Are we ready? We're good. We're all good. Alright. First, I want to say our prayers, our whole community should be praying for the 60-year-old male who was shot this morning, the 38-year-old female, and that female's 60-year-old juvenile daughter. Please pray for them. They're in critical condition right now. That family's going through a lot. And so for them and their entire family, please keep them in your thoughts and prayers right now. Because we as the Sheriff's Office and we as a community need to help solve this crime. So it appears it is a targeted situation. We do not believe there is a public threat. We believe that this house was specifically picked by the suspects. Preliminary information, as I said, this is still preliminary. We're still working this. It's just happened early this morning. But we're still getting information that's coming in now. The main resident of the home who was not at home at the time last week had an altercation and an adult establishment in Tampa. Right after that incident, there was a road rage incident with the individuals that were involved in that incident in Tampa at that adult establishment. We believe there is a correlation between last week's incident and this morning's shooting. About 4.40 a.m., the 60-year-old father of the main resident, he arrives at the house which is in Lake Padgett. When he arrives at this house around 4.40 a.m., there are four suspects outside. He ends up getting to a confrontation altercation with these four suspects. They end up shooting him in the head. So after that, those four suspects go into the house. They start screaming, looking for the main residence of the house, the one who was involved in a fight last week in the confrontation at the adult establishment in Tampa. As they're inside the house, they keep screaming for him, looking for him. They actually enter the master bedroom. In the master bedroom is the main residence, girlfriend, and their 60-year-old daughter. He ends up shooting the 38-year-old female in the head, and he shoots the 60-year-old daughter in the head also. As I said, they're in critical condition right now, but you just talk about something that just breaks your heart of anybody getting shot. There's no reason to shoot innocent people while they're sleeping in their beds. The suspects then fled the scene. A victim was able to notify 911. We arrived shortly thereafter. The 60-year-old male who was shot in the front yard was able to give us some preliminary information, but he very quickly had to be transported to the hospital. As I said, the three victims are in critical condition. Our victim advocates are available for the family and for anybody in the neighborhood who's just upset by what's going on, along with our chaplain program. Our chaplains are out there. Any neighbors, anybody wants to speak to us, please go out there and talk to them, because I know it's nerve-wracking. You know, we're going to reiterate this. It looks like it was a targeted incident. It looked like that home was specifically targeted by the four suspects. And the one thing we're asking is anybody who has any information, please let us know. Notify the Pascua Sheriff's Office. If there are anybody who has cameras out there, videos, please go back and check those cameras. If any of you have been outside walking your dog at a time, something, we need any information we can get. What we want to do is try to apprehend these and speak to these people as quickly as possible, because if they're willing to go in and shoot innocent people, you know, a six-year-old male and a mother and a six-year-old daughter while they're sleeping in the bed, who knows what they're else they're willing to do. So please, we need information as soon as possible. No, there's not this point. We're still trying to narrow down as to who exactly we're looking for. The main resident of the home who was involved in an incident last week did arrive shortly after the deputies did. So we're just getting more information from them now. But the one thing, as soon as we get information as the suspects or people of interest, we want to put that out there as soon as possible because we absolutely want to talk to these people. We want to find who did this, not only for, you know, for a six-year-old daughter. That's how I go back to. How horrible is it?  That's six-year-old. Nothing to do with anything. That six-year-old is probably going to wake up, go to school, you know, do a normal kid's routine, be excited for the weekend.  And that's the one thing. We live in a society now, unfortunately, where the respect for life is almost gone. And how do you not respect the life of a six-year-old? How do you not respect the life of the mother who's sleeping with her daughter trying to protect her and then the grandfather who's outside? So this is what we go back to. You know, we as a law enforcement agency, we have a very tough job. We can't do this without our community. That's what we're asking for any assistance. Anybody who has anything, please let us know. Because a family deserves, you know, that these people be held accountable. And those people will need to be taken off the street because if they're willing to do that to them, what other acts of violence are they going to do out there? No, not yet. And that's what we're trying to pull cameras right now. If anybody in the residence, anybody who has any cameras at neighborhood, let us know. We want to start pulling some information. All right. Thank you all. Have a good day.


Well, hi there. My name is Sandy. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to make some pop-up gift card holders This is not my tutorial. I got it from somebody else. Her link is going to be in the description and lots of people have made This kind of a thing, but I'm going to use this stamp set from Sunny Studio Stamps And thank you to them for sending me little treats to play with I'm just going to do some really fast watercoloring on a scrap of watercolor paper and Just throw some paint on there. I'm not going to stress out about it too much The gift card holder, the card itself, is so special that really working on these Little images is really not a huge priority, but I did decide I wanted a little bit of Shading going on. So what I did was a second layer of color and if I got too much on there I cleaned my brush and I used a Not a wet brush, but a damp brush to basically pull color out and white color off So I'd have a highlight area and then some shadow areas either on one side or both sides whatever Not a big deal left it really kind of minimal in terms of Detail because this is just going to go on the outside of the card as a little note to tell them This is going to be a coffee gift card inside for my coffee loving friends Because I do end up giving out a lot of Starbucks cards. It seems for the holidays There's some sentiments that you can stamp onto the mugs themselves that are in the set and You can also do snowflakes and hearts and all different kinds of little things You can take things from other stamp sets and add them to these and then fussy cut them out Starting with using my fingertip knife to cut the inside of the handles first If you wait until later, then you're going to have some trouble with that little thin handle trying to figure out how to get that to Cut without actually ripping the paper. So it's a lot easier to do if you do that portion first And just using that little fingertip knife. I find this works a little bit better for me I have a little more control than I do with a regular old exacto knife And then I'm going around the outside edges with a black marker To just make sure that there's no white showing on all of these because I'm going to have some dark card stock behind it So I'm just going to go around the edges kind of going from the back So I don't end up accidentally making a bloop with the marker on the front of the paper. I've just colored Now I've taken a four and a quarter by eleven sheet of paper And I'm going to score it at four and a half five and a half six and a half Super easy four and a half five and a half sick and a half about a boom about a being I will list those measurements on my blog post as well And then you want to do mountain valley mountain. I'm not sure wait. Let's see mountain is in the middle valley is on either side You just want to do this little zigzag, right? And that is it for the fancy folding. It's this is an amazingly easy card I might even actually make a bunch of these like for my Toastmasters club or something Because they're super easy and super quick So I'm going to take some B creative tape and stick it on one side You want the thin stuff and you want to just have it at that bottom edge Because your card is going to go inside that flap And that means that you need to open the flap somehow To open mine, I'm going to use a die. It's an old ticket die that I had from Sizzix for a long time ago and you can use all kinds of punches the stamp it up folks use the Word punch. There's like a word window punch. You can do that lots of different ways to slice that open You may need to like I'm going to open that up a little further with a pair of scissors to actually get The card to set in there So you might need to do a little fussing to make sure that it will open And I've taken some watercolor paper to make some panels. I've got some scratch paper here And these are three and three quarters by four I think that was the measurements so that I could do some layering behind it as well But you could also use instead just use some pattern paper and make them super easy But I wanted to do some water coloring since I had watercolor on the outside So I'm taking some of the snowflakes from the same stamp set and heat embossing them on the paper I'm just kind of doing a little cascade Around a corner rather than the whole thing and you'll see how that works out I'm using a spritzer to just spray some water on it And that means my color is going to be nice and muted And I'm going to drop some color in here. I had remember I had one of the Uh pink one of the green and one of the teal mugs So all I'm doing now is adding the same colors to the inside I'll do two panels for each of the cards And I'm just going to show you the pink one here I'm just throwing color mostly around the outside and out around where my snowflakes are And that color will resist where the snowflakes are and then I wanted to have some kind of some lighter areas in the center You can decide whether you want really rich color Whether you want to use multiple colors and stuff around that outside edge But leave yourself either room to write or room to stamp a sentiment And I didn't want to have to stamp my sentiment in white or anything So I wanted to have those be really light and pale You can see how beautifully they came out and I have room for a layer of paper around it So I've got a dark brown and a lighter brown And for the outside, I'm going to make what what's called a belly band at least in my graphic designer days I don't know what they call it in the the normal people