So recently in the media there's been a big push to get people to eat the flesh of hunted deer, sounding the alarm on a kind of existential threat with deer over population, while at the same time marketing deer as a healthy, nutritious meat. This rhetoric made me very suspicious so we started to look into it. Honestly what we found was quite shocking and I think by the end of this video you'll be just as appalled as I am about this whole thing. Whenever you see a big concerted push to kill animals like this, you have to ask yourself, who is benefiting from this? Because it definitely isn't the deer. Now in the UK you will often hear a bunch of deer numbers being thrown around. The most recent being pushed across the media is two million deer, parroted by this MP, Sir Charles Walker, who has been behind the big push in parliament. At around two million animals, the UK's deer population is estimated to now stand at its highest level for a thousand years. You would need to cull somewhere between half a million and 750,000 deer a year, just to keep things stable. Are these numbers even accurate? You'd think by the way they went on about it, they'd have some very strong data to support their proposed massacre of deer. Interestingly, this claim isn't new. You can hear these numbers being used to justify increased culling at least since 2008. But according to the British Deer Society, who apparently did the survey they based these numbers on, said in November 2023, the frequently quoted figure of two million deer is highly questionable. In reality, no one knows for certain how many deer there are in the UK. Current estimates still rely heavily on outdated and limited data. They also mention on their website how anyone even knows the national deer count from a thousand years ago, but MP Charles speaks with such certainty about it. Something needs to be done. We're not exactly sure when or who started the game of pass it on with UK deer numbers soaring at being at two million. When such a number is used to suggest to the public that deer need to start being viewed as some kind of pest that are wreaking havoc across the entire country, it becomes quite worrying. Also, the stat of from repeated that 750,000 deer need to be culled is also dubious. 750,000 deer a year. Just to keep things stable. This claim first emerged in 2013 after Dr. Paul Doleman gathered numbers of just two species of deer by driving 1,000 miles through one area with thermal cameras. Following this, many newspapers and online sources reported that between 50 and 60 percent of the UK's deer population must be culled. Doleman then revealed that his findings were misrepresented. He later told the observer, I didn't say that. I'll just use those figures as hypothetical examples. In fact, we don't know how many deer there are in this country and that's the real problem I was trying to get over. So these claims are being based off of misrepresented numbers that have just been repeated and accepted as fact. This appears to be a concerted effort to demonize deer to justify their mass culling. This is coupled by a big push to market deer flesh to consumers and there's been successful lobbying efforts to push for government grants to help with increased deer culling under the guise of providing nutritious protein to the public. And where have we heard that before? Meat and dairy naturally contain vitamin B12, which helps us get energy from the food and stay healthy. But let's get back to conservative MP Sir Charles Walker who's behind the big government push based on these questionable numbers. This MP is the chair of the Country Food Trust, a charity which brings meals to the need. Sounds like a very kind thing to do, but when you look on their website, most of their meals contain wild hunted animals, which is strange. Why the heavy focus on deer flesh? If you want to feed people, you just feed them any food. But then, when you look at who the Country Food Trust is supported by, you'll see major gun companies, including Browning, major shotgun cartridge companies, the Barbary Shooting School, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and the Countryside Alliance, a lobbying group for hunters who amongst other things fight against hunting bands they essentially campaign for and protect the interests of hunters. And they have of course echoed MP Charles Walker's call for culling more deer. CFT also partnered with people like Chef Mike Robinson who's a hunter and owns a business called Deer Box that sells wild venison. They also claim on their website that they do not lobby for or against shooting. It's illegal sport and there are plenty of people lobbying both ways on the subject. We respect their different views. If they don't lobby for shooting, what on earth is their chair MP Charles doing in parliament? I mean, hunting certainly involves shooting. It's also very interesting that Charles uses this charity as emotional leverage in parliament to help him convince the government to increase the cult. I am chair unpaid of the Country Food Trust. I mean, again, it's very nice to help feed people, but it's very obvious that there's more than just the people in need benefiting from Charles's efforts in parliament. There's an old saying, follow the money. According to the Countryside Alliance, shooters spend in excess of £2.5 billion each year on goods and services and shooting is worth £2 billion to the UK economy. Now that's a lot of money for hunting licences, bullet and gun companies, hunting equipment manufacturers and also the sale of the deer flesh itself. According to the School of Journalism in the 1500s, Henry VIII introduced wild deer to Bushy Park and Greenwich Park, the oldest royal park for the purposes of hunting. A century later, Richmond Park was established for the same purpose. Now deer are regularly being killed in the parks for their meat. 1493 deer have been killed in London's royal parks in annual calls since 2017. The royal parks has earned more than £200,000 from selling the flesh of the slaughtered deer. The writers even called this a glorified farm. If this is true, then killing 750,000 deer could in theory generate a further £100 million in flesh alone. So it seems that killing more deer and marketing deer meat to increase demand will serve the financial interests of the hunting industry and the recreational interests of those who love shooting these majestic wild animals for fun. An oversupply for the moderate size of the existing venison market creates a negative drag on the culling effort. As I mentioned earlier, we're only culling 350,000 when we should be culling a great deal more. Why is there a drag? Because depressed carcass prices mean stalkers can no longer cover their costs and therefore have a reduced incentive to manage deer stocks. So it seems here he's calling for the government to increase the venison market and the need for government funding to help incentivize hunters to increase the cull. I mean, wouldn't hunters just love that? That's what we want. And the government has already agreed with MP Charles in a December 2023 debate about public food procurement, where he sounds the alarm on deer overpopulation again and pushes for hunted deer to be included as a healthy sustainable meat in schools, which culminated with the DEFRA chief Mark Spencer saying, I wholly accept my honorable friend's argument, and it is something we're taking very seriously. DEFRA is working on a deer strategy. I want to see that meat enter the food chain. When we publish the revised GBSF, I encourage members on both sides of the house to support their implementation across the public sector. So what does the GBSF Mark speaks of? Well, it's the government buying standards for food and catering services. It sets the standards for public food procurement in government institutions like the NHS, schools, the army and prisons. Some are even mandatory. So it looks like a very strong push to get deer flesh into these institutions. Four days later, you see an update to how much is paid in deer management grants. And again, to state the obvious, all this deer flesh going into public institutions isn't just going to be given by hunters to the public sector for free. So it appears like hunters will be paid for the flesh with government funds. Therefore, we, the public, are paying for hunting with our taxes. There's something called the perverse incentive. It's where the incentive unintentionally rewards people for making the issue worse. When you have such a large financial incentive for culling deer, you are not incentivising fixing the issue, but rather incentivising the proliferation of the issue.  