For the longest time, all the scientists thought that our DNA cannot change.  And no matter what you do, you're going to grow or you're going to develop into whatever that blueprint is. Now all scientists know that that's not true. We can actually change the way our DNA expresses itself. We basically crack the code on how to communicate with yourselves. We crack the code on how to communicate with your DNA using electromagnetic signals. And we figured out which code does what.


Hello, once more, FlameCommunity. My name is Jeff Kyle and this is Part 3, the final video of the 3-part tutorial covering my take on the Connected Conform workflow. By now, we've wrapped our heads around what it is, taking a pretty detailed look at many of the features surrounding the Connected Conform, and then we went into the specifics of exactly how I use it and what it looks like to set it up and get it going. For Part 2, I thought it would be pretty disruptive to interrupt the main tutorial video with tangents about some very specific details. I wanted to try to make that tutorial as clear and straightforward as possible, but I would feel like the series as a whole would be pretty incomplete if I didn't mention some of these glaring gotchas that I've run into. Maybe they're self-evident based on the lessons that we've covered so far, but if not, just to be safe, welcome to Part 3, where I go through a handful of tips that I think will be very valuable to keep in mind as you take on your own Connected Conform job. The first subject we'll go over is updating a sources sequence. If you watched the first video, we covered what it means to update a source sequence via the Update Source Sequence button. You bring in your new conform, put it in the Sequences Reel, and when you hit Update, Flame analyzes all of the sequences, shows you what's changed, and gives you a brand new source sequence. In some circumstances, this isn't a problem, but if you're using the Connected Conform the way that I've gone over it, then depending on what stage of the job you're on, you can easily run into some setbacks. If you take a look at what happens when you use the Update Source Sequence button, you'll see your connections are gone, the clips' versions are no longer stacked in a way that represents the version that you've set up, and the colors are all gone. You can take some time to go through the source sequence and fix it, getting it back to the way it used to be, but how easy that is really depends on the specifics of the job. Some jobs it's not too bad, other jobs it's just a complete nightmare. I'll show you how I've managed to find a way to work around this. Here's the scenario. You're using the Connected Conform, and you've already set things up. You have some compositing work completed like I have here, a source of sequence, several conforms. Now, there's a new cut in question, and we need to work it into our existing Connected Conform infrastructure. As with a few workflows we've gone over, I have two pathways for us, depending on how many new spots and new shots we're working on. This first one has to do with a simple scenario. If you have one new spot, not a whole lot of new shots, afterwards we'll go over a little bit more of an advanced pathway that's better suited if you have a whole lot of new spots and a bunch of shots. But for now, for the simple scenario, once you bring in the EDL of the new spot, before you've even started conforming, you'd want to match out all of the footage from your source of sequence onto your desktop. When you match out footage that has connections on it, those connections remain intact through the match. What this means is that when you set your search location to that location on your desktop and conform your spots using the matched out footage, the new spot will have all of the connections that you already set up. This works perfectly for shots that exist in both the old spots and the new spot. But the big curve ball would be shots that only exist in the new spot, shots that haven't yet been imported. So to handle that, first I would mark those new shots that you haven't yet linked with a color, so they're easy to see, which will make a lot of sense in a minute. Then you can link them to the footage on the sand. Once the footage is in, you would conform the spot to make sure everything matches. In my case, I know it matches because I'm the one who edited it, but for you, once you're feeling good about the conform, since there aren't a whole lot of new shots, you can select all of the new shots, match them out to the desktop, and at this point you can get rid of the footage you used to conform earlier, and manually place those shots at the end of your source of sequence. All that's left now are some of the same steps that we've already taken to select the clips in the source of sequence. Create a source segment connection, which connects it from here in the source of sequence to the spot that they're used. Take the existing naming convention that you've set up for the shot names from an earlier shot, and apply it to these three at the end, and then go to the conform tab and use the create batch group to create your batch groups if these are shots you're going to be working on. And that's it for the simple workflow. If there are a lot of new shots or a lot of new spots, anything more than just a few, then we would take door number two, the more advanced route. Let's go back to the scenario we were just looking at. We have our EDLs we've imported, but in this case, let's say there's four new spots instead of just one, which makes it so manually figuring out the longest durations of all the new shots is not something you can just know without doing some digging. So first I'll just make sure that everything is backed up into the library. And then, same as before, I'll match out all the sources in the source sequence to the desktop. I'll open up these four new conforms and set that desktop location as my search location for the conform. Now you link your new cuts to the existing footage just like we did before. I can pop into each of the cuts and just link them one by one. But if I wanted to be a little fancier and this is very relevant to what we'll be doing next in just a moment, I could create a quick temporary source sequence that we're creating just for the purpose of getting that new footage into our cuts. With this new source of sequence, all of the unlinked footage is in one sequence where we can easily link all of the existing footage at once. Make sure this handy keep clip name checkbox is checked so that the names of your clips are correct and then link your footage. Now, all of the old sources from my existing cuts are placed into my new cuts with their connections intact. The only thing missing is that when we link footage like this, the color doesn't get transferred over, as you can see by looking at this new cut. This is a completed composite shot, but it isn't marked red. The quick fix for this is to go back into our original source of sequence, select all of that color with the search magnifying glass and just reapply the color, which sends it to all of the sequences again because everything is already connected. But we still have the issue of the new shots that are not yet linked. The first step here is to select all of my unlinked clips in the newly created source of sequence. And I can do that with the nice search magnifying glass feature here and select my unlinked clips and then set them to a color, let's say bright green. Now, I'll link this new footage to the footage on my sand since I haven't worked with it yet. Conform tab, I'll set my search location. I will navigate to the media folder. I will link the footage. And there we go. Once you're linked, I would say the next step is to go back to your cuts, all four of them in this case, and complete your conform. Make sure that they match your reference. This is more of a personal experience thing. In my scenario, since I am the editor, of course I wouldn't have any issues, but I think it's always safe to ensure your cuts match your reference after you've linked them, just in case your EDL didn't have the right time warps or something wasn't matching by default. I'm going to call this sequence the newly created source of sequence, sources sequence temp, just so we can keep track of it. To do a quick recap and just to set the stage here, we have our nine original cuts with their existing connected conform infrastructure connected to the original source of sequence with all of the connections and organization nicely set up. We have our four cuts that we just finished conforming and all of the existing shots with their connections to the nine original spots and the original source of sequence intact due to how we conformed the new spots. We matched out the existing shots and conformed using that existing already connected footage. But the new shots that weren't with us before have no connections whatsoever. We have our new source of sequence temp that currently has no connections, but it does have the new shots. Our goal here is to get these new shots connected with the new spots and to merge everything back to that original source of sequence so it's all in one place and it's all nice and organized. In my mind, the whole purpose of this new temporary source of sequence temp is really just to manage these new clips. So to make things a little clearer, let's delete everything but the new clips in this new source of sequence. I'll select just the green clips, move them to their own track and just delete the others and close the gap. Now that we've taken the time to conform these new cuts and match them against our reference, if we ran into any scenario where we had to modify the time warp of a shot or slip a shot at all, then we actually have to make another source of sequence. It sounds a little crazy, but if you think about it, you'll realize that the source of sequence temp was generated based on how the EDL was brought in, regardless of whether it was right or wrong relative to the reference picture. Now that we've fixed the sequences, those changes aren't reflected in the source of sequence temp, so we need to make a new source of sequence that does reflect those changes. But we're about to run into two more problems. One, making a new source of sequence forces us to replace our source of sequence temp, and two, since it's a new source of sequence, it comes in with no colors, so we won't have a great way of differentiating the new shots from the old shots. So we have to break the special connection that Flame has with this source of sequence temp by duplicating it. Now we can create a new source of sequence, and it's one that more accurately represents the handles used by the shots in the new cuts. To fix the colors, head back to source of sequence temp that we duplicated and preserved, and select all of the new shots, the green shots, and create some source segment connections to get them connected to that newly created source of sequence. Set it to green, and now you're back in action. With this all set up, we're ready to put this back into our original source of sequence, either by deleting all of the other media in this new source of sequence, and dropping the whole source of sequence into the old one, or just to do a quick copy and paste to get it from one sequence to the other. Either way gives us the same result, and it keeps the connections intact. Now it's just the matter of clean up. Clean up the desktop, get rid of any matched clips from earlier, and get rid of any extra source of sequence that we don't need anymore. You can change the green color back to normal, or you can keep the green color if you want. But other than that, we've successfully updated the source of sequence. The last few steps are just steps we've already gotten over before, which are to make sure that your shot names are set for the new clips, and then if we're doing compositing work on them, we can just select them, create batch group, and we're good to go. The next scenario we'll talk about is how to split one shot into multiple shots. We touched on this briefly when we talked about checking your source of