a plate of heartbreak, with a side of tears, and a tall cup of wholesome to wash it all down. That's what I'm having for Christmas, because that's what Oda has served us with this beauty of a chapter to finish off Kuma's flashback. Seriously, for anyone who reads the official Vist translation is in for a sad Christmas day.   Just as many of us have been expecting, Oda finished 2023 by wrapping up Kuma's flashback, and this one is for the books. Quite possibly one of the best, most emotional, most tragic backstories in One Piece. It will truly have a place in the great backstory Hall of Fame. And if you agree that Kuma's backstory was peak storytelling, then subscribe, because that's what Kuma would have done. Just as I think that Oda's writing can't get any better, he proves me wrong. Displaying that his talents are boundless. Because what was that ingenious sequence of panels? You know which one I'm talking about. That sequence that recounts Kuma's life by glimpses of the lives that Kuma has touched with his. Oda executed this beautifully, because although technically, this is Vega Punk witnessing, or in Vega Punk's own words, taking peaks at Kuma's life. It also has the effect that this is Kuma remembering those he loved the most in his last moments.  And brilliantly interspersed through it all was that montage of Kuma running. The tireless journey that he has been forced to endure. The journey that has been his life.  Those that kept him running. Made his life meaningful. Made that exhausting marathon worth it in the end. And these people that meant so much to him. They equally loved him back. Reading those panels, I couldn't help but think of the iconic quote. When is a man truly dead? And I'm sure that Kuma will never die. And in my opinion, this sequence also meant so much more than that. Oda packs in a whole lot of meaning and emotions, just simply by the way in which he draws Kuma in each of those panels. We see that from early on, Kuma's life has been difficult. For no fault of his own. Just the sheer fact that he was born a buccaneer. Kuma's first words were loss and heartbreak. We see Kuma struggling from a young age. His blood, sweat and tears demonstrating that Kuma ran out of desperation and for his life. Not in that same joyful way that children run when they know no fear or no bounds. Free to run because they can. Kuma ran because he had to. His life depended on it. But because of the people that he met along the way, he kept going. His desperation turning into determination. A sense of meaning for his life. But then he almost gave up when he lost Ginny. We witness him stumble, almost lose his way. Only to recover out of his love for his daughter. Bonnie keeps him steady. That much is clear from his very posture. Kuma isn't trudging along. He's upright and determined. And yet it's also clear that he is very much still exhausted. Which is why when Vega Punk delivers that good news that Bonnie can be cured. Kuma can finally relax. That last panel in the sequence. It shows a man making a sprint for the finish line. The end goal finally in sight. Kuma can go in peace. Knowing that his daughter is safe and he can finally relax.  A superb use of symbolic metaphor that I appreciate so so much. And it makes me emotional even just discussing it with you guys. In those last moments I just want to pluck Kuma out of the page.  And say it's all over now. You can rest. You've done such a good job. You were a hero. And what another brilliant use of that sequence to imply that very message. Kuma almost being drawn like Nika. But whereas Nika is the emblem, the god of freedom and joy and laughter. Kuma is the man who came before. The one who toiled and struggled. Kuma ran so that Nika could dance. And because Kuma is very heavily laden with biblical and religious imagery. And One Piece itself has a lot of religious symbols. The way that Odo drew, the light shining through on Kuma's final moments. The panels of Sentomaru and the whole science crew praying at his death. The contrast between the light shining in the background. While Vega Punk did the devil's work of shutting down Kuma's consciousness. Effectively bringing an end to his life.  While light all around him. For me it really left this sense of Kuma being called up to heaven. As if the light was shining down to guide him up above. As if Kuma was a prophet. And the gods called him home so that he could take his place next to them. Watching and witnessing the future of the world unfold from above. Kuma's done his role. Fulfilled his purpose. Now it's up to those left behind. In Kuma's own words. His legacy. And boy what a legacy that is. Which again has me thinking. Man I wish Bunny joins the Straw Hats. Even if it is for just a little while. And I do love that callback. Because we see Kuma tell Vega Punk about his hopes and dreams of having contributed to the birth or the success of a hero in Luffy. And the legacy that he will leave behind with Luffy and Bunny. To then later on in the chapter. Vega Punk assuring Kuma that he too was a hero. And he truly truly was. Something else that really hit hard for me this chapter. Was seeing all past events from Kuma's point of view. Over the last however many chapters. We've seen more and more of Kuma's life unfold. We've been feeling in the pieces about ah. So that's why Kuma acted this way at Sub-Odi. Or this is what he must have been thinking at Thriller Bark. So to see those events actually unfold from his perspective in this chapter. Wasn't completely new or eye-opening. But it still delivered so many feels. There's something about Kuma's sweet face. And his pure heart. That actually experiencing for ourselves. Exactly what he was feeling in those moments. Hit so much more than I imagined it would. I was squealing at the cuteness. And yet the tragedy of him keeping an eye on Bunny from afar. His giant head peeping through the window. Carrying himself away from his daughter. Before she could see. So as not to place her in any danger. Which I want to say maybe GyoGyo noticed. But if he did he doesn't seem to have ever mentioned it to Bunny. So maybe he didn't. I felt the pride that Kuma did. At witnessing Luffy's reliable and loyal group of Nakama. I felt hurt on his behalf. That he had to bear the burden of being the villain. When tearing the straw hats apart. Them not yet understanding his actions. Not recognizing his intentions for what they were. Because it also ties back to his later comment to Vega Punk. When he wonders how much pain or trouble he brought to others. Because yes Luffy and the straw hats felt pain back then. But it was a necessary pain that Kuma inflicted. And I wonder whether Bonnie will share her father's memory with them. For the crew to also appreciate that. I think another reason I love these scenes so so much. Is also because it's another testament to Oda's great writing. Seeing those scenes unfold. I experienced the same emotions that I did. When I first encountered those moments. It brought back memories of how hype I felt. When the straw hats came in to protect Luffy. Admiration and respect at Zoro's nothing happened. The satisfaction of seeing Charles get his comeuppance. All of those iconic scenes. But at the same time I also got to experience it with a new lens. I got to feel those emotions through Kuma's eyes. And the appreciation that Kuma felt in witnessing what makes Luffy and the straw hats different. What makes them the new dawn. I know one of the questions after chapter 1121. Was that if Kuma knew Nika had a body and powers that made him robbery. Then he must have known Luffy was Nika. But I really like the way that Oda has explained this in this chapter. Kuma wasn't sure but suspected or rather hoped that Luffy may be the savior. And not just because of the boy's powers. But it was Luffy's actions that convinced him. It seems very much like when he first witnessed Luffy. He was simply interested in him as dragon son. Wanting to help his comrade understanding the pain that his friend also felt being separated from his child. But as he witnessed Luffy grow and grow and continue to leave an impact on the world. Kuma felt this growing suspicion that this boy isn't just another boy. This one's special. It's not a huge difference but I think it makes more sense and means more in terms of Kuma's story. Again going back to his religious theme. Kuma didn't decide to help and protect the straw hats out of an overwhelming sense of certainty that he was assisting his idol the legend the god. He did so out of hope and faith which is what religion is all about. Something else that piqued my interest was Kuma reflecting that the straw hats are the first to attack a celestial dragon in hundreds of years. And now this may just be a throwaway line. But the mad speculator in me can't help but wonder if he's talking about specific instances. Was it the giant robot incident for example? What does Kuma know? How does he know it? Was it lore that he uncovered during his time as a revolutionary? How much more do the rest of the revolutionaries know? And so on and so forth. This chapter also gave us an explanation or glimpse into Bonnie's journey since escaping the clutches of the world government. And I love the classic misunderstanding that has brought her her infamy and status as a supernova. I love the idea that Bonnie, like Luffy, hasn't been committing heinous typical evil deeds of a pirate but has actually been fighting the bad guys. But she's been misunderstood to be attacking seniors and vulnerable babies, which is what has given her her bad rep. It explains her first meeting with Zoro so much. The fact that she risked her own life to save his. Because that's also the type of person Bonnie is. It's the type of person that Kuma raised. In this similar worldview or values that she shares with Luffy, again, come on, perfect straw hat material.  Not to say that I didn't love seeing Vegapunk stand up to Saturn like that once again, but that's the thing. We've seen Vegapunk openly defy or talk back to Saturn on a number of occasions now. So I think he certainly has the guts to go behind Saturn's back and go through with his original plan.  You can't pull one under me. But there's a reason why Vegapunk is considered the world genius, one of a kind.  Besides, why else or how else would Kuma be acting the way that he is now? In a manner that even top officers like Sakazuki can't understand. Well, I guess we're gonna find out soon because Kuma's flashback is over. And chances are, the next time we see him, he'll be arriving at Egghead to ensure the safety of his legacies once more. And maybe that'll be as soon as the very next chapter? Well, I guess we're just gonna have to wait and see. But on that note, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. And seeing as this chapter seems to be the last official chapter of the year, what was your favorite moment of 2023? Again, let me know by leaving a comment below. And I know we're on a break, but don't worry because I have plenty of videos coming up to get you through the break. And for real this time because I'm on break from work for a couple of weeks. And if you would like more consistent one-piece discussions, please do subscribe, like and share the video. It means a lot and goes a long way. If you're feeling extra generous, you can join the lovely executive officers by becoming a channel or Patreon member yourself. And I do thank all of our executive officers for your continued support. And a massive thank you to all of you for watching this video. This is Joygirl and I'll see you again soon.


