political conditions the historical conditions the cultural context And the economics specifically because we need to keep in mind again You know, I keep stressing this point not not as something against nikaragua But as a fact it's that nikaragua was a very poor country And it's really interesting to me that there's so much criticism Of nikaragua by the u.s. Left by the canadian european left and there's never There's never understanding of the fact that this is a very poor country that has been colonized for most of its history Until this on the nista revolution. It was essentially colonized by the u.s. Government It was controlled by the occupied by the u.s. Military for decades So we need to keep in mind that history because there's so many people on the left in the u.s Who who look toward nikaragua and also to venezuela, which is a richer country But still much poorer compared to the u.s That they look to these these relatively poor countries in the global south and blame them for all their perfection in their All their imperfections and not don't understand that the the real conditions that they're dealing with And the fact of the matter is that when it came to the pandemic Even though I don't want to downplay the economic harm that it did to the u.s. And the real economic issues that working class americans are going through What the u.s. Did cannot be repeated in a country like nikaragua and nikaragua Around 60 percent the estimates vary but More than half of the country works in the informal sector I've seen estimates as high as in the 70 percent tile range That means what does that mean that means that the majority of the population Doesn't get a paycheck the majority of the population doesn't have a bank account So yes, it's absolutely true that the the u.s. Policy has been horrific and not nearly enough a mere $1,200 check cannot most people cannot get by and one $1,200 check considering they've been in in quarantine for months But the the fact of the matter is that Even though that's not enough that's possible in the u.s. That's not possible in nikaragua and also mexico took a similar model It's not possible in mexico. These are countries where people The majority of people They live day by day With what they make so they and also I mentioned the economic model of nikaragua Over half of the economy of the of the gdp is in state control public publicly owned But also one of the things that the nikaragua government has really emphasized Is kind of small business Ownership right but but not in the way that people in the u.s. Think about it Rather because in the in nikaragua a lot of people they they're their own employers, right? They don't have bosses. They they cook food. They provide services. They make they make You know textiles. They make You know artisanal goods Things like that. They're taxi drivers The economy is is based on you know people mom and pop stores, right? It really is the majority of the economy So if you have that kind of an economy How are you supposed to survive a quarantine? And how are you supposed to give people money? How are you supposed to give people food? I mean, I guess you could physically deliver them food But you can't give them money if they don't have bank accounts So Nikaragua realized that it had to take a particular approach That sure it wasn't just free for all the idea that everything was a free for all is ridiculous most of Of the non-necessary parts of the economy shut down But they didn't have a total quarantine and the government provided you know masks and alcohol and things like that and everywhere you go you can find masks and alcohol And you see people everywhere you go wearing masks and things like that the government If you watch any tv channel the public tv channels constantly during the commercial breaks they're There's they actually gets kind of annoying. There's the same like three ads about coronavirus and they have like this song I mean so like they they they took it very seriously The idea that the government didn't have any measures is ridiculous propaganda But because the government didn't totally shut down the economy There was all this propaganda demonizing Nikaragua saying that they're killing their own people etc But what's incredible is as you mentioned leo is that Even if okay, the opposition is claiming that the government has been downplaying the number of deaths We don't have any evidence of that, but let's say we accept that claim All right, even if you accept the own claims of the opposition for the actual supposed number of deaths It's still significantly lower per capita than the number of deaths in the u.s And the number of deaths in brazil And of course they they all look to to bolso narrow and trump as their heroes So it's also lower than in other parts of latin america like ecuador You know, it's easy to look toward the u.s Because the u.s has the worst case in the world and brazil has the second worst case in the world Ecuador has also been a total disaster And if you look at toward ecuador, it's much worse than nicaragua the answer the question is why is that? it's because in nicaragua there is a massive public investment in the health sector period that is the most important factor That is also the most important factor in the u.s Why so many people have died? And look, I need to be honest. I I don't think we should just blame trump Even if even if hillary clinton had been president I think the u.s would still clearly be the world the leader of the world in deaths for coronavirus And maybe it would be a little better But it's it is because the public health that there is no public health the public health sectors It's an oxymoron in the u.s Whereas in nicaragua the government spends Upward, I think of 15 to 20 percent of its entire budget just on the health sector And if you if you factor in other things like education The government spends over half of its entire budget on social services for people That is why the government has been able