Looks like it does. Great. Hey everyone, good afternoon. I'm Alex Stokes, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. And yeah, you know, the title here says Block Building After the Merge. There's like a subtitle, which is MEV Moving Forward. You'll see in a bit, I have another kind of variant of this talk that looks at more, I'd say like the technical side of things. And I hope today to kind of communicate like a sense of the landscape around this topic and like MEV is like the obvious, you know, buzz phrase here. But yeah, so let's dig into what that means. And hopefully by the end, you'll have a sense of, again, yeah, like the landscape and what some of the concerns might be moving forward. So I've kind of always said that putting currency into crypto, like cryptocurrency is like this double-edged sword, because like, yes, you know, there's like this like speculative aspect that draws a lot of attention, a lot of talent, a lot of capital to the space. And that's great. But in the same, you know, sort of in the same breath, that also means that we're kind of directly programming with incentives here. We have this sandbox for, you know, playing with these different crypto-economic games. And I guess hopefully you'll see as we move forward that, you know, this could perhaps backfire. It could be the case that short-term incentives that are supported by protocols like Ethereum are perhaps too great for us to sort of resist. And in the context here, this is an important point. I say secure block space will be a premier commodity of this century. So maybe that's like a bit of a forward-looking projection and maybe you don't quite buy it. That seems to be, to me, the direction things are going.  There's like as much block space as you need. But I will claim that, you know, there's different qualities of block space. Some is much more secure than others. So we have this thing. And if there's this thing called block space and it is actually so important, it's gonna be very valuable. And because it's so valuable, we should expect battles for control over block space. So this is like, if anything, the takeaway points. I'll just get it out of the way. And when I say this, I want you to think about like, you know, influences both inside the community and outside the community. There's going to be all sorts of people who are going to like try to attempt to co-opt Ethereum. And you know, that can happen in very overt ways. It can also happen in very sort of subtle ways. So just keep this in mind. I think when we think about any of this stuff around the protocol, what it looks like, how the protocol changes, things around the protocol like MEV and like a whole separate talk in this vein is like staking pools. But when you think about this stuff, just have an adversarial mindset and just, yeah, be careful out there. Okay, so I use this word block space. Maybe some of you have never heard of it. So what I really mean is just the stuff that goes into the blockchain. So today that's like transactions. If you've ever used Ethereum or like MetaMask, you've done this, you like have this transaction and maybe you sign it. Maybe there's some error. Maybe there's not enough gas. Maybe you didn't pay enough for the gas. Like a lot of things that happen. But you're probably familiar with this notion of a transaction.  And then somehow this like moves the state of things forward. I have this like sort of elusive comment to say tomorrow you'll see in a bit that this notion of builders I'm gonna sort of present today unlocks a lot of sort of abstraction and flexibility around how we use the protocol and how we like access these resources. And yeah, so maybe in the future, it looks a lot more general than just like the transaction you get through MetaMask. But so concretely like transactions are, you know, like the takeaway here is that transactions are a way to interface with the protocol's resources. And like what we really mean when we say that is like the state. Like the fact that Ethereum is organized as a blockchain today is like kind of a detail. It's like an engineering detail most like the important thing that we all care about is the fact that there's this like shared global state. For example, the account balance is everyone in the protocol, the state of smart contracts of Uniswap, of Aave, of Maker, and, you know, everything else, there's a lot these days. And the state is like the thing that, you know, is sort of the actual valuable thing and you need block space to access the state. And this is what everyone, you know, I claim will be battling for control over. And it turns out that, you know, because block space, at least on Ethereum, is so valuable, you know, it supports this ability to specialize. So what I mean when I say specialize is that we're seeing the emergence of this role within the protocol called a builder. And yeah, it's just this entity that says, okay, like rather than just like run a very naive algorithm for like getting these transactions into the block, which then goes on chain, you can do like far more sophisticated things. And if you're familiar with any of this MEV stuff, this is like one example. And yeah, it's like, I really think kind of the sky is the limit in terms of like the ingenuity people will bring to doing this task. And the takeaway here is that, you know, builders specialize in refining block space. So a hopeful analogy that I've come across is like thinking of, you know, we have like, actually I think this, yeah. So a helpful analogy here is like, and now it's lead to like mining some resource like say copper ore, you have copper ore, you can like dig it out of the ground, you just have this like thing, you have to like get the copper from the rock and this whole process of extraction to get to say like refined copper, this copper bar in the middle here. And then that can be further refined into, you know, say copper coins or pick your thing. So this is just like a generic notion of like taking some raw asset, some raw commodity and refining it to do like a series of phases. And in each phase, it's sort of like, it's more valuable than the phase before. So like for example, if I just like walked up to you and give you like a hunk of copper ore, you'd be like, okay, cool, but I don't really care.  So this is what I mean when I say that, you know, there's this sort of raw asset or this raw commodity is probably the right term of block space. And again, what we're seeing is this notion of a builder in the protocol or at least, you know, around the protocol that takes block space and sort of provides these like value added services or almost goods. You can think of them as to go from a less valuable thing to like a more valuable thing. And that's the job of the builder. So now the question is, well, okay, yeah, what are some examples of things they can do? And there's actually a lot. So here's like a list of things. There's a long list of things. Again, this is where I think all the ingenuity and creativity will come in that I think is really exciting around this space. And I'll just run through some of these examples here, right? So like one of them is like sponsored transactions. This is something people have wanted for like a very, very long time. And the idea is that basically you have this builder and they pay for the gas. So kind of concretely, what that looks like is, you know, I have my transaction rather than making like a direct Ethereum transaction. I make some intent, some message, something that builder knows how to like interpret in their own way. They still have the same effect on chain, but then they can be responsible for paying the gas and like end protocol. Another thing they could do, instant confirmations.  And it's like, is it on chain yet? Like what's going on? Like sometimes, especially when there's like volatility and like the gas market and things, like it can be very unclear what's happening. You can like end up waiting a very long time. And that's not fun. But there's this almost service or abstraction a builder can provide, which is just to say, okay, you want this transaction to be in this block and I can basically as a builder say, I promise you this will happen, trust me, and there's a whole design space around, you know, changing what trust me means. But basically I can give you those promises of builder to get into that block. And in that sense, then I can turn around and really say, yes, you're in the block. Related thing, cancellations, retries. So the notion here is just saying like, yeah, let's say I make a transaction and I'm like, oh wait, like the market just moved against my unit swap trade. I'd rather just take it back. If you're just sort of sending raw Ethereum transactions today, that's really hard to do because you like gossip them through this global mempool and you have to like, yeah, it's tricky. One way people kind of game this today is they will send a duplicate transaction or one that will override the previous one that has different effects. But again, that's like an efficient and you can imagine there's like this layer around the protocol that handles this for you. And like in the same bucket, there's like retries. So like, let's say I want to like, I don't know, do a token transfer and for some reason it fails just because of like conditions on chain. So then I want to keep doing this, you know, until it goes through. And rather than me have to sit and do this, like a builder could do it for me. Next one, gas futures. So here the way to think about it is that a rather than selling you sort of like block space right now as a builder, I could sell you a block space in the future. That's a pretty cool idea. And one reason you might want to do this is because, you know, as part of this like contract that we enter into, you're also selling me at a certain price. So even if like the gas market moves against me, I still locked in a price that's nice to me. And builders could do this. I mean, there's other ways to do this on chain with like looking at the base fee and stuff. But yeah, so just to give you a flavor again of what builders could do, sell futures around block space. This was an idea I heard from Hasu. You could basically also sell block space in the past. And I won't go into too much detail here because basically what this means is like selling reorgs, which is probably something we shouldn't dig into too much. There's like some, I'd say moral hazards around it, but the symmetry between selling block space in the future