For a whopping 70 million dollars, located in the hills above Hollywood in one of the most exclusive communities in the city, Rod's estate was custom-built in the 1990s and the main house spans 28,500 square feet of space, while there's a guest house with 4,500 square feet. Aside from the stunning grounds and gardens, there are two full-size gyms, a luxurious swimming pool, a home theater, and much more. Rod is adamant that he won't change this 70 million dollar price tag. A handful of years later, he'd spend some more for a mansion located in the gated community of Beverly Hills. Not content with the home on only the west coast of the United States, Stewart picked himself up an ocean-side house in Palm Beach, Florida in 1995 as well.


Hi everybody, my name is Sarah Lean and I'm a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I've been in the IT industry for a number of years now and I'm firmly in that IT Pro or Infrastructure Engineer camp. Now I'm used to deploying servers physically, so getting my hands dirty and actually installing servers into racks. But over the years, I've transitioned from doing that into actually deploying servers via code. Recently, I've been looking at how I can automate deployment of virtual machines within Azure using GitHub Actions. Now a GitHub Actions is something that was launched at the end of 2019, and it was designed to help automate workflows in the same place that you store your code and you collaborate with others. So in this short video, I'm going to take you through the code and the steps that I took in order to use GitHub Actions to deploy my Azure virtual machine. So here we are in my GitHub repository, and we have several files and folders within it. We have the .github slash workflows folder, and we have the IAC or Infrastructure as Code slash azclifolder. Now inside these folders are several files. In the workflows folder, we have a file called workflow.yml. The workflow file is actually where we instruct the GitHub Action to carry out the steps for us. In my azclifolder, I have a file called vmcreation.ps1, and that's a PowerShell script that runs the creation for the virtual machine and the associated resources around it to be created within Azure. See, here we are in Visual Studio Code on my laptop. Now I've cloned the GitHub repo down onto my laptop so that I can work with it and the code in Visual Studio Code. You can see I have the same files and the same folders that we spoke about when we were on the GitHub website. So we take the vmcreation.ps1 file and have a look at it, we can dissect it and understand it fully.  All of those parameters need to be there in order for this script to fully run and to be fully successful in its run. When we scroll down, we can see that there's four different sections to this script. There's a section called login, there's a section called subscription. We've got creating resource group, and we've also got create virtual machine. So if we dive into each of those four sections and have a look at what they do, the login section actually logs us into our Azure subscription, and we're using an Azure service principal to do that, and we're doing that because it's best practice. We don't want to be using our own username and password credentials here. Now, the service principal has the right permissions within our Azure subscription to be able to deploy the necessary resource group and resources. The next section of the code is picking the Azure subscription we want to deploy these resources in, because if like me, you have multiple subscriptions and access to those, you want to make sure you're actually deploying the resources in the right subscription. The third section creates our resource group and it creates it based on the name parameter and the region parameter. And we do this because the resource group has to exist before we actually create any resources within it. And the last section, as you'd imagine, is actually the section that creates our virtual machine and it creates it within that resource group that we created in the step above. Now, I'm creating a very simple Azure virtual machine here. I'm creating it based on a default Windows image. So it's using the Windows 2016 data center operating system image that is built into Azure. And I'm just passing in the server name and the username and password for it as well. You can obviously deploy virtual machines in a much more complex way, but in terms of being able to work through GitHub Actions and learn from it, we're keeping it very simple in terms of what we're deploying resource-wise. Now let's switch over and look at our workflow file and what it actually does within the GitHub Actions. Again, within this script, we have different sections. So let's break them all down and look at them individually and make sure we understand what it's doing as it goes through. So the first section is just the metadata bit. That's where we call this workflow something. The next section is declaring environment variables and we're just declaring the output path. That's just really the working space, the working directory for this GitHub Action. The next section is the triggers section and we've specified that when we push code to our GitHub repo, it triggers the GitHub Action and it works through this workflow. Now you can change this, you can do it to a pool, you can do it to a commit. There's various different triggers that you can use. Push, again, is just keeping it very basic that whenever we change the code within our GitHub repo, this action triggers. Now the next section is called jobs and it breaks up into a couple of sections itself. So the first section is where we give this job a name. So we've just called it deploy VM and we've said that we wanna run this workflow on the Windows latest platform. Now that's basically just saying that we want a Windows environment and we execute all of our code within that Windows environment. You could select Linux or you could even select macOS for it but as we have a PowerShell script, Windows makes the most sense for this example. We then start to declare the steps that we actually want this workflow to carry out. So my first step is to check out the code from this repository and that's basically taking the code from GitHub and then putting it into that workspace or working directory that we talked about earlier. Now my next section is to change my working directory. So it's specifying we need to go and look for the PowerShell script and we're just changing the working directory. So we're saying we're in the default workspace but look for a folder called IEC and then look for a folder called AZCLI and that's where our PowerShell script will be. Once it's changed, it's working directory. We want the workflow to actually run our script and we can see we've got different sections again in this step. Now we call it provision virtual machine in Azure then we declare some environment variables. You can see here I'm declaring my resource group name, my resource group region that it'll be deployed in, the virtual machine name and the admin login account name and then we say run this PowerShell command and you can see it's quite a long PowerShell command that it's actually running and it's basically saying run PowerShell and run that PowerShell script, that VM creation script that we looked at earlier and pass in these following parameters, the service principal, the service principal secret, the service principal tenant ID, the Azure subscription name, the resource group name, resource group name region, the server name, the admin login and admin password. Now you'll have noticed I only declared four of my variables or parameters within this small section in plain text. The rest are being pulled from somewhere called secrets and this is because those bits of information are really sensitive and I don't want to be sharing them with the general public. I'm happy to share my resource group name and my admin login name. Those are just fairly innocuous bits of data but there are some things like my service principal ID, service principal secret I don't want to be using and sharing with the public. So we store them in the GitHub actions secret repository. If we switch over to the GitHub website we can have a look at that. So within our GitHub repo we go into settings and then we click on secrets and we can see here that we have a bunch of secrets already stored and they're just the ones that we saw in the script. So the admin password, the service principal ID and these are all stored in an encrypted manner and that way that the GitHub actions can actually pull out the secret information but no one else can see this data. So when someone forks our GitHub repository they aren't getting the secrets it's with them. So they'd have to clear their own secrets and set up their own secrets. So if we switch back to our code we want to trigger this GitHub action and this workflow. So what I'm going to do is change the resource group region that I want this virtual machine to be deployed in and I'm going to change it to the UK South. I then use visual studio code to commit that change to my code and then I push it up into the repository. Now if we switch back to GitHub we can go into the actions tab and we can start to see that workflow working and you can see it's running here and it runs up, it sets up the job, it's checked out the repo, it's looked for the PS1 file and I've sped this up a bit but it eventually provisions the virtual machine and you can see the running times down the right hand side so it took two minutes to create that virtual machine. So if we switch over to our Azure portal we can actually see that resource. We can see that resource group, we can see it being deployed to the UK South and we can see the virtual machine and the relative technologies around it being deployed as well. And there you have it, an Azure virtual machine deployed from code that's stored in GitHub and then GitHub actions actually implementing that code. Now the way I've deployed my Azure virtual machine isn't the way I would recommend that you deploy virtual machines in a production environment but from a getting started point of view it's a great use case example to be using. Now I'll post a link in the description box to my code repository so you can give it a go yourself and please do try it out. Please do reach out as well to share your stories about GitHub actions and how you're using it within your environment to deploy your infrastructure. Thank you for watching.


