I'm here in Oxford's South Park, looking west over the city skyline. The sun's just sinking behind the spires over there and already visible, glistening in the twilight, is Venus. Later this year, on June 6th, Venus is going to indulge us with a twice in a lifetime spectacle.  This is a picture of Venus from the last transit in 2004 and you can see it making its way across the bright flaming disk of the sun. This image from right near the end of the transit shows the thin halo of Venus' atmosphere, backlit by sunlight. What's slightly surprising is just how unusual this is. The first problem is that the earth and Venus go around the sun in the same direction, which means that Venus only actually overtakes us on the inside once every 1.6 Earth years. The second and larger problem is that Venus' orbit is tilted with respect to the earth's by an angle of 3.4 degrees, which means there are only two special points on the orbit where Venus passes directly between the earth and the sun. The result of all this is a strange cycle where transits of Venus occur in pairs separated by almost exactly eight years and then nothing for over a century and then another pair of transits separated by eight years. So for example the last transit of Venus happened on June 8th 2004, this one is going to happen on June 6th 2012 and then nothing until 2117 and 2125. If you want to watch the transit later this year you'll need to be careful. You should never look at the sun with the unaided eye, even with sunglasses, but there are a few different ways to see what's going on safely. The simplest is to use binoculars or a pinhole to project an image onto a piece of paper or you can use extremely dark solar filters to look at the sun directly. The reason Venus is so high and bright in the evening sky at the moment is that from our perspective it's just swung out from behind the sun and currently it's right near the extreme of its orbit. Shortly it's going to dive directly back toward the disk of the sun as seen from the perspective of the earth. What I find most incredible is that as we look up at that tiny dot glistening away in the evening twilight we're actually looking at five trillion trillion tons of rock screaming through space at 35 kilometers a second. It's hurtling inevitably and very precisely towards its transit on June the 6th completely indifferent to anything happening down here on earth. UK sky watchers will only be able to catch the end of the transit as the sun rises so find a safe way to check it out about 5 a.m. on June the 6th. It's probably worth getting up before dawn for because if you miss it this is the last chance for a hundred and five and a half years. In the meantime Venus is going to be easily visible in the west after sunset for quite a few more weeks brighter than anything else in the sky other than the sun and the moon. So do take a look and try to feel a part of this entrancing cosmic clockwork.


RCR with Paul Brennan, Reality Check Radio. It's Friday morning at Reality Check Radio and Friday morning is political panel. Morning has been a couple of weeks since we've all been a happy little family together. Here we are again. We've got over our differences. We've had the counselling, we've all come back. So I want to welcome Olivia Pearson. Hi, Olivia. Good morning, Paul. Nice to be with you again. Nice to have you back again. Thank you and great to see and hear you. Like that headset you've got there. It's pretty cool. Sounds good too. Marty in the panel room. Great for the panel. Marty Gibson. How are you doing? I'm good, thank you. And how's that printer of yours? Oh, yeah, no, my wife always says you're just a bit too old for the IT, aren't you? Just a little bit too old. You just missed it. Yeah, you didn't end up throwing it at the wall, really. I came close, Paul. Yeah, I bet you did. Cam Slater. Good morning, Paul. How are you? Good to see you wearing the merch. Listen, I can't see it, but I can. Yeah, it's pretty cool stuff, isn't it? Very high quality. People should check the realitycheck.radio website. Go to the store or shop and get some merch. I've got a pretty flash hoodie on and a T-shirt under that. And I've got my reality check radio hat as well. OK. So go check out the merch. In fact, next time, I want everyone wearing the merch. All right, so a lot has happened just in the short time, last few days even. And I guess we really should start off with the news from Auckland, downtown Auckland yesterday. Who wants to pick up on that first? I'll have a crack at that, seeing as firearms in my bag. I've been looking at all of the information that's come through, and there's a few things that we should note before we comment. First thing is that the killer is a criminal with a history of violent crime. Matu Tangi, Matua Reed was on home detention at the time that he committed this crime. He was monitored with an ankle bracelet. And why he was on home detention was that he was recently, i.e. less than a month ago, convicted of impeding breathing, injuring with intent to injure, willful damage, and male assaults female. Sorry, home detention? Home detention. That's right, that all three of those things, impeding, breathing, injuring with intent to injure, and male assaults female would have been automatic strikes under the three strikes legislation, which this government abandoned throughout. And the judges as well have run a campaign against three strikes, which rendered the legislation almost hopeless because they just willfully went against the wishes of parliament. This government then, of course, removed three strikes. But here's a guy who has a history of violent crime, has been through multiple different courses run by various different groups. One, of course, was one that the corrections minister, Kelvin Davis, has been touting in speeches and in Labour Party brochures. Yeah, really. Yeah, that they've been getting these criminals, their driver's license.  Well, this is one of the guys who went through that supposedly successful training to get his driver's license. One then drove to the crime scene. Well, exactly. And what's impeding, breathing? Is that choking someone? Choking, yeah. So you've got someone strangling, exactly. So he was sentenced to five months home detention on those four charges when he appeared for sentencing before. Yet the guy who did the protest outside of TVNZ went to jail for three months. So we've got a soft on crime government that has emptied the prisons, reduced sentencing, instructed the judiciary not to send people to prison even for violent crimes like this fella. And to top it all off, he didn't have a firearms license either. So he's illegally obtained a firearm. Where would you get that firearm? Well, you can get firearms for not much money these days. If you know a few people in the criminal fraternity, it's easy to obtain a firearm. You don't need a license. And but the drive of the government for the last few years since the Christchurch massacre has been to stupidly victimize and attack the licensed firearm community heap additional regulations and rules all under the pretense that it's going to protect us all, broaden a gun register, done all of these things. It's akin to the police trying to stop drunk driving by pulling over and breast-testing teetotalers.  That's why they're criminals. So when you add all of that together and you've got a government that is boasting on their website and in newsletters that have been sent out to the general public, that they have safely reduced the prison population, you have to say that the responsibility for this tragedy, and it is a tragedy when innocent people are gunned down at their place of work, there is people responsible for that, other very politicians who no doubt yesterday were crying for additional regulations and rules. Look, I'm under no illusion here that they're going to come and try and crack down again. They'll use this, right? Yeah, they'll use it. They'll use it as... Even though they're own politicians. Yeah, when it's clear, it's demonstrably clear that public policy in terms of justice by emptying the prisons, reducing prison sentences, having violent criminals being sentenced to home detention, improper monitoring. You know, you've got people here from the police to corrections to the government, all are directly responsible and have blood on their hands as a result of this tragedy. And it was entirely preventable because if this guy had been sent to prison for those... It wouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have happened. And it's entirely preventable. But as usual, they'll go and try and say that it's the firearms community that caused this. All right, anyone got anything more to say on that? Well, just the seriousness of impeding breathing. I mean, it was that law was introduced because it was a pretty big red flag that someone who was strangling someone was likely to go on and kill someone, or it's certainly the Great Union. Doesn't seem to matter much these days, though, does it? We're starting to see some of the stuff hitting women. You know, like... And I think, you know, we've had a fair while of the men, I guess, feeling that the law was tilted against them and now women are feeling the same thing. And I think probably men need to resist the urge to think, well, you know, you don't like it so much when it's you, does it? And kind of bury the hatchet and realize that we've got a common enemy. I just wonder if... I think it's okay to say this. If it was a Pakiha offender, whether he would be at home with a bracelet. Well, the interesting thing here is Marama Davison, you remember, exclaimed rather loudly after the Posi Paka debacle that she helped orchestrate. That violence in New Zealand society was perpetrated by cis white males.  