and the past is like, I think too nice to pass up. Another one is just like this whole bucket of account abstraction. You might have heard of EIP 4337. And basically, again, it's just this way to like add more flexibility around the core protocol so that people have more, again, flexibility and how they use it. A simple thing would just be like a different signature scheme than ECDSA. And then this last bucket, MEV, I'm sure you guys have heard about this a ton this week. And if you think about extraction as like the service a builder could add, or well, there's a couple different things. But if you think of extraction, then there's like this whole bucket of, we can kind of just shove MEV into this whole notion of like a builder providing the service to users whether it's searchers or someone else. And so then I have a few examples within sort of that subspace. MEV extraction, which is what you usually think of when like a searcher's running some ARB. MEV smoothing, the notion here is basically, MEV is very spiky. And so instead of what we could imagine is somehow capturing it within the protocol and smoothing it out over time. And it's paid out to builders, to proposers, however that looks. That'd be pretty cool. And you could imagine off-chain constructions that do this that builders offer. Our last one is like maybe protection or rebates. And the notion here is like builders kind of would have this direct pipeline to the protocol and they could say, hey, I promise to keep your transaction private so it can be, for example, front run. So there's a lot they can do is the point. And again, there's a bunch more. There's okay. And then like even looking a little further forward, I'll just touch on this. So these are like, you know, this list here I think is like pretty concrete things you could do today. And I do think this is painting a picture of this builder as this like generalization that we'll continue to see in the protocol. For example, you could have rather than transaction level of 1559 you could do the block level. So today when you like send a transaction, you have basically have to like have some amount of ETH that you burn. But if you think about it, it can also the same if the builder of the block burns the same amount of ETH across all transactions at the end. And the reason you want this is because again, there's like better UX for users. They don't necessarily need to have ETH. And yeah, again, this is the generalization of like the protocol providing resources and then the user consuming them. And then a similar thing is rollups consuming blobs and 4044. So you might not know about the CIP, but basically the idea is we're gonna add a bunch of like data space to the protocol for users like rollups. And again, it's like we don't want rollups to have to necessarily like sit and like manage blobs and forget when they get on chain and things like this. And so you can imagine there's a builder or some sort of abstraction like a builder that manages getting blobs from rollups or from sequencers of these rollups onto the chain. Here's another talk, I'll just quickly point out where the one I mentioned previously where I went into a lot more of these use cases in depth. You could welcome to check it out. So this sounds cool.  But what's the catch? I mean, there's probably a catch. And the catch is that the specialization actually implies validator centralization. And this is bad because it kind of harms like the whole health of Ethereum. Like the reason we care about Ethereum is because of this decentralization of the consensus, right, of the protocol and builder specialization harms us directly. So let's look at why. And why is that, you know, this process has economies of scale. So right now the like builder protocol or sorry, the builder role in the protocol is tied to the validator role. And because of that, you could have builders that do their things. You'll have entities that sort of have validators they partner with to do their thing as builders. And what happens then is like better builders have better profits and this makes this flywheel where they have better profits, they can get better building, they can scale up their validation operation and you just get this like again, flywheel that goes until suddenly like, you have these like really huge actors in the protocol. So again, if you're like the best builder, that's great for you. But if this, you know, goes unchecked then it's actually really bad for the protocol long run because now you have this like very fragilizing thing of this like one huge actor that's like easier to say attack and all sorts of things. So just like a note, you know, MEV kind of directly accelerates this problem which is probably why you've been hearing so much about it this week. So, okay, what can we do? There's a couple of things. One of them, proposer builder separation. Barnaby gave a talk about this yesterday, I believe. And I mean, the idea that I think is pretty straightforward just from the name. I mentioned that this builder role and sort of the proposer of validator role, the thing that actually is like minting the block on chain, this thing, these are tied together. So instead we can just separate them. And this sounds great. The question though is like how exactly you do it? And once you start looking at this in some depth there's a bunch of like subtleties and like open questions that have a lot of nuance that like still need to be worked through. So for example, I think like the leading designer now from Vitalik where basically we have two slots, alternating proposer and builder. And the point here is that you wanna have the proposer do their thing in a different context, have the builder do their thing and it sort of firewalls these two entities from each other. And that's great but then you have to make sure that it's incentive compatible. Like you don't want a proposer to like release their block too late after they've accepted a builder's bid and then because of that the builder doesn't have time to like reveal their block and it quickly gets to a lot of tricky situations like that. Another one is like actually deciding the mechanism of sort of selling the block space that a validator may wish to do. The default thing we do is like just enshrine an auction but then the question is like okay is that what we want? Do we want this thing where it's like I'm going to auction off my block space to the highest bidder?  I will call out again Barnabay's very recent post on E3search, I'm bowling PBS and he talks about kind of maybe pulling the auction bid out and just having sort of this notion of like a commitment market where the commitment then is like quite general. Another point then is like yeah there's the integrity of this thing because kind of like I alluded to there's many actors now and they all have different incentives and you need to like align them in the right way. If you don't do this properly then well yeah if you don't do this properly then you can imagine like people just not using it. So one way you could fix that is you have a testers go and also test the chain. You know if there's this two slot process alternating you can have a testers attest what they see and in that way they strengthen again the mechanism but then it's like okay maybe they could be bribed like who knows. So point being there's a lot of open research questions there. Oh no my emoji didn't show up. Anyway it turns out that that's not the only problem. So even if we had a great PBS solution I think like I think the way to think about it is like you firewall off all this MEV all this builder stuff from the battery set so they don't have these pressures to centralize. That's great but then you kind of kick the can down the road and there's another problem where again you yeah you really just kick the can down the road to the builders because now the builders themselves could centralize. So we don't want to get to a world where you know there's like a few actors let's say like very sophisticated actors from Troutfy who are here and you know sort of gatekeeping access to the protocol. Like again it'll be a way for them to again violate Ethereum's values and that would be very bad. So I think it's even less clear how to handle this just because like the scope of the problem is so big if you thought there's like a set of issues the previous sort of like proposer builder sighting there's now like it's I would say even like less constrained so that's fun. And okay like let's think about this for a second like how do we how do we fix this? One option is just to say okay we will have like very centralized builders but we just want to make sure they can compete and the idea is that if there's like very healthy competition then there won't be one entrenched player and that avoids the situation where there's like is very direct gatekeeping where I have to go through like one or two entities to get on chain. So to do that we want to keep the barriers to entry of building very low and yeah maybe that's enough we'll find out. But still you know I think if you look around the world you see there's like power laws everywhere and so I think we'll still be you know even if we do have a healthy ecosystem it could be the case that there's like not a great distribution. So we can ask well what next? Well pretty much most of us here we can call ourselves crypto economists so we'll design a mechanism and what does that mean? Well we'll just read off this quote that I made up. What does it mean to design a mechanism here? Well we want to peer to peer network with proper incentive alignment to ensure safety and liveness of the protocol and now what does the protocol do? Well it facilitates the refinement of the block space and this way I was describing. So that's great but there's some like huge caveats. Huge caveats are we want to make sure that well I think there's many but like two ones to call out right are that the people who are using this thing like let's say users who want to like make some trade on Uniswap we want to make sure that when I make a transaction and for example it has some MEV then like I've actually generated a value that wasn't there before and it seems you know I think we'd all kind of agree it makes sense that the generator of that value should capture most of that value. So that's like a pretty big constraint on how something like this block space refinement decentralized protocol would look like. And another big one, censorship resistance. If you've been following