Good afternoon, everyone. All you very prompt people, there's three or four minutes to go, but I think we might as well just start. So this is Harmony, Forums, and Communities with Drupal. Okay, who am I? I'm Ali, I look alive on most things, and I've been working with Drupal for about, I don't know, six this year now. Kind of a weird mix of roles and development front-end, kind of a bit of everything really. So this kind of project really kind of does it for me, I guess, because I get to play about with everything and have a good time with that. Enjoy all the easy stuff and then kind of run away from the hard stuff. And if you're really, really interested, you can find me on LinkedIn, but I wouldn't really bother with that. That was an interesting transition. That is the only one that is in there. I'm told that my slides are pretty boring, so that was for that friend. That's pretty much it. I can't like black and white, and it's simple and it works. So, Landscape of Forums. This talk, I'm basically going to go through why I considered even doing this, how it went about it, and the result. So, obviously the start is the current landscape, which is pretty much one of two things. You can either go with call forum, and if you really feel like it, you can sort of amp it up a bit with advanced forum, or you can go with third-party integration, which will be stuff like VBluton, PHPBB, and so on, and all the like. And of the choices, they're not really great ones. So, call forum is architecturally pretty simple and not too far away from how it started out in Drupal 4.6, I believe, where you've got a content type and you've got comments against that, and you get this kind of disjointed experience because of it, where if you wanted to theme a discussion, then it's going to be I theme the node, and I'll theme the comments separately. Theme comments separately. And really the main problem with it is the architecture, because it's always going to go back to that issue that it's just the node, and you've got comments on it. So, if you want to have a really sort of performant experience, then it doesn't kind of lend itself to that, and if you look at any design, like database design for forums, they don't do this. So really it's just kind of like, to me, a kick out door, this will do, and that's kind of how it's stayed. Third-party integrations, there are quite a few options. And when you look at them, they've pretty much, again, stayed the same for many years. Forums as a concept have changed a bit. They're still around and still very well used, and people do get a lot from them. But things have shifted around a bit in how people interact. You can see this through the fact that these projects are of some age.  People do still use them, and it shows that people do want to use Drupal to have communities. But the downsides, they're complex in that you have to install a type of software and understand it. You've got to track it in terms of security updates, much as you would with Drupal to keep it secure. It requires more knowledge. It's not Drupal for one thing, so you just kind of fight against it a bit. On the Drupal side, you've got to make sure the Drupal project that integrates with this third-party piece of software is up to date, works how you expect it to. There's a lot of stuff, basically, and having done a few of them, I've lost some life out of it. Separate admin areas, so that's not a good thing either. It's not really as great as the experience, and you re-suffer because of it. More things. Varnish, you've ever tried to put varnish in front of the bulletin? It doesn't really go well. Again, we'll make you cry. Don't try and do it. It's just not funny or enjoyable. Just don't do it. Harmony. Harmony is meant to address these problems. Harmony is a Drupal-based form solution. Very much blown out of frustration. I started a couple of years ago. I started out with a prototype with ECK, and that kind of validated that I can plug these things together. It does make sense. That's the kind of feature list. So when you look at this, the aim is to create basically what you'd need as a developer. So from that point of view, you've got integrations with all the things you want. For example, with core forum, you can't change the location of slash forum easily. You'd have to hook menu alter to do that. Whereas because we use views for all our listings, you could just override that and then change the path. So everything that it would make sense to have available to you, you can do, you can use. So you've got views for listings, paths also for sensible thread paths. Because these are separate entities. You've got the thread entity and you've got the post entity. Yeah, all the kind of things that you'd expect. So my favorite probably being Travis CI. So we've integrated with that recently. So that will run our B-hat test when we commit to Drupal Organ GitHub. The idea with Harmony is that it's an ecosystem that provides everything you'd need. But at the very core of it, you have Harmony Core. And all you should need is that. And we're not going to give you anything extra on top of that because a lot of the problems that you can get, say with Drupal Commons, for example, will be that you spend a lot of time kind of stripping that back. And again, you're fighting something. So with Harmony, it's kind of built with an approach that do, I wouldn't say minimum, but do the sensible amount without kind of overstepping your mark. And then we've got other modules out there to provide extras such as moderation and other bits and bobs. So in terms of components, it's that kind of family of things that you'd expect. You've got a distribution moment, just one, we plan to have more, just to kind of prove the concept that you