No, that's what people like Marama say because they know that actually a lot of the crime is not with cis white males. And it's that classic projection they're always doing to flip the narrative into a lie. Well, that's one word for it. I mean, yeah, you could just call it lying. And I guess we often say, hey, that's a lie. They don't care. No. They don't have it. It's become clear that they don't care. No. I mean, it's come from the top down. I remember that debate ahead of the 2017 election where Jacinda Ardern exclaimed that she'd never told a lie in politics and didn't believe that she would ever need to tell a lie in politics, which of course was a lie. It was a lie. Interesting though, how the world has taken notice of this one because of the World Cup going on. So anybody that's got a team here from Norway right through to other countries they've all made this their lead story in the news because of course they send their young women over here to compete. And before you know it, there's a mass shooting happening in Auckland City which it never used to happen, this kind of thing. There was some massive overreactions in this though. You had Auckland University cancelling all classes and everything. When this was already at the bottom of town, it had nothing to do with where the university's located. Secondly, at eight minutes past eight, it was all over. There was 200 armed police in the bottom of town. Arguably the CBD was the safest place you could be shortly after eight o'clock. Mind you, we're talking about police with firearms. People get very excited in these situations. I've seen it before and they really run away with the situation, they get very excited. Yeah, I remember sitting in a bar or outside bar in Venezuela and a gunfight broke out about two blocks down. And people sort of stood up and kind of like meerkats and wondered what was going down and then we all sort of sat down again. Did a bit of rubber-necking and then went back to business.  And both of them were gunned down, literally 10 feet in front of me by the police who just wandered out of the police station and sorted it out. And everyone carried on shopping and stepping around the increasingly and growing puddle of redness that was in the gutter. Quite astonishing to see that everybody just, oh, okay, another burglar got shot, nevermind. Should we talk about, we'll get to some international stuff shortly, should we talk about undercurrent? Yes. Sure. Who wants to say something about, well, I'll say something about it, the record stuck. The record stuck, the record stuck. This is nothing new. It sounds like, I've listened to the first episode, it sounds pretty well like fire and fury, same sound effects, same creepy music, same everything. I've done it before. I'll tell you what it shows me, is it shows me that the establishment, let's call it the establishment, because that includes politicians as well as mainstream media, are afraid that there's a great number of people that aren't taking their bullshit anymore. And so they're continuing to demonise to other, because propaganda only works when it's constantly repeated. Yeah, but this is a concerted campaign, not just in New Zealand, but in other places around the world, you're seeing the Biden government working hand and glove with Facebook in particular, they no longer able to work with Twitter, Twitter has told them to go fly. You're seeing exactly the same tactics about misinformation, disinformation happening in the Trudeau regime. You're also seeing it in Australia, in the various states, but also from the federal government, from Albanese government, and in the UK as well. And you're seeing this anytime someone says something that's contrary to the approved narrative, all of a sudden you're described as being a disinfo or a misinfo purveyor or super spreader of such. So there's this coordinated event that's occurring in the world that is seeking to censor silence and prevent people sharing alternative views. And it's sinister. It's very sinister. And it's being driven largely out of the WHO, the WEF and the United Nations. And you really have to question whether or not, if you're talking about censorship in such a strong manner and having people really being censored or debanked, including in that for having alternative views, then we're living in a dark world. And we always said that with the pandemic, that it was a practice run to see what they could get away with. And it turns out they could get away with a lot and now we're seeing the results of that. That first episode, I would have to say, listening to it, it's all about politicians pretty well and how insecure they're feeling and how unsafe they're feeling. So the quiet bit is sort of being said out loud. It's they are feeling the heat. I go back to what you just said before, Cameron. They're feeling the heat. I think they're a little bit scared. Well, maybe we need to turn the burners up a bit more.  And that's what's happened. And remember after the protest in 2022, down in Wellington, that glorious protest, which we have forever as a cultural thing that Kiwis did to push back against tyranny. I'm still so proud of it. But the one thing that was really clear was that you can't handle people in this tyrannical way without them really turning around and hating you. But they're all sounding surprised, like. Well, that's what I understand happened. I don't think they're surprised. They're frightened. Well, I think. They're frightened because they know they deserve it. She thought she was the saviour of New Zealand. And then she went on holiday at Tyra and found out no one wanted to talk to her. No one were crossing the road to avoid her that she was actually hated. And she was scared and frightened and bewildered as to how this could happen. And that's what prompted her to resign and quit and run from New Zealand. Yeah, she couldn't go anywhere without being heckled. And heckled by, let's face it, a lot of them were Maori that heckled her. I remember that woman that saw her getting out of a van and, you know, started yelling and her daughter was in the car filming it. And she went, oh, look, mum's going to get arrested. I think we're at that stage. Yeah, the Chinese have got that saying when the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed, which some assassination on an emperor assassination attempt and was done by concealing a dagger and a map that they got past the guards. And I think we're at the stage now where if you've got eyes to see, you can see that there's a, as you say Cam, it's coming from multiple angles and their play is being executed. And so they're just going healthily to get it done.  But, you know, the devil sends the beast with wrath because he knows that time is short, you know? With Radio New Zealand involved in this particular production and this closeout to an election, it could be argued that this is ethically unacceptable to be kind of promoting a certain, I don't know what would you say, left, right, probably over those definitions, but a certain narrative in a very persuasive way using all the production techniques and the power of a national broadcaster that's been around for 100 years, this closeout to an election. Is there, are there ethics involved here? Well, how many right-wing shows are on national radio? There'd be none. Yeah. I mean, the responsible thing to do would be to not make these productions so close. The ethics... It's like holding them accountable for lying. They don't care. Ethics is accounting in England, isn't it? I think the cabal is going hard out because they've been so shocked at the pushback from the freedom communities and freedom-oriented people. And aside from the freedom-oriented people, there's just the normal New Zealanders that are actually just sick of the stuff. And the cabal are going hard out to push and propagandise constantly because it works so well for them during COVID, but it's not going to work for them so well as they seek to do other things like three waters, five waters. The ESG is crapping out as well. Yeah. Investors are running from ESG. Yeah, it's got a lot of... As I said, they know time is short. They know that the momentum's starting to push against them. And so they're going to pull all the levers.   Kate Hanna, the woman just does not come across as intelligent.  She keeps going on about having all this qualification and then she says, white supremacy. White supremacy.  These people are very deliberate at what they're doing.     Well, it's all about the money. It's always all about the money.  