world But I'm just going to fold a one inch strip around the Front of the card. It's 11 inches by one inch And then use some B creative tape on that to hold it closed And then I'm going to use some power tabs to just adhere onto it my little coffee cups So that's going to decorate that belly band and it's going to cover the place where it joins so Voila, bada-moom, bada-bing. These are nice and masculine by the way on the outside So if you use some masculine colors on the inside, you can totally make it a very masculine card if you want So you can slide that off. You can put it anywhere. I do it about kind of two-thirds down from the bottom like this And it makes for a very very cute little card And then each one when they open up have a wonderful treasure of a starbucks gift card inside So there's the one with the teal color on it And I I just think these are a whole lot of fun if you wanted to do all them in like a coffee brown Kind of a chocolatey color then they could be very unisex and you could just mix and match Give them to all your family members and everything Now I did have to slice a little bit of that paper in the center to make my card fit So do be prepared for that depending on what you use whether you use a circle punch or A die or whatever kind of thing to make that opening in there All right, so thank you for joining me. I hope this was helpful to you in making some last minute gift card holders And you can hit the subscribe button if you wish you can click for more on the blog and pin these to your Pinterest And there's some more videos if you would like to see some more watercoloring going on around here And I will see you guys next time if I don't talk to you by then you have a merry Christmas But I will be back before Christmas with lots more videos. Bye. Bye


Hey everybody, I'm here live with you this afternoon for just a Q&A. I am looking forward to getting your questions and as always, if you give me just a moment, I'm going to get on so I can see the feed as I'm doing this and see the your questions. Please pop in and say hello. Tell me where you're from. If you want to start typing in questions a lot of times as I get towards the end, then all of a sudden we get a ton of questions. So if you're here early and joining me now please ask me your questions about mold, about the gut, about Crohn's or Colitis, about environmental toxicity, about anything you want to ask about health related questions. I am here for the next 20-30 minutes live to answer your questions and it's one of my favorite things to do. Always, always enjoy being here with you. Like I said, if you give me just a moment, I'm going to actually get this screen all up so that I can see your questions and see what's going on in the feed here. So bear with me as I pull that up and please say hello. Tell me where you're from. And of course I will dive into a topic if I don't get any questions right away. Always have something to talk about, but I would love to be practical and answer your questions. So please type those in if you haven't seen. We just got done with an interview with Dr. Shilpa Saxena, one of my, one beautiful colleague who does group visits. We talked about feminine energy and healing and how important it is to trust your intuition. Hey, Ru. Hey, Kathy. Awesome to see you guys here. Please say hello. Tell me where you're from and then feel free to drop in your questions. But if you missed my interview just a few moments ago, it is available for replay here. And of course, just a little housekeeping, you can find all of my live Q&As. I think I've got seven or eight of them and I've got almost 80 interviews with other docs on my YouTube channel. So just search Dr. Jill Carnahan. You'll see my YouTube channel there and please subscribe. You'll get notifications when I put up new interviews. And I just do this for fun. I enjoy doing it and lots and lots of great free content with experts. You've heard me say this before, but I always learn from the people that I interview. So it's so much fun to be here with you and to talk to amazing colleagues and other people. And stay tuned because we've got some great guests coming up. Dr. Richard Horowitz is coming back and many more. So if you watch my Facebook feed, you'll see upcoming announcements of the Facebook live and interviews and who's going to be there and what time it's playing. And you can always replay them. If you missed any, you can find them all on YouTube. And now I'm live on iTunes. Podcast is fully functional there. Dr. Jill live and you can see interviews or just listen to them if you are running or in the car. It's a little easier to use and that's on Stitcher, on iTunes, anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find those. So please join me. I would love if you like the show to leave a review because that helps us get more listeners on that. Hey, it sounds like everybody's coming. Hi, Liz. Hi, Tyler. Hello, Ashok. Hello, Monica. So I'm going to start answering some questions from you guys. First thing, thoughts on NAD suppositories, Liz, to get right to the topics. Okay, NAD, nicotinamide riboside. NAD is a precursor of ATP and really, really powerful in healing the body. It contributes to ability to make this cellular currency we call ATP. It contributes to ability to repair and detoxify. And a lot of us, for example, if we're in mold or moldy environment, we may actually have deficiencies in the precursors of NAD. So taking NAD is important and maybe very helpful.  So do be careful with these things. They're very powerful if you're not feeling well when you take them. You probably want to go slower, back off, decrease the dose. So NAD, back to dosing suppositories. NAD can be given liposomaly. This is under your tongue. NAD can be given subcutaneously in injection. It can be given intravenously in an IV. It can be given in a suppository. It can be given in a spray. So basically any way that the body doesn't break it down, usually oral caps, there's a few forms that are made so that the stomach acid doesn't destroy it. But all of these other forms are so that you bypass the stomach acid in the gut and you can get it directly in the bloodstream through IV. You can get it in your tissues through subcutaneous and suppositories, you get rectal absorption of NAD. Any sort of drug that you would use that way because there's such a great blood flow, you get very increased absorption. But I would say while it is an option, I don't feel like it's any better than the other options. My preference is oral, liposomal or intranasally, although IV and subcutaneous are fine as well. I feel like the other routes are easier. You don't have to go to a special location to get them and they can be just as good as uptake. So they're all legitimate routes that you can use to increase your NAD. Okay. Hi, Tyler. Carboxy binder from Cellcore, thoughts on mold. So binders are so critical in the mold detox process. And you mentioned one in particular. There are probably dozens of binders now out there. I still like the basics like clay and charcoal. I find often they work the best. But some of our patients are so toxic that you do one of those binders and it's just too much. The one you mentioned, biotox binder, I'll be sure and include a link to that. It is fairly gentle. It's made with humic and vulvic acids, which are very gentle. They are typically good as an antiviral as well. And typically people who are really sensitive may not react as strongly to those. I also find it's not as strong of a binder. So it's kind of the trade-off if you're really sensitive. It's a great way to start. I still love, like I said, clay, charcoal, glycomanins, chlorella, humic, vulvic acids. There's so many things out there that are good binders and you can combine them because each of them has slightly different charges. And those different charges will give you different access to pulling out the toxins in your body. So I'm a big fan of combining different binders. Hey, Ashak from Houston. Thank you for saying hello and joining us here. Hey, Monica from Florida, binders, inflammation. Oh, so you're talking about what I just described. So, okay, this is so interesting. I have an interview that we just did last week with Beth O'Hara on mass cell activation and mold. Be sure and go back either here or YouTube iTunes and find that interview because you'll really enjoy hearing that. We describe the process by which when you're basically, I'll put it in basic terms. So when you're detoxifying, we're mobilizing toxins and excreting them out of the body. And both parts are important because if you mobilize too quickly and you get that toxic load into your bloodstream where the body can filter it through the kidneys or the lungs or the skin or the liver, but you push too hard, like maybe you take too many binders or too high of a dose, even glutathione, which is a good thing. You might have heard me say my first two years of mold detox, I could not tolerate glutathione. And we hear that term, we hear about it, and you may be discouraged or disappointed if you get worse when you take it. That just means you're mobilizing those toxins too quickly for your body to excrete them. So the process of what you need to do is to decrease the mobilization rate. You can decrease dose or frequency, etc., or use a more gentle approach. You could use precursors of glutathione instead of glutathione itself, NAC, glycine, glutamine, selenium, lipoic acid, all of those things are helpful, milk thistle. And some of those can be just as good in a slow, steady dose, even vitamin C can be helpful in helping your body to make more glutathione. But the real problem here is you're not able to excrete as fast as you're mobilizing. And if that's happening, then waist and hands excretion would be infrared sauna. I love my PEMF mat. You've heard me talk about that. Epsom salt, bals, castor oil packs, coffee enemas, drainage remedies from homeopathic companies like Pacana. So all of these things will help your body to mobilize toxins, even lymphatic massage or dry brushing. All of these things can be really powerful.  