But the population actually increased due to people feeding the pigs and preferentially shooting the large male pigs over the females and young pigs, which doesn't decrease the population as much, if at all. So the hunting industry welcomes the public perception of an existential crisis of deer over population, because then they can capitalise on it, under the guise of conservation and avoid public outrage for unjustifiably shooting wild animals. But let's stop with the euphemisms and nonsense fairy tales, and let's be clear on what culling 750,000 deer looks like. An absolute massacre. Hunting is brutal and cruel, and these cowards stalk terrified helpless animals and shoot them, often not killing them instantly, which causes further suffering. So they're supposedly already killing 350,000 deer each year, and now they want more blood?  Moreover, if there is an overpopulation issue, which I'm yet to be convinced of based on the questionable numbers, then we should focus on animal-friendly methods like contraception. Maybe the government should just redirect funding into this method of managing deer, or even better, redirect some of the billions in subsidies they give to the environmentally-destructive meat and dairy industry, especially considering one of the main arguments for culling deer is that they eat trees. Cows and sheep also eat trees, yet we just breed more of them. It's almost like the main goal is not preserving trees, but more profit for farmers and hunters. Look at what happens when you let the land do its thing instead of grazing. In fact, the 48% of UK land currently used for grazing and growing feed for animals used to be all forest. This paper looked at what could happen if we freed up this land and they found that almost all current UK pasture could once again become forest. The proposal also doubled the UK's carbon budget to reach near zero by 2050 in addition to providing more fruits and vegetables and freeing up land to produce crops currently not produced in significant numbers in the UK without affecting protein production. If the government were so concerned with trees, they would oppose the UK meat and dairy industry, which uses the equivalent of a whole other UK in land use overseas. Do you still believe that the hunter's goal is just to protect trees from deer or just to shoot them to satisfy their bloodlust? If we were going to blame any species for destroying ecosystems in the environment, it would be human beings. We utterly wreak havoc on earth to feed our lust for flesh. But no cull proposals in parliament to control human beings. You know why? Because humans have rights and it would be a sick thing to suggest. But when it comes to deer, if they're rights, let's just chase them down and shoot them all. Ironically, if UK deer overpopulation can be proven, hunters could likely be exacerbating it because hunters like to shoot and kill bucks to hang on their wall. The targeting of male deer actually skews the gender ratio, leaving more females for leftover males to mate with, which increases offspring. So maybe to tackle this, the government should just impose a full hunting ban and make cruel blood sports completely illegal and favour more ethical solutions. But instead, the government has proposed loosening hunting bans to open up hunting at night and open seasons across the year to encourage the targeting of males, which is counterproductive to keeping populations down but very favourable to hunters, some of whom are mega rich, with many large estates owned by extremely wealthy hunting enthusiasts where they pump millions of their own money into their favourite pastime with their buddies. I mean, it does make you ask the question, whether there's some kind of corruption going on, especially with so much money involved, it wouldn't surprise me at all. There's also the issue of lead bullets, which studies show contaminate the deer flesh. And the FDA says there's no legal limit for lead and this Australian study showed a detrimental amount of lead dispersed in deer flesh. So this is a serious health risk for children and pregnant women. Will there be warning labels on all deer flesh for consumption marketed to the public? And what about when procuring deer meat to NHS hospitals? I mean, the country food trust does have organisations sign a lead guidance form before buying deer flesh in bulk on their website, but will every individual be adequately worn before they're served deer? Furthermore, in the UK, according to the WWT, more than 7,000 tonnes of lead ammunition is discharged into the environment every year. Between 50,000 and 100,000, wild fowl die in the UK each year as a result of ingesting lead from used bullets. Birds often mistake tiny shot pellets for grit or seeds and eat them. And migratory swans like whoopers and buicks were the worst affected, with lead poisoning accounting for a quarter of deaths. In England and Wales, the law says non-led alternatives must be used when shooting wildfowl and in some wetlands regardless of who you're shooting. While lead shot is prohibited in all wetlands in Northern Ireland and Scotland, despite the law though, WWT's field testing shows the number of birds ingesting lead still isn't decreasing. This could be because many birds feeding fields where lead shot can still be legally used or because some shooters are still using it illegally. Repeated WWT investigations found that around 70% of ducks sold as locally shot in England were illegally shot with lead and this illegal activity has not improved over time. But hunters are just conservationists who love the environment and wild animals, right? Interestingly, MP Charles was even recorded in Parliament opposing the ban of lead bullets and this was in 2015 before he was even part of the country food trust that he now appears to use as a convenient front. Now, what would be his motivation for opposing the use of lead bullets? This only serves the interests of hunters, recreational shooters and gun companies, not the animals or the environment. So very suspicious behaviour in my opinion. Now we can get onto the irrelevance of 750,000 deer a year entering the UK food supply. Even if we assume the 2 million deer and 750,000 need to be culled figures are accurate, a deer has about 31 kilograms of flesh if we're being generous. So if 750,000 are killed annually, which I'm not sure is even possible, that's 23 million kilos of deer flesh or 350 grams per person per year. The average brick consumes about 854 grams of meat a week. This adds not even 1% to the meat consumption of the UK. In addition to this, deer flesh is expensive with even mince being between 14 to 18 pounds per kilo. When you couple that with mince being more likely to be contaminated with lead, it's definitely not the consumer who benefits from any of this, and certainly not the deer. Yet the hunting industry benefits in every way. Now you also hear deer meat is just so full of protein which is just marketing rhetoric similar to the trick the AHDB use in their campaigns. But when you plug deer flesh into chronometer it's about 60% protein which is about the same as TVP or soya chunks, but less than satan which is around 75% protein. So nothing special here. Also deer is a red meat. So likely a 2A carcinogen along with other red meats. Although there's no human data on venison specifically to confirm. But maybe the government should look into this before pushing deer into the NHS to be fed to people recovering in hospitals. So finally just be very skeptical of the recent push to cull deer. There are many forces acting in the background who don't have the animals best interests at heart. Whenever you see this kind of nutritional rhetoric it's probably consumer marketing. Whenever you see marketing someone is financially benefiting from it. Whenever you see someone blowing up a massive problem off of questionable numbers it might just be that they've started with a favorable solution in mind already and worked backwards. And who really suffers because of this? The poor vilified deer who cannot defend themselves. These quote unquote conservation efforts are in my opinion just glorified animal killers using a convenient excuse to continue their cowardly blood sports with impunity. In the form of full government policy support, relaxed hunting laws and now they're pushing for public support, public consumption and therefore public complicity. So please think critically, do not trust the propaganda of animal killers, dig deeper and always as a primary focus make sure the rights of the animals are being truly respected. Thank you for watching, I'll see you all in the next video.