You didn't get an apology out of Winston, Kate. I didn't get it. You didn't get it either, so... Well, the thing is... How are you going to explain yourself on that? He's moving all the things. That's what I said, baby steps, right? You've got it. Look, if you've had a politician that has been certain about a particular position and it doesn't have to just be the COVID situation it could be anything. If you berate them and yell at them and scream at them, they just dig in, right? If you approach it in a logical, sensible way, you can say, well, okay, would you... Tease it out of them. Would you accept that the evidence that we have now would suggest that those things were wrong to have said? Then you get them moving in it. It's hard to move a stationary object. It's a lot easier to change the direction of a moving object. And so, that interview with Winston was... I tried to get him to get a little bit further along and I think I achieved that. And he moved a little bit further along. He did say he regress at it, Cam. Yes, he did. And I suppose that's a bit of movement. And he did take ownership and you've seen plenty of politicians have deleted tweets and pretend they never existed. And he says he owned it. Yes, it was somebody else who did it, but it's under my name and I... Mind you, there was more than one. Well, that's right. There was two or three. That was a fudge, him saying some other person. That's what he said to me too, but he did say he'd own it. Yeah, and that he regretted it. So, not quite an apology, but... We're on second base now. We know... Two to go. Look, the thing is with Winston is that he was the only politician that bothered to go and walk around the protest in Wellington. He sure he wasn't in power at the time, but he also eschewed the attention of the media in doing it. He refused to talk to them. He refused to take the stage. He was not there to grandstand. He was there to listen. And, you know, that whole protest in Wellington need not have ended the way it did if only they'd come out and listened. Oh, but the schoolgirls were having an ex-throne at them, Cam. Well, show me the evidence of this. And that was always... Literally, Luxon and Seymour have said that. So, that's double proof. But literally, there were thousands of cameras. And yet, you know, there was... Why were those two used the same excuse? Well, because it was convenient. It's like... I will use the schoolgirl excuse. OK, anyone else? Because no one's going to be able to defeat you. Oh, you're terrible at people throwing. No one likes people throwing eggs at schoolgirls. No. But, I mean, there was... It's the most worse than impaired breathing. Yeah, there's a lot of things that were said. And no one's ever critically examined them. Do you remember the day before the jackboats came storming in? We were told, and, you know, hushed tones with, you know, deep music in the background that... Pitchforks had been seen as a weapon. Who are her? Well, you know, when the police moved in and booted everybody out and stole all of their possessions and wrecked their livelihoods at that time, where was the lineup? Like, they do after they have a drug raid of... These were the weapons that were found in this raid. Yeah, there was none. There was none. There was nothing. There's all BS, right? There weren't pitchforks and machetes and... That's white pitchfork. But did everyone just sort of...  Let's abandon ship and take all of the weapons with us so they've got nothing. You know, this is the thing. We were lied to. We were gaslit. Because they would have lined everything up if they had it. But getting back to Seymour, getting back to Seymour, Seymour, if Seymour has to speak a woke language and go with woke in order to get power, Seymour will do that. You know, what about his replacing Chris Bailey with Todd Stevenson?  And he's in love with Pfizer. You know, he's right in with all that stuff. And Seymour has gone down that road, putting him as a list MP, whereas the other guy, Chris Bailey, was at least very solidly anti-woke. If anybody votes for Seymour thinking he's going to fight the woke evil, I can, you know, I've got a bridge to sell you. He's never going to do that. No one's interested, mate. No one's interested. No one cares about you, mate. No one cares, mate. Let me tell you about David Seymour, right? Yesterday on my show, I had Shane Jones and Matt King on. I tried to have the ACT candidate, Mark Cameron, who is an MP, so he's an elected MP on the show. He never replied to any emails, any text messages. I even directly tried to contact David Seymour. And previously, before he's picked up the phone and spoken to me, he's been to my house even attended a staff barbecue. We've got a convivial word for him. Working, you know, relationship and those text messages to David Seymour and attempts to phone him when to unanswer. Well, you're off the Christmas card lists now. Yeah. But, you know, this is a guy who has run a road show around New Zealand talking about freedom of speech and has has lectured and hectic people about freedoms. And yet he prevented his own MP in Northland. From talking to reality check radio. So the thing that I've said in my show yesterday is of these people and these politicians and Christopher Luxon is exactly the same. I actually managed to speak to the national candidate in Northland and it got him to agree to an interview. And less than half an hour later, he was texting me back saying, oh, no, he's not allowed to. So you've got Christopher Luxon, who wants to be the prime minister. For all of New Zealand, you've got David Seymour, who wants to be in government for all of New Zealand, refusing to talk to reality check radio about. About a vital electorate in the election race. I'll tell you why they won't tell you why they won't because so many people listen to the replays that they're worried it will damage their chances. Well, that's why. But so many people now going to listen to the replay of me explaining exactly that, totally, that these two leaders don't want to talk to, you know, one hundred and fifty thousand listeners because they know they can't answer certain questions because they know they'll be put to them. And when they put them, they won't be able to answer them. And that's a very bad look. Yeah. And they don't debate.  And they know people like you and me and us will say, well, hang on, why aren't you answering that? You've got something to hide. Exactly. And it's about and they can't handle that, man. It's about two hundred and fifty thousand people that we know of, not a hundred and fifty thousand. And the more the more that I watch everything unfold in New Zealand, the more I realize that reality check radio is representing the majority of the quiet, silent majority of New Zealanders. And here's the reality. That's who they won't speak to. Yeah. And that's the reality check for these politicians. They will not speak to two hundred and fifty thousand plus people. They will not listen to us. They didn't listen to us in Parliament. They won't listen to us now. And yet, you know, they've wrecked people's jobs. They've wrecked people's health. They've wrecked people's careers and wrecked people's businesses. They've wrecked people's families. And now they're coming to us and begging us to give them their job again. Yeah. But they won't listen to us.  And the best thing that we can do is not vote for them. That's a very good point. If they're not going to listen now, they never will when they handed their power back. No, what's that line? So he didn't want a single anti-vaxxer vote. Didn't he? A couple of weeks ago. No, it was that he we were all nuts. Yeah, Luxon said he didn't want any votes from anti-vaxxers. Oh, well, that's easy fixed. You know, all the listeners of reality check radio, do you think voting for the National Party is going to solve any problems in New Zealand, then you're sorely mistaken.  And sadly, it's not the National Party and it's not the Act Party. No, I'm saying that, Marty. In saying that, it shows you just not fit for leadership. You just not I wouldn't say I'm an anti-vaxxer either. So I've had every vaccination known to man. I've traveled around Asia, but I didn't have that one. No, yeah. They can't handle the truth to use that line from the movie. They can't handle the truth. You can't handle the truth. It's dead. That's true. They can't. There's these approved things you can talk about. And they're trying to sideline, you know, Paul or me or any of the other hosts on reality check radio. Well, let's see how that works out for them. And we're not hostile. No, we just want the bloody answer, you know, and if I'm wrong, I'll put my hands up, I admit it. It's fine. I'll take it.  