any of the Mev Boost stuff which I'll touch on in just a second you see that this is like a very critical question because again when you have just a few sort of I mean yeah, centralized pipelines in the protocol becomes much easier for censorship to censorship resistance to fall by the wayside. So I'm just gonna keep going down I kind of want to just like sketch this path for you. Hopefully to jog some of your maybe like capture some of your interest or you know jog your creative juices but essentially what would decentralized building look like? I mentioned this FPC conference Vitalik you have a talk on this a bit so I'd also recommend that one. So but yeah, so for today the ways I've kind of been thinking about it lately are you have a builder and you want them to basically, well yeah so there's different contexts. The first context would be in a single domain and I'll kind of make that clear in a second but essentially you have a builder just imagine a builder on one chain and rather than this builder being like one server somewhere you can imagine it being split across mini servers sort of implementation wise. But anyway so that's actually not what we really care about like we care about higher level properties like we want this builder then to be able to again be like multiple maybe competing entities and so what that could look like is you have agents who are doing the building and they're not competing for like order flow for example so if this is like in a movie context you have people who are making trades and I'm now like working or perhaps competing with other searchers let's say to build the best block but we're doing it in a way that again we sort of enforce this competition. There I think the more you think about this there's like a trade off between privacy and execution because you know one thing we could say is as a user again of my Dextrade for example you know nothing and then it's just like grabbing random batches of transactions and like putting them into a block instead you could like kind of be in a setting today where you see everything and then you have sort of full information to even leverage against me and when people are front running they're upset about that this is exactly what the tension they're getting towards. If you're familiar with CalSwap so like one idea here is like the builder on a single domain context is you have you know imagine doing your DFI DAP but inside some APC circuit. CalSwap has this thing for basically settling trades off chain before they land on chain by just doing just the diffs or just like the remainder. So could be a cool research direction. Another one there's this DAP I guess maybe application sorry maybe protocol but either way it's called Rook used to be called Keeper now I think and either way at a very hell of a how that works is that they have like a trusted set of searchers who have access to a private mem pool and because they're trusted you know we trust them to then search and extract MEV but due to the way that for the value extracted most of it flows back to the users of Rook. So what this looks like is you have trades where you're paid to make the trade. You can do something like this and then the question that is like how can we tune this like trust spectrum so that we minimize trust while giving us all the nice properties we want. Another cool thing now is like you know there's not just Ethereum there are other blockchains and so now we can think about MEV in like a cross domain context and this one quickly gets pretty hairy because like when you think about it you kind of now like if we're gonna do this decentralized building thing across chains then you now need to like I mean yeah it's not even really clear how you do it like you can imagine like some crypto economic layer whatever that looks like maybe like a network of state channels maybe it could look like yeah I don't know again this is where it's an open question but there's a lot of things you could do and yeah so I think we'll see a lot of exciting research come out of this area in the future so yeah I think I've just tried to like lay out a lot of problems and maybe this seems like pretty hectic that's not good but yeah like I do think these questions around like the builder and like how the protocols use moving forward or like some of the biggest that we face as a community so I do want to call them out and yeah just be aware that there's a lot of thorny issues here so hopefully you are motivated to work on fixing them and yeah like I'd like to like end on a good note like we did the merge you might have heard of that one and you know really this is like an existence proof that like progress is possible like I'll steal a quote from Danny Ryan quoting Albert Knee who said that Ethereum is like an intellectual gravity well and yeah I mean I think that's the case like Ethereum is like a really outstanding community and I think that we're able to sort of adapt to whatever comes our way so I think good things are possible I'm running a little short on time so let me see I think I just had a few slides so yeah thank you okay my problem right so just a few more slides and the first one is I just want to again call your attention to like yeah how can we actually start to work on these issues with this problem of elder centralization like yeah just supporting R&D towards PBS I think there is some like nice PBS solution that we could get to and we may realize that there isn't one and that's also great but the work needs to be done and we'll see what happens in the meantime we have this thing called MevBoost so there's like an off-chain implementation of PBS stewarded by FlashBots and many others now they've recently made a call for like open stewardship of the project so that's a great way to get involved I've called out the Get Up Reboot for MevBoost there's also some stuff around how this interface between the core Ethereum software and the Splitter network works and those specs are under the Splitter specs repo some things that you know that community we'll be looking at very soon is like addressing censorship resistance I'm also working on this notion of a relay monitor there's this like very trusted actor in MevBoost right now called a relay and they can kind of do some bad things and the idea of the relay monitor is to add some like automated monitoring to figure out when they're doing things we don't like and that then we'll feed back into MevBoost to hopefully make the situation a bit better than it is today if you're interested to help there's a repo there that I have and please I would love contributions and then yeah I mean you probably get the sense that this like builder centralization problem is maybe even poorly defined like I think that's the first place to start there is just like defining exactly what we mean because I think it's like a big umbrella for many things you can start pulling a bunch out of it maybe if we can like define the problem we can start cutting into smaller pieces that are you know easier to make progress on you know for example if we do some sort of like MPC or like some crazy state channel thing then how far can we push the cryptography to like actually get the properties we want how could we like now in this like very complex system address or analyze all the incentives to figure out like okay this is mechanism actually work and I think so far FlashBots has done a lot of the thinking here so I just want to call out them they have a forum at collective.flashbots.net and if you're interested in thinking about this reading about this research and things like that check that out and that's it yeah thanks there might be just a few minutes for questions and yeah if you want to get involved just here's my Twitter and I can I'll answer any more questions you have direct you to the next stop all that awesome we can ask one or two questions if there's any questions just raise your hand quickly make sure it's a short one we'll pass that mic over there to you in a second just over there Hey my name is Marat I'm part of block native where we build a lot of blocks FlashBots has a great searcher reputation system I mean we can talk about how great it is and what not but I'm wondering if there's a reputation system that we can come up with within the protocol for block pillars in the future as well Right so I would push back immediately and ask how much we want actually in the protocol because like once it's there it's like very fixed but yeah I mean again like a lot of these I think more like research or like even you know even less formed ideas around distributed building need to take things like that into account like you're gonna have some actors who are like helping the builder do their job or you can even think like the searchers are the builders in this context and yeah like that's one way is like ideally we could have some cryptographic mechanism where like everyone does like perfect searching and valid like users get all the value that is allotted to them and that's great I don't think the cryptography is there and then perhaps it will be one day but not today so then yeah we'll then rely on like trust reputation things like this in the short term so yeah it means definitely a very interesting place to look at Amazing that's the time all the time we have for questions and we're ready for our next talk so please give Alex a big round of applause