So what brought you here to sunny El Centro, California? Actually, I have been selected for International Woman of Courage from the Schedule of the State. And I have been invited to the United States for two weeks. And after I received the award, I was looking how I can get to fly, how I can be in the Air Force. Because it's always enjoyable for me to be around the pilots. It's always exciting for me to see the pilots. And that's why I was asking.  But the Blue Angel, that was awesome. So what did you expect when you first came out here today? Did you have any idea about the experience? Yes, I was watching many of the Blue Angel videos. And that was really exciting for me. And I was always like, oh my god, when I can be there. And I was following them. And I was like in their page, actually. And when I heard I am going to fly in a Blue Angel, that was something so excited for me. Like from yesterday to now, I was so excited. Oh my god, I want to be tomorrow. And I'm going to go fly. I was so excited. So you're a pilot as well, correct? Yes, ma'am. All right. So was it different experiencing what it feels like in an F-18 compared to your flying? Yes, it's completely different. Because the aircraft I'm flying is a cargo aircraft, just a normal, it's not like an Airbus. It's not like an Airbus aircraft. But this is something very exciting, very fun. So what was it like when you were up there flying? Was it scary? Was it exciting? Did you stay awake? I was awake. But I was feeling so wonderful. Because it was my first time that I was pulling the Gs and being in the jet and just experiencing the new thing, that was so excited for me. And I just wanted to shout. And also, I was like, I didn't get scared, actually, the truth. But it's something that I experienced the first time that was kind of very exciting for me. I was a little so excited. So for people that haven't felt G-forces before, what did it feel like when you were riding in the jet? It was, you feel like you are carrying many tune-off things in your head, too heavy.  Just out of your control, even if it's your first time. Now, as a female pilot, you're a role model internationally. How does it feel to be a role model? And what has it been like? That's very, it's like a great feeling. Because it's something like, I feel this is my responsibility. This is my responsibility to be here. And you might be an example for other women that they are coming behind you. I think it's like, not only me, it's being a great feeling. It is for many women that they watch me and they say, OK, when she did it, why we don't do it? We have to go for it, too. We should do it, too. Absolutely, absolutely. So for all of the Americans that are going to be watching this piece, do you have anything that you want to say about either your experience as a pilot or your experience today riding with the Blue Angels? I can say that's being a very, very wonderful feeling. If anyone wants to try it, that will be the best part of their moment. It's going to be the best part of their life, I think. They will never forget it.


And the last week or two, it seems like everybody and their grandmother has made a video about the Gemini protocol. The Gemini protocol is an alternative internet protocol to the modern web. It's light, it's fast, it's mainly just plain text. There's no images or multimedia, there's no ads, there's no JavaScript, and it's really fantastic. And I think that's why it's getting so much attention all of a sudden, it's gaining popularity rather fast, is because it is actually really nice. The more I hang out on the Gemini space, the more I like it. And it's not just me liking it. Now many of you guys have tried it out since I made my initial video about this about a week ago. Many of you guys are trying it out and contacting me and asking me questions about setting up Gemini servers and what Gemini clients to use and things like that. Many of you guys are sharing links to your own personal Gemini capsules. It's just really fantastic. And having spent about a week with Gemini myself setting up my own Gemini capsule, you know, I wanted to share a few things with you. The first thing I want to share with you guys is how to customize a Gemini client. And the one I use is a terminal client called Amfora. I found that to be just a really fantastic program. So let me launch a terminal here and I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Now I'm going to run Amfora Gemini colon slash slash distro.tube. That is the URL to my personal Gemini capsule. And I have worked on this side here a little bit. Actually, I spent a few hours in the last week building what I've got so far. I still got a lot more planned for it. But the first page here, the index.gmi here is links to, you know, social media stuff, my links to my YouTube channel, my library channel, links to my Patreon. And then I went ahead and included some articles because on my traditional website at distro.tube.com, you know, I do have a blog and I have some articles that I've written over the last couple of years. I don't do a lot of blog writing, but I've got some stuff published there. So some of the more interesting ones, what I did is I took them and I went ahead and converted them into the proper text formatting to put them on my Gemini capsule. So this particular article is called Standardized Keybindings Across All Tiling Window Managers. And it's, you know, this was very easy to move over because if I go to this particular blog post here, let me see if I can find it. Here it is. You know, it's really not much. I really didn't even need to open the HTML document itself. All I did was just copy the plain text here and add the appropriate syntax for converting it over to the Gemini protocol, which included, you know, giving it a header by having a hash symbol, a single pound sign there for the top level heading there. Other than that, the only other formatting I did was all of this is pre-formatted text that allows me to keep the spacing because I created this almost two-columned kind of format here. There's no tables or anything in Gemini. Pre-formatted text, by the way, and what this is, it's a block of text that begins with three backticks and ends with three backticks. And then when you have a Gemini client serve up this page, it serves it up as pre-formatted text. That's the same as the article's logo here at the top, which is just some ASCII text. If I go back here to my home page, DistroTube, this very fancy ASCII text generation here, this is all pre-formatted text here. And you can always tell that it's pre-formatted text because if I, you know, open up another terminal here, let me reload this page here. You see all of these lines here actually are non-preformatted text lines, meaning they do get wrapped, right, as we adjust the size of the terminals. See these lines are wrapped, but pre-formatted text is not wrapped. It actually runs off the side of the terminal here. So that is one of the ways you can tell what's pre-formatted text and what is not. Another way to tell is if your Gemini client colors pre-formatted text differently than plain text. And in my case, I have M4 as setting the color for pre-formatted text to be this yellowish orange color. That way I always know what pre-formatted text is. So you know, I can immediately spot that that's pre-formatted text rather than just plain text, which is the white font here. Now let me go back to the home page here. One thing I should mention about the ASCII text generations here is how do you get these fancy ASCII text? Well, there's a number of programs you can install in Linux. One of the most popular ones is a program called Figlet. And to run Figlet, I have it installed on my system. You just run Figlet and then, you know, I could do distro.tube if I wanted distro.tube in this fancy way here. My Figlet does have some flags and options available for it. So if I do 2017-f bubble, what this does is it's going to run Figlet on this text 2017, the year 2017, and it's going to do bubble text. And it's going to create 2017 encircled by these other characters here in this bubble effect. And that is exactly what I did. If I go to my video library here on the index page for my capsule here, you see videos from 2017, 18, 19, 20, 21. Let's go to the link for videos from 2017. I'm going to hit 8 on the keyboard and you see that is the text I generated in the terminal and then I just pasted it as pre-formatted text in this particular page on my Gemini capsule. Now if you want fancier text generations, there's a lot of online tools that you could use. What I would suggest doing is go to your favorite search engine and just do a search for ASCII text generator and there's a million of them. It really doesn't matter which one you use. Most of them use the same programs.  But all you do is go in one of these and then do distro.tube, for example. And then I'm going to create it in what style?  And you can see distro.tube, you know, this kind of horror movie kind of effect, which if I go back here and let me go back to the top of the page, that is where I got that effect going on on my home page. Now let me switch workspaces here because on another workspace I have a terminal open and I've already SSH'd into my Gemini server. If I do pwd, I'm in home slash Gemini because this user is called Gemini. And then I'm going to cd into content. And in content is actually where I have all of my documents for the Gemini server, you know, for the site itself, including the index page, index.Gemini. Let me open that in vim. And I'm going to go to the top and you see all of the ASCII text here at the top.  