I want to get well. I want to do it. But sometimes you push too hard and you get more sick. And I think Monica, that's one of the things you're describing there. And it is frustrating. You just have to go more slowly at the rate that your body will allow. You'll get to the same end, but you don't want to push too hard or you get more sick and more toxic. Thank you, Liz, for your comment. Hi, Zohara. Hello, Ashkak, again. Any precautions when giving an acetyl cysteine? So this is a great question, Ashkak. Anacetyl cysteine is a sulfur based precursor of glutathione. Really powerful. It's great for the lungs. It's a mucolytics. If you have a junk in your lungs or you have a chronic cough or some issues there often, it will break up the mucus in the bile films. That's because it's a bile film disruptor. So it's a powerful agent. I love NAC. Some people who have sulfur issues with sulfur pathways, they won't tolerate anacetyl cysteine. And if you have a very high fungal burden, I find patients don't have to tolerate it, especially in high doses, until they treat that fungal burden. Even so, it's a powerful agent. And what you could do is start with 500 or less low dose and see how you do. Sometimes when patients are really toxic or brain inflammation or needle higher dose will go as high as 2,000 or 3,000 milligrams per day. But again, it's something to treat cautiously and go slowly. Those are the main things with anacetyl cysteine. Hi, Tyler. Oh, I love that you're mentioning calcium deglucorate. So every single pathway with detox and mold involves the glucuronidation pathway. This is a part of phase two in the liver that's responsible for getting those intermediates out of the liver and into the bile and into the gut and stool and out the body. So calcium deglucorate can be one of the helpful things for the glucuronidation pathway. Another thing in that pathway is sulforephanes, which come from broccoli sprouts. We have our own, I'll show you a link, it's called Brocco Boost Plus. I took the very best research out there on the products. And this is what I found to be the best sulforephane out there. I love this as a survivor of breast cancer. Sulforephanes are also absolutely essential for detoxifying estrogens and estrogen issues.  I was going to see if I could find that for you now so I can leave a link. So it's practical. So I'll pull that up real quick and we'll keep going with our questions as we go. So there we go. I'm going to put a link right here and wherever you're listening to this we'll be sure and include a link there as well. So I'm going to stick that in. Okay, so back to questions. Calcium deglucorate, I will put that on there too so you guys can know what I'm talking about. There's lots of different ways you can get calcium deglucorate and most of your products are going to be similar in quality. I will send you a link for that as well just in case you want to know exactly what that is. So look in that chat box for that. Okay, so back to questions. Hi, Karen. Mold detox, what is the best product if I am taking blood thinners? So blood thinners, so what you'd want to avoid is vitamin K1 of course because that definitely interacts and usually they recommend avoiding, I don't think you should avoid healthy vegetables like leafy greens. They have a lot of vitamin K, but what you need to do is be very consistent with the amount you consume. So you don't want to have a big, huge green smoothie one day and not the rest because if you're doing cumitin or some of these other blood thinners, the levels of your PT and INR and those numbers we used to track the blood thinning will vary too much for the doctor to get you the right dose. So what to do with mold detox with blood thinners? Coagulation is the process of the blood clotting and let's talk just a little bit about that and hopefully in a roundabout way I will answer your question, Karen. People who have chronic Lyme disease, mold toxicity or many of these illnesses can have an issue where the body produces slightly excess fibrin in the vascular system and we know that if there's just the smallest amount like one micron thick of extra fibrin in your blood because of an inflammatory response, you're going to decrease oxygen perfusion to the tissues by about 500 percent. So it's a big deal. You might feel more tired, more brain fog, more exercise intolerance and I find this hypercoagulability from babesia, from Bartonella, from Lyme or from mold to be a big deal for many people. Now that's the opposite of what you're talking about. You're talking about being on blood thinners, but these two things can both happen because there's something called von Willebrand's factor that can be artificially up-regulated in someone who has mold exposure and they can have nosebleeds or excessive bleeding. So both sides of the coin can happen even in the same person. This is complex and way more than I can cover adequately on this Q&A, but I will just bring your awareness to it because there are natural things that you can do to decrease that fibrin production. This is really important because a lot of times many of the symptoms are related to that hypercoagulability and decrease oxygen perfusion to the tissues. So all that to say if you have mold issues and you're on an anticoagulant or a blood thinner, you can still detox, you can still use glutathione and binders, but you would want to be aware of your levels in the blood like PTI and how your doctor is tracking that and maybe do that more frequently so that if there is something in your protocol that's affecting the thin or thickness of your blood, your doctor would be able to see that and you'd be able to back off. There is no inherent reason why you couldn't take a binder or glutathione, but again work with your doctor on that. I'm not giving medical advice here and make sure that your blood stays in the adequate ranges. Thank you, Monica, for your thanks. Late cramps. Christina, great question. Oh my gosh, this is so common, right? Any of you who have had late cramps, miserable, right? Oh gosh, I've had them before and they can wake you out of a dead sleep and almost screaming in pain. Typically, the number one thing that happens with late cramps is electrolyte disturbances. This can happen after things like Lyme and mold and many of the illnesses we talk about or just adequately, maybe dehydration.  Electrolyte disturbances due to inadequate hydration and mold illness are very common. Most all of my patients with mold related illness are on some sort of electrolytes so that that will be less common. And especially potassium and magnesium are important. So if you don't find a good electrolyte, you can even just substitute a pill of potassium magnesium and that will often help. There are other issues that can cause late cramps, but the most common is electrolyte deficiencies. So pretty easy thing to remedy. And I want to mention I have a wonderful workout essentials mix.  And this is everything in one. It has the workout essentials. One of my favorite things, it has the electrolytes for a workout. It has the amino acids to keep your muscle mass and your neurotransmitters happy and it has the creatine. So it's all in one mix and you can do a scoop of that in water every day even if you're not working out. It works really well. Okay. So a few more questions and then I'm going to have to wrap up today, but I'll be back. Late cramps we talked about mold brings down DHA and energy. Is it okay to take DHA from Andy? Well, of course work with your doctor on this. I can't really give you specific medical advice, but if you're testing DHA and it's low, it is appropriate to take some. 50 is a pretty high dose. I typically give for women 10 or 20 and for men maybe 50, 25, 50, sometimes higher doses. But definitely work with your practitioner on the doses that high because you want to check and make sure it's not going down and making excess estrogen if you're at risk for cancer because DHA is high up in the pathway and it can go down and make testosterone. It can make more cortisol or it can make more estrogen. And for example, if you have high cortisol and you take a lot of DHA, you might have more cortisol, which could contribute to weight gain. Or if it goes down and makes more testosterone, you can have acne. So just be aware that there are things that it can go down different pathways and work with your doctor to check those levels and make sure your dose is appropriate. Tyler, treating marcon. So gosh, I'm part of the ICI group. You guys have probably heard this. It's a non-profit that deals with mold and lime-related biotoxin illness. You can find more information about DOCS at ICI.org. That's I-S-E-A-I.org. Tons of free resources there. And I've interviewed a lot of the board members, so you can find those on my interviews. But the question is treating marcons. So many of us in this industry of treating mold-related illness used to believe that you must treat marcons in order to proceed and get well. Most of us have found that that is not true. So while marcons can contribute to symptoms and decreased neurotransmitters and hormones in the brain and pituitary, it is important to treat. But having it cleared is not essential for getting well.  You will be fine. Okay. I think I'll do just one more question. Angie, do you work on molding heavy metals before thyroid support or thyroid support first? Oh gosh, great question because order of operations is so important. How I view this is first, a principle of functional medicine is usually there's toxic, loaded, infectious burden. And I'm always trying to find which of those two things is present in my patients and then what order to treat that. If the limbic system is activated and someone is having trauma from mold or Lyme or illness or whatever, we really have to make a create a safe place for that patient because safety, feeling the body, a safe place to heal and emotionally and psychologically is really critical. If you're in that fight or flight response, no amount of supplements or detox is going to overcome that limbic system activation. So treating the limbic system, the fight or flight response, whether it's through somatic therapies, whether it's through some of the DNRS or gupta protocols or any of those, all really critical. You can find an article on my website on limbic activation. If you go to jillcarnian.com and just look in the blogs. I've been writing about that. You can just search for that there. There's lots of ways to do that. And then if you have a lot of mast cell activation where there's histamine and prostaglandins and inflammation and you're super sensitive to everything you take, raise your hand out there if you're dealing with that or have dealt with that. You really have to go very slow and deal with that mast cell activation as well. And then you go down the pathway for detoxification, treatment of infections, and you can start to balance the hormones like thyroid in that process. But often those things are masking like your thyroid might look normal, but you feel hypothyroid because of the toxic load. So thyroid hormone isn't the answer. It's usually getting that toxic load down and then dealing with the infections. But you can do those simultaneously as long as you take care of the first things first. Okay. Last question. I know I said that a minute ago. It's cholesteroamine, a good binder. So there are prescription binders like cholesteroamine, well call, et cetera. I almost always start with natural binders first. There is evidence that cholesteroamine is particularly good for ochre toxin. So if that's your number one or only toxin, those are the cases where I might start with cholesteroamine. Thank you guys. Today was short and sweet, but fun as always. You can find this recording here or on YouTube or on iTunes eventually. We'll have those up. Thanks again for joining me today. And please come back. We'll be back next month in October, which is just around the corner for more Q and A live with Dr. Jill. Thank you all. And I hope you have a wonderful evening.