Thank you, Linda. Welcome, everyone. This is the first in a series of sessions on government information brought to you by the North Carolina Library Association Government Resources section. Today's session will lay the groundwork for future sessions, which will include genealogical research using government resources, legal materials, military history, business resources, and some others still in the planning stages. My name is Bryna Coonan, and I have been rattling around reference and documents departments for many years, first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then at the University of Georgia, later at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and finally here at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. I understand we have a number of folks joining us from outside of North Carolina, and we want to welcome you especially. We have just a couple of mentions of North Carolina-specific material sprinkled into today's festivities, so statehood or even nationhood should not be a factor. All right. Why are we here? The situation will be familiar to many of you. We are all doing more with less. Sometimes we are repurposing staff, reassigning staff to areas and duties where they have not worked before, or for which resources for training may not be available. We may have had someone with us with expertise in government information, but that person has moved on, or we never had someone to start with. At the same time, more government information is freely available and visible, so the expectation that we can find these materials is pretty high. We also have tight budgets for materials, and you've already paid for this material that the government has produced, so this is a way of increasing your collection that you've actually already paid for. There's no reason to fear here. This is not a mystery. It just takes some time, thought, and a little patience. Here's what we'll cover. The reference process and how government information fits into that process, where government information comes from, because knowing that helps you build a structure in your mind to help you organize your knowledge of government information as it develops, as you learn. We'll concentrate on freely available tools to access government information. If you're working in a library that can afford subscription tools such as Lexus-Nexus Congressional, that's a wonderful help to have, but most libraries cannot afford to have these, so we want to concentrate on what you can do without a subscription. Lastly, we'll cover how to learn more, how to independently, at your own pace, build on what we learned today, and we'll want to make sure you have a strategy for getting more help if you do get an abide. By the end of our presentation, we expect you'll have a little better grasp of the structure of the federal government, the main types of publications produced, some strategies for finding government information, and again, that you can take it from here. Learning more about government information on your own, and in a pinch, getting help when you need it. Reference is not magic. While it may at times resemble chaos, it is actually a process. Not that serendipity plays no part, but there really is a process involved. First, do a good reference interview. That doesn't change just because government information is involved. Remain approachable to your users, whether in person or communicating electronically. Clarify the question as best you can using open questions. Say your patron asks where your law stuff is, your legal materials. Do you know enough yet to direct the user? You don't really, not just yet. Are they looking for federal laws, state laws, or perhaps they or a member of their family is thinking of going to law school or getting a divorce? You might respond in this way to help clarify. We have a lot of law resources. If you can tell me a bit more about what you need, I can be of better help to you. Or perhaps a patron outraged at some recent current event asks, who is my congressman pounding on the table? Do you know yet at this point in the reference transaction whether the patron is asking for a state senator or their member of the House of Representatives in Washington? And depending on the source of their outrage, it may actually be the mayor of your town that's really the person they should contact. So conduct that interview without badgering until you know a little more. It makes for a more efficient and better quality interaction. Nothing takes the place of knowledge, and that's what you're building by joining us today. So be patient with yourself. You'll never know everything or remember everything. This is an ongoing learning activity, and you will get better at it as you go along. Lastly, most reference questions actually fall into one of two major categories, topical questions and known item questions. And that has some relevance for our government documents work. Topical questions are ones that could benefit from using government information, but you do not have a specific document or publication in mind. Say a patron is interested in the subject of elder abuse. That's a good example of a topical information need. A known item query is one where you have a specific target item to find. You know it exists. You know exactly what it is. The techniques and tools for finding topical items and known items differ a bit when searching for reference information generally, and the same is true when looking for government information. So keep this in mind, and we'll see it play out as we go along. Where does government information come from? It issues forth from the three branches of government, legislative, judicial, and executive, plus some additional agencies and departments like the Department of Energy or National Science Foundation, for example. It also comes from commissions like the Federal Trade Commission and government corporations. You will remember Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. For many years, government information was largely organized and distributed through the Federal Depository Library Program, the FDELP. What should you expect when working with government information? Well, you will need some tolerance for broken links and redirects. Be aware that freely available government information websites rarely provide a deep archive at this time. We're still in a transition period with regard to the archives. Organization of the federal government. This is important. The legislative branch is responsible for making the laws. So we elect members of Congress. They make the laws that govern us. The judicial branch contains the courts. When laws are broken, the judicial branch is involved. The executive branch contains the president, but also the agencies and departments within the federal government. Department of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Homeland Security, and so on. Note there's a common misconception. Justice is a department, and if such is found under the executive branch, let me mark that for you, in the executive branch, not the judicial branch. See, it follows from the executive branch. So be sure not to confuse them. It sounds like it should be under judicial, but it isn't. The state of North Carolina has a similar structure. We have the General Assembly with the House and Senate for our legislative branch. This consists of our elected representatives who make our laws. Our judicial branch gets involved when we break the laws of North Carolina, and our departments and agencies come under our top executive, our governor. All right, and today we're going to have several instances of what I'll call don't miss. We'll see a number of items that we've designated as don't misses. Standard established sources that if you can get familiar with them, will take you a long way toward a solid knowledge of government information. The U.S. Government Manual is one of these. In one place, you'll find consistent and comprehensive information on the three branches of government, complete with contacts, statements of purpose, description, and a brief history. Yep, you can piece together a lot of this from various websites, but the U.S. Government Manual can save you a lot of time by gathering all of the information in one handy spot. A little background, just a little. The government printing office, the GPO, publishes information produced by and for the federal government. That's a lot of stuff. And in fact, the GPO is the largest publisher in the world. The head of the government printing office, also called the public printer, selects someone to serve as the superintendent of documents. The superintendent of documents job is to actually disseminate the information that GPO has produced for us. This is organized by Sudak's number. Government information, whether in print or electronically, is organized by the governmental body or agency that produces it. In many of our libraries, we use Dewey classification or LC class. In these, you can browse for items by call number and expect to find items on a similar subject grouped together within those numbers. But not so in the world of government information. The organizing principle in government info is the body that produced the information. And the superintendent of documents, sometimes called Sudak's number, is the government information call number. Let's take just a quick look at this. Sudak's numbers begin with the letters A through T that usually identify the executive department or agency that publishes the document. So a number that starts with A93 is a pub produced by the Department of Agriculture. A pub that has a Sudak's number beginning with S, such as S1, would be from the Department of State. By the way, agencies have changed names over time. So very old publications from the Department of State will have a Sudak's number beginning with FS for Foreign Service. Well, the exception to the rule. Here's an important exception. The letters X and Y identify documents pertaining to Congress, such as congressional hearings and reports. An example is the Sudak's number you see here. Y4 denotes congressional hearing. In this case, it's a hearing on the legal rights of Guantanamo detainees. We won't have time to look at committee materials, but those are called Y1s, committee reports and committee prints. So if you want to sound cool and sound like you know a lot and you're around government documents people, throw around a few Y4s and Y1s. Because this hearing is available electronically, it also has a persistent URL or a pearl. Congressional hearings. Once a bill is introduced, it's often sent to committee for study and consideration. The Y4s for congressional hearings represent testimony before these committees and the subcommittees of Congress. So hearings can cover proposed legislation. This is very common. They can be conducted as research for future legislation. Hearings may also be conducted when there's a question of whether the president has overstepped his or her power. This is an example of oversight of the executive office. For example, President Clinton pardoned commodities trader Mark Rich, who was accused at that time of evading $48 million in taxes and illegally trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. A congressional hearing was held to determine whether this was a misuse of presidential power. In more recent history, there was a movement to conduct congressional hearings to probe whether U.S. intelligence was accurate concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to ultimately determine whether the president was justified in sending troops to that