It doesn't look quite right in this terminal. But you know, that's all I did was copy this and pasted that here and it just, it doesn't display it correctly, but make sure you wrap it in the three back text. So it needs to begin with three back ticks and it needs to end in three back ticks. And that creates the pre-formatted text you need. Let me quit out of that. I'm going to go back to the Gemini client here, the M4 client. Now I've gotten questions about how to theme the M4 client because my M4 client doesn't look like your M4 client because I've really played with the colors to fit my general color scheme that I use in all my tiling window managers. I wanted to match my terminal color scheme and my Emacs color scheme. I use the color scheme that I use in pretty much everything here in M4. But how did I achieve all of that? Well, let me open up a terminal. Let me zoom in a little bit. And in Vim, I'm going to open up .config, M4 config.toml. And there's several things that I changed in this config file. Matter of fact, I should just briefly go through it with you guys because you may be interested in changing some of this as well. The very first thing I changed in M4 was the home page. By default, the home page was a home page for just general information about the Gemini protocol. That's that to be my actual Gemini capsule, Gemini colon slash slash distro dot tube. By the way, if you ever open a terminal and the page is not quite right, what you need to do is just hit R on the keyboard in M4 to reload the page so it fits back correctly. You know, it adjusts to the correct terminal size. That does happen anytime you have a like a terminal full screen and then all of a sudden you change it to half width. Well, it's still displaying the text like it's full screen. So just hit R on the keyboard to quickly reload it and it reloads immediately anyway, because again, we're just dealing with plain text. Some other settings here, color equals true. You want color to equal true so you can have color in M4, antsy equals true, bullets equals true. What bullets is, is if you have a list, you do lists with asterisks. But if you want them to actually be changed to bullets like this here, this is, this is the bullets here. If this was set to false, bullets equals false, you would have just the asterisks appearing rather than the actual bullets. I have show link equals false, what that is, is every link on the page. We have a link and then we have the title. I don't need to see the actual link. I only want to see the specified title for that link. If I had show link equals true, we would have the title and the link both displayed. But again, that's just extra information that I really don't need to see. Some other things I changed in M4 was HTTP equals and then whatever browser you want to use to open HTTP links. I set this to LibreWolf. You can set it to whatever. You can leave it as HTTP equals default, which will always use your default browser on the system if that's what you want to use. I also set the search URL, which is, there's a Gemini search engine at this URL. So anytime I do the search command, it's going to go to that site. You can also adjust the margins and the width. So the margins are the percentage of margins on either side of your Gemini pages. So at 0.10, that's 10% margin on either side. So it needs to be a number between zero and one zero, of course, is no margin. I also have max width equals 140 characters. By default, I think it's set to 100 characters. I wanted it to be a little wider. You may want to play with the margins and the width depending on what size monitors you use. Just play with the numbers and figure out what looks best on your monitors. Now I did change a lot of the M4 key bindings. So the default key bindings, a lot of them were pretty good, but there were some that I didn't like. I prefer Vim key bindings and by default M4 used some Emacs like key bindings like it used B for back and F for forward and things like that. And I wanted to change those to standard Vim motion keys, HJKL. So another thing I also did is by default the space bar opens up like a prompt at the bottom of M4 and I changed that to a colon. So typing colon opens that bar rather than space. Why? It's because that's what you do in Vim and all Vim like programs is you do a colon to get into command mode. So I changed that from using the space bar to using the colon. I changed some other stuff. H and L go back and forward and B is now getting me to the bookmarks. O is an edit. So if I type O, it's going to edit the URL that I'm actually on right now. So O really is for opening a URL, but it's opening the one you're currently on. But I could adjust this to, you know, maybe I wanted to instead of going to my index.gmi, maybe there was a page on here called next.gmi. You know, I could just adjust the URL I'm on to whatever it is I want to go to. Now some of these keybinding values were not here in the M4 config by default. They were not in the example config. So how did I find some of these settings? Well, what I did is I dug through the source code a little bit. If you go to the M4 GitHub and look at the source code, go to config. And in config, go to this file here, keybundings.go. And I searched through this file until I got to this section here. Config, bindings, equals, map, command, string, and then these here. So keybindings, bind link one, bind link two, all of this, bind home, bind bookmarks, all of these, these are values that you could plug into this here. Matter of fact, let me find some of the ones I just showed you. There's bind underscore home is H. So if I type H on the keyboard, it goes to my home page. My home page is set to distro.tube, which we're already on. But if I wasn't on it, let me go to another page. I'm going to hit eight on the keyboard to go to videos from 2017. If I hit H on the keyboard, we go to my home page. So that's a little bit about the M4 config. And then, of course, that's only useful if you guys use the M4 terminal Gemini client. But I think it's probably the best one out there. So I suggest you guys check that out. Another thing I wanted to mention is that so many of us are checking out Gemini and creating our own Gemini capsules. If you have a Gemini capsule, let me know about it because I'll link to your page here. Another thing is this side here that I've got link number 20 on my page currently, Medusa, eSpace, Gemini directory. Let me go to that. So let me do 20 on the keyboard here to go to that link. And this is a guy that has created a directory of various Gemini capsules. So if you create a Gemini capsule, make sure you go and let this guy know about it so he can add it to the Gemini directory. Again, there's a Gemini search engine as well. Let me go back here. I have the Gemini search engine linked here. This is link 14, at least that's what it is currently until I had some more links than the numbers will adjust. But if I go to number 14 here, GeminiSpace.info, this is the Gemini search engine. And again, if your Gemini capsule is not showing up in the Gemini search engine, maybe let this guy know about your site because we need more stuff in the Gemini space. And what I think I'm gonna do is the very first comment of this video. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a comment myself and I'm gonna pin it.  Give me the URL and by posting your URL, of course, I may check out some of your sites and you guys can check out each other's sites, your Gemini capsules. Maybe we all enter link to our capsules, no pressure on that. Link to what you want to link to, things you find useful. But I think we need to do more promoting of Gemini already. A lot of people that are checking it out are finding it just a fascinating thing. I know I've just been blown away by it. If I really didn't think Gemini had a future, I would not have spent several hours this week working on this Gemini capsule. Let me tell you these video links here. Let me go to link number 11 here, videos from the year 2020. If I page down here, this was not easy to create. I had to go get every title of every video from the year 2020 that I made and then give you guys the library link is what I posted. That took some time. This was not something that was just a 10 minute job, right? I've spent several hours putting this together. I know a lot of you guys have spent a lot of time working on yours. So again, post yours in the show description. Again, look for the pinned comment below and that's where you guys should leave your URLs for your Gemini sites. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Ebsi, Dallas, Devin Fran, Gabe, Lou, Corbinian, Mitchell, Lacombe, Archie, 2535, Chris Chuck, David, the other David, Donnie, Dylan, Gregory, Lewis, Paul, Pick, Veeam, Scott, Wesson, Willie. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this show. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because DistroTube is not corporate sponsored. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you'd like to help out, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.