It's a constant refrain of mine as well. Paul, that, you know, I'm not necessarily here to argue that I'm right at all costs. I'm primarily arguing that we should have the debate. Give me more information. That's what I always want. The information that will allow me to change my mind. Yeah. But that shows you how far down the rabbit hole of. Tyranny and fascism that we are is that we are very, very clear. It's been obvious for ages that the debates are not allowed. Debate is debate is the thing they stare away from. Have you noticed how you search results have changed on, you know, when you when you search something that might be contentious, you just get pages and pages of official government sites. Yeah, I've noticed it a lot lately. I've noticed that change in the last couple of months. Oh, they must be desperate. Well, they must be feeling their heat. All right, let's move on. And Olivia, I know you want to touch on this and I've been following it as well. More Trump indictments, they really are using law fear. They're doing everything they can to stop this man from having another shot. And it looks inevitable that if he can go all the way, he will. Well, I mean, well, he's he's still the favored leader for the Republicans. I mean, he outstrips anybody in the polls. I mean, he's not even really bothering with the turning point USA and all that sort of stuff that the other people are turning up for. Trump just knows that he doesn't have to, although he did turn up to make a speech at that. But yeah, yet another round of inditing Trump about the 10th one. We know these folks are not going to rest until they have Trump arrested for insurrection for January the 6th, which was such an obvious false flag pantomime that was clashing me on the day. I remember actually turning the tally off when that unfolded. I remember thinking I'm just turning this off because this is lies and I could recognize a false flag when one was in front. Yeah, I'm the same. I was the same, too. I thought I can see what's happening here. Yeah. Normally, I back away slowly from people who mentioned false flag, but I have to agree with you on the January 6th. It was clear the FBI was the actual people that were inciting, you know, all of that. Yeah, and if you knew about that kidnapping attempt on the governor, was it Illinois governor? There was about six weeks, two months before that, it was the same. It was a rehearsal, essentially Michigan or Michigan, one of those states. I know the woman. Yeah, but they they had the infiltrators there, the agent provocateurs. It turned out that I think six of the eight who were involved were actually FBI agents. So if you knew that that had happened, you could kind of see what was happening. And the guy, the guy that they had worked on to do an act of violence. Was it Kirsty Noem? Kirsty Noem, yeah, I think it was. They were begging him to do it. And he was saying, I don't reckon this is a good idea. They were inciting him to it. He said, I don't want to. He said, I don't want to see the woman hurt or anything like that. No, no, he told you they needed it to be as dramatic as possible. You see, yeah, it was such an epic fail. But anyway, so this new one with Trump was is. Honestly, it's just another psycho drama. And I so we've had, you know, in April, it was the the improperly classified payments for the in the 2016 election that Alvin Bragg in the Mount Manhattan District wanted to, you know, get Trump on that. Then in June, it was the mishandled documents from Mar-a-Lago. And now in July, Jack Smith, the prosecutor for the DOJ, and he is Merrick Garland's aggressive little.  Hasn't that guy, Merrick Garland, got the weirdest voice you've ever.  Sorry.  No, he's got Lindsay Graham. Merrick Garland's like the exemplar of that phrase, the banality of evil. He's got that horrible voice. Well, and he's a little bit sort of like this. It's like this sort of like that. He's what I would call a blank. He's a blank, but they're all puppets. But anyway, so this new one, you know, this is all to just, you know, they're going to target that. Trump got a letter saying that he's the main target of the January 6th grand jury investigation. And they gave him four days to report to the grand jury, which always means an arrest or an indictment. So he's just ignoring it at the moment. And of course, we know it's all to distract from the actual crimes of the Bidens, you know, like the White House Coke gate. The Biden crime family. Yeah, and Hunter's pornographic dealings with Will. Okay. Multiple, multiple, maybe.  And also. It's just gross. It's so gross. But I want to say on the good side, on the good side of this, because it's great to see something positive in the world at the moment. One of Trump's most stalwart new defenders is the Republican primary candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy from Ohio. He's cool. And he is so vocal about the fact that what we're watching is this obsessive compulsive need to persecute Trump. And he's saying that what we're watching happen to Trump is the most dangerous thing happening to America that we have ever seen in the history of the country. And I agree with him on that. He recognizes that having Trump removed in this relentlessly underhanded fashion is bloody well un-American. And if they can do that to Trump, they can and will and are doing that to anyone, including people like himself. So I like Vivek's integrity on this. And it really matters because I'm not hearing the same integrity from anyone else who's running as a Republican candidate to quote Vivek said a couple of days ago in a tweet. He said, I believe the Federal Administrative Police State is preparing to invoke the insurrection clause from section three of the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump from running in a way that past indictments technically have not been able to do. This isn't theoretical quoting from Vivek again. He said, in New Mexico, County Commissioner Coy Griffin was removed from office after his election for merely being physically present at the Capitol on January the 6th. Even though he was peaceful and did not even enter the building, that sets a very dangerous precedent for states like New Mexico to try and keep Trump off the ballot and a prosecution by Jack Smith would only strengthen their argument for doing so. Vivek concluded that with saying, it is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its chief political rivals. Do you think? Yeah, I mean, amen to that. And just to remind everybody that the section three of the 14th Amendment and I'll paraphrase succinctly says that no person can hold office in the United States if they have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or give an aid or comfort to the enemies they're of. So now you know why the Dems and the Rhinos have been so desperate to make it look like an insurrection. They went to great trouble with the FBI to make it look as if Trump was involved in an insurrection where he was not. But there's all the evidence of him calling for calm the day before saying, we have to go peacefully, telling people to disperse peacefully. There's so much evidence. I know, but Paul, like we were discussing with what's going on here. They lie. Yeah, they lie and the media just keep parroting, parroting, parroting because propaganda only works when you keep repeating it. So they keep repeating it. I guess as just a human being that's in my early 50s, what I am so shocked at from being raised in the free world and then watching this push for totalitarian, what I'm so shocked at is how the media propaganda works. It's flippin' works. Well, did you see Tucker Carlson destroy Mike Pence at the time? It wasn't that great. It wasn't that fun. It's so easy. You know, if we had better journalists, we'd have better politicians. Yeah, but what's so big? If I'll just finish on this, Marty, and I'm happy to go to that because, yeah, that was great. But I want to say that Vivek Ramaswamy is running for president. Trump is his opponent. Yet you couldn't get a more stalwart man of solidarity than Vivek saying, hey, we can't let this happen to one of our opponents. We don't want to win this way. We want to win on our own marriage. Well, what happens if Trump's taken out? What if they do take Trump out in that way? And his popularity, I can see big problems, civil unrest problems for the United States. But maybe they're happy to let that happen. Well, if they do take Trump out and you know their bloody will going to try in every way available to them, at least there is someone like Vivek in the race who can pick up the supporters of Trump because he has been loyal. And it's not loyal to the man or the culture personality. It's loyal to the trying not to swear. It's loyal to the flipping principles of the Republic where we do not make war on our candidates in this way. You do not use the power and the apparatus of state to take out an opponent. It's just so wrong. Well, nobody's saying the words out loud for what this really is. And what it is, is a nonviolent coup d'etat. Yeah, it's a coup. It's a six-year, it's a seven-year coup now. Like a rolling maul coup. We're starting with Barack Obama with all the transition teams spying. Well, how much, how many legacies is he still pulling behind the scenes? I would say all of them. I still think that man's president.  The man. Well, I mean, you could, I think, the crew started with J.F.K. getting shot, you know, and that you're seeing the same players keeping the rolling maul going, as you said before. Very true.  You mentioned the media before, I can tell you, and this is no secret that when I was at RNZ, most of the journalists there, the new sub-editors, they all had Trump derangement syndrome. They couldn't handle it. And when I told them that he was going to win, they literally went crazy.  I bet she was. I went into the, into Princeton, the Gizman Hill, saying he was going to win. What sort of reaction did you get from your colleagues, mate?  