Thanks so much to our colleague Candace and to John Horowitz. Our next panel is Diversity and Security Policymaking, Progress Report. We're excited to be joined by retired commander Ted Johnson, Deirdre Johnson, the 2017 Eric and Wendy Schmitt fellow at New America, and currently director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and formerly the speechwriter to the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. Also ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, his Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the US Department of State and Bishop Garrison, senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Human Capital Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And this will be moderated by Heather Hurlbert, director of the Models for Policy Change at New America. Thanks, Daniel. And I wanna thank all of our panelists for joining us this afternoon. And I have to say of all the topics we're discussing today, I think really it's you and the Space Force who are the most innovative, the thing that perhaps we least could have imagined looking back 20 years about what the shape of US security policy in 2021 would look like. So I wanna invite first Gina and then Bishop to start by giving us a little bit of a Progress Report if on the one hand we're thinking about the sweep of 20 years, but also of course the two of you are now each about 200 days into new roles that have never existed before in the US government that we have never tried in such a visible and public-facing way to not just make significant gains in making the actors in US foreign policy look more like the US population, but also really enshrine that as a value in the how and the what of national security policies. So you've got several hundred of your fellow citizens and taxpayers watching who would love to hear about what it is looking like inside the Defense Departments and State Departments to be the people in charge of diversity, human capital, equity and inclusion. So Ambassador, I'll start with you. Thank you very much Heather. I'm delighted to be here and engage in this discussion and sharing some updates on where we are. As you know, I was appointed to this position in early April by Secretary Blinken. He set me up in the strongest way possible by doing a few things from the very beginning. Number one, I report directly to him. And he made clear to me from the beginning that this is something he takes seriously and expects progress from. I meet with him about every two months on this topic and it begins, what have you done? What have you accomplished? The second thing is that I participate in our senior leadership positions of selecting senior positions, ambassadors, deputy chiefs of mission, principal officers, deputy assistant secretaries. That means the top understands the importance that the secretary puts on this. We have begun with my three favorite words, accountability, intentionality and transparency. We are trying to improve our accountability mechanisms and that goes to data. Nobody believes anything is real unless they see the numbers. And that has been one of my greatest challenges in all honesty. There are privacy concerns and we have to do the balancing act in partnership with our lawyers of course. And the Global Talent Management Bureau here in the department to ensure that our efforts to share the data don't compromise people's privacy. So we have ongoing discussions about disaggregated and aggregated data. I have very little interest in aggregated data and make this clear every single day that I'm in the department. I need to know what the numbers look like sliced and diced by gender, by ethnicity, by race, because everyone has overall challenges in the department and in any career, but individual groups, different groups have different problems. And our greatest tool for making headway on these problems is doing barrier analysis, identifying where the triggers, where the choke points are for different groups and then identifying what the barrier is at that choke point. And that's why we must have disaggregated data. We will continue the discussion on how much is shared and with whom, but everybody wants to know how well we're doing and you can only judge that by looking at the numbers. The other thing of course is increasing transparency. Excuse me, increasing transparency so people can see what we're doing and how we're doing it. That is in recruitment, retention, particularly with regard to our assignments process and promotion. And again, we get down to the data. Who's where? How long did it take them to get there? What's held them up? But being very clear about what we're looking at and being very clear about what we expect from the workforce. The secretary has made clear, he spoke honestly and crisply in that a diverse workforce makes our foreign policy smarter, better and more innovative. We need everybody's voice. And finally, of course, acting with intention. Once we identify those barriers, identifying what is the fastest, most effective way of addressing them and moving people beyond them. So that's what we've been doing for the last few months. We've also started an inter-agency working group. All the organizations that fall under the Foreign Affairs Act of 1980, that's AID and State Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce, the chief DEIA folks, we get together to look at what each of us are doing and to amplify and augment what each other are doing so that we can go forward in long arm as far as the progress is concerned and help each other find out where we might be stumbling, where we might be hobbled or where we might be facing barriers. We've also moved forward on putting together our strategic plan for diversity and inclusion and accountability. And that will be a more public document by October. I've just cleared off this morning on the draft of that. It's a comprehensive document, but of course it's being fed by the government-wide effort that was announced in the executive order on the 25th of June. So it has space to be modified or augmented as OPM leads this broader effort. So that's where we are overall, and I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thanks, Bishop. Thank you, and thank you so much for having me. Some things I wanna highlight and echo on what the ambassador said. Her thoughts is always so cogent on this particular topic and of the importance of it, particularly when we talk about diversity is not simply for diversity's sake. We already know here at the outset that diverse teams lead to more innovative solutions in how we deal with some of the most complex problems facing the national security apparatus in our country here in the 21st century. So that is why the president and Secretary Austin have focused on ensuring that we have the proper representation within our ranks, that we have a force that reflects the best and brightest that America has to offer, that we have talent pools that bring in as much as we possibly can, that diversity of lived experience that we need in order to engage these issues. One thing that the ambassador really hit the nail on the head on for us is, two things actually, she's very brilliant, two things. One, the need for data and research, and two, the need for an assessment. So first, we began our efforts back in April where I was tasked with building out the diversity, excuse me, the defense equity team. And that team is comprised of individuals from our personnel and readiness shop, led by two incredibly talented career leaders, Mr. Salazar, Mr. Johnson, in order to really help us scope out a proper assessment of what programs currently exist and where they have been in the series of events over the last four or five years to understand what type of progress has been made. So once we've continued to understand that, we can get a better understanding of what types of lines of effort within those areas we actually need in order to help us identify the issues and engage them properly. So right off the bat, one of the top things we know is data and research. When we look at the Department of Defense, you're speaking of approximately 2.8 million people across the world. Of that fighting, of that total force, excuse me, when we speak of both individuals in military uniform as well as the civilians that fight alongside with them, serve right alongside with them, you're speaking of approximately about 41% of those folks are people of color. So it identifies people of color as some type of ethnic background. So we need to get a handle on understanding is that the proper representation reflected in our leadership? And if not, why? What types of issues exists within our workforce to help us meet the needs going forward of retaining top talent, continuing to recruit top talent and assuring some of our top talent is in our leadership ranks. And that our diversity is properly reflected throughout. That's something that we're trying to come to terms with and identify. And that goes into our next line of effort, talent management. Again, when we look at building out these leaders of the future, you can't decide on a Friday that you're gonna take every colonel within the United States Army and make them flag officer. That's not the way this works. What you need to ensure is that people are getting the proper prerequisites in order for them to matriculate through the processes and through the systems in order to be selected for our highest leadership ranks, whether they be senior executive service or whether they be flag officers. So what are we doing early on in their careers and as early as our initial recruitment phases of properly identifying talent and figuring out at what points are they hitting barriers that may take away from their experience that may have them leave as a part of, may have them leave into a different career. That's what we're trying to identify and address. What are those key issues? So when you look at individuals that are at that mid-career stage, what type of life experiences are they having? What type of career experiences are they having that helps either retain them or that pushes them away from our ranks where we can't keep them and to get them into that leadership space? So that's the next piece of overall talent management. And then it comes down to education and training. We want to ensure that we have a welcoming environment for all of those who serve regardless of their backgrounds. So we need to ensure that we're doing everything we can to help people understand and learn culturally about their fellow service members, about their fellow civilians and to understand where those individuals are coming from and how the world around them has helped to shape their vision of life and impact their own lives and careers. That's a part of what the education and training piece is really all about whenever you talk about DEI. And it's not simply about the idea of woke-ism or the idea of any type of insurance that people won't simply be offended. It really is about understanding where people are coming from and what their overall perspectives of work, of life, of career, all of it, how that encompasses their vision of the world and the lens through which they view everything that they engage. So we're trying to determine what are some of the best steps in