country. You'll also find in hearings nominations to high office Supreme Court nominees, for example. And as ever, budget and appropriation issues will take a lot of congressional time. So who testifies at these things? Well, experts on a subject. I've used this to help patrons or members of an organization looking for speakers for experts. Lobbyists, of course, testify. Members of the executive branch, when they testify, they're usually summoned. They don't usually stop by on their own. Recently, for example, Secretary of Defense Gates testified before Congress concerning the budget for the Defense Department. The members of the public may also be called to testify, even movie stars. Picture here is actor Richard Gere testifying in 2002 before a congressional committee concerning human rights issues, urging the United States to support the Dalai Lama in his effort to resolve the issue of Tibet through dialogue with Chinese leadership. Somewhat less commonly, other members of Congress may also be called to testify. In 2008, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia testified at a Senate committee on Indian affairs hearing to push for passage of legislation to federally recognize six of Virginia's Indian tribes. There are a number of ways to find hearings, and we'll discuss one of those, USA.gov, later on in our presentation. Let's recap. Legislative means Congress, laws are made, judicial is the courts, the laws are allegedly broken, and executive is the president and the departments and agencies, laws are implemented and enforced. Legislative branch congressional, both the Senate and the House have their own websites, and they're a great place to find contacts, biographies of members of Congress, information about voting records for the senator or representatives, what committees they're on, some nice photos, etc. Here's our second Don't Miss of the day. Thomas was created by the Library of Congress. It has improved a great deal over time with respect to content. It includes the texts of bills introduced, resolutions, like House Resolution 22 and the current Congress, resolving to reduce the amount authorized for salaries and expenses of members in 2011 and 2012. You can also see what's happening with a bill as it moves through the lawmaking process through various committees, and when it's finally brought to a vote, see the roll call vote for that bill. This seems very esoteric, but it's actually very simple and very important. Bills are numbered sequentially as they are introduced, HR1, HR2 from the House, S1, S2 from the Senate. The sequence begins all over again with the next Congress. The bill number is unique only through the sessions of the Congress in which it was introduced. So if you have a number like HR2314 and you have no year or Congress associated with, you do not yet have enough information to locate it. Once passed and signed by the President, a bill becomes a law and it gets a public law number. In this case, we have public law number 109-358, and the 109 refers to the 109th Congress. The bill is published in the Statutes at Large in order of the date it's enacted. Our example is 120 Statutes at Large number 2048. In this case, the 120 refers to the volume of the Statutes at Large, not to a Congress. That can be confusing because they are often very close to the number of the Congress, but it's a volume and not a Congress number. Both the public law number and the Statutes at Large numbers remain unique for that law. So the bill numbers are not unique. You have to have the Congress of the Year, but the public law and Statutes at Large numbers are unique. Let's recap for just a second because it's important. Bill numbers like HR1, S2 are unique only to their Congress. Public law numbers and Statutes at Large numbers are unique to that law and remain so in perpetuity. Knowing this can save you a lot of grief when you're working with congressional materials. The U.S. Code. A bill becomes a law. It gets its public law number and its Statutes at Large number. These are chronological numbers assigned at the time the bill becomes a law. But the next important thing that happens is that the laws get codified by subject in the U.S. Code. So if you're looking for current federal laws in force concerning child pornography, you cannot comb through all the laws passed in various Congresses over many years. You'll want to go to the most recent edition of the U.S. Code. Here is 18 U.S. Codes section 2251 refers to title 18 of the U.S. Code section 2251. Don't miss number three. You can find the U.S. Code available in a variety of resources. But here you'll see two that are stable and freely available. FDCIS, the Federal Digital System, we'll see again in just a moment. It was formally known as GPO Access and it's maintained by the government printing office to provide free online access to official federal government publications. The development of FDCIS is still ongoing. Thomas we saw earlier from the Library of Congress. Lots of times, let me get you to the next slide here, lots of times we hear laws referred to as acts of Congress and for simplicity we come to know them by their popular name rather than by their long official name. The Clean Water Act is actually the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. The Glass-Steagall Act is actually the Banking Act of 1933. What we refer to as the Original Hate Crimes Act is actually the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. So sometimes we just need the official name of an act to search an official source. That's when acts by popular names can help. And here are three places you can freely go to decode these if you need to. If you ever watch C-SPAN you are seeing the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress live. The official printed record of these is the Congressional Record. The Congressional Record has a long and fascinating history. For example, eulogies for many well-known and lesser-known individuals are recorded in the Congressional Record. We won't have time today to explore the rich history of the Congressional Record, but it's worth a session all of its own. You can use both FDCIS and Thomas to locate items in the Congressional Record, although here is an instance of where free online access means you will not yet have a deep archive available. At this time FDCIS only takes you back to about 1994. Thomas goes back only to the mid-1980s. And there are some individual digitizing projects going on, and the problem of free access to all of the Congressional Record searchable in one free spot will eventually be solved. But right now for comprehensive readily searchable access to the Congressional Record for free, excuse me, you'll need access to a paid subscription to something like LexisNexis Congressional. You won't be able to do it completely for free. Congress has its own research arm, Congressional Research Service, the CRS, researchers who gather information for congressmen and congresswomen to use in their own deliberations. Congress needs the best of the best, top-notch research, and they get it, paid for with your tax dollars. But they do not readily distribute it after they use it. Fortunately, there are ways to get the CRS reports. You can request individual CRS reports from your congressperson, but this is cumbersome and inconvenient, and it can take several weeks to receive the report you need. You may have to go that route for some reports, but first try these two free websites that help you get electronic access to many CRS reports. These are put together by organizations that have already requested reports from congresspeople, and they mount them for us. Here's an example of a CRS report on alternative fuels and advanced technology vehicles. You and your patrons have paid for them as taxpayers, so you'll want to make them available to your users when appropriate to a question that they bring to you. Judicial. On to the judicial branch. Anyone here watch Law and Order reruns that you do? I do. That show is a great way to help with the confusion we noted earlier when we were looking at the chart of the structure of the government. One part of Law and Order involves the police, law enforcement, ultimately under the Department of Justice, which we saw as part of the executive branch. The second half of Law and Order episodes involve the courts, the judicial system, the judicial branch. Our judicial system rests upon the notion of stare decisis, stare decisis, to stand by decisions. That means that judges are obliged to respect the precedents established by prior decisions. The Supreme Court is our highest court. A case that reaches the Supreme Court has usually, though not always, gone through a number of lower courts, such as district courts or other courts of appeal. The supremecourt.gov site contains biographies of current justices and Supreme Court opinions for the last five years or so. Cases decided by the Supreme Court are collected in a publication called the U.S. Reports. So the title of the publication that contains all the Supreme Court opinions does not have the word Supreme Court in it. This is one thing you just have to remember. Here we see a typical site to a Supreme Court opinion. It's read as Bayes v. Reese. It's volume 553 of the U.S. reports, and the case starts on page 35. Here's Ms. Number 4. Sometimes freely available legal materials from the government are not always available or easy to use. Here are two non-government resources that are more user-friendly for us to use instead. Cornell Law is helpful for more academic uses. NOLO is especially helpful when you need to refer a patron for more consumer-related or personal law issues. In some ways, the executive branch is the least familiar to us. We are well aware of the president, but usually not so aware of the publications the president is responsible for creating, and we're often less aware generally of the departments and agencies that make up a huge chunk of the executive branch. The president can issue executive orders. These have the force of law, but they do not travel through Congress, so sometimes presidents do get criticized for issuing them. Executive Order 9981 issued by Harry Truman in 1948 desegregated the armed forces of the United States. The president can use an executive order to create a national holiday or a day designated to a special event. Take Your Child to Work Day was created by executive order. Following the earthquake in Haiti, President Obama issued Executive Order 13529 ordering