I thought I was mad. They said, you're mad. You're crazy. I said, no, I'm not. He's going to win. You watch. Well, I mean... And then, of course, they could never admit that they, because they think they're iron stones, that they could ever be wrong. So it was very awkward. No, but they, but I spent four years writing about the Trump presidency in camp published on, republished on the BFD, all of those articles. So there's a long track record of the amazing president that Trump actually was. But going into that 2020 election, I wrote a piece, I think, four days before the election saying, you know, as surely as night follows day, the Democrats are going to cheat. And right on cue, we got all the, what the, what the... Nikki Haley, when going to your point, Mardi, when at the, on that event, where Tucker got to interview all these candidates, Nikki Haley, they call it the anomalies and irregularities. What a euphemism of the election. That was out and out fraud. And, and, you know, China was behind that fraud on all those election machines and the printing of the ballots, which were being flown in. There are affidavits testifying to that. And what about the missing postal truck? How dare... With a quarter of a million ballots. Those sorts of things. Yeah, how dare people like Nikki Haley sit there talking about them being irregularities? You know, what a... Oh, makes me so angry. And people used to say, no court has ever found, no, no court ever gave them standing to even present the case. That's what happened. That's what happened. They've never ever gotten in front of a court. So... No, they weren't heard. Three Supreme Justices, including Clarence Thomas, Supreme wanted those, they wanted those court hearings to be heard because they knew that that was fraud. And good on Trump. Who would have the heart to do this all over again? Could we safely say then, are our elections here secure? Look what happened in 2020. Okay, did 400,000 national voters... I mean, I don't know. I'm just asking a question. Yeah, they did. Well, Michael Bassett said it was fishy. Well, you've got to question it. What sort of tabulations involved? Let me weigh in here on this because I've got a lifetime of seeing how elections... Stand back, Cam's going to weigh in. Right? I've had this question yesterday when I was visiting someone. Could we have these tabulation errors and all of these things? Here's the thing, right? Every polling station in New Zealand has scrutiny is at it. And the scrutiny is allowed right up to and can handle voting papers, right? So they're seeing from the whole day through, they're watching how people vote. People being unencumbered with their voting. Can they put the ballot into the ballot box without any interference, all of that. And then when the ballot box is opened by the returning officer in each polling station, you've got members of New Zealand First, of Greens, of ACT, of National, of Labor. There's people in every polling booth that are seeing those tallies being done. And as they do those tallies, they're reporting back to their head officers that this polling booth, polling booth number XYZ in, you know, Epsom, etc, whatever, they're reporting back those numbers into their party. And in the regions in the party, they'll have an organization that'll be saying, right, now this polling booth and the last election voted this way and the last election from that voted this way, are we seeing something that's massively different here and is it out of the ordinary? They're being able to see that as it goes. And so they get a running total of all of those votes. What about early voting? Well, early voting is a little bit different because, you know, you've got all of that. But even at the early voting, it's still being scrutinized in the same way where there are scrutiny is from the political parties that are observing each of the ballots as they're being counted.  You actually got multiple eyes on some. OK. So I actually don't believe that it is possible to have the weapons trade. I thought 2020 was fishy, kind of fishy. No, I don't believe it is.  What about all the cuckold men that went along with it, too? Yeah, but, Cam, here's my question is that are you saying that once those ballots are counted and they go on to the machines to tabulate and then that information gets placed to the news, goes out to the news channels where it gets reported as the event happens, the election happens. I know in America that a lot of people said that the problem was not the ballots. It was the fractionation of the vote. Yes, we don't do that here. The digital voting. Well, they have catalyst machines. How do you really know that? Yeah, I do. I look, honestly, it's in New Zealand. It's too New Zealand's too small. We there's a reason why two degrees was called two degrees, right, because there's two degrees of separation. So if there are some dodgy stuff going on like that, people know.  Sure. But the thing is, is that if there was, if it's a huge number of votes, it's really hard to try and turn that around. Right. And if you say, I were bought about local body elections. Well, my argument for that is if it was rigged and it was in favour of somebody and it's generally in favour of the left, they like to cheat, have double votes to all of it. They've been doing it for years, right? There was the infamous only only hunger, you know, recount and all of those sorts of things going back decades. It's always the left that doing it. But if you say that we've got this tabulation error and there's a possibility that you've got an election that could be rigged. How did Wayne Brown get elected? Against the FISO columns that the entire establishment said was going to win. How did Wayne Brown get elected? Maybe they were too relaxed about it. That's a very fair question. Yeah. OK. So, you know, if there's a tabulation issue, like you're saying with fractionated voting and those sorts of things, Olivia, and they're valid questions to ask and you're entitled to ask those questions. But bear in mind that the two major parties, national and Labour, know the numbers before it ends up in the tabulator. And if it was vastly different from the numbers that were actually physically counted and witnessed by their own eyes, they would be squawking and nobody's squawking. Yeah. So so I do the difference between Labour and national is not much. If you're controlling it from the big picture, you wouldn't care either one of them is right. I mean, it's just changing changing the shirts on the same globalist team, really. You've got the offensive team and the defensive team. The offensive teams, the Labour Party, the defensive team, you know, reflecting the status quo is the National Party, but they're the same team. OK, I'm probably got about 15 minutes left here. Let's talk about another current president, Putin. This is an interesting one. He was invited to a BRICS conference in South Africa, but there's that International Court of Justice warrant out for his arrest for war crimes. Am I right with that? And that means if he had traveled, we covered it in our news yesterday morning, if he traveled, they would have had to have arrested him on arrival in South Africa. So he's doing it by Zoom. Well, they wouldn't have to arrest him. Oh, they wouldn't. OK. Well, it would be a choice, but Ramaphosa in South Africa encouraged him not to come to South Africa for the BRICS conference because he may be arrested and because they've signed on to the Rome Statute, which is all part of the ICC, the Criminal Court. But the US never did, did they? No. And actually. Or maybe in the end they did, but at first I might need to check that. I'm not entirely sure. But here's the thing is that, you know, they went on to say that, you know, the people that are baying for Putin to being arrested for war crimes, they said, Ukrainian and Western authorities say there is evidence of murders and executions, shelling of civilian infrastructure, child abductions, torture, sexual violence and illegal detention. And I thought, God, it's hard to know whether they're talking about the US or Zelensky's or France or the Ukraine or China. All this goes on in the US now. Think of all those people that were at the Capitol that are sitting there and rotting in prison and solitary confinement without being represented. I mean, you know, these things are happening in France as well and in Ukraine, of course, and of course, in China. I mean, that particular list and child abductions. Anybody? I mean, they're happening all over the Southern border, USA. Yeah. And but I wanted to say that a successful war crimes prosecution requires a very, very high standard of proof in a situation where access to suspects and crime scenes is often extremely restricted. And there's an overlapping jurisdiction between national and international courts. Just to give you an example of how hard it is to successfully prosecute war crimes. The woman, Mary Fulbrook, wrote the definitive book called Reckonings on the Nazi atrocities at the end of the Second World War. And she wrote in there that between 1946 and 2005, only 567 individuals throughout Germany were sentenced to death or life imprisonment for their actions in the Holocaust. Of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who had been involved in the machinery of mass murder and the six million people, Jews who died in what we now call the Holocaust, 164 convictions for murder is not an impressive total. And she added that the total number of persons convicted under the Federal Republic, which was West Germany for Nazi crimes, was itself fewer than the number of people who had been employed at Auschwitz alone. Gee, yeah.  