order to properly shape that. And then we do have some additional requirements when we look at internal and external stakeholders. We work very closely with OMB as well as with DPC, the Domestic Policy Council and the White House in general to ensure that we have as much transparency as possible in our overall decision-making processes as well as our overall, just overall policies and processes in engaging these topics every day. So it continues to be a work in progress. When you're creating policy and process for nearly 3 million people, it's gonna be a slow moving shift from time to time. But it's important for us to do the heavy lifting and to do a lot of this work in order for us to ensure the best possible outcomes for everyone involved. At the end of the day, again, this is about making the most inclusive environment that allows us to recruit and retain the top talent across the board. And that's what these policies are really about for us. Thanks. Ted, you had a very successful 20-year career in the Navy and know there are not going to be any football arguments between the two of you and in the Pentagon. And then came out and have written a really path-breaking book when the stars begin to fall, looking at posing the idea that racism is an existential threat to the US. So when you watch some of the things that these two are trying to do and that more broadly the new administration has tried in its first couple of hundred days, what would your kind of progress report be as an external observer and stakeholder? What have you seen and what are you still watching for? Yeah, well, I'll tell you the updates that we just received are heartwarming. I mean, they're encouraging because it points to the fact that we're not focusing on diversity for diversity's sake, which sometimes is an objective in and of itself to get different people in the same room and then clap the dust off your hands and suggest that you've now won the battle. So a few things I wanted to pick up on to sort of answer your question and to be responsive to what the fellow panelists have said. The first is when the ambassador talked about the cross tabs about thinking about diversity, not just in terms of overall demographics of the fighting force or diplomatic force but of at the different levels where folks are. We know that in the military, I can tell you from my time when I was the first ships that I went to, I would be the only black officer on the ship. But if you looked at the demographics of the ship, it was actually quite diverse. It's just so happened that most of the people of color and most of the women frankly were on in the illicit side and not in the wardroom with other officers. When I was general Haydn's aide at the national security agency, I was the only black officer on his immediate staff or in the director's action group. And when I was speech writing for the chairman, I was the only black officer, only person of color in the officer ranks on his staff, on the immediate staff or in the action group. And yet when I walked around the Pentagon, when I walked around the national security agency, I saw many people of color and many of women. So it's not just that we have diversity but that we have diversity at every level of decision-making in order to ensure that the outcomes of our missions, of our diplomatic efforts reflect the strengths that diversity brings to the fight and to our objectives. The second thing is something Bishop said around soft power where when the United States shows up as a diverse military, as a diverse diplomatic corps, that in itself is a strength, a strength frankly that many other nations cannot replicate because they don't have the level of diversity that we have in the United States. And it's, and I can tell you that from certainly in World Wars I and II through Korea, Vietnam, other nations used racial tensions in the United States as a weapon against us to suggest that the democracy that we said we were fighting for, our belief in liberty and freedom was actually hypocritical because when you looked at the state of the United States in terms of Jim Crow and how we treated certain immigrants and how we treated women, the fight for democracy we were carrying out overseas often wasn't reflected in the lived experience of people at home. And so that became a weakness for us. In fact, the Soviets during the Cold War often used racial tensions in the United States as a psychological operations instrument tool against us. And so diversity is actually a counter narrative, a strong counter narrative to what other nations say about the United States. And again, that gives us, that helps us when the hearts of minds in other places when we live our creed and that includes necessarily in a nation of 330 million people as diverse as ours that that diversity be front and center. And but the last piece is something that my book talks about and I think that we sort of talked about quite a bit already on the panel is that the government service is one of the few places where Americans are meeting other Americans who are not like them in terms of racial or ethnicity, race or ethnicity, religion, immigrants as cultural backgrounds naturally, like it is an extremely diverse place. And this is one of the strongest benefits and I can speak from my experience in the military of meeting folks who you would never meet otherwise except for the fact that you were both serving. This allows democratic strangers, again in a nation of over 300 million people to establish a kind of civic friendship because you are exposed to people who are different from you and you find that even across these differences that we all want the same things out of our country that we want safe and secure communities that we want our nation to be protected to offer prosperity and opportunity to all. And so when you meet people who you normally are not exposed to, you become resilient to divisive appeals especially along the lines of race and gender of race and ethnicity and gender, you no longer buy into the caricatures that some divisive leaders may put forward because you have real exposure to the people that are being demonized. This is something that I think should be extrapolated nationally in some sort of national service program because the connection to other people who are different from us is essential to a well-functioning democracy. And I think that the lack of that is partly explained some of the animus in our politics in our society today. So I have to follow up from that on the data point because which Ted, you called it the crosstabs and you both mentioned both the importance and the difficulty of finding data. And I have to ask, number one, why is this so hard? Why are we not better able to get and share this information? And then my second question is, does the need for this much data mean that in point of fact, you're still dealing with significant audiences that actually aren't convinced on the merits? So sort of what is it that we need the data for and why of all the things that you'd think it would be hard to do, as you said, Bishop in a massive bureaucracy, the data isn't the piece I would have imagined. So what's so hard? Sure, well, first, I think we want, as many of our decisions as possible to be driven by data, meaning that there's actual tangible, demonstrable factual evidence of a need to change policy or to make some type of shift in a new direction. I think that's very important. Not everyone, I think Ted's point, some of the points he made are really important here. Because we lack the diversity in a lot of instances and individuals to culturally understand the importance of having these types of diverse teams and being able to bring new people in, sometimes you really do have to demonstrate with data, with a scientific fact, how important that innovative thought is. And the way we do that is first to show them the Harvard business reviews or the Yale management reviews that really demonstrate, hey, in business settings, is long been established that diverse teams lead to more innovative solutions. And once you begin to peel that onion back a bit and you see, just as he pointed out, hey, I've written about this, I've been the guy that's the only diverse person in the room and have wondered where all the other people were. So once you come to terms with that issue, yes, then you can start to not only focus in on, well, this is what the data tells us, well, the data can also help us to understand what needs to change in order for us to see the type of goals and end states that we think are important in this process. In terms of why we don't already have the data, well, honestly, it's a few different things I would say, at least for our department, it has long existed but has lived on actual different servers and different systems that didn't necessarily have the type of inoperability we needed in the past. And now we're at a point where we have the type of systems that and the processes in place that can bring it all into one place and we can regularly have automated updates that don't include a lot of manually driven processes. So there's actually a technical piece to that as well as a policy piece as well. Gina, before I come to you, it has been pointed out to me that I was so excited about hearing from the three of you that I am monopolizing you and the audience, you have a Slido box on the lower right-hand side of your screen into which you can type questions for the panel. And if that technology is not working for you, you can also email questions to eventsatnewamerica.org and I apologize for monopolizing and not mentioning that sooner. Gina, data. Well now, I said I'd be honest, so let's be clear. Everybody is not on board this particular frame. There is considerable resistance even as there is considerable support for doing better with regard to inclusion, diversity, accessibility and equity in this organization. Absolutely. Part of the reason that the data is hard to get is as Bishop said, we don't necessarily have it set up in order to get the data. We're gonna have to reconfigure some things to get that disaggregated data that I mentioned is so important. But then we look at, well, why don't we have it? The business case for diversity and inclusion has been made long ago as Bishop points out, but let's take a look at what the private sector looks like. When I started this job, before I started this job, I was looking around for best practices of who's got it right, who's done it right, who's got the boardroom that looks like it should look, who's got the front office that looks like America that has all of the perspectives and lived experiences that are needed to really do the mission as it should be done. And frankly, I haven't found one, let me be clear on that. Nobody's doing it perfectly out there as a wonderful example for the rest of us. So we have to leave. And the government has led in this space before. We have to leave. So that business case, you look at boardrooms and yes, the case has been made, but people still are resistant. I was reading an article early today about public companies requiring diverse boards, but in fact, public companies are the minority and private companies are many more and 1% of private companies have African-Americans on boards. I think it was something like 49 out of X thousands of positions in the last 20 years. Some of that, of course, obtains in the government as well. So we are at the same time giving the message that we are done admiring the problem. And part again of having it not in place is that nobody believed we were serious about this for the last 30 plus years. And in fact, we weren't really serious about it because we're all brilliant people here. And if we were serious about it, we would have taken care of it. We would have got it done. So now we're serious. Now we're putting in place the data analytic teams, the barrier analysis, so we can really have a look at what we are, where we are, why we are, the way we are.  