to deal so well with the crisis And every country has been affected by it, but and of course They're having people who have died which is tragic but Looking at the situation here. I've been living here I I've been living through the coronavirus situation. It hasn't been that bad honestly And there was a balance. I think it was a pretty fair balance between not having a quarantine But still having a functioning economy so people don't starve But also shutting down the unnecessary parts of the economy that that might endanger people's public health Yeah, and just for some context in terms of figures Nicaragua has less than 5,000 cases total 141 deaths as of September 7th And their deaths per million population are 21 compared to 583 for the united states and over 900 for bedou Which is one of the most Worst-hit countries in latin america Thank you And in response to those numbers people some people say that the government Hasn't because the government doesn't have the ability to do all of the comprehensive testing that it needs etc Sure, maybe maybe the figures are higher But again, even if those government even if the government figures are not quite accurate We even if you look at the figures of the opposition, which has a vested interest in exaggerating the figures Even their numbers are Significantly lower per capita than other figures in the u.s. brazil and ecuador. So once again I mean we have to look at the layers of propaganda and i'll just say that there's so much fake news So much propaganda targeting Nicaragua the media will will for for weeks just like with north korea for weeks The media will claim that daniel or tegas had died. They did that a few months ago They said that he died and that the government was hiding it and then he came out and gave a speech So people just really need to exercise critical thinking and be skeptical of what they see Because just as with venezuela, there's there's constant lies about nicaragua Absolutely and in that regard, I think the gray zone does a great job and telling people the truth about countries like nicaragua and venezuela Thank you again so much for being with us here with us today ven Thanks for having me leo and thanks to keep up all the great work You all are doing amazing work at codepink and we need more of you. Thank you


This is a PV powered power pump, there's no charge control or battery, the PV is going directly into a windscreen water motor Which is the entire and the fellow's pump that I made from a Dispitton and some bike energy rubber It's 18 volts coming off the panel down to about the 30 and 40 volts of the motor pump It's supposed to be doing 1 liter per second or 1 liter per stroke of air times 2.5 strokes per second I don't know if it feels like less than that It should be, it should be that much There's just little, if you can see, little valves in there that I made from aluminium plates or where you can use a lot more of this steel can and a circle of wood to do a thing on how to make those It's powering down now because the sun's going behind the cloud But other than that, it works pretty good This has cost me about, well the panel was free because the glass is all smashed You can see it there, look at that for free The biscuit tin was free obviously, the windscreen wiper motor was free because the Wreckers gave it to me for free for some reason So I paid $5 for the diodes about the same for the PVC fittings and everything else was free and just not some bolts and stuff So if you were to pay for everything all up, not including the panel that would cost you about $20 I guess And this is a 120 watt panel which is like, just because that's what I got free This is drawing about 14 volts on the motor times about 2 amps So a 30 watt panel will do the same, will power it just as well Yeah


Today I'm going to be explaining Backroom's level 64, which seems to shift and change every time you look away or blink, so unless you don't have to blink, and you can keep your eyes open forever, this level is going to be a confusing one. It's also very well written and it gives me this really nostalgic sense from the Backrooms of two years ago. It's kind of got that old timey vibe. I really think you're going to enjoy it. Without further ado, let's get into the video, shall we? Hey, what's up?  I don't like plugging in social medias. I don't even ask you to subscribe or like ever, but I'm going to be announcing something on Twitter very soon. It may or may not involve a plush. Also while you're down there, if you want to join the Discord, it'll be there as well. I've had the broken link in the description accidentally for like five months now. Twitter, Discord, check it out. Let's get back to the video. The Backrooms level 64 is classified as a class 3 survival difficulty and is unsafe and insecure with a very low entity count. Specifically, there is one type of entity here that I'll touch on in the Entity section, but mainly it's the level and the level's properties that are going to be dangerous to you. The level in its simplest form takes the appearance of an infinite house with very dysfunctional lighting and that's just a fancy way of saying that it's dark. The level has many, many rooms and hallways and staircases and stories to it and it seems like a house of horror that you might go through in your dreams. No matter where you go, there's going to be another door or a staircase leading to another brand new part that you haven't seen before. It just keeps going and going. The walls of the level have decorations on them like ones you'd see from real life, you know, paintings and portraits and that kind of thing, and everything seems like a house. As I said, the entire level is very dark. But it's not that there's no lights that work, I mean, there's lights in the ceiling, it's just that the darkness is like a real thing, it's an effect, and it absorbs all light sources, which leaves the level in a kind of dark glow type thing. If you try to use a flashlight or your phone or something like that to light your way, it will not light up very bright. And unless you can see really well and really dim and dark situations, you're not going to be able to see much. The structure and layout of this house changes when no one is looking. And the document specifically says when no sentient being is looking. So that means that when anything that's alive is not opening their eyes or looking around, the level will change its layout like a giant Rubik's cube. And it's not just the layout, it also changes its decorations and design and everything.  