You're all Japanese biological scientists who did all those terrible things in Manchuria and very few of them were ever bought to to justice for war crimes. So war crimes are hard to prosecute and Putin is not going to attend the Brits conference now. He said he won't accord. Well, that's according to Western media, since Ramaphosa doesn't want the conflict of interest. And I mean, who can blame him? It sounds like there's a bit of respect there for Putin. There is some Putin like there is TDS. There is some Putin derangement syndrome. Oh, yes. And for there's a lot of it. It's not just Putin derangement, Paul, Russia. It's Russia. And that came out of the Russia, Russia, Russia thing. Well, before that, I mean, the way that's where it really was ginned up.  They obviously not informed. I would have to say from what I've seen with Putin is that he fronts up to journalists. He actually answers tough questions. We don't see any of our politicians doing that ever. And if you look back at the history of why they're in Ukraine. Well, yeah, I would have been a bit grumpy that I'd had these moves pulled on me as well. So what do you do? Well, I mean, but the Russia derangement actually goes back to the British when, you know, they were territorial disputes. I mean, Crimea was one of them. Hence the Crimean War in the late 19th century. But it goes back to the Brit certainly have something up their arse when it comes to Russia because of their because of under the Indian Raj, the Raj days, you know, Russia was trying to take territory there and influence territory there. And there were wars all over the place. But but the Brits, I actually think the UK is more anti Russia than America is. Boris Johnson scuppered that whole thing on a day visit. But the British were left bankrupt after the Second World War. They only finished paying the reparations for Len Lies in the year 2000. They lost her empire and Russia without Russia, they couldn't have won. You saw a legacy of they were hanging onto the probably blame Russia for being bankrupt. They were hanging at the Brits were hanging on to the empire by the absolute skin of their teeth after the First World War. But I mean, this is a legacy of the Cold War, too, where we essentially brainwashed generations of Kiwi of not just Kiwis, but the Western world to despise Russia and China without actually looking into the details. And the communism's an evil, maligned, you know, mass murdering ideology and it was bad. But the whole way it was done was, you know, Russia is evil, China is evil, all of these sorts of things. And of course, the UK had numerous of their rather squishy, soft, liberal type people that were Russian spies. And and who who, you know, some of them escaped back to Russia and, you know, lived lived a frugal life under communism, even despite the fall of communism, were still living there.  And so there's this mindset that's understandable after all so many years of the Cold War of trying to defeat Russia and China, that you've got these, you know, built in biases that doesn't allow people to actually start looking at a modern Russia and seeing, is there anything there? Now, I'm not on Russia's side. I'm not on Ukraine's side. I'm not on anybody's side in all this. I think a pox on all of their houses. But the way that we're being driven towards a global war based around the Ukraine and in Europe is shameful. And it's so transparent. It's not funny. And I just wonder how people, well, I don't wonder anymore. It's just relentless propaganda, isn't it? That's just driving. We've just thrown in another 4.2 million. I don't understand the historical. I understand aspects of it, but this real anti-Russian derangement syndrome that's been in play for a long time. I think it's Trump. It really came on. No, no, I'm thinking. I know it's going back, but it's really come on since Trump. Yeah, no, I am. But I'm thinking of the last hundred years. Obviously, the Bolshevik Revolution, sure, they deserved everything they got after that. But even before that, there was such a snobbery toward Russia yet because they weren't quite European. They had a lot of French influence. And but their music, I mean, you've got the Rachmaninoffs. You've got the Tchaikovsky's geniuses. Yeah. And you first into space, Dostoevsky, you've got Pushkin, all the brilliant writers. I mean, Russia contributed massively, massively to cultural beauty and a Christian country of the Western canon. Yeah, well, yeah, then that the Russian Orthodox.  I can't get enough. I can. I listen to them every every week. I'm a dais, but but but they I mean, you've never had composers like that come out of America, out of New Zealand. You've had very few composers, John Hanlon, Britain, that are of the stature of the Russian composers. So Benjamin, Britain, there was Benjamin, Britain and Elgar, you know, apart from that, the great, you know, they do not compare to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. People should respect Russia's contribution to Western music. And Western art and literature, a bit more than they do. And what was so sad was as soon as Putin did the invasion of the Ukraine, you know, it wasn't an invasion. Oh, sorry, it was a special military operation with 80,000 troops. Can they can never be an invasion? Invasion's yet to come. But and in a Trebco, the glorious Soprano and my favourite composer, Valerie Goodejeff, they all had to ditch their schedules for opera all over Europe and go home to Russia. And they were pressured to condemn their own country. Yeah. And they were only allowed. And in a Trebco was only allowed to sing in Europe if she came out and made a statement against Putin and she refused to do it. Authoritarian totalitarianism coming through there again. Yeah. Before we wrap up, I think we were chatting before, Marta, you were interested in what's happened in Spain's election. And that is what a like a directional pointer for something that's going on. Maybe you should just. Yeah, I mean, it's a broad movement of several EU countries, Sweden, Finland and Italy have also recently elected. And, you know, we were talking before we started about, you know, the muddiness around what's left and what's right. And I define it these days as left is more government, less freedom and right is less government, more freedom. And I think there are quite a few people from left and right, as you would have known, from the protests. You know, there wasn't a clear political or racial bent to them. But yeah, there's been a big, you know, Spain's left wing government is was defeated initially at a local level. Very heavily by a combination of the popular party and Vox. Was that Catalonia? Catalonia was one of them. Vox is held up as the more right wing, it opposes abortion rights.  What it probably denies is printing lots of money to send to countries that are still making coal fired plants as a way of battling climate change and rejects the need for government to kill to combat gender violence. And I'm sure you can work out what that actually means. It doesn't mean stopping wife beaters, right? It means stopping speaking derisively about men and dresses. Vox and frocks. Yeah. So so it's interesting reading this because the the. I think the article, one of the articles I read was out of Associated Press. They really they just were swinging around and just shrugging the shoulders about why it was happening. And I think Wayne Brown's election that you spoke about earlier is probably a signal at that local level in a similar way in New Zealand, isn't it? People are just saying, man, we're going to go broke. Yeah, so that's that's going to be interesting to see. It's the first right wing government elected in Spain since General Franco died in the 70s. Wow. OK, that's a good one. Was Franco right wing? He was a fascist. So so I'd have to argue that he wasn't right wing. He was supported by the National Socialist Party of Germany. Yeah, totally. Right. So but I mean, but but but also remember, I've noticed a lot with the Spanish elections, they're constantly trying to say, oh, they're reviving Franco. But I mean, Franco overthrew the what they called Republican. And it's not Republicanism like America has Republicanism. It was Republicanism that was more aligned with Soviet Russia. What's interesting, though, is the the flipping of a people's Republican, other words. Yeah. What's interesting is the flipping of the sides that support civil liberties and freedoms. You know, traditionally, we've seen civil liberties being pushed by the left freedom of speech.  