We're communicating that this business about inclusion is real. And that is what's helping us get the data. Now we also have to think about how we shared it. As I mentioned earlier, they're privacy issues, but they're also concerns about how much we share and what is it going to show? Is it, it's going to be clear as it was in the 2019 GAO report, just how much of a failure we have had in our organization of brilliant people to move this forward, even though we've been talking about it for 30 plus years. So there's going to be some continued uncomfortable conversations within my organization. We had some, but we are intent. We're going to have more uncomfortable conversations. No doubt there's going to be some data out there for America and others to look at and see that we have talked but not walked, but we're serious about it now. And I have no doubt that from the top to the bottom of this organization, there is sufficient momentum, desire, demand to get this done in the way that we know we can get it done. And that's why we have our data issues. So Ted, I'm going to ask my next question to you and let you kind of lay out a maximalist path and then let our two government colleagues follow on behind you. But my colleague Peter Singer had a terrific question earlier for the commander of Space Force. And he said, looking 20 years into the future, what problem that you face today, could we get rid of 20 years from now? And I am not so naive as to imagine that we can eliminate sexism, racism, discrimination or bigotry entirely in 20 years, but what piece of this could we hope to wipe away by 2041? What a great question. And I think the answer is, the first thing that comes to mind is we can create a welcoming culture in the Department of Defense and the Department of State that encourages people of color, women to stay. We know, look, if we just do data collection from a number standpoint, for example, we know how to get recruiting numbers up through bonuses, through direct sort of recruitment efforts, but can we keep people? And if we can't keep them, we have the numbers that we collect to understand how many have stayed and how many have gone is one thing, but the qualitative data to suggest why people stay or why people left is sort of the next step there into determining how we can not just recruit a diverse force, but to maintain it. I will say that we're not, the United States government in this national security apparatus is not the only ones to have this problem. If you look at Silicon Valley, for example, they have a lot of trouble keeping black STEM graduates, for example, out in the Bay Area. I think, you know, San Francisco is meeting black that are just leaving because of cost of lives to which they're working in, whether it's the Apples or the Facebooks or the Googles. And at the same time, we are creating more black computer scientists than ever, more black engineers than ever. So it's not a supply problem. The issue is once those folks show up in those organizations, they don't feel welcomed. And so I think, and the same thing can be said for the military, again, you can, if you take the kid that went to a segregated school from K through 12, which three out of four black children attend, and then they go up to an HBCU and then you send them to a unit where they're the only black officer that is an extreme cultural shift that happens almost overnight. And what are we doing organizationally, nationally, to ensure we're creating cultures that are welcoming to folks that don't fit sort of the standard demographic of folks that have traditionally held these positions. That is fixable. And as was mentioned before, corporations are beginning to figure this out some much better than others. But to the extent we can learn lessons from large corporations and implement them for the mission of the national security discipline, then I think that's something that's doable with the right amount of political will and prioritization by our leaders over the next decade or two. Gina and Bishop, your 20 year plans. 20 year plan. 20 years, I shouldn't be needed. That's my plan. We are trying to get things, the system. We are trying to get after our system. Ted is right, it's the culture. And so, we do training with diplomats. We're used to working to make other cultures comfortable. Other people's comfortable. We're gonna have to bring that expertise and energy to ourselves. So, as I said, I know we can do that. That's what we're trying to do. It is changing the culture, putting it in black and white so that it stays that people understand what and the why. So, I would say in 20 years, it's my intention that there is not a diversity and inclusion officer at the Department of State, but that we have done the job of putting these changes in our system of how we bring people on board and how we train them and how we prepare them for higher positions. We make our assignments process more transparent. We make clear that what is valued will be judged and therefore supporting diversity and inclusion is part of what people are going to be judged on and it will show in their results. So, my 20 year plan is that somebody won't have to do this. There have been so many brilliant things already said on this. I'm gonna take a little bit of a cop out and kind of combine the two. So, first my hope, similar to what the ambassador has said is that you will see a less of a siloing effect of DEI efforts and we will actually truly encapsulate within our overall communities across the board whenever we enter into decision-making processes or the development of policy, we will think as just a part of our regular checklist, how is DEI affected or impactful in this particular effort? So, that would be the first thing. The second thing to Commander's point is that I think that we will have a workforce and it's leadership that fully does reflect not only the values of our society but it'll be a proper representation of the individuals that live within it. When you look at 2050, we're gonna become a majority minority country. So, I think it's gonna be important for us to ensure that we have the proper policies and processes in place that allow for opportunity for individuals to come in and take advantage of those opportunities and lead that career that properly reflects it. I want by that point for us to have had a couple or a few men of color or women of color that have served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that we have additional Chiefs of Staff that are people of color, that we have more pilots, more submariners, more ship captains, all of the more special operators, all of these positions that have traditionally been very white, very middle class, very middle America, that we have a greater representation of folks across the board in all of these pivotal positions because they are so important to the national security apparatus and they provide for so much opportunity and growth and so much impact throughout everything that we do that I think is gonna be very important for us to ensure that we have processes in place that take advantage of the variety of talent that already exist right now in our country. So, I'm hoping that 20 years will be enough time to see a lot of the efforts and policies that men like Secretary Austin and President Beiner and Secretary Blinken and others are trying to put in place now that we see them too fruition by then. Thanks, we've got some great audience questions and I'm going to put this one to Gina first because I know you have to drop off a bit early and then you're both welcome to weigh in but I've got two more for you. And this is, can an organization be genuinely committed to diversity, equity, inclusion if that is not fully reflected in every subunit? If it's not reflected in every subunit? Yes, as the organization, the leadership and what the leadership stresses every value or mission statement, is it fully fleshed out I think up and down the scale, it's aspirational, it's what people use as their touchstone, where they're headed, if they're trying to double check are they on the right path, are they doing then they look at that. And so we are adding to ours a real commitment to diversity and inclusion. And as offices and bureaus work toward it, they know what they're working toward. And so I think, yes, but it's not, listen, I'm working and I'm leading an organization that is overcoming 70 years of no interest in this or in Russia, indifference or hostility, combination of the two. And it's not going to be quick, it is going to be a living, as we like to say, living document, living effort. But as I said, we are all smart people here. So we don't have to be slow. Some of the people who used to not taking it seriously, I've got to change minds. I have to, I and my team and those who are on board have got to work to change the perspective of others of our colleagues who have heard of all before many times, many administrations and not seen real change. And so it's on us, our credibility is lacking. It's on us to make clear, oh no, this is real. We mean it this time. This isn't going to stop a year from now, four years from now, it's going into our systems. We're going to show you the difference and the outcomes so that people understand why we all have to value it. So I believe the answer is yes, but it isn't all, turning a page from yesterday to tomorrow, we got to get through today. Bishop and Ted, you're both welcome to weigh in on that. But I also want to ask you another audience question, which is how have the events of January 6th and specifically the number of active duty and veteran military personnel known to have participated in January 6th, how has that redounded against Bishop the work you're trying to do? Sure, so the first thing I'll say is that as the secretary and the chairman and deputy secretary have said on multiple occasions, the vast majority of those who serve do so incredibly honorably with great integrity. We have witnessed a very, we believe to be a very small population within the veteran population having a very, a larger or outsized impact overall on the conversation and discussion. So I think it's important, and I think Ted has pointed this out earlier when we talk about exposure to various culture and having, as Gina said earlier, more of the awkward conversations around a lot of these topics, that is the effort that it's going to take in order for us first to ensure that we work and live and preside in a healthy environment overall for everyone in an inclusive welcoming environment. And we need to get to the bottom of our efforts around misinformation and disinformation before it honestly tears us apart. We all know that that continues to be an issue for a variety of sources and it's something that we need to engage and address and do so in a very thoughtful way that ensures that everyone's that writes and that constitutional rights, privacy, and everything else is properly upheld, supported, and protected. So Ted, working at the Brennan Center, this is a big part of your day job. So I'm looking forward to you weighing in on this as well. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest benefits of service, military service, or service in the federal government where you're exposed to other Americans, again, is this increased social contact and sort of working towards a bigger goal, a mission bigger than yourselves. But the benefits are really a function, not just of exposure, but that is happening in places where there's principled leadership and in institutions that are sort of have a normative culture of acceptance and of tolerance for others and not sort of an intolerant culture. What we're seeing, and I think what's responsible for some of the veterans we saw participating in January 6th is that that exposure does not last a lifetime. The benefits of intergroup contact in the wrong conditions or even in the right conditions, it doesn't last forever. And so what happens is there's sort of a radius and a half-life to this exposure. If you have a veteran, if you have someone who serves, meets people of different races, ethnicities, religion, et cetera, and then they leave service and go back to their home community, the exposure they had to other groups doesn't last them forever. And after some time, maybe a year, two years, five years, it begins to dissipate and they can become susceptible to some of the divisive narratives or some of the animus towards other groups that is being fostered maybe in their local communities. So the exposure isn't enough. It has to happen in the right set of leadership, the right culture, and then be cultivated once military service or diplomatic services ended in order to ensure society benefits from the sort of intergroup contact. Now I was told that we can go a little bit over our original time and I've got one more question for you both and it's the kind of question that I love to ask and I'm pretty sure you're both gonna love to answer. We have viewers who want to know where they can study more about this field and how they can get the kind of jobs and do the kind of work that you both do in this space. So if we're raising up a new generation of people who see diversity, equity issues in national security as not just a cause to take on, but it's something they could devote a career to, where would you send them? Yeah, that's a really good question. And unfortunately, I'm biased because I would tell them go join the military and experience it firsthand. But that aside, so look, there's lots of good books out there and programs undergrad, but certainly graduate programs that do a good job of looking at the sociology of national security. One of the newer fields that I'm really taking with over the last few years is ontological security and the ways that national character and national identity impact national security and a nation's interests. And so you don't have to join the military to get into this work and you don't have to be an international relations major to sort of get smarter on this. Things like sociology and political communications and rhetoric also expose you to how people interact with one another and how they view people who are different from themselves, different cultures, different nationalities, different races, ethnicities and how those differences can be cultivated towards strength or how they can be activated towards animus and the importance of leadership and rhetoric to sort of determine which way folks go. I think he absolutely hit the nail on the head. I would not focus actually on a career necessarily and a particular area of national security in order to go into the high work. I think the sociology piece, anthropology history to be quite frank, American and world history are very important to understanding culturally how people interact, how they engage with one another and the history of how our government and country has had a treatment of a variety of people on a variety of complex issues and understanding why that has taken place plays a pivotal role in understanding the types of policies that are gonna be necessary to help affect it. So for me, I think that's actually the direction which you wanna go, as well as getting a general understanding about the issues facing the national security community regularly because there are no shortage of them whether you're looking more from a functional perspective or more from a regional policy perspective. There's so many out there that it behooves anyone that's interested in the types of issues that we've been discussing today and what we do to really focus more on the humanitarian people side of it versus the actual national security policy side. I'm laughing a little bit because Ted and I are both recovering speech writers and Bishop is a recovering presidential campaign operative. So I think that might suggest another pathway that people have profitably taken in this space. I'll maybe close by saying that there are a number of groups that Bishop Ted and Gina have all worked with at various points doing really terrific work in this space, women of color advancing peace and security, the leadership council for women in national security, out in national security, next generation national security. And you can go to our website at New America and find links to many of them or you can check out Bishop and Ted and Gina online and learn more about how they do that work that way. And I wanna end by thanking all three of our panelists for coming on for this conversation which was really terrific in its own right and something that was really unimaginable even 20 years ago. And as Gina said, perhaps somewhat unnecessary 20 years from now. Thank you all so much for coming.


This Civil Engineer Air Force Qualification Training Program videotape contains backhoe operations, excavate, load and backfill material. The Air Force Civil Engineer Support Agency has developed the following video to support the Air Force Qualification Training Program. This video covers step-by-step procedures for a specific task identified in the specialty training standard of the Career Field Education and Training Plan. This video does not take the place of on-the-job training. It is not intended to replace the applicable technical reference. However, this program is intended to enhance the on-the-job training process, standardize the training procedures, provide spin-up training and provide the minimum knowledge on a task or piece of equipment when a unit does not have the equipment. We hope you'll find this video a valuable training tool. How many times have you been jolted from a sound sleep by the telephone ringing? If you've been a pavement and construction equipment operator very long, then this has bound to happen to you. Being on emergency standby means that if something is going to break it will always happen at the most inopportune time it's Murphy's Law. With most new construction utility system installations are being placed underground. You can bet if there is a problem it will be underground. Utility system problems rarely happen on the surface where it's easy to fix. Trying to find the break's exact location isn't much fun. Digging it by hand is even worse.  We're talking about the industrial tractor with a bucket mounted on the front and a boom, dipper and bucket mounted on the rear. This particular backhoe we're using is equipped with an extendable dipper stick. Retracting and extending the dipper stick expands the backhoe's digging capability. This program will discuss how to excavate and load material with the rear backhoe bucket and highlight backfill procedures with the front bucket. Before we cover the backhoe excavating procedures let's define the term excavation for the purpose of obtaining a digging permit. Excavation to Air Force civil engineers means digging or opening any surface to a depth that exceeds four inches below the existing grade. Plowing or tilling the soil is not considered excavation. However you still need to make a thorough check of an area before beginning this type of work. There's always the possibility of cutting electrical or communication lines that were not buried as deep as they should have been. So before you do any excavating obtain a base civil engineering work clearance request AF Form 103. This form is coordinated with the appropriate local agencies prior to any excavation work. It will identify what utilities are located in the immediate area and who needs to be contacted prior to excavating. Excavating without an approved 103 is dangerous and can result in serious damage to critical base communications. Cutting through an electrical utility cable can cause loss of power and could result in serious injury or death to the backhoe operator. Without this form you are responsible for any damage. This form should be attached to the work order which authorizes you to do the job. If the AF Form 103 does not accompany the work order contact your supervisor immediately. For most on base projects you would drive the backhoe to the work site. When you arrive at the work site position the backhoe so it's centered on the trench line with the rear tires facing the start of the excavation. The trench line may be marked by grade stakes or surveyors marker paint. Place the transmission in neutral. Set the parking brake and level and lower the front bucket to the ground. Do not raise the front tires off the ground. Swing the seat around and lock it in place.  