All right. This concept clearance proposes to renew the Centers for Mendelian Genomics Program. The proposed purpose for the renew is to bring the field forward towards the goal of solving all or most of the Mendelian disorders in the foreseeable future by solving as many Mendelian disorders as possible at the founded centers and by enabling and coordinating with the rest over the world. By solving Mendelian disorders, I mean identifying the underlying genomic defects of Mendelian disorders and for the rest of the presentation today I'm going to stick to the term solve. This slide highlights the main achievements made by the three current centers for Mendelian genomics, often referred to as CMGs. These centers have been founded by NHGRI and NHLBI since November 2011. Together they have demonstrated the power of sequencing at scale for solving Mendelian disorders. They have so far discovered soft over 165 Mendelian disorders. In the process of solving Mendelian disorders, they have also made discoveries of phenotype expansions of about 120 Mendelian disorders. By phenotype expansion, I mean the discovery that the phenotypes started and turned out to be underlined by the same genomic defect underlying a previously already solved Mendelian disorder except the phenotypes were not previously observed or documented. Some of these studies have been published in just over 100 publications so far. Along with others, the CMGs have also revealed to a much greater extent than previously anticipated the pleotropy and heterogeneity underlying Mendelian disorders. They have developed methods and tools and data source in the process of solving Mendelian disorders and the effort for disseminating these resources have been ongoing. The progress made by the Mendelian centers and a few other similar efforts and the knowledge and the estimate on the remaining Mendelian disorders to solve have largely informed this concept that I'm presenting today. So how much remaining work lies ahead? This is a summary of current estimates. For about 3,600 Mendelian disorders, there is a known genomic basis. You will notice here that I used the term molecular basis rather than genomic basis and that's because that's the term that OMIM uses and so maybe some of the molecular basis here refer to non-DNA molecular basis but essentially about 3,600 Mendelian disorders have molecular basis and about equal number of Mendelian disorders still remain to be solved. Every year there is still additional number of Mendelian disorders described. In conclusion, much work remains to be done in order to solve all Mendelian disorders. This and the next several slides will present the proposed scope and objectives for the renew. The first objective is to solve 300 also Mendelian disorders in order to learn the approaches and methods and scale and technologies that it will take to solve all Mendelian disorders and the second objective which is as important as the first one if not more to enable others and coordinate with others by developing and disseminate methods and other resources and reach out coordinate with other researchers over the world in order to meet the ultimate goal of solving all or most of the Mendelian disorders. We came up with this production goal of solving 300 also Mendelian disorders based on the NHGRI funding level that I'm going to propose in a few minutes. Also based on the progress that the CMGs have made so far in solving Mendelian disorders also based on the expectation for improvement of efficiency and costs and the anticipation that there will be fewer hanging fruit disorders left to be solved. In other words, the decrease of per-exome cost and the increase of per-disorder cost may cancel out. So these three factors all together led to the estimate of this 300 Mendelian disorders as a production goal. There are two more general goals that we wish that we believe that that we believe solving 300 Mendelian disorders will enable us to still meet. One is to understand the genetic characteristics of Mendelian disorders as a group and the other is to learn what it will take to solve all Mendelian disorders. It is our judgment that 300 represents a significant magnitude in terms of scale and the range of disorders that will allow these two objectives to be met. We are also introducing two new features to the program for the next iteration. One is that when, for example, exome sequencing fails to lead to insight when appropriate whole genome sequencing should be implemented in order to explore the entire genome. And the other change to introduce to the program is to allow a very small percentage of CMG funds to be spent for small scale function assets and this will be a difference to the current program. Of course, we are going to continue to expect follow-up function assets after varying discovery to be largely performed at the collaborators place. And finally, I should mention that this goal is set up based on, as I said, the NHGI funding level that we are going to propose and we are going to seek co-funding from other ICs. Currently NHGLBI puts in $2 million to the program every year and should that amount of money be available or hopefully other sources become available, this goal will go up from $300 million. My estimate is if $2 million become available again from heart and tongue every year, then the goal could raise from solving $300 to $400 million per year through the entire iteration. And then moving on to the next objective for the proposed renew, enabling and coordinating with others. In the process of solving Mendelian disorders, there will be necessary refining and development of approaches and tools and ways to improve efficiency and cost and improved data analysis methods for difficult genomic regions. These methods, we are going to require dissemination of these methods as community resource. In addition, data release is going to be an important feature of the program that we are going to continue to emphasize. And data release will entail DbGaP sequence data release and posting of a course of allele information which would include simple and brief information about the disease names and the location and genomic changes of the course of allele at a public CMG browser and then link to other sites including ClinVar. And also, the CMGs are now coming together to work out issues in the consent process so that data can be pulled together for them to come up with leo counts from the pulled sequence. We anticipate this to be done before this funding period ends and to continue through the next iteration, but a better outcome may be that the CMG data and other programs data could be pulled. So the last part of the enabling and coordinating with others are exactly about reaching out to individual investigators. Based on the current CMG's experiences, we anticipate that training of collaborators and other researchers would continue to be necessary in order to equip them with the know-how for sobbing and dealing disorders and the program will continue to participate in the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium. And the last point is a very important point to make. That is, given the rarity of Mendelian disorders, as Rod McGinnis pointed out at the recent July workshop, the goal of solving most or all Mendelian conditions requires unprecedented cooperation and coordination among clinicians and scientists worldwide. We are going to continue to require public posting of the project lists in the CMG pipeline, and we are going to promote matching of samples or candidate genes of the disorders of common interests. So those were the two main objectives and the scope proposed for the program. In terms of relationship to other NIH programs, Adam already touched the anticipated interaction between CDVD and the CMG's, and he will talk about the interactions between these programs with the Genome Sequencing Program Coordinating Center. And the other two programs I list here are the NSGI-funded CSER program and the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Network. For those of you who are not aware, the current CMGs actually have a coordinating center affiliated to the Mendelian Center at the University of Washington. So a lot of these activities, a lot of the working group activities and steering committee activities and annual meetings and outreach efforts have been coordinated by the CMG Coordinating Center. And the CSER program also has a coordinating center. And these two coordinating centers actually have worked out a communication channel, excuse me, I guess I woke up everyone. And these two coordinating centers have worked out a way of communication so that patients who have not been diagnosed at the CSER sites, particularly those who are suspected of having Mendelian disorders, when appropriately consented, may be passed down to the CMGs to be further studied for discovery. We haven't had a success in this arrangement yet, but we do have our communication established. And the NIH UDN, as you all know, will also discover molecular bases underlying rare disorders. But at least one of the differences is that the CMGs largely study existing samples rather than newly enrolled patients. And one of the goals that the CMG program aims to meet is to lower the undiagnosable diseases and increase the diagnosable diseases over time. Because UDN, even though UDP has been very successful in ongoing, UDN is a relatively newer program, but there have been some initial communications between staff about any potential