sequence in the second video, but occasionally, you might run into a case where you have a relatively long shot, and one section is used in one spot, and another section is used in another spot, but that middle section is filled with a whole bunch of unused frames. When the source of sequence sees this scenario, it tries to do you a favor by consolidating it into one shot, but depending on how much empty space is in that middle area, it could be more trouble than it's worth to do those extra frames. Using a shot sequence could work in some scenarios, but for the same reason, I'm reluctant to use the shot sequence in general. For instance, if the time warps just aren't set up right, then that wouldn't work either. I think the right move here is to take that long shot and manually split it up into however many shots you need yourself, using a few tricks that I'll share with you now. In this scenario, we're at the stage of our workflow where we've finished conforming our spots, and we've just made our source of sequence. We were in the process of taking a quick look at our source of sequence to check it, and we noticed that this shot here is abnormally long. If we dig a little deeper and we poke around at our sources for this shot, we can start to see the full picture, and that is that multiple sections of the shot are used in multiple spots. But it's a little difficult to wrap our heads around the specifics of where and how they're used when we're just looking at the time code and the handle count, especially when time warps really mess with the handles. You'd have to do some crazy math to know for sure. Maybe a smarter person than me can figure it out, but the solution I've come up with here is to give myself something of a diagram that helps me visualize exactly where the shot is used. I very distinctly remember one job in particular where one 30-second shot was used something like 15 times, and I really needed to map it out in order to see where to split it up. In the end, even though it was used 15 times, there was so much overlap that I really only needed to split it up into two composite shots to cover the range of the frames that I needed. In this example here with our car commercial, it looks like we have a shot that's used nine times, but if we look a little closer, we can see that we have a 16-9, a one-by-one, and nine-by-16 spots in question, and if I flip between them, we can see that the shots are only different between the 30, the 15, and the six, so realistically, we're only dealing with three shots here. The first step in this visualization process is to match out the full-length shot from our source of sequence. Since the source of sequence is smart enough to know the full range of frames that we use in our cuts, we can be sure that one of the shots starts at the beginning, and another one of those shots ends at the end. I think it would make our lives a little easier if we set our match settings to preserve handles, and then we'll match out the long shot to our desktop. I'll just add the word split to the end of this sequence so that I know exactly what it is. Now, it's time to find that same shot in the other spots. I have it all queued up here to save some time, but once again, flipping through the 16-9, the one-by-one, and the nine-by-16 of the 30, I can see that they all use the same handles, so I can confidently say that this is just one shot here, so I'll match that out with the handles preserved. What's really cool and really important to note is that when you match out a shot that has a time warp on it like this one, flame makes sure the range of frames that it gives you is covered by the time warp, which is really key for what we're doing. I'll label this shot just with a 30 so we can keep track of it for later. After I drop it into the split sequence and just take a look at the head handles, I can see very clearly that it should be placed right at the beginning of the sequence here. Now, I'll go find the 15 shot, which is right here, and I'll match that one out, and I'll call this one 15. I'll drop this one into our split sequence and for this one, it's definitely not at the beginning of the shot, but I can make sure my field here is set to time code instead of frames with my control alt T shortcut and my flame hotkeys, and compare my sequences time code to the sources time code of the selected clip, which tells me that I should navigate to 16.02 and drop this shot right here. So now we are two thirds of the way there and we can start to see that these two shots are overlapping and we're definitely gonna wanna combine them. The last shot to grab is the six second spot, so I'll pop over there, match it out, name it 06 and drop it into the split sequence. I'll take a look at that source time code, which tells me to jump to 31.10. And there we go. It's looking like that's a pretty big gap in the middle there, just like we thought. If we just worked on this 25 second shot by itself, there would be a lot of unused frames right in the middle. Now, in a real world scenario, of course, we would take a good look at the shot and determine whether it's better to split it up or to leave it alone. Because if it was like a locked off shot, then we might consider just doing the long version instead of just doing it twice. But regardless of the answer to that question, let's say in this scenario, we've concluded that we do wanna split the shot up. So here's how we do it. Our goal here is to get one instance of the shot placed into the 30 and 15 and another instance of the shot placed into the six. You can do this manually, but what you have to be extra careful about is the fact that when you create a source of sequence again, which you would want to do since if you remember back, our current source of sequence has that shot in its incredibly long state. If any of your shots still have all of their handles, then even if you've severed the behind the scenes clips, the way Flame works is it re-associates those connections to try to help you. But in this case, it wouldn't be helping us. So we just have to make sure that we set this up in a way that will work when we create that source of sequence again. The key to all of this is that little fact that consolidating handles duplicates your behind the scenes source. So in that case, it would be serving two purposes and fits perfectly into what we would like to achieve here. So the first step is to make some cut points in this split sequence to separate out the shots that we'd like to use. And then I'll consolidate the handles based on the amount of handles I would plan to work with in batch. Let's say we're working with 10. So I'll set that to 10. I'll head to the second shot and do the same thing, make my cut points and consolidate those handles to 10. Now I can match these two shots out to the desktop so we can put them into our cuts. I'll do them one at a time and label them accordingly just so I can keep track of them. Now we need to create a source segment connection with the shot in question so that it gets connected with itself in all of the sequences. But what we do next is something we haven't done before, which I think is very cool. Once our connections are made, we're going to split off all of the spots that are going to get this first shot. So that's just the 30s and the 15s. So I'll take all six of them and put them into this reel here outside of the main sequences reel. And now I'm going to perform a duplicate connected segment but with settings that are different than what we use when we version clips. I'll change the scope to current reel so that only these six sequences are affected. And then I'll change the connection type to replace on current segments. What this does is make it so this shot is now connected to all of the other instances of it in the 30 and the 15, but only in the 30 and the 15. The six second spots are totally left alone. So now when I open one of these sequences and perform a replace media operation on this shot and the shot I've marked as 30 and 15 in the reel here, that shot that's been cut to the proper length with the correct number of handles is placed in all of the spots in this reel. So all that's left is to do the same thing to the six. Since we've connected the 30s and the 15s, the sixes are already connected from before so we don't need to do a duplicate connected segment. All that's left is to get the six second version from the shot we've trimmed, match it out to the desktop, rename it to stay organized, and then get it back into the cuts. I'll open up one of the six second versions, click on the clip in question in the timeline, click on that clip in the desktop and replace media. Now that this is all set up and we don't have any overlapping handles, I can create and overwrite the sources sequence. And what we find if we look at the sources sequence is that we have our shot properly split into two and we're all ready to go. One of them is named 3015, the other one is named six, and they are the correct length for their appropriate spot. The last little real world variable I have for us is how to bake in a time warp for a shot while still using the connected conform. The scenario here is pretty much the same as what we just went over for splitting shots. We have our conform spots and we've just made our sources sequence. We were going through the sources sequence checking it when we found one shot that was longer than all the others. In this case, after some inspection, we can see that there's just an incredibly significant time warp on that shot. It's a full 1000%. With that in mind, our options here are to either work on all 27 seconds of that shot or work on the shot after the time warp has been applied, bringing it down to a nice two and a half seconds. I think in this particular case, it's hard to imagine that we would work on that 10 times longer shot. So at this point, maybe we would have a conversation with the producer, with your client, with the editor if possible and see if there's any good reason not to work on the time warp version. If you get the green light, then we can get to work. The first step is just to see what you're working with. All of my shots have a 1000% time warp on it, but the durations aren't the same. The very handy jump to shared source segment can show us that it's the longest in the 30 second spots, shorter in the 15s, and the duration is shortest in the six second spots. We're going to want to base everything off of the longest duration shots. So I'll jump to one of the 30s. This would be a lot more complicated if we had different shots that use different sections of the shot. If we were worried about this, we could use some of the things we went over in the previous section where we split that one shot into multiple shots and we could map out and visualize every instance of our time warp shots into one sequence so we can just see how they're split up. For this example, we don't have to do that, but just know that that's an option too, if you need to. So here we are in the 30 and we're going to look at our time warp. Our goal here is to get a flattened version of this shot with the time warp baked in. We have to be careful though, because if we were to just drag this clip from the timeline to the desktop, we won't be working off the source resolution of the clip. Since when you drag it instead of matching it, it keeps the timeline effects resized based on the timeline's resolution. We want to be sure that we're working off the source resolution when we bake in the time warp. It just so happens in my particular scenario, my source footage is HD and my timeline is HD, but that's just me in this tutorial world. You might have sources that are larger than HD in your examples. And when it comes to matching, just as a note, I'm preserving handles just like we did in our previous example because I think that makes this a little simpler. So once that shot is matched out, we would want to head back to the 30 second spot and save the time warp as a setup. I've had much greater success saving the time warp rather than dragging it or copy and pasting it. Feel free to name it anything, I'll name mine A. Next we go to the shot that we