selected reserve and certain individual-ready reserve members of the armed forces to active duty to assist in Haitian earthquake relief efforts. The weekly compilation of presidential documents is published every Monday, and it's the official publication of presidential statements, messages, remarks, and other materials released by the White House press secretary. As you might imagine, the public papers of the presidents have great significance for historical research. The National Archives website helps us keep track of executive orders, including the most recent ones. Our by now old friend, F.B. Siss, houses for us the weekly and daily compilations of presidential documents. F.B. Siss does not have the papers of the presidents, I'm sorry, does have some of the papers of the presidents, but not all of them. So for now, we depend on a wonderful and interesting nongovernmental website created at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called the American Presidency Project. The departments and agencies. Agency websites are so helpful for finding contacts and current services of the agency, but often do not effectively lead us to the many publications past and present of the agency beyond those of a fairly consumer nature. If they did, we could just skip over the whole next section, but we can't. Here's the example of one that actually does a nice job of both. The Department of Education website has lots of good information about scholarships and grants, no child left behind, and under the research tab, under the research tab on the top toolbar, you are led to the many of the reports and statistics available over time from the Department of Education. So that's an example of a good one. Regardless of that, many agencies do indeed provide excellent standard titles electronically, whether or not they clearly link them to them from their own web pages. Don't miss number five. Let's look at a couple of these. If we're running short of time, we may not see them all, but let's try to. Here's don't miss number five with two important standard titles to tell you about. The catalog of domestic federal assistance contains detailed program descriptions for more than 2,000 federal assistance programs available to state and local governments, including the District of Columbia. This is a great place to take patrons. This will also include organizations and institutions, can get assistance, specialized groups, nonprofit organizations, and individuals. So it's a good place to take a patron who is interested in what kind of federal assistance is available perhaps to them or to their organization. The Occupational Outlook Handbook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a classic. It's a reference title for information on occupations, details the training and education needed, earnings, outlook for the profession, what workers do on the job, and the working conditions in that profession. Don't miss number six. The CIA World Factbook sounds like it should be filled with classified information. But what it really does is provide information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and all kinds of transnational issues for nations recognized by the U.S. The FBI Uniform Crime Report. Ah, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable uniform crime statistics for the whole nation. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports is where we go to find information on such topics as crime rates, what types of crimes are committed, hate crime statistics, for example, and the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. The reputation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC has taken a pretty bad beating during the last couple of years of economics recession. But the purpose of the commission, when it's working properly, is to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets. The inter-database on the SEC site provides detailed information on publicly traded companies listed on American stock exchanges. The economic report of the president sounds like it might be very dull, but it really isn't, and it's packed with well-researched information and statistics about our economy. On science.gov is one of my favorites. You'll see a small fire ant here on the top left. I hate to bring that up, but in the eastern North Carolina we have to be concerned about those. It's a great gateway to government science information that was always very hard to pull together, and you use it to access more than 45 databases and 200 million pages of science information. The national map, again, I don't miss. It's one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey, and if you haven't used topo maps, geographic maps for your area, you're in for a real treat. You can see those through that site. The statistical abstract of the U.S. for statistics we're going to come back to in just a moment. The U.S. Bureau of the Census, American Fact Finder, the Bureau of the Census. Every 10 years the decennial census is taken, and the American Fact Finder is the Bureau of the Census' tool to help us make better, easier use of the census. And we'll have a specific session on that a little later in our series. For NC people, NCLink is a don't miss, and for simplicity's sake I'll let you explore that on your own, but it's the State Data Center of North Carolina that produces that using the U.S. Census. But they also add agency information as well, good for comparisons of various counties. FedStats, an overall tool to help us find federal statistics when we're just not sure where to even start. It's good particularly for topical searches. The search engine on it isn't great, but it's a good place to start when you're a little bit at fee. If I were on a desert island and I could only take one government source for statistics, this would be it, statistical abstract of the United States. And it's so important because you'll see that it tells you not only the statistics, but where they got it. So the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is where this came from. And it also tells us that Wards Automotive, it also tells us something else important. It tells us about a resource that is not a government resource, Wards Automotive. And that's a trade organization, a way to find additional information that we might need, at least a lead, someplace you can go from there. The regulatory environment, the Congress brought into being the Social Security Administration by an active Congress. But the rules and regulations of the Social Security Administration are actually established by the agency itself. And this is the regulatory environment. They have the force of law. They are not law. They do not go through Congress. They come from an agency. But they have the force of law. An example of this is the Federal Register, the official daily publication for proposed rules and notices. Well, the Federal Register grows up to be the Code of Federal Regulations. It's the codification of the general and permanent rules from the Federal Register. You'll remember that the statutes in large and public laws grew up to be the U.S. Code. I'm kind of a similar situation here.  The U.S. Code is the law of the land created by Congress. The Code of Federal Regulations are the codified regulations of agencies under the executive branch. And in North Carolina, agency regulations are codified into the NC Administrative Code. So code is around a lot, and it doesn't always mean the same thing. Here's the new FDIS, FDIS website. It's very new. And what you see circled are many of the resources we've already talked about today. Tools. Well, what to use and when to use them. GTO Access, now FDIS. We've mentioned a number of times in our presentation the need for these, and that's our main tool for finding a lot of government information. But we need a real search engine, and there are really two that you need to know about. One is USA.gov, and the second is Google U.S. Government Search. USA.gov used to be called firstgov.gov, and Google U.S. Government Search was formerly Google Uncle Sam. Well, which is better? It's really a bit of a wash. But let me give you some clues as to which might be better for us. The USA.gov, let me go in reverse. Google USA, Google U.S. Government Search. And when it started, it could not pick up things like .mil, .gov, .com sites. And there are many U.S. government resources that actually have those endings. A National Technical Information Service runs on a .com. That's no longer the case, but that was a problem at the beginning. I'll mention this later why I prefer USA.gov and why, but it is a little bit of a wash. We're going to see also WorldCat, the OCLC database, and the FedStats. We'll come back to that in just a second. So, GPO access is good for no, particularly good for known items on relatively recent engines, such like congressional hearings go back only to 1985. For example, most other series only to the early 1990s, so relatively recent vintage. FDCIS provides free online access to official federal government publications. As I say, it's a bit of a wash, but let's take a closer look. The original Google wasn't picking up the .mil sites and so forth, but that's no longer the case. I'm sorry for the little jumble here. Of course, I dropped my notes on the floor, but I think I'm back to business here. USA.gov or Google USA government search, both are helpful when you're doing a topical search, particularly. Both have an advanced search page available, and doing most topical searches produces similar results in each. In this case, I did a search on elder abuse, and I found pretty much the best sites within the top five on both. USA.gov at this time has a cleaner interface, especially for consumer type things rather than academic information searches. So you can find services and agencies and contacts very easily on USA.gov. WorldCat helps us get stuff that we don't have, especially specific older items not available electronically. WorldCat is what is known as a union catalog, a catalog of many catalogs in a lot of libraries. Here's an example of a hearing concerning the establishment of outpatient eye care within the Veterans Administration. Veterans Affairs are very much in the news now, and healthcare for veterans is a very current issue, and this is a very old hearing. If someone's looking into the history of this, whether we should keep eye care within veterans benefits, they may need to go back to the original hearings. So that's here, the hearing itself. Now you