interactions between the program, between the two programs. And we have a council member here advising UDN, so any advice on any potentially fruitful interactions between these two programs would be appreciated. This slide summarizes the proposed mechanism and funds. Given the scale and complexity of the program, as with the current CMGs, we propose to continue to use a cooperative agreement mechanism. And the program, including the grantees and staff, will regularly seek advice and guidance from an external scientific panel. Both the representative grantees and staff will be required to participate in steering committee and working group activities. And we propose 40 million NHGRI funds for the four-year period, which is at the current level, and $10 million annually. As I mentioned, we will seek co-funding from other NIH institutes. The RFA will fund up to three centers, and it will be open to all participants. So this is the last slide. Just to summarize, I have presented a concept that proposes to fund centers for Mendelian genomics with 40 million total NHGRI funds, aiming to solve 300 or more Mendelian disorders, and to enable and coordinate with others to meet the ultimate goal of solving all or most of the Mendelian disorders in a foreseeable future. That's my entire proposal. Are there any questions? I'll put on my glasses. Yes, Howard. Thank you. You'd mentioned, I think you used the term, low-hanging fruit was already eaten, or you've already, you know, the most available data sets have been started on. Has anyone gone through the OMIM catalog and asked the question how many of the remaining diseases are likely to be, to even have samples or can be assessed? Because it won't be the full number, for sure. That's an excellent question. How hard is the next set going to be, I guess, is what I'm looking at. So my understanding from interacting with the current grantees is that it's going to be a achievable goal to solicit quality samples. I should have mentioned that currently the effort to solicit samples has been at low scale. One of the reasons is because when the current grantees came on board, they brought in samples that they had solicited through years of effort before the inception of the program. The first question you asked was excellent when, in fact, the Coordinating Center at UW just went through the exercise to look over all the listed Mendelian disorders that are included in all the disorders on OMIM together with Ada Hamash, who is the PA of OMIM, and they have identified a set of Mendelian disorders and the PIs who initially published on those disorders, and there has been discussion for the CMGs to reach out to those PIs to see if samples are, some of those samples are actually available. So the current, so the next iteration is going to need to give more funding support for, you know, a higher scale sample solicitation effort. Yes, Jo? Yeah. Howard took part of my question. I was wondering about the bottleneck of this, but also coupled to what other institutes might be interested in partnering based on the samples that are out there, right? So I think you mentioned NHLBI was potentially going to partner again, where they had been an important partner, but I'm wondering if the limitation in finding co-partners is in fact finding diseases associated with those institutes. So if you have a very large set, you can say, okay, we could go this direction, but we'd like to have co-support based on the disease focus of that institute. So if you had that population early, you could potentially interact with ICs in a way that says these are the diseases that we're looking to go after. Yeah, that's, yes. Versus the other way around of saying, well, we got this great program and we're working on diseases, something that would directly interest them. Is that possible? I think that's possible, Jo. Just a few words about the current collaboration with Heart and Lung. So the contribution of their dollars represent about 16% of the total funding level. And what Heart and Lung has been doing is to publish XO1s to solicit samples that represent Heart, Lung, or Blood phenotypes. And the XO1 mechanism has not brought in enough samples to consume 60% of their funds, but has had some success. And what we ask the grantees to do is to purposely choose Heart, Lung, or Blood samples in the samples they already have and also pay attention when they go out and solicit samples to be sure that they will feed the pipeline, 16% of the pipeline that can give, that can lead to discoveries. And there have been some good publications coming out of the joint effort. So I think looking into the samples, the grantees will already have and the grantees might already have and the network they have already built. And there could be something presentable to other potentially interested ICs. Okay. I have Carol, then Dan, then Bob, and then Val, and then mine, so Carol. So in looking at the current centers, there seems to be a distinction between solved and completely solved. Yes. So I'm wondering if you, and just for my own education, can you clarify on what the distinction between those two things are? What do you mean when you say solved and what's the difference between solved and completely solved? Okay. First of all, given where we see the advantages of the central efforts are, we have required that they focus their effort on discovery of the quote-unquote causal variance which I'll define for you in a minute. And then we are going to continue to urge the grantees to rely on their collaborators to perform function assets which will help validate the discovered causal or underlying variance if that's a better term. So in order to be able to call completion of, you know, to call when it's, when would be a good time to, you know, complete a project, the CMGs have defined that a variant that they have discovered to associate with the disorder understudy has to be discovered in at least two other families. So that's their definition of project completed and disease solved. I don't know that, you know, there will be absolute proof of causality. And the other layer to this question is that there are some dealing disorders that can be actually explained by the discovered underlying genomic defect. And because of genetic heterogeneity, you know, the underlying genomic defects cannot explain every individual that suffers from the same syndrome, modifiers and also, and heterogeneity. Okay, Dan. Carol asked sort of much of my question. So again, I'm going to focus on words. I think solved is the wrong word because I think of some cardiovascular guy and I think of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or long QT syndrome, you know, from one level those are solved. And another level 20 years later, they're still not solved. There's still people out there. There's still other genes that remain to be discovered. There are compound heterozygates, there are modifiers. So at what point do you stop working on those and let the community do those? So I think solved is, again, sort of not quite the right word and I understand the appeal of using it. But the other question I had was this, I think the function is underplayed and really very vaguely described in this document.  And at some point, function becomes important because otherwise you really have no confidence that the variant does anything. And the third point that I wanted to make was that maybe the reason NHLBI has been interested is because they're these high profile, not so rare diseases, it turns out, but we didn't know that when we started. But I'm sure that the I Institute and the Kidney Institute, you know, and neurological guys, all those people might be equally interested and have investigators have family. Can I can I follow up on that though? Are these centers the right place to approach function? Well, that's a great question. But I think that that you can't have your cake and eat it too.  We either do function or we don't. So, you know, what we have considered again and again is that function assays for Mendelian disorders and actually will be all sorts. You know, so it will be very hard to scale. And also, we, you know, consider a lot about what the available funds can do most effectively. Well, let me take my answer back a little bit and say that, you know, 20 years later, most of the variants that cause hypertrophic cardiomyopathy don't have we don't understand it to this day. And so that you can have a you can set an army of people to work on function and still not get to an answer. So I but I think that that this sort of lip service to function maybe is is the wrong way to spin it. That say maybe maybe we should say function is not part of this. I take variant and then and then let somebody else prove it. I don't know. Maybe and maybe at the end of the day, you've put more time into it than I have and you probably phrased it right. I don't we probably don't want to spend too much time on this. I have a feeling function sneak in here because many of the grantees have trouble publishing these manuscripts without some aspect of function in it. That's that's part of that. That's actually the main reason when a collaborator does not have the capacity or expertise to do some function assays. Then we are thinking about allowing the grantees to perform a few in order to publish. OK, we have Bob and then Val, Lon and Howard. So I had a couple of points. One was that there's a lot of Mendelian disease discovery going on through commercial laboratories