matched out, add a time warp timeline effects, open it up and load the saved time warp. Now our source resolution shot has the time warp applied, but Flame doesn't know how long the clip should be, so we have to just do some trimming. I'll peek back in the spot in question and see how long the shot's supposed to be. Looks like 68 frames is the number, so I'm just gonna keep an eye on that frame count for the clip I'm working on on my desktop until it hits 68 and then I'm good. Next I'm just gonna do a sanity check to make sure nothing's gone wrong so far. The last thing you wanna do is be much further along and realize something's gone wrong. So I'll just drag the shot I've been working on back into the 30 and just double check that everything matches. It looks like it does, so I think I'm ready to bake it in. I'll go back to the sequence I've been working with, right click on it and commit the timeline effects. This preserves the handles but bakes in the time warp. Now we have to make a decision. We can either overwrite the existing shot or we can preserve that original shot and its time warp just in case we have to consult it or go back to it. I'm a fan of keeping it intact, but that's definitely something you can conclude yourself and choose to go whichever route that makes sense to you. Since we're preserving it, I'll just quickly make a source segment connection here to connect all of these clips and then duplicate the connected segment in all sequence reels, duplicate segments and set it to below. Now that we're duplicated, I can open one of these sequences, click on our baked in time warp shot on the desktop, click on the clip that I just duplicated and replace media. The shot with its baked in time warp is sent to all of the sequences. The only catch here is that in the different sequences there was already that time warp that was applied to the clip. So now you do have to go into each of the sequences and remove that time warp yourself. If you don't have different aspect ratio versions and there isn't any resizing going on that you've modified, you could sync them, but in my case I do happen to have different aspect ratios so I'll go in and just get rid of the time warp in each of my cuts. It's just a simple matter of alt clicking on it and since we just replaced it in all of these cuts, Flame has jumped right to the shot in question for me so it's pretty convenient. Now it's the simple matter of checking our work, making sure that everything looks correct in all the shots. In my case it's looking pretty good across all these shots. So now just to make sure everything is good in my source of sequence, I'll just remake that source of sequence and overwrite it and take a look at what we got. Since we decided to duplicate it, I should have two versions of that time warp shot in our source of sequence, one with the baked in time warp and one that's the original. To organize this source of sequence, I'll just add the time warp again. I can add a time warp timeline effects, load the time warp in question, drop it underneath the baked in time warp version and trim it to length. Now I've fixed my source of sequence and we have a baked in time warp shot in all of my cuts. And that's it for my section on real world variables for the connected conform. I really do hope it made sense and I sure hope you're able to make it work for you. If you'd like to chat about anything we went over here, maybe if it wasn't clear or if you wanna show me a better way to do some of this stuff, I would love to chat. You can find me on the logic forums over at forum.logic.tv or on the logic discord that I'll link in the description below. As you can maybe tell by now, I'm a big fan of the connected conform workflow in general. I find it to be a lot of fun and a big time saver. So really, any questions or comments or if you feel the same way, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, thanks a bunch for watching.


Good afternoon everyone, thank you so much for coming to this panel, I'm very honored of being part of, so the paper that I'm going to present today is entitled Rebel Governance during COVID-19 describing and explaining armed groups responses to the pandemic in the Middle East. So as COVID over the past two years has been spreading worldwide, not only governments but also armed groups and especially those armed groups that control territories and the population living in those territories have inevitably been called to address this crisis. However, still very little is known when it comes to how these armed groups have been dealing with the crisis and this was before I went through the presentation of Siobhan. And this lack of knowledge actually inserts itself into a broader gap because in the literature on Rebel Governance, despite we know a lot thanks to the work of many of the people here in this room also about how armed groups have been providing governance, there is a kind of a gap when it comes to how external shocks that are not related to the conflict dynamics in which these armed groups are part of. We do not know exactly how, thank you so much, how these external shocks affect the kind of decisions, the preferences and the strategic choices that armed groups make as providers of governance. And in fact over the past two years while we've been reading a lot of studies about states and governments responses to COVID-19, we have a comparatively less deep knowledge when it comes to armed groups responses. So my research aims in this paper were to first describe the different responses that different armed groups have been providing to address COVID-19 looking specifically at the Middle Eastern region that over the past decade has been a laboratory of Rebel Governance. And the second step proceed to explain why armed groups have responded to the pandemic as they have. And from this point of view, COVID was an opportunity to really look at how different groups respond to the same emergency because previous studies could only look at our groups in a specific context were dealing with emergencies occurring in that specific geographical context. For instance a tsunami or a mine, while COVID really gave us the opportunity of adopting a global approach and outlook. So this is the academic relevance that I believe the study has, but it also has a more practical relevance and I became increasingly aware of this working for the past year as consultant on Syrian Yemen for an NGO that is trying to bring humanitarian aid in areas under the control of armed groups. Because understanding how violent news detectors address the COVID-19 pandemic and potentially other emergencies can inform our approaches to dealing with violent news detectors and approaches to intervene more successfully with realistic approaches and strategies to provide humanitarian assistance to the civilians that live in these territories under the control of armed groups outside the control of governments. So when it comes to the descriptive side of my work, I built this very simple but I hope clear COVID-19 governance response continuum that goes from null to extensive. By null I refer to a situation in which the armed group takes no action to address the crisis for instance denying the presence of the virus in its territories or engages in disinformation for instance conspiracy theories. Minimal response means that the armed group engages in preventive measures for instance instructing the population on how to behave to prevent the spread of the virus, but nothing more than this. Intermediate means that besides engaging in these preventive measures, the armed group also engaged in proactive joint measures, joint for instance cooperating with foreign governments or humanitarian organizations to distribute vaccines to make an example. While on the other end of the continuum we have extensive responses that means that not only we have preventive measures, proactive joint measures, but also proactive independent measures. So the armed group has the willingness and the capacity to engage in proactive responses independently for instance providing training to the medical personnel. While proceeding to the explanatory effort of my work, referring to the literature on rebel governance and armed groups behavior, I identified four factors that might help us to identify the reasons why some groups might be on one point along the continuum and others on another point. So ultimate goals I assume that secessionist and ethronationalist armed groups are more likely to engage in emergency governance because they need to prove their governance credibility in the case of secessionist groups to the international community, in the case of ethronationalist group to the specific ethronationalist constituency that they are aspiring to represent and to govern upon. While non secessionist and non ethronationalist armed groups are less likely to invest in emergency governance because they are more free from this need of proving their governance credentials in the eyes of the international community, excuse me, or internal domestic constituency. Financial resources, so I assume that armed groups who depend on civilians to access financial resources, for instance through tax stations, are more likely incentivized in times of emergency to provide governance because they need the population to be alive first of all, healthy and economically productive. While armed groups that are not dependent on the civilian population to access financial resources for instance because they have the support of an external patron will have a less incentive to invest in emergency governance because their financial survival is not dependent on the well-being of the population. Thirdly, conflict in intensity, so armed groups engaged in high intensity conflicts, I assume are likely to divert resources from the military battlefront where their priorities are towards governance even in times of emergency, while armed groups engaged in low intensity conflicts are more likely to engage in emergency governance because they can allow themselves to redirect resources from the military effort to the governance effort, especially in times of crisis. Governance experience, finally, armed groups with poor governance experience, especially in the specific field that is affected by the external shock, in this case, health governance are likely to lack the capacity to offer a governance response to the emergency. While armed groups that have a significant governance experience or at least intermediate have the know-how, the manpower, the facilities to address the crisis. I, to conduct my study, I looked into Hayatari Rasham in Northwest Syria, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis or Ansarallah in Yemen. I selected them because they are engaged in some form of at least minimal governance. They, from my preliminary reading of the data, so that they engage in different responses to COVID-19 and they displace some differences with respect to these explanatory factors that we were just looking at. And to collect my data, I looked at the materials that the armed groups themselves publish that are videos, images, newsletters, reports and that are available online and that are in Arabic mostly, but also in English. And then secondary literature, so journalistic articles and reports by humanitarian organizations on the ground. I will not go deep into the case studies, but for instance, it's interesting to see how Hayatari Rasham from the very beginning instructed civilians on how to behave, for instance, wash hands. It cooperated with the humanitarian organizations to bring vaccines into Northwest Syria and the interactive systematic medical checks on people coming from Turkey to Northwest Syria. The Houthis, on the other hand, engaged in a disinformation campaign from the early days. They accused the United States and Israel of having fabricated the virus purposely. They intimidated journalists preventing them from spreading information and they even recruited youths saying that the only way for them not to contract the virus was to fight alongside the Houthis. While Hamas engaged in an extensive response, as we will see, because it closed public's