The title of this lecture is Amazing Grace. Is it Jewish? And what I would like to do tonight is to give a brief background to the famous Christian hymn, Amazing Grace, and then look at the doctrine of grace in Christianity, and then look at the Jewish perspective of grace. You see, last week we discussed the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, pointing out that this was probably the biggest difference between Judaism and Christianity. This week we'll be looking at an issue which may in and of itself not be a major difference. However, the implications of the differences that exist between the Jewish view of grace and the Christian view of grace may have far-reaching implications. So I'd like to start with the following episode as described by a famous and prolific Christian author. His name is Philip Yancey, and it's in your first reference in your source sheets. So it reads as follows, During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation, other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection, again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C.S. Lewis wandered into the room. What's the rumpus about? He asked and heard and replied that his colleagues were discussing Christianity's unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, oh, that's easy. It's grace. After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. So what we see from this is that from a Christian perspective, the issue of grace would be considered to be among the major differences that set Christianity apart from all other religions. And what's important for our discussion tonight, it set it apart from Judaism. So let's start with a brief background on John Newton, who is the author, the British author of this hymn, Amazing Grace. So John Newton was an Anglican clergyman who lived from 1725 to 1807. His father was a Catholic and his mother was a Puritan. However, she died of tuberculosis two weeks before his seventh birthday. His father came back from sea and very shortly after that remarried. He married this Italian woman and she was a very emotionally distant woman. And that's the way John Newton grew at. At the age of 11, he joined his father on a ship as an apprentice. And he joined the navy, then he deserted the navy. We're not going to get into all of it. But the bottom line is that Newton became involved in the Atlantic slave trade and he really stooped very low. He became a drunk, he was depraved, a morally decadent man. Now, without going into all the details of how depraved he was, he ultimately came to a point in his life where he decided upon making a change. What happened? In 1748, there was a violent storm which battered his ship so severely that he actually witnessed a wave come on deck sweeping away one of the members on deck and that man was never seen again. And they tried everything and it seemed like to be a hopeless situation.  Out of desperation, Newton called out to God and said, Lord have mercy, praying to God for the first time that God should help them and save them from this disaster. Miraculously, the ship was saved and they made it back to dry land. Now, Newton didn't radically change his life at that point. However, he did start to read his Bible and he started to make gradual changes in his life. He continued his slave trading career until around 1754 or 1755 when he decided to stop going out to sea altogether and he decided to start studying Christian theology. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1764 and he became the parish priest of a place called Olney. It's about 60 miles from London and he started to write different hymns. Now, just a side issue about this John Newton to understand how his life completely changed and how he became a force for good. It's claimed that Newton was somebody who influenced a young man named William Wilberforce, the British member of parliament who led the parliament campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire, which culminated in the slave trade act of 1807 and this was largely due to the influence of John Newton. And so this radical change in his life is something that was lived out by the way he chose to live his life for the rest of the duration of his life. And what happened was before New Year's Day of 1773, so this is in December 1772, he was trying to find a way of expressing what he wanted to deliver in a sermon on New Year's Day and he did it by writing this hymn, by writing Amazing Grace and what was it about? Basically what he wanted to do is he wanted to communicate to his parishioners something about his own life, something about how he would be able to demonstrate to them what he was talking about by writing about his own life. And so when you look at Amazing Grace, what you'll find is it's really a description of what happened to him and what it's based on is a passage in the Jewish Scriptures. It's based on a passage in 1 Chronicles chapter 17 where King David has his reaction to what he hears from the prophet Nathan. The prophet Nathan promises him that God will establish his line forever through Solomon and David feels very humbled by it and King David says, who am I, O Lord God? And what is my house that you have brought me this far? In other words, I was nothing. I'm really not deserving of everything that you've done for me. And so what John Newton really wanted to inspire within his parish is he wanted people to start thinking about where were you when God found you? What state were you in? And his answer to that was I was a wretch. That's where God found me. I was a wretch. And that's how we get to the song Amazing Grace. So you find in your source sheets, I put the song Amazing Grace or read it out, Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. So again, this is Newton speaking over here. I once was lost, but now I'm found. This is like from the Prodigal Son, the story in the Book of Luke. It was blind, but now I see this whole notion of somebody who comes from so far and yet is brought so close. It was grace that taught my heart to fear. Again, why did this whole storm happen? It was God's grace in Newton's mind that ultimately got him to recognize that it was a wake-up call to call out to God. And grace, my fears, relieved. And it was because of God's grace that ultimately the storm subsided and he put his faith and trust in God. How precious did grace appear? The hour I first believed. In other words, he's going back to that first moment in his conversion. Through many dangers, tolls and stairs, we have already come. It was grace that brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home. That's basically the gist of the song and that's basically the background of the story. Now, it's claimed that this song is sung around 10 million times a year. Okay, that's pretty big. And so that's where the song Amazing Grace comes from. But now what I'd like to do is to move on to the doctrine of grace. And what I want to just point out here is that there's more than one view in Christianity of grace. And I'm going to be speaking from one perspective within the Christian denominations, basically conservative Protestant evangelical Christianity. That's the perspective that I'm going to be speaking on when I speak about grace. So let's start with the definition of grace within this context. What does grace actually mean? So grace means unmerited favor, which means to say it's what God does for a person, even though that person is not earned that favor. Okay, does that make sense? In one of the most theologically important books in the New Testament, in the book of Romans, Paul lays out his understanding of God's grace as it relates to justification or salvation. And Paul explains that by the deeds of the law, meaning abiding by the commandments of the Torah, no man will be justified in Hashem's sight, in God's sight. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This is in the book of Romans, right? According to Paul, the wages of sin is death, which that means separation from God for eternity. And so Paul explains that it's only by God's grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus, whom God set forth as propitiation by his blood through faith, that one can actually be saved. What does that mean? What that means is that according to Paul, and his understanding of the world, through the sin of Adam, all of mankind fell. And now we're a fallen race. And because we're a fallen race, and because we're imperfect, and because everybody sins, there's no way we could possibly come into the presence of God. And so what we're left with is this problem that we are going to be forever separated from God. However, God wants to have a relationship with us. God wants to connect with us. And the problem is sin. The problem is our corruptness. So God in his infinite grace and kindness provided us with an atonement. And through that atonement, we are now able to come into God's presence, because now we have been imputed righteousness, and we are justified in God's eyes. And so now we can have this relationship with God. That's basically Paul's understanding of God's plan for this world, that this is how we were going to deal with the issue of sin. Paul sums it up, and you see this in the third reference on your source sheets, in Romans chapter 3 verse 28. He says, Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from deeds of the law. In other words, it's an act of divine grace that while all humans are sinners, they are still able to be justified before God and be in right standing with Him, not because of what they've done, not because you did an extra good deed, not because you prayed hard, not because of anything like that, but rather because of what God has done by offering His Son Jesus on the cross. That's how we understand it. That's how we understand grace, and that's how we understand justification. And so what comes out is that there's absolutely nothing that you could possibly do to save yourself from God's judgment or make yourself acceptable to Him, right?  All that's required from your part is to have faith in the provision made by God. That's Paul's understanding. Now, he goes so far as to say in the book of Galatians, and this is in your fourth source, Galatians chapter 5 verse 4, you have become estranged from Christ, that's the Messiah, you who attempt to be justified by law, you have fallen from grace. In other words, what happened was there were many non-Jewish believers that came to faith in the message of the gospel, of the good news, of Jesus, etc., and they had people telling them that if you really wanted to find favor in God's eyes, what you need to do is you need to start observing the law. You need to be circumcised, you need to keep Shabbos, the Sabbath, the Cossian Dietary Laws, etc., and Paul was extremely upset because this goes counter to everything that he stands for, this goes counter to everything that he's been teaching. And so he writes to the Galatians basically admonishing them not to go back to the law of Moses to try and find justification. On the contrary, if you do that, then ultimately what you're saying is that you don't need Jesus, you don't need his atonic sacrifice, and therefore what you're doing is you are falling away from grace, you no longer see it as grace. Paul actually writes elsewhere that when you think about it, when a person works for something, right, then anything you receive for that work is not grace, it's not a gift, it's paying off a debt.  