could have Stack Overflow with Drupal if you wanted to, and then some more community-focused things. You've also got modules. There are a lot of them. There's going to be a lot more. And then also themes to support that. So it aims to be kind of a full package or product. And the real vision for it is that even as like an open-source project that when you think of forums, you kind of stack it up against PHPBB or VBurtain or Discord. So any of these things, and it's a decent kind of collection or product in its own right, regardless of the fact that it's Drupal and just like the fact that it is Drupal is, you know, just like an extra thing that's an amazing bonus. So let's run through the modules very quickly. So we've got a various... quite a few different things which address different needs. We'll go through the interesting ones bit by bit. But as you can see, you know, there are modules which address the needs that you'd expect to have as a result of I want to build a community and I want to enable people to communicate in ways that make sense, whilst also administering it and then tackling spam and all those different requirements and chances that you're going to have. One thing that I do like to show is the .info file for Harmony. I don't know if you can see that or not. The point is that there's incredible amount of dependencies and it's kind of ties in with probably built elsewhere in that I'm going to let these other projects do things and I think that's kind of a sensible approach in that I'm not going to try and make listings. Listings can be views or inline-nc form works well for embedding the post form inside the thread form which is how it works. So that's one of the key approaches. Leverage all the other things out there which we can. Right now, let's have a look at the front-end demo. So this is a HTML mock-up of what I want Harmony to look like. So this will be like the distribution. So this is bootstrap 3. Responsive, all those good things. It was a break from doing like hard dev stuff. So one of the reasons why I really love this project is that I get to do all these different things in terms of I get to see some front-end stuff some dev stuff, some branding, design, badly. And the front-end was kind of sort of a short break from doing the sort of core development. So what this has done is kind of set out that high level of I'm going to make this product. I know exactly what I want to do with it what it should look like and how it should behave. And that's informed things like I know that when I want to build out views listings that I need to have a responsive table and whilst we do have these things kind of done in Drupal in some form or another there's a number of ways to do it. So we've got in Harmony Core for a separate views plugin style for Harmony Responsive Table which kind of executes this vision and much in the same way we'll see that the thread page the posts themselves they should be largely represented easily by Harmony Core by itself so when you install it it will roughly look like this or give you the means to kind of build this. And in terms of setting goals for a product very much kind of make something that looks really nice or decent and don't worry about too much the fact that it's Drupal and even if you can tell that it is Drupal then something's gone a bit wrong because you should be able to just sort of look at it and go again this is Harmony as opposed to oh this is Drupal because I can recognize the tab style or those kinds of things. Harmony Core let's have a look at Harmony Core can everyone see this okay? yep so this is yes cool right so as I said we provide a views listing at slash forum though this is something that you can override because it's a view it should more or less look like the front end mock up so if we have a look at the listing style itself then it's probably not too far away in that you've got a number of likes, views, avatar so on and it's also responsive so I won't try and do that right now because this theme is not responsive it works believe me so currently there's user one so you see the kitchen sink of all these tips but I can go and create a thread as you expect to have the regular kind of options that as a Drupal user you do expect to have so this is a thread entity with a post entity form embedded in it so in effect you're creating two things which gets a bit conceptually funny sometimes when you're trying to work out what saves first and so on but in line entity form does a good job of working that out what I would draw attention to is the fact that we do have these kind of forum based options which meshes the concept of you've got nodes they're published and threads also have that you would have that in other form software but we take on that sort of terminology just because it is Drupal and again it's what you'd expect from a Drupal module so let's create that and then we've got a thread and you've got all different kind of options this looks roughly like what we want it to so you've got thread operations if I reply it will show as a direct reply to this post as you can see in reply 2 we now have one reply so again looks like this and when you click on one reply it loads in that reply so you can see the direct replies to that post all this stuff is backed by nc references and views and core ajax type of stuff which has nice benefits in that if I like this thread here it will update it here so anywhere that we can rely on someone else doing something for us we do it and we get that benefit and then there are other nice things such as a number of projects have kind of sprung out of again I want to make this a really good product and I want to or just having that kind of approach I mean it's open source software it's separate