places, it enforced a general lockdown in Gaza, it prohibited large gatherings and open quarantine centers and provided training to medical personnel in Gaza. So going back to the continuum that we saw before, I called the Houthis as providing a new governance response to COVID. Hayatari Rasham, an intermediate response, possibly leaning towards extensive and Hamas as providing an extensive response. And proceeding to see which of the factors that we discussed before can really help us in illuminating this picture better, I find that armed groups that depend on international recognition to reach their ultimate goal, and this is the case of Hamas and Hayatari Rasham, have an interest and incentive in providing governance in times of emergency. While a group such as the Houthi that is uninterested in international recognition, thanks to its military upper hand in the war in Yemen, is not incentivized to provide this kind of emergency governance and invest resources even in times of emergency. Secondly, armed groups that depend on civilians to access financial resources such as Hamas and Hayatari Rasham that derive most of their finances from the taxation of the population, are incentivized in investing in governance in times of emergency. While the Houthis, a group such as the Houthis that derives its financial resources from other means, for instance expropriations or the version of humanitarian aid and sold on the black market, does not have the same incentive to invest in emergency governance. When it comes to the conflict intensity, I find that armed groups engage in low intensity conflicts such as Hamas, simple to invest resources. However, what was my expectation when it comes to high intensity conflicts was not confirmed because in the case of Hayatari Rasham the group is engaged in a high intensity conflict against the Syrian regime and the Russian allies, but nonetheless it found it convenient in its interest to invest some of its resources in governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. And finally, armed groups with a poor governance experience, and this is the case of the Houthis, do not seem capable of engaging in extensive governance responses in times of crisis while armed groups with some degree of governance experience such as Hayatari Rasham and even more so Hamas have a greater capacity when it comes to facilities and personnel and know how to address the emergency. And here I put these observations in this table that I hope can be the beginning for having a clearer picture than we have now of how armed groups behave when a sudden emergency comes and they are left to deal with it. I thank you for your attention and I'm looking forward to the discussion.


As I'm sure many others would say, I love Lana Del Rey. She may even be my favorite female artist of the time. I loved her from when she first broke out into Hollywood and I never get sick of listening to her songs, ever. Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant in 1985, the star is 34 at the time of this recording and obviously she goes by Lana these days. Critics have been harsh to Lana in the past and at times she was accused of being a fake that she couldn't sing, you name it, they said it. People also said her father was a millionaire and that's why she's successful when in reality she lived in a New Jersey trailer park at one point. Lana definitely achieved fame by her own means. These days Lana is finally getting recognized for her talent and all of the albums she puts out are amazing, at least to me. Lana is a singer, songwriter, poet, model and even music video director and she has 15 million followers on Instagram at the moment. Lana has created a one-of-a-kind image that feels like a mix of 1960s glamour and tragedy and what she even called a gangster Nancy Sinatra. Although we could go on and on about Lana and all of the reasons why she's so different and amazing, that's not what we're gonna be doing today. Today it's all about her real estate and let me tell you, the woman isn't living in a New Jersey trailer anymore. Lana's net worth these days is estimated between 14 to 18 million, which is definitely not modest and of course with that kind of money, the star lives in a pretty impressive estate. Lana's main mansion is actually two separate properties combined but I'll show you guys in a little bit and it's not the only house the star owns either. Hey guys it's Kara and today we're doing another house tour here on Famous Entertainment. We're gonna look at where Lana Del Rey calls home including her main double Hollywood estate, her gorgeous cabin, as well as the house she used to live. If you like these videos make sure you're subscribed and ring that bell to be notified when we post so you can always be up to date. We've also done house tours on the likes of Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande and we'll have links to those at the end of this. I've also been reading all your comments and I'm gonna be responding to some at the end of this video. I need you to let me know who to do next in the comments down below and whose home you'd like to see. Now let's get into this video. Let's first see where Lana used to live. Back in 2015 the star was looking for some serious privacy and she opted for a beach front home. Located on last tuna's beach in Malibu, Lana paid around 3 million for this place. The home was surrounded by water, rocks and no neighbors so it really helped her get this secluded feeling she wanted. This place was over 2,600 square feet and had three beds and four baths. There was also a really big covered patio that had beach views for days, perfect for Lana considering she said she's happiest when she's going to the ocean. As you can see from photos, the place looked pretty basic when it was purchased but Lana apparently did a whole remodel while she lived there. Not surprising because those before photos gave me total time share vibes. I couldn't picture Lana living there, that's for sure. Although Lana probably got enough privacy in this Malibu spot, she moved on from it and sold it on the down low last year. Since then, she's upgraded. Before we get into Lana's main estate or estates I should say, let's see her cabin in Echo Park. The area of Echo Park is in central LA and not surprisingly surrounds the Echo Park Lake. People also say it's a bit of a hipster spot. Although her cabin may look a bit vintage from the outside, once you go inside it's a different story. Lana apparently spent 1.2 mil on the bungalow style cabin which was built way back in 1911 but since it's been renovated and redecorated, obviously. It was actually revamped and sold to Lana by Leanne Ford who is a host on an HGTV show. There are two beds in one bath which is definitely on the smaller side but I'm sure she has enough space in her main mansion to be cool with that. In the living room area there's a modern wood stove that's been placed inside the old fireplace and the ceiling has exposed wood beams. Looking at this room in the kitchen there's actually a lot of light which I wouldn't have guessed from the outside of the home. The design in Lana's cabin has a theme that's mostly white which also brightens everything up. The master bedroom is no different. There's a sitting area as well here which leads you to outside, complete with a wrap around porch. Time to look at Lana's main estate. In 2016 the star purchased two separate houses on neighboring lots in the Hollywood Hills which is where she calls home now. Purchasing two houses side by side seems like something celebrities like to do. You know like Kylie Jenner and Katy Perry for example? Lana's properties here were two separate transactions and combined they cost Lana around 5.8 mil. Together they take up almost four acres located at the top of Coldwater Canyon between Beverly Hills and Studio City. Lana's first home in her private compound is the bigger place set of the two. She bought it for around 3.7 mil and it sits atop a long driveway with two acres of property. It's 5,432 square feet and has six beds and seven baths. The mansion was built in 1936 but has obviously been completely redone and looking at photos you can see that it's modern and spacious. The main room is an open concept and has 24-foot wood ceilings with exposed beams. Although this home has a lot of wood accents it doesn't look dark or overdone. There are a ton of windows and doors which makes it really bright. Lana's main house also features a four-car garage, a gourmet chef's kitchen, two powder rooms and an entryway with dual staircases. Not to mention the huge saltwater infinity pool outside, steam sauna and of course a detached guest house. Even looking at the exterior the home has a very cool vibe to it and I could really see Lana living here. The second and smaller home on the property Lana picked up for 2.1 million. It's located right behind the other house and sits on a smaller 1.9 acre lot. This ranch style house was also built in 1936 and has since been redone. It measures 2,829 square feet and has three beds and two baths. Even though this house is smaller and apparently wasn't as renovated and modern as the larger one, it still has its own guest house and is pretty spacious. Looking at the aerial view of Lana's properties you can see that both of the estates have their own pools as well. Lana's compound in the hills has gorgeous views that stretch for miles and definitely looks like a dream. Thankfully it's so high up in the hills that she's far away from the noisy street and traffic below. The peaceful property also seems like the perfect home for the start to get some songwriting done. So we've seen Lana's Malibu beach house which she apparently sold last year, her vintage cabin in Echo Park and her main mansions in the hills where she's created a compound for herself. Which ones did you guys like the best? We also know that Lana's real estate portfolio doesn't stop there.  This neighborhood is also highly desirable and historic. That house is 4,762 square feet and was built way back when in 1925. Apparently this house is where Lana got robbed back in 2015. A woman snuck into Lana's home for a few days while she was away, borrowed her house and also took out two of Lana's cars for a joy ride, getting them both impounded. Anyways, according to sources, Lana still owns this property as well. I'm not sure if Lana plans on adding any more purchases to her real estate portfolio in the near future, but she doesn't seem to be doing so bad considering she now has her property in the hills with not one but two mansions. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what's next for the star. Okay guys, so now it's time for me to read out some comments from previous videos. These comments are from our recent video on Jeffree Star's celebrity feuds. Also if you guys liked that video, be sure to let me know if you want more like that. Maggie Nunez said, Here you look so cute as Alice in Wonderland, love your channel, keep up the good work. Love and respect, Maggie from Los Angeles, California, Happy Halloween. Thanks Maggie, now it's clearly not Halloween but when we did that video it was. I'm glad you liked my costume and the channel, sending love and respect back.   Thanks RM, I always love a new subscriber and glad you liked my costume too. I also think Jeffree's a hoot, I love his sass. And finally our boy Skittles boys said, Skittle boys in the comments, much love from Skittles nation, good vibes only, fame gang, shout out to Kara, always fashionable, happy Halloween and Jeffree Star, he cool. Thanks Skittles, you know we always love hearing from you. Alright guys that's all I could find on Lana Del Rey's homes, which was your favorite property of hers. Her previous Malibu beach house, her cabinet echo park or her property in the hills where she has two mansions combined. I'm gonna have to say I loved her main house the best. Let me know down in the comments. If you guys like Lana, let me know what other videos of her you'd like to see and let me know some other celebrity homes you want me to do a tour on. Follow me on Instagram if you want to chat more and I'll see you next week with some new videos. Bye.