And Paul's message is no, this was a gift of grace, so you can't earn it, right. This idea is confirmed in Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8, and Ephesians, there's also an explanation given. In other words, why is it so important to recognize that this is a gift and nothing to do with anything that you've done? So you see this in your fifth reference, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8, for by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast. In other words, if you were to assume and believe that you were saved because of something that you've done, so that would be a cause for you to boast and say, hey, look at me, I worked hard, I achieved, and that's why I'm saved. And this is exactly what Paul didn't want and this is exactly what he's trying to fight against. However, it's important to point out that from a Christian perspective, grace doesn't stop there.  In fact, it becomes the enabler for you to do good things, to live in the Spirit, as it's called in the New Testament. How does one live in the Spirit? How does one go about living in accordance with the way Paul expects them to live, the way Jesus had told them to live? The only way to do it is by God's grace working in you. It's God working in you, it's not you working yourself, it's God working in you. And that's the notion of grace in Christianity. Now, I want to read to you from a popular charismatic Christian pastor. His name is Joseph Prince. This is in your sixth reference. Listen to what he has to say. When you think, here he's trying to explain what grace is and how to understand it. When you think that it is by your efforts and obedience that you receive God's blessings, you become like the Pharisees. They believed that their lawkeeping justified them and ensured that God would bless them. But the truth is that when you believe like them, he's quoting from Paul, you have become estranged from Christ. You who attempt to be justified by law. You have fallen from grace.  Christ has become of no effect to you. In other words, the Messiah and the blood of the Messiah and so on and so forth has become of no effect. And this is what Joseph Prince says. Now, you need to understand that it's not Joseph Prince alone who views the Pharisees, but by extension all of Judaism as being super legalistic and very dependent on our works in order to be able to be blessed by God. That's the way many Christians view Judaism and our view of our salvation, how we will be saved, how we will be blessed. Often people see people within the Jewish community so committed to following God's commandments to the T, to every letter of the law that they believe that these Jews are doing that because they hope to find favor in God's eyes through performing these commandments. The question we need to ask ourselves for tonight is, is this true? Is that really how we view it? Do we believe that we are justified by our good deeds? And how do we view our blessings in our lives? In order to be able to explain this, I want to read to you a couple of passages from the Jewish Scriptures which will really put things into perspective. Now, most people who take this view of Judaism often have never opened up a Jewish Sidor, a Jewish prayer book. They've never looked at some of the prayers that we pray daily to God. For had they opened up the Sidor, had they opened up the prayer book and had they read some of the prayers that we recite daily, they would recognize that there's absolutely no truth to any of this. That's not how we view our salvation. That's not how we view our blessings, et cetera, et cetera. Now, let's start with the seventh reference you have. It's from the first book of Chronicles chapter 29, starting verse 10. This is something that we read every day in our dawning. I remember in school we had a teacher and we were young and so you could fool us. And so he says there's a special passage that we read every day. It's the story about the binding of Isaac. So he asked all of us in class, he says, who knows which day of the year we don't read this? And so we're sitting there and one guy says Yom Kippur, the other guy says Tish Abab, and everybody's trying to guess, you know, the 9th of April, which is a very sad day, and Yom Kippur, the day of Atomuch, it's a very special day.  So the day we don't say this is the day we don't pray. We pray this every day. Before David blessed the Lord before all the assembly and David said, blessed are you, Lord God of Israel, our Father, forever and ever. Yours, O Lord, is the greatness, the power and the glory, the victory and the majesty. For all that is in heaven and in earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head over all. Both riches and honor come from you and you reign over all. In your hand is power and might. In your hand it is to make great and to give strength to all. Now therefore, O God, we thank you and praise your glorious name. Before who am I and who are my people that we should be able to offer so willingly at this, as this. For all things come from you and of your own, we have given you. What's the context of this passage? The context is where the Jewish people are coming and they're offering up gold and silver and all these kinds of special things for the building of God's temple. And one could think that a person would walk away saying, look how much I donated to the temple. It's such a great thing. David comes to warn against that and he says everything belongs to God and everything that we give is all from your hand. In other words, how do we perceive our contribution to society, our contribution to the community, our contribution to God. We see it all as coming from God. These are all gifts that God has given us and nothing that we do or anything that we give is our own. It's all from God. You have spiritual talents that are given to you by God. You have riches, you have wealth. It's all given to you by God. There's nothing that we earned on our own. So there's nothing really to boast about, right? On the contrary, notwithstanding everything that we do according to what God has commanded us to do, nevertheless, if you look at your eighth reference, we say to God and we plead with God in Psalm 143 verse 2, do not enter into strict judgment with your servant for no living being will be vindicated before you. In other words, we all recognize our frailties. We all recognize our imperfections and we recognize that if God were to throw the book at us, no one would make it out alive, right? If God were to have strict judgment, there's no way. And therefore, we continuously ask God for his mercy. We recognize something which is so beautifully summed up in Psalm 103, which is in your ninth reference. We read in Psalm 103 verse 10, he has not dealt with us according to our sins nor punished us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west so far, has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. For he knows our nature, he remembers that we are dust. Frail man, his days are like grass, as a flower of the field so he sprouts, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him and his righteousness to children's children to such as keep his covenant and to those who remember his commandments to do them. What is this telling us? What this is telling us is that we know our place, we know who we are, we're not trying to fool ourselves or fool God, we know that we are frail and we recognize that if God has not brought down judgment upon us for something that we've done, it's because of his grace, his long-suffering, his patience and his mercy that God has upon us every day, like a father has mercy on his children. However, at the same time, we recognize that notwithstanding God's grace, it doesn't let us off the hook. We are still obligated to live our lives in obedience to God and that's what we read over here in Psalm 103, that yes, God is merciful, God is kind and God doesn't punish us according to our deeds. He removes our sins from us, but at the same time, who does he do this for? He does it for those who fear him and those who remember his commandments to do them. Another thing we read every day in Davening, it's right at the beginning of our prayers. This is referenced from the book of Daniel chapter 9. We quote from it and we say, for we do not pour out our supplication before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great compassion. What does that mean? This is verse 18. What does this mean? It means that we view everything in this world as an expression of God's grace, right? We don't see anything that happens to us as something that we have earned, something that we have done, we've been smart or anything, but rather it's all God's grace towards us. Do we ever consider our deeds or our attempts to be obedient to God to somehow diminish our appreciation of and our reliance on God's mercy? Certainly not, certainly not. We believe that God, in his infinite kindness and grace, sent Moses down to Egypt to take a nation out of Egypt. He brought them through the sea, saving them from those who wanted to oppress them, the Egyptians. He brought them to Mount Sinai and at Mount Sinai, God sends the following message to the Jewish people. It's actually from this week's Torah portion that we read in Shul on Shabbos, in the synagogues this coming Sabbath. It's Exodus chapter 19 verse 5, to your 11th source over there. It says as follows, So this is God telling Moses to tell the Jewish people that if you agree and you actually follow through and keep my commandments and I'm about to give you, then you will be a special and holy nation. This is what God is telling us. In Leviticus chapter 26 verse 3, and I've only quoted a couple of sources, but this is repeated over and over and over throughout the Jewish scriptures, is that if you walk in my statues and keep my commandments and perform them, then I will give you rain in its season, the land shall yield its produce and the trees of the field shall yield their fruits. Deuteronomy chapter 6 verse 25, and it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all these commandments before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us. And then in Jeremiah chapter 7 verse 23, again I couldn't quote all the verses because they're just too many, but in Jeremiah 7 verse 23, he says as follows, but this is what I commanded them saying. Again, this is Jeremiah speaking on behalf of God, telling them about what God had commanded our forefathers going out of Egypt. I commanded them saying, obey