that are doing whole exomes. And I'm wondering what efforts are made to try to capture that information because I mean, if you just look at one large but currently unnamed clinical laboratory, they have, quote, solved 500 disorders that they have studied in the last couple of years. And that's already greater than the 300 that you've proposed. So there's a lot of sequencing going on. It's not being paid for by NIH, and we should get that information in. The second question I wanted to ask about is whether there should be any increased attention to picking appropriate populations that have a lot of first cousin marriages, et cetera, that would help with finding rare Mendelian disorders. And the third thing I wanted to raise to you is about the function question. I mean, whenever I have found anything in a Mendelian disorder, that's a genetic variation. The first thing I do is I go and look at the literature and I find the world's expert on the function of that protein. And I don't care where that person is and the likelihood that they're going to be in my institution or even in my lab is vanishingly small to zero. And so maybe you should consider some kind of supplement that would allow people to, excuse me, that would allow people to reach out and have a small amount of funding through a supplement mechanism to try to work up the function in the hands of the people best suited to do that function. Yeah, so all excellent points. To your first point, and it's actually good news to it's always good news to learn about other ongoing efforts that scale in for the ultimate goal. And that that is precisely why the program is going to continue to push for sharing and for disorder list. OK, Val. Well, much of my comment was already said, but it's picked up on the low hanging fruit thing, too. And now going for the high hanging fruit seems to me that means smaller families, fewer cases, less well-defined phenotypes, greater heterogeneity, which all leads to more mistakes or more false positives. And so thus I was going to comment on the function part. My comment a little different is I think that means that there does need to be a more strict criteria of what actually solve means. And and that may indeed mean a function. I like Bob's comment about, yeah, where do you go to get the function? And it probably is to the experts somewhere else. But I would agree then that a supplementary proposal thank you would be a good idea. Thank you. I take all of your comments about the importance of doing functional assets to at least to a certain extent validate the variant discovery. I wanted to point out that so far the CMGs have been doing quite well to rely on their collaborators to perform function assets. But but they they have run into cases from time to time when the sample providers don't have the expertise and capacity to do functional analysis. And that's when it becomes helpful to go out to the right expertise who actually didn't provide samples. So I understand your comments and thank you for the advice. I want to go back to Bob about the second point you raised. And we have one and among the three current centers, we have one center and who has done a lot of sequencing of our consanguine families. And that has actually turned out to be quite productive. Yeah, in identifying very extreme phenotypes. It's just I'm wondering whether we could do more to reach out to the populations in the countries where these samples exist and these families exist and have a quid pro quo of of helping them understand and deal with the problem and also contributing to the research and making sure that those populations in those countries don't feel like they are being exploited, but instead are partners in an important discovery. Thank you. So there's a common theme coming out here, so I'll be brief on mine because I think Bob and Dan and others have stated it. I'm really excited about this, actually. I think this is great. I think it will work and I think it will work at scale. And it comes back to that that question then if it works at scale and you have 300 all of a sudden diseases out there and you take the patient perspective, apart from validation, which we can get through, there's nothing that can do about it. And so so I think we owe it to ourselves to have some statement of what the follow up is of the initial discovery here and not just not just leave it behind. If it's a supplement, great, if but we have to have some stance, it seems to me and not just leave it hanging because because it will work and it will work for a lot of new diseases. Can I just press you? What do you have in mind? Well, I mean, so so you've I mean, it takes us back to Huntington's or something, right, where we know the defect, but we can't do anything about it. And so it is exactly what Bob was saying. Can we find some mechanism not just to validate the defect itself or the causal variant, but to begin to understand what it's doing? And only then do we start talking about solving it to me. But is that going to be a practical thing for NHGRI to do? I think I don't know that NHGRI. I think we need a stance on it right out of this. What what are the steps? Are we going to facilitate ICs coming in? Are we going to provide potential supplements? I don't know what that solution is, but I don't I don't think you can just leave it hanging personally. I think something has to come out of this.  I don't know if the point already got made or you wanted to I just want to say that I think on the function side, it's yeah, I think on the function side, we just want to give these guys some latitude. And so whether they're coming in on a supplement or they want to come in on as you some of their own resources, I think we got to give them a little bit of latitude. They're not asking for a huge amount on this. So I'm supportive of that side of it. I do want to be careful on it and come back to the whole utility side. There's a whole series of issues around that. And so just making a diagnosis for some families is really a lot. And so I just think we want to be careful on how far we want to push that with within this institute relative to the other ICs. I guess one other quick comment about this issue about who does functional studies is that in general, what I found is that if you pick the right collaborator, it actually will not require a lot of money because they've already got everything set up and know exactly what to do. In fact, that's a biomarker for being the right person to have chosen. Maybe not sufficient, but at least necessary. All right. So no further comments. Can I have a motion to accept the concept as per. Okay, can I have a second? All in favor, please keep your hands up. Okay. Any opposed? Abstentions. Thank you.


So, my name is Devin Launey. I am a PFC. I am with 1503 and I'm from Wisconsin. Alright, so I'm with 13 Fox. I'm a forward observer, fire sports specialist. We observe rounds. We also fire or call in indirect fire, which is based on surface fires. Today we're shooting 105s and observing different targets, doing different missions and just having a good time out here. We're out here shooting 105s observing different rounds for different targets and different missions. It's been a good five days and so far I've been able to actually go down to the gun line, shoot the 105s, load the 105s along with shooting different missions I've never shopped for and being able to shoot the actual live rounds is pretty exciting. Definitely be at 13 Fox. You get to see cool rounds, do different things, dig in, just do what the Army does. Definitely be at 13 Fox. You get to do a lot of cool things and you actually get to dig down and do what the Army people do. Hello, my name is PFC Dennings. I'm from Toledo, Ohio with the company 1503 Airborne Infantry. I'm with 13 Fox and that involves indirect fire and surface to surface, air to surface. But we pretty much get to blow up some targets. Like we have different missions like we've been doing time on targets today, we're doing fire for effect, adjust fire and later on tonight we're going to be doing illumination so we'll be able to see the targets under low visibility. It's going to be pretty dope. I'm with 13 Fox. I'm a forward observer. Pretty much what we do is we deliver indirect fire, surface to surface, air to surface. Today we've been calling it for fire.  And I love my job because we get to actually watch what happens, not just sit on the gun line. And it's beautiful to watch something, especially when it's steel and steel. I'm with 13 Fox stationed in Italy. Currently we're dropping bombs in Germany. It's fantastic. So surface to surface, we have two means of surface to surface. We have more than we have artillery. Finally we have a sassin battery who's been shooting our one of fives all day. And then we sometimes have the UAS around and then we also get to call in close air support as well. I love my job because I take pride in it. I know that I can do my job effectively because I love hitting steel on steel. You should definitely be at 13 Fox. This is Joe's and Fire's fire for effect over. Grid, Quebec Alpha, 0, 3, 7, 5, 0, 8, 7, 0. Altitude, 4, 2, 0. Direction, 6, 2, 4, 0. Over. One company in the open. Length, 200 width, 100. Attitude, 1, 600. Over. At my command. Over. Open. Length, 200 width, 100. Attitude, 1, 600. At my command. Over. Correction. Attitude, 1, 600. Over.  Shot, hotel delta, 4, 5, 0, 3. Splash, hotel delta, 4, 5, 0, 3. You see it? Those rounds landed at the same time. Really?