have a known item, but you don't have it in your library, and you haven't been able to find it electronically. What the WorldCat also tells us is that Duke University has cataloged this in their library. Often libraries do not have their government documents cataloged in their catalog, their actual catalog. Some do, but many don't. And some libraries catalog their government documents using perhaps an LC classification and put them on the shelf with other materials to integrate them. In this case, Duke has cataloged this item as a book, and they have it in that manner. There is, in the WorldCat record, a sudox number. You can get the sudox number. And a large library with a deep archive of uncataloged printed hearings can still locate this in their collection using just the sudox number. So that's a lot going on in this slide, but the basic moral of that story is it's something you can't find electronically, and you don't have it in your library. And you know it exists, something very specific, and this will help you find it. You can find it in a large library or by using interlibrary loan with that information. All right, let's pull some of this together in real life. You don't really use government documents according to the slides we presented today, right? So you get questions. You get actual questions. So if someone wants to see the hearings and reports associated with the Challenger accident, okay? We talked about congressional hearings, and we mentioned that in this case you may or may not know the year that the Challenger accident occurred. But you perhaps need to just Google, okay? That's our first impulse, and it's not a bad one. In something like this, for hearings and reports, I would certainly try USA.gov, or if you come to prefer Google's U.S. government search. Who is my senator, and how has she been voting, or he or she, on major issues facing our country? You'll remember that we went to thehouse.gov or senate.gov site. We hear a lot about Rosie Wade. I'd like to read the actual opinion of the Justice of the Supreme Court for this case. You'll remember that we talked about Supreme Court cases being part of the U.S. reports, that the title of that series does not have the word Supreme Court in it, U.S. reports. How many Hispanics live in the United States, and how many live in my state? Well, it's a demographic, isn't it? And there are a lot of ways to get to this. We may try the stat abstracts, but chances are pretty good when you, especially after you have our session on American Fact Finder, that you'll go to the U.S. Census to find out that information. And if your state happens to be North Carolina, NC-Link. My neighbor's husband passed away suddenly, leaving her with two young children. I've heard she can get help from Social Security. Is that true? We know that agencies under the executive branch are brought into being by acts of Congress, but the regulations and the regulatory environment means that they set the regulations and the procedures. The first place I would try would be the Social Security site itself. There is a federal depository library program. It's very important to know about. It's having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment, now that a lot of documents are available electronically. But there are more than 1,200 depository libraries in the United States and its territories. In North Carolina, many of our large university and public libraries are selective depositories. They don't receive all of the publications selected by the superintendent of documents to go through the system. UNC Chapel Hill is our regional depository library, and they should receive everything. Here you'll find people who can help when you get in a bind. So talk to your friends at libraries that are selective or regional depository libraries. Learning more and getting some help. If I were trying to do that myself, I would examine the don't miss examples in this presentation. I would then, and this is, I do this still quite a bit, examine quality library guides on government documents. Many of these, the University of Michigan site was always a wonderful one. I learned a lot from them. Many of them, though, are better to use if you're trying to learn about a specific thing. I want to know more about congressional hearings. I want to know more about executive orders. But a lot of times you need to, you have an information need. You have a patron with some kind of subject or topic and they need information. These two are helpful because they allow you to browse topics fairly readily. The federal websites organized by Subject, by Oklahoma State, and St. Mary's. So taking some time to look at these ahead of time before you need them can be useful. And again, the FDLP libraries can help. And I'd like to thank Brenna. She did a wonderful job. That was a great session. Well, thank you for having me and thank you all for your patience.


So I ended up buying it for 35 grand. I took it to the ballpark and said, I'm gonna wear this sucker. Joe Torrey caught wind of it. He's like, hey, you can't wear that hat. It's not required uniform. I'm like, Joe, how cool would that be to wear the hat? Babe Ruth wore it. Now I'm wearing it in a game and kind of brings back history a little bit because it is history. I'm like, I'm gonna wear this hat. He goes, no, you're not. I'm like, oh yeah, I am. I was warming up. I walked by and he was looking right at my hat. I looked down and I said, see, I don't have it on but I went up to my locker, he put it on and I'm looking up the tunnel. I see Jorge and Derek and they're looking at me and I'm like, go, just run out there because when you run out there, they start the music and I'm like, go. So they took off running and then I came right on the mound and Joe passed. He goes, take the hat off. He goes, I told you not to wear it. I said, well, I wore it. It's pretty cool. He goes, well, you're not wearing it anymore. After the game, he called me in. He's like, yeah, you'll find $2,500. I'm like, that's it. I said, all right, whatever it is. The least I got to wear the hat and history is history. So I bought it for 35 grand and I took a lot of grief for paying that much for a hat. I saw on the paper of Babe Ruth Jersey and it was going up for auction. I said, if somebody's not gonna get the jersey, they're gonna buy the hat. So I ended up putting a hat on the auction and ended up getting like $500, $500, $600 for it. That's a good investment on my part. That's the saga of that hat. It was pretty cool.


Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, this evening is more of a, I'm gonna preach on one verse, Proverbs chapter 21 and verse number 31, I'm gonna preach on this evening where the Bible reads, the horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord. I'm gonna preach just on this one verse in the Bible. And this is more of a safety message than an actual or a sermonette. I guess you could call it a short sermon, but really I wanna focus on something very specific this evening. The Bible does say, we've read this verse many times. You know, we always, we quote this, when we go out soul winning, you know, safety is of the Lord. We've never had problems out soul winning.  People are always telling us, I mean, we're always out soul winning, right? And people are always like, be safe out there. I mean, one guy said to me the other day, he's like, watch out for the crazies.  I mean, but look, we just, God just takes care of us when we're out soul winning, because we know that we're doing the work of the Lord and God is gonna protect us. It makes perfect sense. But I wanna just look at the whole verse where the Bible says in verse 31, the horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord. So this is how the Lord works. Hopefully you understand the philosophy of the Lord, but he tells you what to do, and if you do it, you can expect those results. That's kinda how the Lord works. I mean, if you don't get that from the preaching at this church, I don't know if you're going to get it, but if you do what the Bible says you're supposed to do, you can expect the results that the Bible says you're gonna get. That's how the Lord works.  I knew a guy one time that actually he didn't work and he didn't wanna work and he wouldn't go to work and he wouldn't get a job. And he just told me, he said, well, welfare and food stamps, that's how the Lord takes care of me. Wrong, wrong. That is not God blessing you. That is just taking advantage of a socialist situation. The Bible says very specifically that you are to do certain things and then you can expect those results. Yes, all blessings come from the Lord. We get that, but we must be obedient to his word. So safety is of the Lord, but it also says that the horse is prepared for battle. So what I wanna talk about this evening is just being prepared. You all are men here tonight and you all are, many of you are leading families and I've been yelling about leading your families for the last couple of weeks. Take advantage of, let's look at this philosophy when it came to COVID, right? The whole COVID thing that we're finally getting past, it's done, the mass mandates are even being dropped at work. I mean, it's kinda like, hey, we've made it. We made it through that event. Here we are, we're safe, but what do we do? We just continued to do what we were supposed to do during that time. I can't tell you how many people when they found out that we just kept having church through the two years.  You know, or how many people did you lose in the church? I got asked that question so many times over the last couple of years. But look, we just continued to do what we were supposed to do, our horse was prepared for battle is what we did and the Lord took care of us in that. But look, as men, we should be prepared for unforeseen times. COVID was just one of those things. COVID was just one of those things. Look, the Bible says that there's gonna be tribulation. The Bible says that there's gonna be great tribulation in Matthew 24. There is going to be, now that COVID is over, we're starting to see difficult times pop up in the world. We're starting to see some wars pop up in the world that we'll be talking about in the next few weeks. But the point is, is that, yes, safety is of the Lord, but we should be prepared as men and especially as leaders to other people. We should, we have a responsibility to be prepared. Now look, I'm not talking about quitting the Christian life and digging a hole in your backyard and living in a hole, okay? That's not what I'm talking about. But we should be prepared to take care of our families for an extended period of time, should the services that we're used to as Americans become unavailable? This is a very specific safety message for you this evening. Think about your home.  