This is stock number AT169A. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used truck headquarters. Today we are taking a look at this Super Clean 2008 Ford F-150 Super Cruise Short Box. This truck has the King Ranch package. It also has the 5.4 liter V8 motor. From this HD video you will be able to tell that this truck is extremely clean all the way around considering the age and miles on it. Factory fog lights, front bumper is absolutely perfect. Oxford white, over gold, two-tone paint scheme. It has the factory chrome step bars, factory alloy rims. These are 18-inch rims and they have Cooper Discover LT27565R18 tires on them. Tires have probably about 60 to 70% of the tread left, so lots of good tread left on those tires. We shoot all of our videos in HD, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device, turn them on now because it's like you're right here looking at the truck with me. As we go down this side of the vehicle, for the most part the body is in really nice condition. The doors are in nice condition. I didn't see any dents or dings down this side of the vehicle. Back rim is in pretty nice shape and the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. Framing under bodies got a little bit of corrosion, but nothing too bad. It does have a Borla dual exhaust in the back. Sounds really good. Full towing package, which includes the receiver hitch, four pin and seven pin wiring. Tailgate is nice and clean as well and it has a Lakeland truck cap. Also has a bed rug inside. Tailgate shuts nice and solidly and so does the cap. It has backup sensors and as you go down this side of the truck just as clean as that pass on their side. Like I said that cap's in really nice condition. I didn't see any scuffs or scrapes on that. This back rim is in pretty nice condition as well. It has the heated power folding mirrors with the built-in directional signals. Those fold in like so. Has power windows, power locks and power mirrors aftermarket brake controller. This one has the King Ranch package which gives you the real leather bucket seats. Both these seats are heated. Memory driver seat, power driver seat. There are no rips or tears in the seats. Really like this King Ranch leather. It's a real actual leather and it gets a lot of character to it as it ages. Weather tech floor mats throughout, auto headlamps and power pedals. As we hop inside here you can see that this truck has 125,260 miles. Leather wrapped steering wheel. Same thing on that steering wheel. It's real leather. Audio controls, cruise controls. This one comes with a six disc CD changer. Turn dial four-wheel drive. There are your heated seat buttons. Get the King Ranch emblem on the center console. Passing your seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that and a weather tech format on that side. Up here you have your home link buttons and then your power sliding rear window and your adjustable storage bin on top of the ceiling there. Take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood. The back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. Cool thing about the King Ranch is you know your leather is never going to look like any other King Ranch. It's always going to be unique. Got a weather tech format back here. Those seats do fold up and of course you get the stitched badges back here as well. We'll take a quick look under the hood. Thanks for checking out the video. Under the hood we have the 5.4 liter V8 motor. Engine bay is very clean. Runs very smooth. Looks like it has a brand new battery. This truck has been inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and tapped off. Runs really smooth. Don't hear any cam phase or noise or anything like that.  And to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, halftones, recorded tons, you name it we got to go to our website www.summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at www.summitauto.com. Thank you so much for checking out this vehicle. If you want to check out just our used inventory you can go to truckson41.com. That's truckson41.com. And if you want to check out more videos go to youtube.com slash summit auto. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video in every vehicle that you see there. In fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more half-ton truck videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this truck on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to helping with this super clean 2008 Ford F-150 supercruise short box King Ranch. Thanks again.


I didn't block it. No! Didn't even see the Broly assist. Tough. Ah. How's he going, everybody? Dato do I hear back within the round of Dragon Ball fighters, rank matches, and this one is going to be a good one because since we hit God of Destruction, this is going to be the very first time that we were going head-to-head with another God of Destruction rank. Oh, we're also playing a suggested team. That suggested team was called Team Square with Vigito, Gojita, and Bardock. I don't really get the Gojita one because I guess I don't think his auto combo is that great. In fact, I would actually, if they sped it up, maybe it would be pretty good. I would like it then, but yeah. Gojita is here though. He's bringing the Fusion power, and I'm nervous, dude. This guy's already moving. He was moving pretty fast there, not gonna lie. I do like the movement. Let's see if we can't match his pace. Okay, I did not expect that. Not with the Broly assist though. I looked up at the assist, saw he had Broly. I was like, nah, nah, nah, he's not gonna drag much. Behind the back, maybe Square will work. Don't get the vanish off that nice, nice, end the snap. Oh my goodness. DP. Okay, he's playing very, very high tempo. Damn, and I thought I should have died for that. Okay, we're gonna, we're not gonna get anything too big off this. In fact, we're even giving up the corner, but basic block string, basic. Oh, he teched it. Oh, this is what I'm looking for. I like, I didn't know we could clash after that, or what to do after a clash after that, but he went to Square and it did hit me. I tried to just get out of the situation. Should have just taken the heavy. No, we got hit again. Those keyblasts are very impressive as well. Oh man, I thought I had that. All right, I'll take that too though. Oh, we didn't have the, I thought I still had smash property. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Yeah, really folded under that pressure. Don't hit me. Yeah, shields up. Going to get us the first knockout of the game. Bardock finished it off. Really, really lucky that he decided to swing on us like that. I mean, I guess not lucky. He has been playing very high tempo, but that's okay. Still a very lucky knockout for us. Watch the command grab. That is fast. Our car trying to jump away. I was very afraid of those squares. Ironically, with the team we're playing. No, I was trying to finish. Oh, should have Bardocked my way out of that faster. But okay, we have lost the lead. That's changed quick in this game. We have lost the lead yet again. Gojina coming back out. Hopefully we can make it. It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. My panic finished. I don't know why it worked that time. I didn't do anything different. Oh, I tried to get a trade off there, but he reacted to the clash faster. And these keep, I think these keyblasts have been really tough for me, actually. I have been struggling with the keyblast game. I actually don't think Vegeta or Gojina have necessarily great keyblast games. Oh, no. I even tried to get it down heavy. I messed up. I messed up completely there. I don't even know what happened, actually, or why that dropped. That was good. The reason I'm super dashing from full screen like that, by the way, is because I'm expecting those keyblasts. So if he over commits to that, I do want to be there to catch him. I'm going to start off with... Okay, well, he can't punish us for this. On second thought, I forgot he could get keyblast vanish. I wonder if he can kill off of the... Oh, spark. Yeah. No, no, no. We're still living this. Nice response to that. All right, Vegeta, get down. Get down. Take that. Take that, Gojina. Vegeta, sorry. We got to reassess that one. Okay, we made a lot of mistakes. So there is a lot to clean up, which is good. But also, I feel like we got a lot of lucky openings. There we go. That's how we respond to those keyblasts. Love to see it vanish. We got a bar. Not sure if that was a super optimal or not. Please, go, go, assist. I did not respond to that by blocking. In fact, I just got hit. I was like, oh, here it comes. Oh, we whipped the high. I thought he was actually going to commit to that. No. Got me low. Now I'm starting to worry. Gojina. I got him with the 2L slide, and then I was just sitting there like, don't do that. Oh, does that work? I mean, I guess it should, right? Unless he kicked me down. Oh, no, because he appears behind. That was enough time for the spirit bomb to catch up. I probably should have just taken the actual knockdown. Drive through him. I'm so very surprised how much Gojina has been the driving force between between this. Yeah, I don't I don't know why that worked on me. I just sat there watching the dragon rush come in like, oh, no. I got to react. I got to react to things like that. Level one. Hopefully this takes at least one more bar. OK, at least we cleaned him out on meter. Gojina did pretty well for what it was. But I would love to get I would love to get base Goku back in here. Not like that, though, not not in that fashion. Really? OK, now he's looking for the full screen. Superdash is all right. Got to be careful with that. Not to whoa. He got a superdash really quickly after blocking that. We're dead.  