my voice and I will be your God and you shall be my people and walk in all the ways that I've commanded you that it may be well with you. So clearly, God tells us about the concept of reward and punishment for obedience and disobedience. This is not something that Jews made up. This is something that God tells us explicitly time and time again throughout the Jewish Scriptures. However, notwithstanding the fact that we acknowledge that there's a concept of reward and punishment in the Bible, in the Jewish Scriptures, and God is the one who tells us about these rewards and punishments, nevertheless we recognize and we believe that no matter what we have done in obedience, it is an act of grace on God's part that He blesses us. Where is this expressed in a beautiful way? In Psalm 62 verse 12, King David says, and to you, O Lord, belongs kindness, for you repay to each one according to his deeds. Now, this can be understood in two ways. Number one, it could be understood that David, who's continuously being persecuted by those who wish to destroy him, God will repay them what they deserve for persecuting David. But on the other hand, we could understand this as saying, we recognize that even when God repays us for doing anything good, it's not as if he's paying a debt, but rather it's his kindness and his grace that God blesses us at all. When we look at the issue of repentance, which we consider to be one of the greatest expressions of grace, we find the same thing, that it's all stemming from God's goodness and his kindness that he actually accepts our repentance. So you look at Ezekiel 33 verse 14, and when I say to the wicked, you shall surely die if he turns from his sin and does what is lawful and right, if the wicked restores the pledge, gives back what he has stolen and walks in the statutes of life without committing iniquity, he will surely live, he will not die. None of his sins, which he has committed, shall be remembered against him. He has done what is lawful and right, he shall surely live. And then when we move on to the next source, Isaiah 55 verse 7, you'll see something interesting. He says as follows, let the wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts, let him return to the Lord and he will have mercy on him and to our Lord for he will abundantly pardon. Before we move on to verse 8, what you see over here is that the whole premise of repentance being effective is God's mercy, God's grace. In other words, why does God forgive us? Because we impressed him. Because we did something and now he feels better about things or is it because this is God's grace? This is God recognizing our frailty, recognizing that we are born with the capacity to sin and we are born with a nature that draws us after things that are selfish and things that are not in accord with what God wants. God recognizes that and in his grace and in his kindness allows us for a way back. It doesn't make sense. Well, God says in verse 8, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. So to summarize, Judaism recognizes that God can owe man nothing. He doesn't owe us a thing. The fact that God allows us to serve him and to follow his commandments is the greatest privilege that God granted to his creations. The fact that we can be called by God to so to speak be partners in creation to make a difference. That is God's grace and that's the way we view it. We don't view it as a burden. We don't view it as the most difficult thing ever or a curse or some of the other fanciful language that Paul uses in the New Testament. On the contrary, we view it as an expression of God's kindness and his grace. It is never on the basis of our deeds that we pour out our supplication before God. It's always on God's mercy that we rely. It's interesting that in Partius Ve'eschanon, it starts out this is in Deuteronomy chapter 3 verse 23, it starts out Ve'eschanon el Hashem and I entreated the Lord at that time and this is where Moses is begging God to allow him to cross over the Jordan and enter the promised land. He's begging God but the Torah uses a very specific term Ve'eschanon and the root of that word comes from the Hebrew word chein, which is grace. What he's asking God is for a gratuitous gift. Moses could have come to God and said, God, I have suffered so much from your people. I stuck my neck out for you.  I went through fire and through water for your sake, God. There was nothing in it for me. I'm asking you, for all the good that I've done for you, please let me into the land. I haven't asked for anything and yet, no, Ve'eschanon el Hashem I asked for a gratuitous gift. I've asked you God based on your mercy and your kindness to allow me in as an unmerited favor. That's what he's asked and that's where we learn our concept of how we are supposed to come before God. We never come before God and say God, look what I did yesterday. I gave so much charity. I helped the poor and I learned with this person and I did something else for the community and therefore I deserve. No, we say God in your mercy because you are my father. That's why I'm coming to you and asking you to please grant me what it is I'm lacking. One of the consequences of teaching about grace apart from the law is the direction in which the church ultimately took. Christianity went in a particular direction as a result of Paul's teachings. Now I know that today especially in the messianic world where you have Jewish believers in Jesus who are trying to go back to Torah observance and they're trying in all kinds of ways to show that Paul doesn't teach against the law etc. But nevertheless history is very clear about the direction that the church took based on their understanding of Paul. Based on their understanding of the writings of Paul. Those who followed Paul reading passages like Galatians 2 21 which is on your sheets which says as follows I do not set aside the grace of God for if righteousness comes through the law then Christ died in vain. What that means is as far as Paul's concerned if you think that you can by in any way reach salvation or justification through your works through following the Torah then Jesus died in vain. There was absolutely no reason for Jesus having to die because after all if you can work your own salvation out who needs Jesus. And then in Galatians 3 verse 23 but before faith came we were kept under the guard by the law. Kept for the faith which would come afterward which would afterward be revealed therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ to the Messiah that we might be justified by faith but after faith has come we are no longer under a tutor. Now somebody reading that would have a right to assume that what Paul is teaching over here is that there's no longer a need for the Torah. There's no longer a need to follow the commandments of the Torah. It's now you put all your faith in Jesus and that is what's going to ultimately save you. Romans chapter 4 verse 1 this is an interesting one because Romans chapter 4 verse 1 Paul goes to the story of Abraham in order to be able to support his claim. Let's read what he says. Romans chapter 4 verse 1 what then shall we say that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh for if Abraham was justified by works he has something to boast about but not before God for what does the scriptures say? Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Now to him who works the wages are not counted as grace but as debt. But to him who does not work but believes on him who justifies the ungodly his faith is accounted for righteousness. What this means is Paul's basically saying when we see that God accounted righteousness to Abraham based on what? For what reason did God account righteousness to Abraham? Is it because of some of the good things that he did? Clearly not because the Bible says it was Abraham believed and it was accounted for righteousness, right? It was basically if you put your faith in God's provision and God's promises that's what's accounted for righteousness and that's how God's grace really works and therefore if you try by your own means to attain that grace it's not grace it's a debt God is paying you and that's not what salvation is all about and so what happens historically is that James or the author of the book of James has a problem because people are running around claiming to be Christians claiming to be followers of Jesus and they're claiming that all you need to do is put your faith in the death and the resurrection of Jesus and that's enough to start from the law you don't have to keep the Torah anymore and so James in his in his book in his epistle chapter 2 verse 21 he goes to the same story in the Torah of Abraham and he uses it and shows how on the contrary faith alone is not enough so let's read what it says verse 21 was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar you see that faith was working together with his works and by works faith was made perfect and the scripture was fulfilled which says Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him for righteousness and he was called the friend of God you see then that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone and so what we see over here is that irrespective of whether or not James and Paul were together or they were really saying the same thing it's clear to James and it's clear from James that this was a problem way back when that people were walking away with this idea that you no longer have to keep the Torah and it's enough to have faith in the death of the Messiah from a Jewish perspective there's no contradiction between our faith in God our belief in his grace and our reliance upon God and God alone and our observance and obedience to the Torah and to the will of God I want to conclude with a teaching from the Medrash the Medrash says as follows Reblevi in the name of Reblechanina says I'll call Neshimo Neshimo I'll call Neshimo I'll call Neshimo for every single breath that a person breathes I'll call Neshimo I'll call Neshimo I'll call Neshimo a creator my timer what's the reason or where you getting this from what's the scriptural support that you should thank God for every breath that you take so he quotes from Psalm 150 verse 6 it says call Hanashama to Hallelujah that what? that every soul should praise God and he says that although it's read Hanashama you could read it as Hanashima. Call Hanashima every breath. Nishima meaning breath. For every breath I praise God and this is Judaism's view of God's grace. It's not as if that there's just one issue being salvation for which we need to rely on God's grace but it's for every breath that we take, every breath that comes to us from God. It's something that we view as a gratuitous gift from God and we thank him for it and through doing that, through blessing God and praising God etc. we ultimately are able to become a light to the nation's teaching the world what it really means to have amazing grace, amazing grace from God in every breath that we take. Thank you.