modules but there have been bonafide projects which have kind of sprung out of trying to build this thing and we'll touch on this a bit more later but you've got things like app.js where you can inline app mention people in a post and then it will be a linked kind of tokenized thing which will appear inside the content which you can do whatever you want so in this case it's just a link to that user's profile let's have a quick look at the entities so harmony when you install it you get this little harmony menu which kind of collects everything together so you can view all the threads you've also got amount of reporting stuff in here but posts you can modify the threads again so this is all kind of stuff that you expect to have so entity reference fields quite a lot of them really you've got bundles as well you've got types of threads you can have a standard type pole thread, announcement thread Q&A, that kind of stuff and you can really just sort of do what you want with it posts are slightly more basic you've just got one post like there's no bundles but again you've got entity references you've got all the kind of things that you can achieve what you want to with this and you've got a really sort of strong basis to build what you want from it there is a harmony distro which again it's kind of a monster really just because of that dependency list so I'm not too sure how long it's going to take and it works and great if not then and this is kind of gluing everything together so this is very much a work in progress and it's mostly like different harmony modules poked together with a few other choice ones for security and again it just gives you sort of like an easy way to jump in and understand what this thing is so I encourage anyone to give this a go if they feel like it or they want to know more about this or just kind of pull it apart and see how it could work out for building community site for yourself or a client or you know someone it's going to take forever I give up so let's talk a bit about the separate different modules that exist the first one that really was a requirement is that sort of I've got a forum, I've got different cascades which people can post in, I once had a a moderator only one so from that came harmony access and harmony forum access again looking at things like core you see things such as the node access layer which is you kind of look at it and it's like okay and then you start to get into it and someone's like wow these people are really smart I'm just going to copy what they did so I pretty much just copy what they did with a few tweaks one of the pain points about creating your own entities is that you have to pretty much create your own entity and there are tools out there to help you with it but you kind of they're much on your own you've got a lot work to do some things are nice views for example which does provide an amount of integration but when it comes to things like I want to create link in my view listing that will not be provided for you you have to do that kind of stuff yourself so with all of this within as many places there's kind of this kitchen sink approach to integrating with things so with the value you've got integration to develop but you've also got to develop generate integration where you can just kind of spawn a lot of content to play about with so let's have an actual look at what it looks like again all this has been done with kind of intelligent approach to what would I want as a developer or what would I want as a site builder and I install this thing I just want it to work I want it to have sensible defaults with this as a developer I'd like to have the ability to enable or disable access control against multiple different categories and then only have that in place if I want it for that category and if I'm going to have all these permissions and they are standard permissions then let's have them with taxonomy term machine names as opposed to taxonomy term IDs because when you move between environments that's not going to work out for you so a lot of it is just try and make it work, try and make it as painless as possible harmony moderation so this was a good one through real world requirements where we've done quite a few things which allow people to or active members of the community to really be a part of preventing spam or flagging up inappropriate content in that there are features like if I don't know 5, 10 people however many people report one post you can automatically unpublish it and put it into the moderation queue and flood control against someone's going around reporting tons and tons of posts you can limit that kind of stuff so it's important in place learning lessons from other places in Drupal core, Drupal community and so on yep, so as you can see reports post then Ctools modal appears and you can provide this is using flag as well provide the reason for why you're reporting it go through write things and then you've got an admin listing which is a place to moderate that kind of stuff glued together quite nicely and again it goes back to that ecosystem and providing something which plugs in together in all the right places profanity profanity can be a problem in communities there are a few other modules which can do this kind of thing for you but they weren't really that modern so stuff like I think it's bad words and there's another one which escapes my mind but there are missing things such as features integration so I want to have multiple word lists and be able to export them and move my configuration around from different environments that was one requirement and it just sort of made sense to create a separate project and that means you can also go out and try and tackle these different problems such as I've got a