No, I didn't even call out Broly second. We missed it. I didn't block it. No, didn't even see the Broly assist. Tough, very, very tough. Reeds on whose part, though? No, bad, bad spark on my behalf. I'm just I'm just going over what's actually happening to the game because this has been a pretty fast paced one. I guard cancel there because I'm very afraid of base Goku's command grabs. I don't want to stick around long enough to see if he commits to one. Yes. OK, we're just going to level three here. Level three will clean it up. The reason I when did I superdash? I threw two I threw two rounds of Key Blast, so I thought he would respond to that by superdashing, which is why I did what I. Oh, what a response. We were in a very awkward stage of the game right there. I was waiting for him to throw Key Blast. He was waiting for me. I shouldn't have committed to it before he did. Should not have made that jump to be the first one to do it. Very good on his part, though. That was a great reaction. OK, I can clean it. I can get it done with this team. I can get it done with this team. I just I just got to clean it up. I'm not going to hit by that assist. I feel like with Vigito out front, I have too many grounded assist. Too many grounded assist, as in Gogeta does a kick on the ground and Bardock does a fast punch on the ground. So not a lot of variety there. But with Gogeta, we have I'm going to spark could snap us out. That wouldn't be a bad use of his time. And I'm also dropping things. That doesn't work. We've just gotten multiple hits off nothing, just like super dashing at him. DP, don't get him out of there. Oh, that's fine. I didn't go as bad for us as it could have. No, how did I drop that? No, and I missed the 2H. That could have been a very good sequence for us. But unfortunately, I just dropped it. Man, that sucked. That time I dropped it because I didn't know what I wanted. I was like, do I avenge? Okay, this time I'm not going to make the same mistake. I'm going to settle for the corner here. That still hit us. Damn, but you've got some long legs. My man was stretching for that one. Okay, dragon rush. Don't have sparks. It's important to remember that. Get off me. Oh, nice. Forgot I didn't have Bardock B for a second. Yeah, he was looking for the Key Blast again. No, God caught dashing up by base Goku. He was looking for the Key Blast though. It's important to recognize that. Unfortunately, we kind of lost that option. At least he didn't confirm off of it. That was a nice button. That was a nice button. I wanted to dash up, see if he DP block, and then throw out a 2L. But he threw out his right before I hit it. That rough, rough, rough. There we go. See that? That time we were both awkwardly waiting, but I hit it before him, just by a little bit. There we go. Okay, okay. Maybe we just got to swing more. I feel like maybe I got to pick up the tempo. I'm going to settle for a level 3 here. Maybe it wasn't the best idea. Maybe we should save the assist. But I'm okay with this. I'm okay with this. Because at least now we get a mix-up opportunity. We get base Goku down. Now we just got to deal with Broly. I like it. This is the best odds we've had so far. That's fine. Okay, trying to move around the ring fast so we don't get caught by Key Blast. We don't want to super dash because then we can get caught by Vanish, which is also pretty bad at the health wrap. I should have switched out Negojina that time for sure, but I just... I got scared. Got scared that I'd missed the level 3, and that would have been really bad. 6M? Should have been looking for that. I was definitely too afraid of just the normal command grab. Why did I do what I did? Oh, he hit! Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, wait. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm getting too random. I'm trying to finish it randomly. Trying to catch him off his toes. I'm jumping again. Dude, you got... The guard cancel was bad. No! So many mistakes and rapid succession. You would have thought I was me taking the SATs. Aw, come on, man. I just blew it in so quickly. Aw, I couldn't get it done with this team. Thank you so much for the suggestion, though. Sorry, it had to be in a match like this, but we tried it, dude, we tried. We got close on that last one. I just... I think a big mistake we made was not switching out to Gojira to get that level 3 when we did. That would allow us to keep the Bardock assist, and it also probably would have made me play a little safer or a little calmer, but yeah, overall, it was just me getting too random. Hopefully you enjoyed it, though. Like I said, if you got any more team suggestions or favorite moments, let me know down below in the comment section while you're down there. Make sure to like, button, and subscribe to stay up to date on the channel, and it helps to support the channel so greatly, so I really do appreciate it a ton. Another way to support the channel is checking out the videos that are on your screen right now. If any of them catch your eye, of course. Other than that, I've been Dr. Doi. Thanks again for watching this all the way to the end, and I will see you in the next one.


The other astounding feature of the Rife Universal microscope was that viruses could be viewed in their live state, like a movie, whereas the electron microscope could only view viruses in still images, or like photos. When studying any organism, observing how it moves and behaves in real time provides much more valuable information than viewing it as a static image.


Ukrainian Army shoot down Russian hypersonic missile Zircon for the first time. During the last missile attack on Kiev, Russia tried to use its new hypersonic missile ZM-22 Zircon, which has not yet been officially adopted for service, but it was shot down. This was reported by Defence Express. One of the pieces of debris that fell in the Neprovsky neighbourhood was marked 3M-22, which corresponds exactly to this missile. Since it is unlikely that the power line was the target of the Zircon, it was shot down, the publication believes. Meanwhile, the Air Force Command report lists only cruise missiles such as the KH555, stroke 101 and caliber among the intercepted missiles. According to Defence Express' own sources, the fragmentation of the missile is quite high, which makes its identification much more difficult as the ZM-22 Zircon has not been publicly demonstrated. However, it has become known that yesterday's debris matches the wreckage of another unidentified missile used by the Russians on the 29th of December 2023 during another massive missile attack, fragments of which were found in Zaporizia. Of the carriers of this missile, which was designed to be launched from ships and submarines, only the frigate admiral Goshkov and the nuclear submarine K560 Severodvinsk are known to be far beyond their launch range in Ukraine. Therefore, the enemy could most likely use the bastion complex to launch them. According to open sources, the 3M22 Zircon is a promising hypersonic air-launched anti-ship cruise missile under development and testing in Russia. The missile is being manufactured in Rootov, Moscow region. In January 2022, the first test of the Zircon missile took place. It was launched from the admiral Goshkov frigate. It hit a coastal target at a distance of 500 kilometres. The characteristics of the missile are not disclosed, but some parameters are given. Range almost up to 1500 kilometres, flight altitude 30 to 40 kilometres, flight speed up to Mach 8 to 9. It is possible that the Zircon is a two-stage missile with the first stage powered by a solid fuel rocket engine and the second stage by a direct-flow air jet engine.