Welcome back today's Thursday and that means acting analysis for animators and today we're going to talk about Chernobyl, episode 4 and the next week episode 5 and then that's it. Lots of different things today so why waste time let's go straight into it. First off we have that short little shot of those three soldiers actually two soldiers and he is not a soldier as he says and it's all about contrast. I'm jumbling around in terms of the timeline this is more towards the end of the episode but what I want to take a look at is let's go here look at that he holds the gun like this he holds it like that he has it over his shoulder so in whatever if you have one or two I mean not one character but if you have two characters you want to think about contrast there have to be somewhat different and if you have three again think about the different poses the different ways of holding things all of that can be just a visual interest it can be a character difference in how they behave what they feel maybe he's really into this mission maybe he doesn't care maybe he's really angry about it so whatever you can do contrast is key unless unless you want it to be one two three or more and it's all repetitive there's always a reason for this so if I want to switch to something else here so if you're going to be repetitive you have cubicles right it's all the same it makes it monotone it makes it boring it makes it almost oppressive you're in this little cubicle in your life it's just duplicated and it's and it's cloned and you have no there's no contrast you have no individuality no purpose and if you want to put this into a movie you can think in terms of the Incredibles where you have the cubicles and cubicles and cubicles but then you can think in terms of contrast again because you have all the cubicles this pillar is going to stand out and his head is going to stand out so if you look at this that him being so big and this pillar here this is different than all of the other cubicles so you can use something as repetitive as a contrast point to your character or your scene or an emotion or whatever it is even in here and it's all repetitive all lined up that head peeking out is an interesting difference the interesting break into the repetitive lines of this composition now continuing on with this this is a classic stand-up assignment with variations so as always if you watch this channel i like to look at scenes and kind of analyze them and see more how could you use this in your shop you may be at school you have an assignment or you have a shop for your demo reel so technically he's sitting and he's getting up that and that that's a good body mechanics assignment for everybody to learn it's very important now how can you add more to this well you can have that that tells us he's either extremely sad or tired or frustrated or there's so many things you can read into this so now you have this overlying emotion this emotional state that drives the rest of it so he's waiting potentially for some news now you have the look first then you have also detailed stuff if you character as props or or clothing how he pulls that all that stuff and on top of that there is a wall so i'm always a big fan of sets so to add contrast and variation and asymmetry in your posing this helps so he puts his hand on here and then leans on it to pick up the phone that again changes the whole posing and it can add interest and contrast to your posing as well so if you think about an assignment oh stand up assignment is boring well think about this you can do it like that you can add something to your character so it's not just body mechanics and you can add more things like props to add more variation and interest now going back to this sequence here and this is a bit tricky to implement into one shop but i do want to point it out where the contrast in behavior and movement of a character so he's there for the first time watching how the characters are shooting at dogs it's a very sad assignment that they have so as they are pros he's kind of watching somewhat in horror or just not used to this and you can see the flinch right there as they shoot bam so as it continues you can see it's kind of the somewhat of a not super confident walk and then he sees his first target it's very sad he has to shoot they have to shoot the dogs with their their radioactive so you can see the kind of a hesitant walk he doesn't really want to do it and he ends up just kind of wounding the dog he's not doing a good job in not making it suffer contrasting to this right so now he's done this for a couple times the walk is much more confident he sees the dog shoots it there's there's a very clear strong stance he's not shaking he's not wavering he realized he didn't do a good job reloads without checking goes up and shoots it's a horrible sequence but i just wanted to point it out in terms of if you have characters and you potentially have more time to show change think about posing how the character stands how much the movement is changing the the you know the control of a prop and all that stuff can help you in kind of showing the change of a character and now there's something totally different it's a camera move but i'm not going to talk about camera that's a whole different fna i want to talk about just this move and how we are framing the characters and it's not exactly what i want to talk about but i want to use this as a springboard so if you have a shot like this your camera is on rails on a track and goes right to left you can show off i mean imagine the grass wouldn't be as high you can show off this main character yay you can show off full body mechanics and it could be something that's more broad it's further away bigger silhouettes and as the pen continues you can see here imagine this less grass you would have at least half of the character there and you can start incorporating a more facial features it's still body mechanics driven or in terms of you know seeing more bigger broader body actions and you can end in something where we are very close now imagine this character doesn't have a hat and all that stuff but you can end up with something where it's a full-on facial performance and i think that could be interesting change throughout the shot to go from wide to mid to close up and you can show up different skills in one shot speak of off-screen i like this one she calls someone in and waits and then as the character comes in here this could be an interesting introduction you have kind of a contrasting thing of again close up where you want to show someone waiting or looking at someone or judging someone whatever it is but i do like as this character comes in all we see it's almost tom and jerry style we just see the legs we only see this right now she's waiting here we only see the hands handling this now of course you can have a different prop it could be very aggressive stance it could be very nervous whatever you want to do but it's interesting to do a shot where you only see the body and again you can have a walk in a walk out or however that character is handling a prop or no prop but i think that could be an interesting composition interesting way to show off i can do this and it's in contrast to this and those two elements can play off of each other now speaking of prop he is done with this and this is just one of those many examples i want to show if your character has a prop how do you handle this what kind of push-off would it just be pushing from here to here so she has to make the extra step this could be something very arrogant where he doesn't respect her and makes her do all the job like all the work of getting there but you can argue maybe this is a bit more polite well i'm going to get this as far as i can but maybe you can interpret this this this last thing up as a bit more of a dismissive which i mean this case he is like here take this and not get out of here but it's just an interesting way of showing this and of course composition in terms of the power status and looking down all that good stuff you want to kind of look into into this shot if it's true or not but i do like this moment of the prop push-off and the way he does it and as always if you're handling a prop but even if not if you just have an arm movement think about what the movement is and how we are going to interpret this as an audience this is a bit more random not something you can use for your shop but i still want to mention it because as i was going through this episode they linger on this and this is the sound it's radioactive and it's almost now this is all death and decay and then as you go forward to this one he puts this out and again we linger on this and this is also causing cancer death and decay some parallels i don't know if i'm right but it's what i wanted to mention just quickly it's just interesting i just love the show and i want to end with some non-verbal answers and acting and gestures and looks it's mostly a look here and a facial thing so as he listens it's actually not not on him but he listens as this character is talking about their first kill so he's going to ask him do you remember your first kill and i love this character just he has a great face but look at his answer he look at eyebrows and right there that's all he does when he does ask him hey you know do you remember your first kill he does some secondary action stuff where he kind of looks at him i need to drink some more and he just does this i love that it's just this as an answer so when you add a second character it doesn't have to be a lot of work i mean i argue prop handling constraints it is a lot of work so maybe don't don't do this but if you have a character asking someone something and there's no audio you can still do something with that right your character doesn't have to be off screen you can have that second person even that person is saying nothing in the in the lip-sync in the audio piece you can have something like this and i love this it's just very subtle well i'm a subtle or not i mean it's it's broad enough for eyebrows but i love that as an answer and then within the show he actually doesn't talk a lot and it's kind of it's very in character except towards the end he starts talking and saying there you go that was it we have one more to go for next week i hope it was helpful to anybody who watched this if you watched this till the very end as always thank you so much i appreciate the time that you put in and if you like this you can hit a like if you have comments complaints concerns bribes comments are open if you feel like this could be helpful to your shots you want to work with me on your shots i do have workshops sign ups are open link in the description and if you want to know more about my channel subscribe hit that bell button to get all notifications because i do upload every day except weekends and that is it for me i will see you tomorrow and next week


If there were an Olympic event for stretching, cats would win gold. They're constantly stretching their muscles, likely for many of the same reasons that people do, experts told LiveScience. The main reasons? It feels good and increases blood flow," said Andrew Cuff, a postdoctoral researcher of anatomy at the Royal Veterinary College in London. Cats stretch to get their muscles moving again after periods of inactivity, whether they've been sitting still or sleeping, Cuff told LiveScience. When a cat is sleeping or relaxed, its blood pressure drops, Cuff said. The same is true for people, he added. Stretching can help to reverse that.


I'm Todd Vacazzo from Penn State. Welcome to lesson five, the Capstone Activity. The Capstone is where you apply Juin's principles. Here you want to investigate a real-world problem using the analytic techniques and tools we introduced in the course. As we discussed, Juin is an art and science of understanding the impact of place and time on human activities. It is all about humans that make up the world's places. The Juin professional studies and describes the changing pattern of places using words, maps, graphics, to explain how these patterns have come to be on raveling their meeting and anticipating changes in patterns for the decision maker. This is geospatial reasoning. You will use this in the Capstone.  Central of this understanding are the three aspects of GI science, geographic information technologies, and the Juin tradecraft. This is your opportunity to apply what you have learned. At the end of the Capstone exercise, please don't forget to complete the final exam. Thank you for participating in the MOOC. We hope you enjoy the experience as much as we have. You are now part of Juin's growing worldwide community. Please stay in touch with us. I wish you the best in your future endeavors and thank you for participating.