And you kind of just feel like something's watching you from the darkness every time this happens. This level also often induces the feelings of nightophobia, which is the irrational fear of the dark. And even if you don't have that now, when you get to this level, it'll probably give it to you. The furniture inside of the level seems to be pretty normal compared to real life. And the only really different thing is that they're all covered in mold and rot. Everything is just decaying, it seems.   And even when the level layout changes and it shifts how it looks, they're still dust. The hallways in this level are pretty small and very strange. And they often lead to other empty, strange rooms. Some parts of the level are completely 100% dark. But in other parts, there's this kind of dark glow that lights everything up just barely. Like when you squint really hard, you'll be able to see. But most of the level is fully dark. There's also some weird anomalies with the nature of this level. And you'll start to notice them when you walk around and try to escape it. Specifically, the geometry, of course, is very non-Euclidean, as a lot of backwards levels are. Some of the hallways have been reported to be upside down, as well as some of the staircases upside down. And many of the fixtures have been seen on the ceiling and everything's inverted of how it should really be. And it's just very, very confusing to be in. Nothing makes sense. And it makes even less sense that everything changes when you go in a fully dark spot and can't see or when you blink and look away. If you physically cannot see anything, the level is changing right before your eyes. There's also sections of the hallways in this house that appear to be voids. Like the hallways themselves are voids that you can walk through, black voids. So this entire house in general was very dangerous because you could get trapped in these dark spots and have to just feel your way around. Kind of like how level six is completely dark, except this level you're confined to these houses and rooms and hallways. The only entity that's been seen on this level is one that's been nicknamed the lurkers. And in an essence, these are large humanoid worm-like creatures that are around six feet tall.  Some of them have been reported as being 20 feet tall, which is a little crazy, but who knows? It's the back rooms. Lurkers have a ton of little legs on the bottom of them that kind of help them walk up and down and crawl on surfaces that you wouldn't think would be possible. And they hide in the extremely dark spots in this level. The good news is that they're pretty rare to find and they only attack if they see you. It actually seems like they cannot hear at all, like they don't have ears or anything, so they don't use sound to hunt. They use some sort of nighttime vision in their eyes, like dogs and cats have from real life to hunt their prey. And if they see you, they will attack on sight. So just be wary of that. But yeah, that's the only entity that you might be able to see. If you avoid the pitch black areas, you should be safe, I hope. Now the levels effects of changing and shifting aren't just for you. They also are the same for these entities.  The only problem is you will also be moved and your entire surroundings will look different and it's gonna be really hard to explore when you have no idea where you are. So through an unknown means, level 64 can actually transform itself back into a normal sized house that's not infinite at all anymore. And it does this completely randomly without any warning, like it just shrinks down to a regular house. And it never lasts for long, but this is the most important stage of the house's shifting because during the stage is the only opportunity you have to make your exit. As far as bases go on this level, there are actually several ruins of old-abandoned bases that are inside deep hallways and deep basement areas from previous groups that have tried to put up camp and stay here but because of lurkers attacking and the level changing so much, they had to leave. But to be honest, I don't know why you would set a base up here that doesn't seem like a good idea. To enter this level, you have to go into an elevator on a random level and you'll have the opportunity to be sent here or you can go into a cellar on level 98 to be sent here as well.   But yeah, a shifty house with non-Euclidean features and strange inverted void geometry and a weird human worm creature that stalks from the shadows. Oh, and don't forget the fear inducing effects and crippling anxiety that the level gives you. Sounds pretty fun to me, I know it doesn't, never mind. Thank you so much for watching the video. If you enjoyed it, make sure to leave a like, I would appreciate it. Comment below which levels that you want to see me go over. I'm always looking to add more to the schedule. If you are looking for more content from me, that's not Brugli content, check out Tugli, my second channel. I upload reactions with this format and kind of rants and gaming videos and that kind of stuff. And if you want more creepy stuff from me, go check out my third channel, Spookli, where I upload internet mysteries, creepy stuff, cryptids and y'all that kind of stuff, you know what I'm talking about. But yeah, that's it for the video. Thank you so much for watching. I love and appreciate each and every one of you and I will see you all later, bye.