Hello I'm Christine for those of you who don't know me. I was raised in a Baptist church in a Christian home thanks to the faithfulness of my mom and despite the great difficulty and struggle at times she taught us the things of God and brought us to church, dragged us to church at times. So the assurance of my faith that wasn't ignorant to the word of God because of faithfulness teaching my mom I knew who Jesus was and I knew who I was as a sinner and the assurance of my faith was based on this knowledge of the work that Jesus did on the cross combined with sporadic devotions and you know several heartfelt prayers asking for forgiveness of my sins. But every other observable action in my life was in complete opposition with my profession. I lived in this manner darkened with sin and deceit ignorant of my condition before God completely alienated from him all the while professing his name. This false way of living became so routine that I was honestly deceived into thinking I was right to stand before God. It's clear to me now the great measure of hypocrisy littered in every contradictory word and action in my life but before God opened my eyes I was unable to see my wicked deception. It was the end of May spring semester at UCF this year when Edgar and Fredo lightly approached me with boards and Bibles in hand asking me to go through a survey and it was really the sovereignty of God that they even were there and I was there at that time and that I decided to go through it with them. As we continued through the law my pride in answering the questions correctly and striving to maintain the front of my faquette prohibited me from even taking a second to acknowledge the disconnect between my words and my actions. So near in the end of the survey I'm sorry yeah I was like going through the survey I was thinking like this this doesn't apply to me because Jesus died on the cross for my sins so I'm forgiven. Near in the end of the survey though I was filled with how to content with a survey the way the survey went and my ability to get through it despite my neglect of the church and the things of God I'm not sure Fredo and Edgar were what they were thinking about my responses or if I deceived them but despite that they continued with the survey taking me through Matthew 5. As we went through each one I was asked to rhetorically rhetorically to answer whether these characteristics were evident in my current walk.  How could I profess these things with such boldness and confidence when every single aspect of my life was absolutely void of any sign of true conversion or godliness. At this point of the conversation my mouth was completely shut each revelation of the next lacking quality was like the piercing stab to a vital organ and at the end of the passage I was a lifeless body with nothing to offer. Everything I had assuredness in had dissipated into nothingness within just those 10 verses that we went through. Yes Jesus Christ did do an amazing merciful and selfless act on the cross but he didn't die for all those who who professed Lord Lord. He didn't die for those who just knew the facts like I did and had biblical novelage.  Coming to this realization by the grace of God I have been made a new creation in him. I've been granted a new heart given the eyes to see ears to hear and the desire to obey. These things are not humanly possible and my attempts at repentance and devotion to the word of God proved futile time and time again completely impossible without the mighty power of the Holy Spirit. I'm a changed person in with thee and outwardly and by the power of God sin and death no longer have authority over me. I'm no longer under the bondage of sin living as an enemy of God but now as an adopted child of a majestic king. The life taking I'm sorry so I am eternally grateful of the work the Lord has done in me and for the precious gift of his son's blood. I'm no longer deceived and deceiving others as well but recognize my salvation did not come free. It took the innocent blood of Jesus and just as essential it requires the laying down of my own life and my own will to surrender my will to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I want this account of my testimony and the evidence is that my walk to testify to my commitment before the Lord as well as a testament to the miraculous and abundant abundantly gracious work the Lord has done in my heart and continues to do in my life.


Its civilization versus nature's fury. Raging blizzards bury cities under thousands of tons of snow. Howly hurricanes tear apart coastal communities with wind and rain.  As the sky is clear, people begin to pick up the pieces. But after the storm, insidious damage is still being done. Our most vital natural resource is under assault, our nation's waters. We're at the Chattahoochee Nature Center and we're trying to find out what a watershed is. First victim. I need you to tell me what a watershed is. Do you have any idea? Watershed. A watershed? Where people go to the bathroom? Sweating, I guess. Something to do with sweating? Uh huh. Like after you run when you... You aspire, yeah. And then you shed it? Uh huh. We wanted to ask you if you knew what a watershed was. A watershed? Yeah. Is it kind of like the rain? Do you know what a watershed is? A shed that holds water. Come here for a second, I want to ask you something. Do you know what a watershed is? No. No. You have any idea? What do you think it has something to do with? What a watershed is, yeah. That's just a drain pool, I guess you'd say. Or the drain area. That's where the water, the rainwater drains into the river. Correct, that's a great answer. A watershed is that area of land that drains to a body of water. Be that if it's a river, a stream, the ocean, an estuary, a bay. Wherever you live, drains to some water body and you'd live in a watershed, so everyone lives in a watershed. And in this modern industrial age, our water sources are becoming more contaminated with each passing year. The biggest water quality problem that we have in the nation today is polluted runoff. All water east of the continental divide drains to the Atlantic, while water west of the divide flows to the Pacific. And one drop of rain can cross many different watersheds along the way. As runoff flows into rivers, streams and storm drains, the water picks up trash, dirt, bacteria, toxic chemicals and fertilizers, creating a super pollutants that is extremely hazardous to the environment. And the consequences of polluted runoff exist worldwide. The UN estimate is that there's about a billion people on the planet right now who don't have adequate access to fresh water. 97% of all water on earth is salty ocean water. Of the remaining 3% it's fresh. Over two thirds is frozen in glaciers and polar ice. That leaves less than 1% of all the planet's water for our use. I predict in the future that some of the U.S. water needs are going to come through pipeline because we have just overused our supply. To address the complex threats facing U.S. water resources, the Environmental Protection Agency recommends adopting a watershed approach. We're trying to reconnect some of the river. It's a method that looks at each watershed for its own unique set of environmental challenges and solutions. In many cases, people mistakenly identify large discharge pipes in the water as the problem. But that may not be the problem. It may be coming from agricultural runoff. It may be coming from stormwater runoff and parking lots and impervious surfaces. Every watershed is different and you need to look at each watershed in its own terms and then think systematically about how you remediate, how you clean up that watershed. In California, the Santa Monica Bay watershed drains a dangerous amount of polluted runoff after each storm. When it rains, literally the whole residue of urban living ends up getting washed into the storm drain system and ends up going straight into the bay on Santa Monica Bay's beaches with no treatment whatsoever.  Because of the pollution, the dog mess has been building up and building up and building up. When it rains, it flushes into the storm drain and goes directly into the surf. In 1996, the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission proved there was a link between the contaminated runoff in the Santa Monica Bay and reports of illness afflicting people who swim there. What we did find was at the outlets of storm drains, no matter where they were up and down the bay, if there was a flow of runoff into the surf zone, those people that were swimming in those areas definitely experienced higher incidences of illnesses. The pollutants in the water affect surfers because we're actually the indicator species with all the pollutants. When we're in the waters, we're ingesting it through our skin and our mouth. Even if people don't take a swallowing water, it's still getting into our systems, our ears, any orifice on your body. And it causes infections. It can cause cold sore throats at the very least. I wouldn't want to swim in a water that's got those diseases in there. You know, just floating around, making more diseases. I've seen it pretty much as bad as it can be.  Generically, we call it fecal coliform. More specifically, you might know of it as E. coli, salmonella, or enterococcus. Whatever's in poop. There's times when it tastes funky, for sure. Every day, the city and county of Los Angeles perform a battery of tests to keep the public informed about water quality in the Santa Monica Bay. Cesar Arzadan begins the monitoring process each morning by taking a series of coastline water samples. Then it's back to the lab for analysis. Most of the bacteria that you're going to see, it comes from feces. And when you put under the UV light, you're going to see a different kind of color. It's a fluorescent sign that there is a bacteria, and it's called E. coli. That one definitely eats feces from animals, or it could be humans also. The results are reported to the health department, and beach warnings are posted as necessary. The number of beach postings has decreased, and 85% of the beaches that have been monitored in California have received either A or B grades, and that's significantly different than four years ago. But while progress is being made in California, the harmful effects of polluted runoff are a growing concern everywhere. So what can the average person do to help reduce pollution in our watersheds?  Do not dump things on the ground, especially oils or any chemical pollutants. Pick up after your dogs. A lot of people don't realize how important that is. And just be a conscientious citizen, and don't leave anyone on the ground. I think one person can make a difference, and it needs to make the difference. If not you, who? Coming up. We're heading for what's known as an ecosystem collapse. Can the Gulf of Mexico be saved from polluted runoff? It was a flood of apocalyptic scale. 26,000 square miles of the Lower Mississippi Valley inundated by water.  