Do you rely on, do you rely on just services for you all the time? I mean, just think of the 3-3-3 rule is if you've ever heard of survival situations where you can survive three minutes without air, you can survive three days without water and you can survive three weeks without food. What does your home look like? Do you have water in your home? Do you have food in your home? I mean, I have a goal of having a few weeks of survivability in my home for my family. Should something happen where services, stores, things like that are not available? This is very possible and I believe that it's a responsibility that a leader of a home should have. You should think about things like supplies. What kind of supplies does your family need? What kind of just think about the things that you take for granted every day? Does your family, do you have family members? Do you have a wife? Do you have yourself? Do you need medicine? Is there medicine that you depend on every day, every week, every month, whatever it is? You know, things from just like glasses. You know, do you have glasses in contact? Should these types of services become unavailable? And then you know, you can even go so far as to think about toiletries and comforts and things like that. I mean, think about the toilet paper disaster a year and a half ago. But the point I'm trying to make is that you should be prepared for these types of things. You should think about these types of things and you should have a goal, or as I was explaining to Garrett, you should have a design criteria for your home. Like my design criteria for my home is that I will be able to be autonomous for a month. That's a design criteria in everything I can build from there. How much water will I need?  How much water will I need? How much food will I need? Does my son or daughter or kids need medicine? How much of that will I need for a month? You need to design these things. Look, this takes time, this takes effort, and this also takes resources to put this type of thing together. Another thing that you need to think about for your home is energy. You know, California is a little bit different than North Dakota. I had a lot of energy concerns on the farm in North Dakota because if the power went out, things would freeze, things would break. Animals could not get water, animals could not get food if I didn't have electricity heat. So I needed to have backups for all those things. Here in California, in our design criteria in our home, we would like to have some refrigeration for food. So, you know, you should think about that, energy.  You need fuel for the generator. You know, how long will you need to run that every day? How many things are you gonna be running every day in your home off of those devices? Once again, the design criteria, you start with what am I going to need to run if there is no more electricity and just build from there, okay? In California, you really don't need heat. It would be nice to have air conditioning but you don't really need it to survive. A fridge and a freezer would be nice. So it's a little bit easier on the energy side. In California, we have solar that is very available here in California. But we, you know, we are spending some time planning for these types of things in my household just to let you know. At least keep our fridges going and you know, you gotta think about fuel storage and things like that as well. How about this one? An emergency plan. Do you have an emergency plan for your family, men? You know, if you have to, if something catastrophic happens, where do you meet? If you can't meet at your house, if that's not gonna work and everyone's at different places, how do you get a hold of each other? You know, I actually have some documents at the front of the church that you can take with you tonight. It's a nice template for building an emergency plan, things you would need for your home. You don't have to use everything on it, but it's a very well thought out professional template for this type of thing.  What will you take? How long, how long will it take you to get out of your house? Because typically emergencies, they don't happen where you have a lot of time. I remember I was building a power plant north of Sacramento a few years ago and the Paradise Fire broke out about 15 miles north of the power plant. I walked to the top of the dam and it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off. There was a mushroom cloud coming out of the mountains and I worked with several men from the plant that lived in Paradise. They left the plant immediately after we saw the cloud and they went to their homes and they literally had 15 minutes in their homes to get everything that they could, gather their family, find out where their kids were, find out. It's a miracle that more people didn't die, in my opinion. Because they had 15 minutes, they got their stuff and they got out and that whole town burned in less than an hour, the entire town. The fire moved through there at something like 50, 60 miles an hour. So you need to think about these things. You need to have your family trained on these things because it's not going to be, if it's an emergency, it's probably not going to be a situation where you just have a whole lot of time to get trained on everything and let everybody know and discuss what we should do. Look, you're going to need to have a plan. Everybody's going to need to know what to do, where to go and you need to get out fast, okay? How about this one? Brother Trevor brought it up in his sermon. Defense, do you have a way to defend? Look, self-defense is a very biblical concept. Okay, it's a sermon in itself but do you have a way to defend your home? You know, do you have guns? Do you have ammunition? Do you have the skills to be able to use these things? Does your family have the skills? Look, every boy should know how to shoot a rifle. That's my opinion. I was telling Jacob the other day as we were talking about countries invading other countries, imagine that. I said, you know, the United States, while there may be a lot of threats against us, really like an actual invasion is not much of a threat to the United States in my opinion because literally everyone has guns here. And Jacob said, especially you, Dad. But look, it's not just having weapons, it's knowing how to use them, knowing how they work, how to clean them, how to take care of them, how to fix them. These are all things that just don't happen in five minutes, okay? Here's another one, how about this one? Money.  You should have some cash, some way to go out and purchase things that you may need in an emergency. And just the things that I brought up tonight, just they are going to take money by the way to accomplish. So if you are thinking about these things and you're thinking about a plan, look, this plan is not cheap. It will take savings. You can't be living paycheck to paycheck and then execute a plan like this and have a month's worth of supplies in your house and you'll have some cash on hand in your house. You need to be a frugal budgeting person to be able to set things aside and start, and you don't have to make this plan in a week either. You can make the plan and then you can start saving and budgeting your money to start executing this plan over time, okay? But look, we should just recognize, and look, this is not a comprehensive list. I'm just trying to spark your responsibility here and get you thinking about these things because look, we should recognize things when they have the potential to go bad and this should help us lead our families to preparedness.  And I'm not just talking about what's on your mind right now is probably war, nuclear wars, everybody's talking about now. But look, I'm talking about earthquakes, natural disasters. Look, what does the Bible talk about? Famines, pestilences, look, if nothing is an advantage to us, the Bible should be an advantage to us. I mean, we know that these things are going to happen. And look, I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist. I hope that the end times are not 10 years from now. I hope that the end times are not 20 years from now. But look, earthquakes, natural disasters, famines, all these things, war, they're gonna happen. They're gonna happen and they're gonna happen more and more frequently. What are we seeing happen now? I keep wanting things to reset and go back to normal and then something worse always keeps popping up in the last two or three years. But look, preparedness is not gonna happen by accident. That's all I'm trying to tell you tonight. It takes leadership, it takes training, it takes drills, it takes phones, it takes technology, it takes radios, but look, as a leader, this is your responsibility. If you take nothing from that, take that from this sermon. We're to make sure that we're not victims because I gotta tell you, when something like this happens, if a major event happens to this country and don't you think that it can't? It is a mathematical probability in my opinion that something major will happen in this country. The majority of this country, they can't even find toilet paper. The majority of this country is gonna be casualties, they're gonna be cannon fodder in a situation like this because everyone will be unprepared. But that should not be us because we have the Bible. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.


Any one place to start and that's your second goal and the label finished always through it. Do you like that one? Yeah. I just kept making runs in behind because at the end of the day defenders, they don't want to, they might have a press that comes to feed and run in behind, you know, it causes them a problem. So just made the run, kept making runs all afternoon and then yeah, I just had a little glimpse at a goalkeeper and I thought it must be because a lot of times when the ball goes forward, the goalkeeper sort of that comes off his line even if it's a little bit and just try to just direct it back across the goal and obviously when it went in, I was even surprised to be honest and I didn't really know how to celebrate but yeah, it was just, I don't know, one of the moments where you just think, wow, enjoy that one.