Open the rear windows for better visibility and ventilation if you have an enclosed cab. Lower the rear stabilizers until they're firmly on the ground. Apply enough pressure on the stabilizers to raise the rear tires off the ground. Leaving the rear tires on the ground reduces the machine stability and causes unnecessary stress on the rear tires and axle assembly. If you're working on an uneven surface you may need to extend one stabilizer out further than the other in order to level the machine. A wooden board or block under the stabilizer pad may also be required on the low side to aid in the leveling process. Another situation you might encounter is loose or soft soil. Place some type of material like heavy boards or matting under the stabilizers to prevent sinking into the ground. Before you start to dig you must unlock the boom from the transport position. To do this grasp the boom lock handle with one hand and pull back to raise the boom lock. Lower the boom slightly and release the boom lock handle. Continue lowering the boom until it is positioned at approximately a 45 degree angle. Uncurl the dipper and bucket until they are over the starting point to be excavated. Lower the boom until the bucket touches the ground. The backhoe is now ready to start the excavation so let's go through the digging cycle. Start by slowly pulling the dipper back toward the backhoe. The swing arc of the dipper will force the bucket down into the ground. As the dipper goes through the swing arc curl the bucket so the bucket teeth remain parallel. This will force the teeth and the front cutting edge of the bucket to penetrate into the soil. This simultaneous movement of two controls should be done throughout the digging cycle. It takes coordination to operate both controls at the same time. A little practice will help you master this technique. When the dipper reaches the back of the backhoe or the bucket is full release the dipper control. Finish curling the bucket and raise the boom. This completes the digging cycle. Our next step is to swing the loaded bucket toward the dump site. Before we swing the bucket let's discuss this potentially hazardous situation. The danger area is sometimes referred to as the pinch zone. This zone covers the 180 degree boom swing arc from outrigger to outrigger. It's your responsibility to be sure the area is clear of all people and equipment before swinging the boom. If someone is in the pinch zone ground the bucket and remove your hands from the controls until they have moved back out of the way. Never swing any part of the rear bucket assembly over or in the direction of people or equipment. With the area clear swing the bucket over to the dump site. Raise the boom and uncurl the bucket to dump the material. Keep the stockpiled material as far away from the excavation as possible. Shake the bucket to remove all the material. After the material is dumped swing the boom back over the excavation for another digging cycle. During the swing reposition the boom, the dipper and the bucket so you'll be ready to start digging when the bucket is over the excavation point. With the bucket positioned back down into the ground continue the digging cycle by lowering the boom pulling the dipper and curling the bucket simultaneously. When you have completed filling the bucket raise the boom, verify the pinch zone is clear and swing toward the stockpile site. Position the bucket over the stockpile and dump the material. At this point the excavation site is checked for proper depth. It has been dug to the required depth but the length of the excavation must be extended. The backhoe operator can easily move the backhoe forward from the rear operator's position. Check the area to ensure it is clear of people and equipment. Raise the front bucket just off the ground and make sure the front tires are pointed straight ahead.  Position the dipper almost vertical with a slight lean toward the backhoe. Lower the bucket teeth into the ground and raise both outriggers high enough to clear the ground. Make sure the area in front of the backhoe is clear and release the parking brake. Apply pressure to the dipper and boom controls. This will slowly force the backhoe to roll forward. Continue to apply pressure until the dipper and boom are extended all the way out. If the backhoe didn't move very far reposition the bucket and try this procedure again. You can also move the rear of the backhoe side to side from the rear operator's position. Slowly attempt to swing the boom. This will cause the rear of the backhoe to shift to one side or the other. When the backhoe has been correctly repositioned, lower the rear outriggers to level the backhoe. Don't forget to lower the front bucket. Reposition the rear bucket down to the ground and start the digging cycle all over again. Excavating with the backhoe takes a lot of practice to be able to operate several controls at one time. The operator must be able to feel as well as see what is taking place down below ground level as the bucket fills with material during the excavation process. With the excavation complete, the backhoe can easily set a piece of pipe or culvert down into the trench. There are a number of safety issues that you need to be aware of and we will discuss them throughout this section. First and foremost is determining how much weight you can safely lift. Always check the backhoe lifting capacity and the object to be lifted. Failure to do so can cause an accident. Before we begin this operation, let's take a minute to verify that all personnel working around the suspended load and down in the trench are wearing their required safety items. This should include safety towed boots, gloves and hard hats as a minimum. Position the backhoe perpendicular to the trench, lower the front bucket, and position the rear outriggers firmly on the ground. Lock the boom in the transport position. Swing the boom to the side of the backhoe. Uncurl the bucket and extend the dipper stick until the bucket is next to the object to be lifted.  Some buckets have chain hooks welded on them. If yours doesn't, a chain or sling can be attached to a bucket pinhole or wrapped around the bucket. Always use a properly rated lifting device for the item to be lifted. For our particular demonstration, we're using a small chain because the pipe we're lifting is light and lengthy rather than heavy. Secure the chain around the pipe to be lifted. Try to position the chain in the middle of the pipe for good balance. If the object is properly balanced, it will be a lot easier to control while lifting and positioning. A guide rope tied to at least one end of the pipe is recommended. If you have sufficient people and rope, both ends tied will provide better control. This guide rope can keep the pipe from accidentally swinging into the backhoe, some body or part of the construction project. Check the area to ensure that everyone is back before you attempt to lift the pipe. Keep everyone away from the suspended pipe and never move the pipe over a person's head. Very slowly raise the pipe off the ground. Do not raise it any higher than necessary. Keeping it close to the ground should result in less damage if accidentally dropped. And if it happened to weigh more than you thought, you can quickly set it back down and prevent tipping the backhoe. Slowly swing the boom until the pipe is positioned over its resting spot. Avoid swinging it too fast as this might cause it to swing out of control. Remember, the people on the end of the guide ropes will also have to move to maintain control of the pipe during the swinging operation. Watch the guide rope person for directions to ensure proper placement. With the pipe over the trench, slowly lower the dipper. If the pipe is not centered exactly where it needs to be, curl or uncurl the bucket a little to assist in the final alignment in the bottom of the trench. Don't forget to remove any material that became lodged in the pipe. Wait until the backhoe operator signals it's safe to enter the trench. Then unfasten the lifting chain from around the pipe. Also, remove the guide rope while you are still down in the trench. With the trench area clear, raise the dipper up and out of the trench and position the bucket off to the side for chain removal. This completes the steps to move and position material using the backhoe boom, dipper, and bucket. Other items can be positioned with the backhoe following the same procedures and safety precautions just discussed. If the item to be lifted is extremely heavy and hard to handle, double wrap the chain to prevent shifting. On objects that are prone to slip, a sling may be more appropriate. The only thing that remains to be done is to backfill the trench. Instead of using the rear backhoe bucket, we'll be using the front bucket. We'll only highlight these procedures since they are very similar to the front end loader procedures. For more information on the front end loader backfilling procedures, see the AFQTP video identified on the screen. There is one thing the backhoe operator must keep in mind and that is the rear bucket assembly. A number of accidents have happened when the operator forgot about it and accidentally hit something during backfill operations in close proximity to other objects. Some trenching projects might call for sand or gravel to be placed on or around the pipe before the final backfilling operation can begin. In that case, fill the bucket with the appropriate material. Remember to carry the loaded bucket close to the ground as you proceed to the trench. Position the backhoe perpendicular to the trench. Be careful not to roll the front tires into the trench. Raise the bucket just high enough so you can see the pipe in the trench and watch the material as it flows over the pipe. If the pipe is too deep, get a spotter to help with material placement. Very slowly ease the backhoe forward until the front of the bucket is centered over the trench. Watch your front tires closely. Very gently uncurl the bucket so that the material will slowly flow out of the bucket. Take your time. Dumping the material too fast can shift the pipe out of alignment. The sudden impact of all the material being dumped at once has caused pipes to collapse. You may have to move the backhoe forwards or backwards to keep the flow of material in the center of the trench. Several bucket loads may be needed to cover the pipe. Continue to fill the trench in the manner just described. If the trench crosses a road or is really deep, the initial fill material may have to be backfilled in lifts and compacted as required. In some situations, you will be able to skim the ground with the bucket to obtain the desired fill material. Drive through the stockpiled material until you are over the trench line. Raise the bucket and dump the material. Continue moving the remaining stockpiled material back into and over the trench line in the manner just described. What you should end up with is a wind row of material directly down the trench line, leaving this material a little high will allow for settling. To finish this little excavation project, dress up the area. You'd be surprised how many people will notice an area that has been left a mess. A little more effort on your part will make a big difference on the final appearance of this job site. This program discussed the importance of a base civil engineering work clearance request AF Form 103, a mandatory form that is required on every backhoe digging project. Excavating with the backhoe is the coordinated simultaneous movement of multiple controls to accomplish the digging cycle steps over and over again. The speed, accuracy and proficiency of the operator will increase with backhoe seat time. Not only can the backhoe excavate trenches to various depths, it can also be used to accurately place objects and load and unload material. The front mounted bucket is ideal for backfilling trenches and other small projects where a larger front end loader would just be too big to use. The number of projects levied on the base civil engineer each day is enormous. Coping with unexpected emergencies only compounds the schedule. Having a backhoe in your vehicle yard and a proficient equipment operator on the staff will make these emergencies a lot less stressful. Air Force procured backhoe tractors must meet a noise level of less than 85 decibels at the operator's position. If the noise level is 85 or greater, the backhoe must have a decal stating caution, hazardous noise, operator ear protection required. The backhoe operator in this video was not required to wear ear protection in accordance with the reference documents. A special thanks to the Silver Flag exercise site Rapid Runway Repair Cadre for their enthusiastic support during the development of this program.