The flood of 1927 was the most disastrous in U.S. history, and its effects are still felt today. After the flood of 27, massive levees were put in place. And while they helped protect the Lower Mississippi River basin from flooding, the levees and other human activities would ultimately harm the watershed in unforeseen ways. The Gulf State of Louisiana is the terminus of the Mississippi River. The mighty watershed that drains 41% of the area of the lower 48 states into the Gulf of Mexico. We receive water from as far away as Montana, Michigan, to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa. All those waters drain right past this area right here. But by the time all that water enters the Gulf, it has accumulated enough contaminants from polluted runoff to create an enormous hypoxic zone, an area of water lacking in vital oxygen. The size of the low oxygen zone in the Gulf of Mexico is about 9,000 square miles. That's equal to the size of the state of New Jersey. The shortage of oxygen is killing fish and other sea life and could potentially have a devastating effect on the regional economy. We are the largest navigation port in the United States. We are the second largest in the world. We have the largest fishery in this country. When we was crabbing, a lot of times all our crabs we did, we can't even sell them. The reason hypoxia should be of concern to most citizens in this nation is because it's a sign. It's a sign of the degradation of our water resources. We're heading for what's known as an ecosystem collapse. If you're going to have an ecological disaster caused by the offshore hypoxic areas, then that absolutely translates into an economic disaster. So what exactly is causing this dead zone in the Gulf? Hypoxia develops when an area of water receives excess pollutants, primarily an overabundance of nutrients, which produce large algae blooms that die off and lead to low oxygen. And since the Mississippi gets fed by tributaries that flow through 31 states, that adds up to a staggering volume of contaminated runoff. You have drainage into the Gulf of Mexico from the Ohio River, the Mississippi River and the Missouri River. Yet each of those three major river systems are watersheds in and of themselves with their own challenges and their own problems. The Mississippi River has always delivered a lot of water. That hasn't changed over the centuries. What's changed is the amount of nutrients in that water. In fact, the Mississippi's nitrogen levels in the lower Mississippi River have tripled since the 1950s, and the growing hypoxic zone off the Louisiana coast contains the disturbing evidence.  You see fish just swimming sideways, gasping for air and stuff like that. And when you pull up the nets, not a one shrimp alive. All dead, orange. The fish, they're rotten, like melting away and stuff like that. Can't breathe stuff. And it's just rotten. This is just a fact of life, the way we treat our water systems, because we use them as our garbage dumps. We use them to dilute our pollutants and things like that. And it flows downstream. Maybe the statistic is that if you're in New Orleans, the water that is going by you has passed through human guts something like three or four times before it gets to you. Incredibly, Louisiana boasts a natural resource that removes pollutants from the draining Mississippi, the once abundant wetlands. Plants that grow in wetlands produce these wonderful filters for everything that is coming into them. They trap sediment, they temper chemicals, and what leaves the wetlands is much, much cleaner water. Wetlands also provide an important habitat for birds and other wildlife. Sadly, the Louisiana wetlands are quickly disappearing. Coastal Louisiana has lost about 1.2 million acres of wetlands in the last 100 years. When we levied off the Mississippi, it cut off the Mississippi River water from the marshes. In addition to the levies, a network of man-made navigation channels is also compromising the wetlands by allowing saltwater to seep into the marshes. Once that saltwater travels up these channels and overflows the banks of these channels out into freshwater systems, such as this cypress swamp, that saltwater sits out there around the roots of these trees and kills them. They cannot survive saltwater, their freshwater plants. Eliminating the hypoxic zone will take more than saving our wetlands. Reducing nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River watershed is the heart of the problem. It's an issue involving over half the states in the nation and a vast array of industries, particularly farming, which uses nitrogen-rich fertilizer to grow its crops. Fertilizers are helping the United States produce the food for the world, but there is such a thing as overuse. There are scientists who have done the analyses and predict that you could reduce fertilizers by about 12 percent without reducing crop production and see a significant decrease in the amount of nitrogen going into the Mississippi River. Experts say the first key to changing behavior is raising public awareness. We all live downstream of somebody and we all live upstream of somebody. So what somebody else does in their watershed affects the water that I receive and what I do in my watershed affects the water that somebody else receives downstream. If we don't clean up our act, our water resources, which we simply cannot live without, will be ruined. Coming up, can the water supply for 9 million New Yorkers be saved from the ravages of polluted runoff? In January of 1996, one of the most devastating winter storms in history slammed the East Coast. Two feet of snow dumps on New York and throughout the Northeast Corridor. Schools, airports and roads are shut down. By the time it's over, the blizzard and resultant flooding caused $3 billion in losses and 187 lives are taken. And in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, the snow melt triggers another potentially devastating crisis. Stormwater runoff, contaminated with trash, dirt, fertilizers and pesticides from nearby farms and communities, threatens the fresh water supply. And the Catskill system of reservoirs is vitally important for it is the biggest watershed of New York City, providing drinking water to over 9 million people. The miracle of the city's water supply system is largely unknown to most New Yorkers. You ask people, where does the water come from? Often people shug their shoulders and say, New Jersey. I figured that we were probably our own separate water system than from upstate. I'd rather be drinking water from upstate than the Hudson River. I don't know that most people are aware of how large the problem is and how close to crisis many of our water supply systems are. To preserve the purity of the reservoirs and enforce the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency presented the Big Apple with two options. Either build and maintain a $6 billion facility to filter all of the city's tap water or fund a $1 billion program to protect the watershed from polluted runoff. When it comes to our investment in clean air and clean water, preserving open space, fixing antiquated sewage treatment plants, we can't wait. It doesn't get any less expensive. It gets more expensive. With the historic Watershed Agreement of 1997, an unprecedented upstate-downstate partnership was forged to protect the New York City water supply. The Watershed Agreement is saving New York City billions of dollars. The plan includes purchasing and preserving 355,000 acres of undeveloped watershed land, the upgrading of sewage treatment plants, and the protection and restoration of stream corridors. What we're looking at here is Main Tributary of the Osoapus Creek. During flooding, we were seeing a lot of sediment coming out of the stream. The clay gets into the water column and it becomes very turbid, and then it makes it very difficult to treat and clean that water. So from a water quality perspective, we're very concerned about erosion. The program also provides funding for farmers that implement agriculture management practices. Well, we have a very exciting program with the Watershed Agricultural Council where we are working with local farmers. We look at how they're handling the animals, so that the runoff associated with manure, fertilizer, and that farm activity isn't getting into the streams around our reservoirs. This water here is basically the water you're going to be drinking down in the city, and I feel I've got a responsibility to try my best to keep it clean for when it gets down there. It used to be when it rained here on the farm, the water that ran away from the back of the barn here was full of mud, manure, and it would just run brown and right into the stream. Two years ago, we would spread every day. We'd have to take it out, spread it on the fields. If the snow was deep, we'd spread it on the snow, and unfortunately, if the ground was frozen when the snow melted, the nutrient value of it for fertilizer was gone and wound up down in the reservoir. With New York City funding, a secure, above-ground steel tank that can hold 400,000 gallons of manure was installed on the Meadowbrook farm. That's enough storage for six months of the year. Now we can store it, spread it when it'll do the most good to us for fertilizer, and we don't have to spread it every day. I worked with Tim on the plan to develop the improvements we're going to make. The plan really belongs to the farmer, and it's a collaboration of their ideas and what technical advice we can bring to the program, but the farmer makes the decision. It's a program that seems to make everybody happy. It shares to the farmers who are working so hard to make sure we've got clean water to put in our coffee. To guarantee the city's water supply is fresh at the tap, comprehensive tests are performed by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, both in the lab and at over 1,000 sampling stations throughout the city. New York City has probably one of the most extensive water quality monitoring programs in the nation, not the world. We're sampling every day, 365 days a year. We've been drinking this water for 53 years, nothing else. That's water in the world. New York City, straight from the tap to my lips. Coming up, the future of our water supply remains at risk, but there's something everyone can do to help protect it. Find out how, next. To keep our watersheds free of pollutants will require the actions of every citizen, community and business. Paved concrete surfaces, asphalt, parking lots, sidewalks. The question is, do we need to have as many as we do? Because to the extent that you have too much impervious surface, the water is not retained on site. It doesn't soak into the ground. It runs off, picks up speed, carries pollutants and contaminants into the water body. One strategy for preventing stormwater runoff is occurring at the new Ford Rouge Center in Dearborn, Michigan. This remodeled truck plant is covered by a green roof the size of eight football fields. Planted with a porous ground cover, it reduces the amount of polluted runoff released into the watershed. The thing that tends to get the most attention is the 10-acre green roof, but that's really just part of a philosophy that if an area does not have to be paved or built upon, it's going to be green space. And communities are also implementing green space strategies, such as rain gardens. They sloped the lot in such a manner that all the flow goes towards this landscaping where basically the polluted runoff can percolate into the ground and get filtered rather than going straight onto the street into the storm drain system and really a very simple approach to cleaning up our runoff in urban areas. But perhaps the most powerful course of action is individual participation. People need to take responsibility for the state of our waters and water conservation is one area where they can do that as a committed citizen.   When you change your used motor L, you don't dump it into the street. Everybody's got to clean up after their pets. Obviously that's a big concern. Fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, make sure you don't use them any time there's any chance of rain coming up in the near future. When you're irrigating your lawn in your garden, make sure that you're not over spraying and causing all those chemicals to end up getting into the storm drain system. The only way we're going to solve the problem is if everybody does their part. We all live in a watershed. We all have an impact on our environment. And we must all play a role in the protection and restoration of our valuable water resources. To learn more about how you can get involved and to get a free brochure called After the Storm, visit epa.gov.