Okay, we're back on the Cube. Day three, eight hours of coverage every day. We are here Sunday setting up. I actually flew out Monday night to go to San Francisco for the HBase conference and flew back this morning, Dave Vellante. We're everywhere, wherever the stories are, we want to cover them. Whether it's the tech alpha geeks in San Francisco talking about HBase or EMC, we're all talking about storage, big data cloud or talking provisioning with Puppet. Guys, welcome, Nigel Hurston from Puppet and Nick Weaver from EMC. Guys, thanks for coming on the Cube. Tell us about what's going on with Puppet and the deal with EMC because you got an apps dev ops like company playing in the elite, cutting bleeding edge cloud and EMC bare metal provisioning. So tell us the deal, how you got here and then we'll have a conversation around. So we just announced today that we've got Razor which is our next generation provisioning solution built by our good friends at EMC and we built it on top of some of the core technologies we have in the Puppet ecosystem. We've got automated inventory system, we've got automated node discovery and we've built this awesomely flexible system that lets you dynamically provision bare metal and honestly treat it with the same sort of agility that you have with the cloud and I'll let Nick talk more about how the project was developed. I mean, it came out of the fact that we were experimenting with bare metal live or with drill the ring study EMC and we kind of looked at a lot of different tools that were out there and we realized that not many of them actually partnered well if you're also trying to do dev ops after the bare metal provision, right? And there's a real kind of big gap and disconnect between the two. And so we said, you know, if we decided to do some of our self what would be the hit list? Like what would be the top things and how would you integrate it? And out of that, we decided to just give it a shot and work with it. And so we kind of packed up our little list of dreams traveled out to see Nigel and the guys and said, hey, what do you guys think about this? And the awesome thing about it was they basically came to us with this prototype and went, what do you think about this? And this is the software we would have built if we'd spent time working on it. So we just knew there was this really awesome synergy really quickly. That's nice. That's great. Like, did you flew by the Portland? Yes, I spent like five weeks, I think four or five weeks out there in the last couple months, yeah. Nice, great area there. So these guys came to you with software, great collaboration. You guys, hey, no problem. We can do this and just made it happen. Yep. How long ago was that? So I think the first time we actually kind of got permission to continue, it was about mid January. I think our first trip was in February. So between about in the February until now is about the total length of the project. That's like lightning for a big company like EMC, right? I mean, I mean. Yeah, it was very agile. We had a lot of help though. So we came in, we would come in with code and with designs and we'd balance it with these guys and they would, because they've got a great library of software. We were using their Factor product, which does the inventory. We got M-Collective, which is their distributed control framework built in. So they had a lot of great repos and knowledge and understanding. So we kept bouncing things off them and they kind of helped hone us and helped us figure out problems in short circuit issues. And so it was a great collaboration. A lot of design and influence from Puppet and then a lot of just coding and work from EMC. I think we really saw the benefits of having a really robust platform and this laser focus on just solving one problem really, really well. Exactly, yeah.  So, you know, from a coolness relevance factor, you know, it's really high. You guys could obviously have better with Opsco with Chef. So you guys are really doing well in the marketplace. This is the business model of the future for cloud, right? This is cloud. And it's on the hardware side, right? Bare metal. What's the environment look like with this solution? Is it just EMC solutions? Is it other servers? In fact, part of that list of dreams, one of the big line items was we should build something that can handle, you know, VMware virtualization, KMVM virtualization, any kind of physical hardware, any kind of blade, why corner ourselves with one product? It should be able to discover, inventory and understand and bring relevant metadata to make you make decisions with on anything. And that's why, you know, Puppet Labs factor was so important to us, is that's what it does, is it's able to inventory and extract all this great information, facts out of a system. That's why we use that. It's because we want to make it so we can have, so if EMC internally makes a choice on a different kind of platform to launch on, we're not restricted by choices we made earlier. So Nigel, when you talk to other vendors like Dell, I mean Dell's very active. I've seen OpenStack and a bunch of other initiatives in the community, but also they're trying to make their commodity hardware still be commodity hardware, but yet have some flexibility to integrate into these hyperscale environments like DevOps, Hadoop, and really cutting edge work where you can just stack, rack, and then expand and scale out. So that's great, anyone with Hadoop you can load a ton of stuff on one server, forget about the old way, but this is the new model. So commodity hardware is changing that definition. It's still kind of commodity hardware, but it's got a lot more software in it. So the question I have for you guys is, tell us your vision around how you see this provisioning, configuration management, automation side of the business that's been an app side integrating with some of the infrastructure hardware guys. Is it going to be running to APIs? Is it going to be, you know, how do you balance that arms race, if you will? Who goes first? Is it driven by the app guys? Are the hardware guys playing catch up? I think honestly, sysadmins and app guys are going to pick the software that works for them. And so I think that's why it was so important. This is vendor agnostic. It'll work with everything. And it's Apache licensed. There's people are free to innovate in an open source manner with their proprietary plugins. This space is as open as it can possibly be. And I think ultimately that's the software that wins. Talk about the openness because actually we're a big fan of open source. Explain to the folks out there who might not have a lot of depth in open source. When you put a project out in the open that could have agendas. Talk about what makes a project successful when it's in the open from the beginning. I think what makes it successful is fair governance. When people have an itch to scratch and they write code for it, that you're fair about accepting that code, that you're not blocking it because of commercial interests, but you're letting innovation proceed at its own pace. Is that balancing the commits, the committers, balancing that kind of committee of commit bits? What are we managing to commit code or is it? I think honestly, you judge on code quality and functionality. And if you're genuine about that, every successful product. Versus mailing it in with crappy code. No one wants that. It's meritocracy at this point, right? I mean, it's like, you know, good code speaks for itself, right? Yep. At the AMC standpoint, we went to Puppet Labs and said, look, we want to open source this because we realized that the best partner we could have in the DevOps community was Puppet and we wanted to adopt their model and the way they approached the community and the way they approached success, right? And so that partnership was, we went to them and said, look, how do you guys deliver functionality? How do you guys do open source? And they ended up coming back to us and said, listen, we do Apache license. We open it up to the community. We accept functionality. We accept features. And so EMC has made this investment but the EMC is going to reap the benefits also. So as people add functionality and extend this code. And that's the open source way. And that's like, we'll benefit from it strongly. Yeah, well, you guys, first of all, good citizen to doing that work. That's job one. Two, you're going to get the halo effect from the poll. Absolutely. And drafting off that success. The question Nick, I have for you now is, what were some of the challenges and complexities that you were looking to overcome with this partnership? When you started, you know, kind of kicking the tires and hey, I want to go out and talk to Puppet, what were some of the complexities you guys were trying to solve? I'd say it's really down to three things. One is already mentioned as a big air gap, right? So everybody looks at bare metal as this single task. It's a long operational cycle. It's painful to do. It's kind of like, if you're an application guy or administrator guy, sometimes it's one of those things where it goes into a black hole, right?  I need 10 more servers.  Nobody knows what happens to it. Then all of a sudden two weeks later you get your servers, right? And then the second piece we had was there was this real big disconnects with tools that do provisioning and then the upper level stack control. So Puppet has the ability to deploy with our demos vSphere, right? It could be not right now, but also OpenStack, Apache, Hadoop, all these great platforms on top, but it has no visibility down into the bare metal if the actual thing's underneath that, right? So the issue becomes if there's some way we can actually harvest the information at bare metal and share that while provisioning with the upper level configuration, you can make some really cool decisions, right? So you can take finite hardware of different sizes and shapes and Puppet can take it and go, okay, this is how I want to slice it up into a proper stack, right?  You can take mapping and do all kinds of cool stuff with these very complex application steps to can inherit finite resources. So what's the next step in the evolutionist project? Is it going to be an open source project? Is it going to be managed by Puppet? Is it going to be, how are you guys looking at this? We're combining governance on the RAZR project and it's going to continue to be open source. We are a really strong believer in the fact that the components of the platform for your infrastructure really have to be open source. There's lots of scope for people to have commercial differentiators on top, but really the plumbing itself needs to be open source. So this is all going to be headlined under RAZR as the project, okay, great. EBC actually took the code and gave it over to Puppet Labs to go underneath their license, so it's properly underneath all the rest of the Puppet. Okay, cool. So you guys kind of be the gatekeeper, that's cool. So Nigel, give us a quick update on what's going on Puppet with the company, some recent status updates.  The company talking about what's going on in your product and company. Sure, so we've been continuing to release Puppet Enterprise, which is our commercial version where we take the well-tried, well-tested open-stack components, open-source components, build out the stack and provide a bunch of commercial differentiators on there. We've got some great GUIs around orchestration, live management, which allows you to visually browse all of the resources on your nodes and then clone them across machines. So people who don't even have any idea how to write manifest, how to write any code can really leverage the power of the platform. Awesome, well congratulations, Nick. What's next for you guys? You're going to continue this relationship, obviously, with EMC. Does this mean you're going to get an apartment in Portland or travel out there? They have good beer in Portland. They keep offering you guys. They say I can office out of there if I wanted to. The best beer is up in Portland. You know that. They do coffee too, actually. Coffee, beer. I'm being impressed by the coffee as well. That's why everyone's so chilled out up here. They drink a lot, then they have coffee in the morning. And the food carts. I'm a huge fan of the food carts, actually. A lot of innovation in Portland. Alex Williams, our contributor's up there. Clint Finley, a writer for us, was up there as well, so good stuff. So the next thing, I mean, we still have a lot of stuff we wanted to get into the code. We haven't finished yet, so look for EMC to add some more features and more value. And I don't want to say too much ahead of time, but we have a lot of ambition with the code. All of it going into the community, all of it benefiting everybody. But this is just a tip to the spear for us. All right, guys, thanks so much. We're going to be right back to wrap up EMC World Day Three. We have waiting for Scott McNeely to come on theCUBE, and that'll be a fun interview for David and I as old school dudes. We'll have a good wrap with Scott McNeely to talk about the Sundays and the Unix. So we'll be right back after this break.