Hey, what's up everybody? So in my last video, I was talking about Unreal Engine versus Blender for this Star Wars fan film that I'm using. I kind of knew Blender already to a very limited degree because I've used it for a few months now. I don't really know Unreal Engine very, very well, but it looks great. So I was really kind of torn, you know, which one to use for this. And I realized kind of in the end, you know, this is a use both type thing, right? And so what I want to show today is sort of the improvements from, you know, what I was getting from my limited ability in Blender with the EV render engine versus what I was pretty quickly in about a day to be able to do in Unreal Engine. I kind of want to show this, you know, to show that it's doable for people. You know, it doesn't take, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks to do something simple like this. You know, I've put out a few videos lately that, you know, the quality wasn't fantastic on the things I was doing in Blender. And I know this, I'm just learning and I tried to kind of frame it in that way. You know, I've had a couple of comments, you know, in different social media outlets that, you know, say maybe this isn't really good enough for you to be sharing and maybe you're right about that.  And so it's just as important for people to see, you know, your progress and that, you know, if they're in the same stage of their progress that, you know, it's okay, this is expected.  I'm just learning as I go, you know, none of this stuff is a tutorial. I'm learning from watching other tutorials and I'm trying to, you know, link out to those tutorials so that other people can learn and this is just my own experience. So I'm going to share things that look like total trash. I'm going to show things that I think look pretty decent and show my progress. Hopefully in a couple of years I'll be really good at this and, you know, I'll be much more happy with the type of stuff I put out. So but for now, you know, watch it or skip it, whatever. I watch lots of Star Wars fan films that people do, you know, and there's lots of great ones out there. I try not to compare myself to those, you know, for one thing I've only been doing this for a very short period of time and this is just a side hobby that I do in my spare time.  If I get too hung up on it looks fantastic, you know, and then mine doesn't look as good, you know, then it kind of makes me not want to do that.  It's not like I have tons and, you know, of viewers on this channel anyway.  I'm kind of on a roll putting out a lot of Unreal Engine videos right now. So if you like that type of thing, you know, you might want to subscribe. Also still do some camera videos too. So if you're into the GH5 or the Blackmagic cameras, you know, subscribe for that as well. Anyway, back to the main point, you know, that this is YouTube and not Netflix. It's kind of the way I like to think about it.  So, but let's start out with, you know, something that I did yesterday that I'm actually pretty pleased with. And so that is this. So I'm doing a lightsaber battle for my Star Wars fan film. I really kind of want to have a little bit of action in it. So I'm going to kind of sequence out, you know, two or three movements along with the sound effects and then kind of cut from frame to frame to kind of show that this battle is happening while the Jedi is trying to, you know, collect this Sith holocron or whatever this dark artifact is, what the name of this short film is. And so, you know, I'll start by showing the good and then I'll show the bad. So let's see. This is, you know, what I came up with yesterday.  This is the next scene with some mega scans and this holocron item that I'm working on here. I don't mean to move that. But this came together fairly quickly, but I had to go through several different tutorials and several different paths to get this metahuman head attached to this other body that I was able to get online. I think these assets are from some other Star Wars thing or something. So I just wanted to replace the head. I thought the body was good enough. So at any rate, I'll link to some tutorials that I watched. I think it was DDubs, maybe that channel. The Fractured Fantasy, another channel, and the JS Films, that channel. Not a lot of people doing this type of stuff right now, which is, you know, kind of interesting. I would think it would be a little bit bigger. But it's very exciting to me. And so I'm going to do a lot more of this and check, you know, kind of join that group. And I probably eventually will figure out some things on my own and make some what I would consider tutorials. But for now, I'm just kind of raising up what they're doing and so that you can learn from them. And these are my experiences with this type of thing. So at any rate, what I did here was I took the Chandra from the Megahumans and Metahumans. It's been a long 24 hours. And I wanted to replace the body. So I think it was DDubs, maybe, or Fractured Fantasy. One of those, you know, shows how you can go into the blueprint here. And you can delete all of the things that are under the body. And then you select the body, and you basically put a different skeletal mesh here for that. And so I took my hero, my Jedi that I had, brought it into Blender, because I want to use both of these together and basically cut his head off, right? And so I just have re-exported this FBX. So I just kind of had this headless model, but still rigged to the skeleton that I had already remapped everything. That's a whole other process of doing all of that, which I'm not going to get into right now. Like I said, none of this is a tutorial. This is, but I will link in the description where I learned from a couple of the different videos of trying to piece together how to remap the metahuman skeleton to the mannequin skeleton, and then other skeleton, so that you can use these animations, which was another great thing that I learned how to do. And then just to finish this out, I've got this little lightsaber thing, this little simple two-object thing that I built in Blender. I found another tutorial that showed how to make this emission. Very easy to do in Blender, but not so easy to do in Unreal for that material. Once again, I'm not going to make a tutorial here, but if you want to know more about that, I'll link to that in the description. So let's see. We'll close this out. So basically, once I had all of that together, then I have this actor that I can put into my scene. And I did the exact same thing with the other one. I just didn't have to remove the head, because it's just this kind of Sith robot droid guy or whatever. So I think these are from the video game that came out recently. At any rate, good enough for me. Lots of this stuff is just good enough. You know, can I tell a story? Can I just learn how to use these tools? But something out that's not embarrassing. You know, that's kind of what I'm going for. My next step with this is to do the facial animation using the live link things that I've experimented with already. I've got a couple of videos I've already posted on the channel for that. My next step is to try to make the head and the mouth to have a little more expression as I'm doing these scenes. So, but basically to animate these, I've put these animations in here. I purchased some sword attack finishers, things on the marketplace, some animations, along with the normal. I think these are free, the pose animations and the animation starter pack. I think those are free, but I did buy this sword attacks just because it looked kind of cool and I wanted it to be, have something pretty, I wanted to have a kick ass lightsaber battle. And so I thought the best way to do this is just to kind of get one of these things that looks cool that someone else has already done. So, but the way that I was had to do this was go into the animations, you know, find whichever one I wanted to do. And then, you know, you have to retarget it to one of the skeletons. And obviously I've been playing around with this quite a bit. I've got several skeletons. And so one is for my bad guy, one is for my good guy. You know, these are other ones for the mannequin where I was just playing around. I'm going to cancel out and not do that for now. But for each one of these animation sequences that I want to do, I have to export it, retarget it for whichever skeleton is going to be playing that back. And then they become available automatically for you in the sequencer here. So you can go in, you know, to one of your actors, like this guy right here, for example, you can add another animation, they will automatically appear here as you retarget them. So that's a really kind of neat thing to me a little while to figure some of these things out. This is, I want to make this video as well for myself so that I can revisit it in a few weeks and say, how the hell did I do that? And I can watch myself explain it. So at any rate, this is kind of, you know, where I've landed right now. I'm pretty happy with this. I'm going to, like I said, do some more facial tracking. What I want to show next is the garbage that I came up with in Blender, with a couple of other models.  But, you know, these guys don't even touch each other with their lightsabers from the animations that I was trying to use here. And I kept scooting them closer in together to try to, you know, maybe they'll, maybe they'll fight. And then I kept experiencing weird things like this, like where this guy's hand is just kind of jutting out to the side for some reason. So these weren't very good models. You know, I kind of regret purchasing those. I may, you know, attempt to get a refund on that. But at any rate, you know, here's our holocron.  But man, it was going to take me a long time in Blender to make it look the way that I wanted it to look. And then in one day, in Unreal Engine, I was able to get what I've shown you before. So anyway, that's kind of the point of this is that, you know, I don't mind showing my garbage like this, because I can show that, you know, here's my next day's progress. And then my next day's progress and my next day's progress. And, you know, I'll keep at it. And one of these days, I'll be as good as it is, you know, one of these other guys like J.S. Films is doing some great stuff. Very entertaining. And he's just churning out videos, you know, so I'm trying to follow in that turning out some of these videos, people are watching him sometimes, you know. Anyway, thanks for watching this one. If you want to subscribe, please subscribe. If you like this video for some reason, click like. Don't click dislike, please. But anyway, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.