views listing I want to have a profanity filtered tightly in that listing how do I do that with views and it's like good lord I have to provide a separate field which means I've now got to go through NC info also and then it's like okay now I need to provide tokens because I don't want that in my URLs so really gone to the nth degree on this one and again that's the approach that's kind of happened with this retake it as far as possible without killing yourself at JS so we saw that in action a moment ago this implements a library JavaScript library and we saw that you can at mention people but what this really is is the ability to have a trigger character trigger phrase which then references starts up a search against a list of entities and provides that back as like an also complete within a text area and when you go to output that in filter text you can theme it so make it link to use a profile make it link to a taxonomy term so for example if you wanted to you could have a hash or something as a trigger for I want to search taxonomy terms and then also complete based off of that and then you can now tag content automatically just by sort of doing hashtag whatever so there's quite a lot of potential for this one and the other thing that's quite good about it is also got this awareness of what is an existing mention and what's a new mention so if I had mentioned someone then someone goes through and edits that post which can potentially happen if I leave it alone then no new notifications will be sent as a result of it but if I choose to add in another mention then you know that there's another mention in there because that kind of stuff does happen so again as a degree really sort of think about everything as much as possible and seeing the potential for what could happen after this project because again this is a standalone project and if you want to have notifications as a result of a mention a taxonomy tag or that kind of stuff then you've got the ability to do that okay event data store so with event data store the initial requirement was that we need to make charts and having a look at what's available in Drupal there's quite a lot of stuff around charting but not I want to have a data storage back end so again it's one kind of came out requirements and it's got a lot larger kind of potential for what you can do with it in that with this module you can create your own watchdog so just like a store of events that happened and then create listings of it because we've integrated with views filtered against the date so you've got pop-up calendar again integrated with views and you can create multiple different storage items for these different events so it means that you can track things such as I want to track number of user logins, I want to track registrations storage created, post created edited, deleted, all those kind of things and then produce a chart image bigger but then produce a chart which has all the status together and do it easily because the other issue with this is that I want to create a chart easily how do I do that, I need to start using aggregation this module will aggregate your data for you so you can easily go in and say I want only the yearly monthly, weekly, daily hourly data so this is a really good module in that it makes things quite simple and easy in terms of I want to produce a chart I want to create a listing of stuff that's happened and it kind of hits on event sourcing which is a concept in that I'm going to log and track and have a storage for every different kind of event that happens and as a result of this it means that I can rebuild the state of an application so I mean have a read of this blog post here because it's really quite interesting stuff but with this module it's the kind of thing you can do so I want to rebuild the state of the application in terms of posts created so I can sort of if I wanted to in a live sense see all the posts that occur and have links through the database to the actual entities that exist and kind of recreate the sort of play by play with the different events happen that's a default avatar okay another module which has come out of real world requirements and this was surprisingly hard purely because of image magic support and it's not really you can't rely on that being there so we see this kind of happening quite a lot in that you've got a default avatar now so in I know Google inbox on try to think of other examples now quite remember discourse would be another one github I believe does have something in any case it's quite simple give me a default avatar based off the user's username with this you would you can't bring in the concept of I have a default avatar which means we had to do stuff like also the user scheme which was kind of a surprise but it says don't use the data property so we didn't use it and then provide an amount of ability to have this kind of stuff live in the CDN so we generate real images which can be derived you can provide separate fonts so this is hell best I believe and change the color set so it's all quite random and you can choose different colors but again it's kind of like another solid approach to providing something which is kind of expected now in terms of community because you don't want to have just like a simple default avatar it's just a bit more interesting and Google recently, Google being the other example of default avatars if you want to see you can have separate images so they're now doing animals so if you look on google docs you'll see an anaconda you know so on going through the alphabet you can just have images for animals whatever you like really right so what starts coming up with Harmony a lot there's a lot of effort that's going to go into this project because over the