Good morning. Proud parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, children, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends of our graduates, welcome to the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome too to the many dedicated faculty, staff, alumni, community members and other honored guests who are here with us today. And welcome especially to those individuals whom we have gathered here to recognize the members of the exceptional Berkeley graduating class of 2018. Berkeley's 11th Chancellor, it's my distinct honor and pleasure to preside over today's ceremony. This is a day of joy and celebration, of happy endings and new beginnings, of friends and family, of achievements and high hopes. Members of the class of 2018, you've long anticipated this day with eagerness, with anxiety, perhaps with a mixture of both. But however you're feeling today, I hope you hold a keen sense of accomplishment. Through your passion, hard work and diligence, you've reached a great milestone. You've completed a demanding course of study at the nation's best public university. Today you join and renew the long line of alumni reaching back 150 years whose lives are forever intertwined with this great institution. Today you become one of the nearly 500,000 living alumni worldwide who can proudly call themselves UC Berkeley graduates. Congratulations. While today is a celebration of you, your success is certainly not yours alone. While the entire Cal community is proud of your achievements, known as Prouder than those who have stood by you with their understanding, love and support. Graduates, please join me in thanking your families, partners, children, friends and mentors, everyone who helped pave the way for your arrival at one of life's great crossroads. Let's have a round of applause for them. For those in this room who, like me, have been immersed in the seasonal rhythms of higher education for a long time, there's a pleasing familiarity in the customs and traditions of today's ceremony. Seeing you all today in your caps and gowns links you with generations of Berkeley graduates who have come before you, just as the many rituals that you've taken up over here in the last several years. From morning coffee dates at the Free Speech Cafe to afternoon study sessions in Morrison Reading Room to sunset walks in Tilden Park, all are points of connection you share with Cal's students of years past. But for all the similarity that these shared activities give your college experience to that of previous generations, your Berkeley is distinct. Colored as it is by the particular set of events that took place here and in the world during your time on campus. Events that guided your class discussions, that you and your friends debated late into the night, that shaped the decisions that you made in regard to coursework, internships, your major, perhaps even the career ahead of you and the kind of life that you will lead. Your Berkeley, the years that you have been on campus, has been marked by hugely consequential changes in the world. You saw the rise of the strongest woman candidate for president in the United States history ultimately delivered a stunning defeat in an election that upended American politics. You saw important strides toward justice and equality in society as the Supreme Court declared same sex marriage a fundamental right. As the Black Lives Matter movement challenged institutional racism in law enforcement and as the Me Too movement toppled abusive men in positions of power. Yet you also saw major setbacks as disdain for immigrants and refugees to hold here and around the world and as fear and hatred of the other became a central theme in many countries political discourse. In your time catastrophic natural disasters from monsoons in South Asia to a hurricane in Puerto Rico to raging wildfires across the state of California have stirred up debates about wealth privilege and our responsibility to aid victims and help rebuild their communities. Not to mention I'm dismayed to say arguments challenging the reality of climate change. Other kinds of disasters to including acts of terror and bias motivated mass shootings have renewed disputes about gun rights and seen thousands take to the streets in protest of standing laws. While you've been at Berkeley concerns about cybersecurity changes in the media we consume and questions about privacy rights have asked us to reconsider our relationships to now ubiquitous new technology and moans of communication. Many of these historic events and the attendant discussions about rights responsibilities and privileges that come with them have had analogues here on our campus. It is a defining quality of those at Berkeley that you do not sit idly by when you see injustice whether in the larger world or locally. You reflect on the issue at hand consider solutions and confront problems and all their complexity and with all their deep and enduring difficulty. As surely as this institution has left its mark on you you have left your mark on Berkeley. When you saw the need for change at our institution you seized it and our university is richer and better for your efforts. It was your classmates in the Black Student Union who were behind the creation of the Fannie Lou Hamer Resource Center and the ones who helped craft the African American Initiative which is now working to improve our campus climate for black students at Berkeley. It was the work of survivors and student advocates among you who in 2016 and 2017 helped this university critically examine its policies and procedures for handling cases of sexual assault and harassment and take up the process of improving them. You modeled strength and resolve in support of our undocumented student population even as those students were villainized by the leaders of our country and threatened by anonymous chalkings and posters on campus. You celebrated the 50th anniversary of the free speech movement and then saw Berkeley cast into the national spotlight as we endeavored to navigate a new free speech debate about how best to reconcile maintaining a sense of community alongside a sense of the university's role as a public forum open even to speakers whose views we find abhorrent. In February of 2016 you helped to clean up the mess literally left by rioters in the wake of Milo Yiannopoulos's appearance as well as joined us this past year to use dialogue not violence to bridge the partisan divide. You have in short embraced opportunities to speak out, to organize, to advocate, to lean into controversial issues, to participate in public life, to leave this place a microcosm of the larger society better than you found it. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., you have not been silent about things that matter. This is so critical for the world you are entering is rife with intractable problems that are pervasive, that have many dimensions, that span national borders, that don't care about partisan lines. Your training here has prepared you to become teachers, social workers, scientists, and software engineers certainly. But as the examples I mentioned show, it has also helped you hone the skills you need to fix a broken democracy and address the truly monumental challenges of your day. I hope you will not retreat from these challenges. Even when things seem hopeless or pointless, you must not abandon civic life and a commitment to the public good. It will be all too easy, privileged as you are now with a Berkeley degree, to retreat into your own lives into getting a decent job, making enough money, maybe playing tennis after work and calling your parents on weekends. Those things are important, but as one of our business school's core principal states, you must think beyond yourself as well. Just as each one of us has both a professional life and a personal one, we also have a civic life, and it should be just as central to our identity as the other two. Our civic life does not mean simply voting in elections. In fact, even those who cannot vote can live immensely important civic lives. Instead, it is the sum of all the good that you do in your community, and that is not confined to the town hall or the town square, the ballot box, or the soapbox. You build your civic life when you volunteer to tutor students two towns over, when you develop a thoughtful proposal to address a community need, and bring it to your city council. When you knock on doors in support of a state proposition you think is best for California, when you turn out in protest to oppose something that won't. An active civic life asks you to be aware, to be engaged with the world and its goings on, to take action, to organize, to volunteer, to advocate, to campaign, or take up public service yourselves, to dissent, to protest when it is needed. It will take a firm commitment to building up your civic life, to bring grace, justice, and beauty to the world. You all know that Berkeley's motto is fiat looks, let there be light. You are that light, shine it where you go. Thank you.


So there are 4 Merlin Trials within the North Ford Bug Area, right up north guys, and today I'll showcase to you how you can solve each and every one of them. Okay, so to activate the Merlin Trials you will need those mellow sweet leaves. Here I suggest you grow your own by buying a seed from the Magic Neat vendor within the Hogsmeat, makes life a lot easier. Okay so there are 4 Merlin Trials within the North Ford Bug Area, so let's get into it, and the first one guys you can see right here on the map, now this trial requires the spell of Confringol. So here just activate the trial with Confringol in hand, you will need to take out these statues along the cliff, some of these are actually hidden behind a few grassy vines too, so use Confringol on them then take out the statues, quite simple people. Okay so the next one as you can see right here on the map, this one requires the spells of Accio, Confringol and Incendio. Okay so here guys activate the trial, then head as I do on screen and you'll find some stone pillars surrounding a grassy area, using Cyndio or Confringol on the grassy area to burn it away, which will reveal a hole. Then use Accio on this large round boulder, on this hill, and pull it towards the hole to complete it, it really is that simple. Okay so the next Merlin Trial here requires the spell of Flippendo. So here guys you first need to clear out the enemies, then you need to activate the trial, here guys you need to use Flippendo on these stones as I do on screen, matching the symbols as I do to complete it, it really is simple people. Okay so the last one here guys is probably the easiest, okay so you can see it on the map right here, so come here and activate the trial, then all you need to do guys is climb up these stone platforms, jumping from one platform to the other, getting to the top without touching the ground, and then guys this one is done, easy. And there we have it, all four North Ford Bug Merlin Trials. Guys if you enjoyed the video, leaving a like really helps out, if you want more Hogwarts Legacy guides, check out my channel, there are literally hundreds there, if you're new around here and want to see more Hogwarts be sure to subscribe, if you never want to miss a video I upload, turn those notifications on and hopefully guys I'll see you on that next one.