Right. We had all of that sort of thing where there was the conservatives and the right wingers that were stopping freedoms. You had the left that were pushing the anti-apartheid thing with South Africa. They've always been at the forefront of the civil liberties. So what happened? So something's changed in the left. They've become more totalitarian. They probably were always there, but they've now removed the mask. And you're seeing the Democrats doing it in the United States. You're looking at Trudeau doing it in Canada. You're watching Albanese do it in Australia. I'm here. We had the Ardern Hipkins regime that is still doing it. You had you've you've got the likelihood of that occurring in the United Kingdom, even though you had Boris Johnson who did some appalling things while he was prime minister, including the way that they control the lockdowns, etc. It seems that the political classes and elites of society have decided we can't be having things like freedom. That's why we're seeing a push for censorship of the Internet, controlling, you know, labelling of things as misinformation, disinformation because they're they're petrified that people will learn things that are contrary to what they're actually trying to pimp to us. And so you're seeing that swap and then you're starting to see conservative politicians coming in and saying, no, I actually support freedom of speech. You know, you're seeing people on the right of the Democrat Party like like RFK saying the same sort of thing. And these they're getting a lot of traction because people really are sick of the elites telling us what to do. It seems though the followers of the left are the easiest to brainwash. Sorry to say. Well, that's because they they are too emotional in their language. So they've been you've been able to influence them by talking about feelings, lots of feelings. And what's that song? Feelings. Nothing. It's not a lot of money, you know, and you. Well, it's easy money, too. Easy money. Yeah, if you've got easy money, if you've got cheap energy and it just makes the whole I mean, how do you think they work at the disinformation project? They turn up for work. What do they do? Have a few coffees? Have something they call a meeting?  I really missed out. You missed out on the two K's in the turn right there. Now, you missed out washing their hands at the little. Oh, yeah. OK.  Right. Well, the greater good. And I'm going to give you this and I'm going to give you that. And you're going to be happy under this. And really, it's like, please, just leave me alone. Just let me act for my own good.  I've got a very smothery mothery. And all we need them for is to sit there and protect and secure and keep secure our individual rights. Give me a little rest. You know, I there's a lot of criticism about the Gadison flag in the United States, the famous yellow flag with the rattlesnake saying, don't tread on me. Don't tread on me. I love it. Don't tread on me. Appeal to heaven. Yeah. So that that sits on the wall in my in my apartment here, right? This always remind me that the government is not acting in our best interests and that our refrain, people who listen to reality check radio, people who love freedom, we should have that refrain to tell the government to get the hell out of our lives and don't tread on me. And I think that's very, very important there. Will we call conspiracy theorists and right wing nutjobs for that? But if you look at the history of that flag and what it stood for, it's very powerful. It's very powerful. Have you seen the beautiful HBO series called John Adams? No, I haven't. Oh, have any of you seen that? I don't watch that sort of TV. I'm afraid. Oh, you must. It's the it's the whole it's the whole putting together of the Continental Congress and Thomas Jefferson's in there. John Adams, it's the most. We got any airplanes in it? It's got no, no aeroplanes, but it has a balloon. Oh, balloon. OK. Yeah, but worth a watch because how that was put together with the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton's in there. Well, they even anticipated the situation that's happening now, didn't they? They weren't. Well, I don't think they quite. Well, they said that, you know, as something along the lines, is as much as you think you can control this. Well, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I mean, when you think about those drafters of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were some fine people. Really? Why were they on? They saw it's up again from cactuses. They saw quite clearly that a rampant state apparatus that would subjugate citizenry and they put in place a written constitution where the primary the first amendment, the primary rationale behind the whole creation of the United States was it was based on freedom, freedom of speech and the Second Amendment. People don't understand this. The reason why the Second Amendment, the right to be your arms is there to protect the First Amendment.  Then that's why you've got guns and that's why you've got a militia and that's why you've got the ability to fight the state back. All right, I think that's about time is up for us this Friday for the political panel here at RCR. Thanks, everybody. Great to be with you again. Have a great weekend. All right, thanks. See you, Paul. See you later, guys. RCR with Paul Brennan, reality check radio.


So, quickly about the Mada Elephant Studio, we are a company that was founded in 2017. So, this is our global presence and we are all about open source. So, I'm gonna talk about basically what we do and yeah, where we're heading in the future. The first open source, we are very pro open source. So, basically build all our business on the open source with support, a few projects, pretty much all the time. So, one of them is GitLab. So, GitLab has been great for us as a small business to actually build the company and do all sorts of support from ticketing system to Zendesk type of things, to software development and communicating with the clients. I'm actually a GitLab hero and I do training for, not affiliated training for GitLab from time to time. So, they're usually free and I also do help them contribute to the code. So, the second project we support is Bootstrap. So, Bootstrap is a great framework and I'll talk a bit more about Bootstrap and Drupal even in the future, but we also do help to contribute to this framework and build a lot of sites based on that. Obviously, Drupal, this is our bread and butter. We do it pretty much most of our, like 95% of our projects are Drupal based or attach Drupal one way or another. So, now a bit about work. Again, we're a very, very small company. So, we did a few quite an exciting projects and this is just the highlights of what we did. So, first thing is state library Queensland that was quite an interest in migration from proprietary CMS and six WordPress websites. Took about six months and migrated into single Drupal eight installation back in 2018. The actual migration process was the kind of quite an interest in one, but now it's on consolidated in one. The library actually had different departments and different buildings running different websites. So, it was interesting to not only work with like team and upscale the development team in there, but also to help them and migrate and consolidate all this data. So, we do work with non for profits as well. So, a relationship Australia Queensland and we do look after about half a dozen of their websites. So, that's the latest addition that was built during the coronavirus and it's actually interesting to see how government projects are different from NGO and what sort of requirements are there. So, we do work with NGO. Another great migration project is masdabriswin.com. So, the challenge was here, they have about like tens and thousands of images to migrate and that was at the time we were doing the original migration when the media library, Drupal Media Library wasn't ready yet. So, but was almost there like a AAA.5.4. So, it was an interesting way to find a solution and make sure it actually will be used and would be supported when we are actually yeah, release it and when the media manager is up. So, we work with some government organization like a AAA.C. and helping them to migrate their websites to Drupal 8 and 9, but also helping them with integrations like Dynamics 365, this particular one. So, build couple in-house applications. This one is interesting because it tightly integrates with Salesforce and it's a quite a significant application we migrate hundreds of fields between Salesforce. Like Salesforce in this case is a single source of truth. So, we don't have to do like a bi-directional syncing yet, but it's a quite a large system and actually shows how Drupal can with health quite a lot of traffic and also large, large data structures I'm talking about a couple of hundreds fields on content types. So, that was a few projects we'll build in the last couple of years. So, now I'll talk a bit more about community and what we do for a community. So, during the COVID, we had a bit of a break mid last year and we were contacted by David from Alianza Del Mor. He's Australian guy who is now living in Peru and you can read about the response project that we helped build on Drupal.org and Pantheon as well. So, there was like an interesting collaboration to actually help distribute food and this project is quite interesting because we were actually building the software as they were trying to distribute large amount of food as you can see by the numbers on the screen. So, that some, yeah, really put different perspective of how you can build, you know, Drupal websites but actually people the next day would be using it for very, very challenging and tasks and that was during the pandemic as well. So, we do organize quite a few events including training and the meetups. So, and the contribution we can as well. So, we're running it for a few years now in Brisbane, town of Brisbane. So, yeah, and trying to sync it with a global contribution weekend which is on every January. So, I think it's third year in a row, we're running it down in Brisbane. Luckily, all the spaces are now open so we can continue actually meet face to face and help people out like Drupal Brisbane meetup is another thing we've been looking after and actually sponsoring for the last couple of years.  So, if you're in Brisbane, feel free to pop in or we're still doing them virtually so you can jump online and help that. We did organize a few Drupal campfire and base. The last one was 2019 and we're pretty much single driving force behind the Drupal campfire and base for obvious reasons last year was canceled. So, at the moment we are looking if we should organize one or more Drupal camps this year. So, we actually had a few locations. We decided to stay for obvious reasons closer to state at least. So, there is a Brisbane, Bundaberg or maybe going back to Byron Bay towards the end of the year where if borders are open or we have a bubble maybe if you interstate or people from New Zealand can join us. But again, this is, but in case and if anyone interested to co-organize it as well I would be happy to hear from people. Training, we organize a few trainings for a number of years now trying to sync it with the Drupal Global Training Day or doing them absolutely for free. This year we're trying something different. I actually started, as I mentioned before we have big supporter and working with Gitlabs organized Drupal and Gitlabs here. So, doing a bit of a CI. So, we already ran one workshop in February. It was online and next one is coming on the 1st of April. So, you can go and register on the Madelophon Studio website. You can also find details on Brisbane Drupal Meetup page. And this is just a two and a half hour workshop on how to start working with a Gitlabs CI but and just making sure so the first workshop was about how to run proper CI and checks and LinkedIn. And this one would be about writing and running Drupal unit tests inside your CI. But throughout the last couple of years we organized workshop on building various websites from beginner basic kind of internet or furniture shop to acquire them intermediate and advanced level websites using views, web forms and so on and so forth. So, I just keep making myself try to find a different topic or just react to the response we had from people. This year we already had one request to actually try to organize something like a Drupal and a search engine optimization, SEO. So that might be coming in June or later in the year like September. Again, they're all free and I'll try to make them available online unless we have a quite significant response in Brisbane they'll just do it face to face workshop here but they are synced with Drupal Global Training Days which you can find on Drupal Global Training Days page on Drupal.org. Now a bit about our contributions. So we obviously do look after a few things in modules. Probably my pride and joy is a booster for very clean kind of non-prescriptive theme. We should include booster for libraries and we've seen quite a significant uptake. So it's going to 4,000 plus usages and this is just the theme that a couple of people looked after and yeah, it's been quite an interesting journey to actually get and build theme from scratch in a few years and see where it's heading. So there is obviously a, I think if you're in Drupal business you probably saw there's a bit of a kind of split in them at the moment no one actually invest in the themes. Everyone's just trying to go grab some sort of a react view, angle a beast and do something there or try to do a decouple. Whereas I think the theming layer was neglected for a few years now and this is more of our response to how to do a theme. I know there are big changes coming to a theme builder in Drupal 10 as well, which is I'm following and that's a great work but just having a good bootstrap-based theme where you have a lot of elements already styled. It's also great idea. Also there are new themes in core as well which are great for quick prototyping projects. So as I said, the uptake of the theme was quite interesting journey and we also introduced for one of the clients we introduced Drupal 7 theme because they requested it using bootstrap 4 and now without even the stable release there are already almost a hundred sites using it. The next step in the evolution of themes is a bootstrap 5. So this is, yeah, if you don't follow bootstrap development either two was released they dropped a few things including jQuery support. So it's, yeah, all in one kind of library which you are happy to just create a new theme for with thought and deliberated about it would be a good idea to maybe include it in bootstrap 4 but then with so was following the update from bootstrap 3 to bootstrap 4 and it was quite a significant change so we decided probably a good idea to keep them separate rather than try to cater for two different frameworks. So we did build a few Drupal 9 modules I guess two of them that I quite use this paragraph admins that actually allows you to go and delete or check your paragraphs as a separate entity. And another one that I really enjoyed building it's a CK editor spell check as you type. If you did multi-browser testing you've probably seen that some browsers especially for CK editor, they don't highlight errors and stuff like that. So this plugin for CK editor actually allows you to do that and we just build an integration for that. Late last year a few of our clients obviously start getting updates to Drupal 9 so and a lot of modules were outdated or just the contributors either left or had something better to do. So there were a lot of Drupal 8 modules which required either minimal or for some or quite a significant reworking done to be actually compatible with Drupal 9. So throughout the last year we did maybe a good dozen of modules that also migrated into Drupal 9. And there are quite a few integrations there that we helped to move over to Drupal 9 including HubSpot, which is CRM and couple of mail clients like MailChimp and Campaign Monitoring and looking after them. And this year a few clients who are actually still running Drupal 7 update realized that a lot of Drupal 7 modules actually no longer supported by PHP 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4 so any of the latest versions. So there's a lot of modules for Drupal 7 had about a couple of thousand users at the moment but they're not compatible with the latest secure versions of PHP. So we actually jump and help to move and this work is still going to help update couple of Drupal 7 modules because Drupal 7 due to COVID is updated until support for Drupal 7 is on until November 2022. We, yeah, it just makes sense to update a lot of Drupal 7 modules considering a lot of them hasn't been updated for five, six, seven and more years. So a bit about support. We are Drupal Association Organizational Parther and we're trying to get all our developers to be a Drupal Association member. We loving for people to actually go and help support Drupal Association any means possible. We also became a monthly donor to web form module for Drupal on Open Collective. I talk about it all the time and Drupal Brisbane made up. So if your company's using forms you probably know how precious and how important this project is for Drupal future. So I would kind of recommend you to again, go and support them any which way you want, especially if your company is using the making money or using the forms. So we are a partner of few companies. So actually last year we went and actually 2019 we became Google Cloud partner. And we are, yep, Google Cloud partner. So I have a couple of Google Cloud architects. And we're also working closely with Platform SH as a partner, although we do support clients on all major three, Acvia, Pantheon. But Platform is our go-to platform as a company. So what future holds for us? So we are working on a few events. As I mentioned before, maybe camps, definitely monthly meetups, trying to get that going, especially for people remote training, contribution sprints, maybe thinking of monthly or by monthly some sort of mentoring program. Luckily we can do that in Brisbane face-to-face. So we just started the partnership. So we got the first apprentice and trying to up skill them and see all the challenges that it brings. Hopefully it will eventually into something like a blog or a talk, but it's interesting to see we are working with Dave Brisbane and trying to source some of the talent there and see what sort of gaps are there between just graduating from college or uni and actually being a software developer on a large triple project. So that's been taking quite a significant number of time and we're working on a couple of products as well. So they're probably gonna be services, triple based, but yeah, at the moment we had a few kind of playgrounds here and there. So hopefully this year that's what we're gonna concentrate on apart from all the ongoing triple work.