past year or so it's been kind of like gradual progression whereas we're looking to kind of kick things into overdrive in terms of providing all the different things that you want for a strong community part of that is giving people the ability to move away from things like core forum, advanced forum phpbb all those places where we want people to come to us and sort of leverage Drupal as a platform one of the things that happened recently as I was reviewing things for this talk is that I remember that Acre did a community site for twitter so dev.twitter or might be now that did use core forum which is kind of surprising because when you look at it it's like that's the best that we've got to offer and again that's really why I've done this project and looking at recently twitter now use discourse instead of Drupal so they've been the core forum thing for discourse which is not great again so this is about giving people more choice and enabling people to use Drupal to create communities one of the main things that I see coming up as a requirement is that we don't have just say good enough messaging with the message module or private message or whichever thing you choose to use it's that I want to have Slack or I don't know Facebook grade messaging in my community so there's a lot of interesting stuff that we see out on the horizon and looking to do but right now I kind of realize that communities is very niche in a way with Drupal and that's a problem and probably the twitter example is the best one that I can give and that people aren't seeing it as a viable platform which is something we're looking to change and this leads me into who's using it so cancer research in the UK is a massive charity that do a lot of good work and they want to rebuild their community going away from Jive into Drupal because that's their platform of choice Harmony was seen as pretty much the only game in town I suppose if they didn't want to use Core 4 or if they didn't want to do a third party integration which really don't do that it's horrible and they're committed to open source software so I worked with them to create the new community which launched in November migrated a lot of content and it's been quite a good experience it's given this project kind of a legitimacy that it really needed to progress and in a really good way but also a very painful way for myself the current resources that it needed to become a lot more serious in that there's a dedicated tester on the project making me cry and finding so many bugs but all this good stuff went back into the projects on Drupal.org so they've really really given a lot to the open source community for from that project and the amount of those modules which you saw previously that's from that work and the real world requirements cannot be sort of underestimated in that it's kind of stuff that none of us would ever think of depending on what kind of role you fulfill if you're a site builder, if you're a developer, it's like wow I did not have thought that people would want to do that but there's a lot of things and harmony as an ecosystem is much much better for it so I'm massively grateful to Cancer Research for that and it's aside from that, I would say have a look at the site if you want to but never actually read anything on there because it can be incredibly sad so don't read it but I appreciate it and be happy that they've believed in this open source vision which I'm very privileged to be a part of yeah who else? Right well as I was saying Drupal is a platform it's got so many incredible kind of solutions and modules available such as commerce for I almost create a shop then it's its own sort of like stand-alone thing which makes a lot of sense you can solve a lot of problems with Drupal but communities isn't really one of them that you can do easily or do well so that's exactly why I do these kind of things I do talks cons, camps, whatever that's kind of stuff I want to be doing to raise awareness that you can create communities with Drupal they can be really good and with that not that many people are using it which makes me sad because I've poured a lot of effort into this and a lot of time it is each time I do these talks I meet more people who say this is what I need I'm going to go build it but when you take on a community as a part of a build it's never a light thing it's not just I'm going to throw in the community it's far more of a consideration and it can be its own site as well as in like cancer chat that was its own thing that's its whole other project and with that I expect to see a lot more spring up I know there are launches which are coming up within the next say week on the horizon I expect to see more and more of them and there are quite a few harmony sites out there cancer chat is the one that I really want to talk about and sort of like point to but the reason for doing this is improving landscape and improving options and it's one of the things about doing open source software that you can share this kind of stuff and make things better so who else will see I hope to fill out a few more slides by the next one but yeah, for now I'd say if you are aware of requirements for a client or someone asks about I want to make community studies today about harmony, I'd be very grateful I encourage that if I can there's a d.o. group which isn't so well traveled that's kind of the state of Jupiter group sometimes but if you want to get involved then by all means come say hello, come say I think you suck you wasted all your time and then you might cry but there could be an opportunity in that I could make it better who knows and if you want to try the distribution out then simply test me is a great way to do that kind of think I wonder if that ever got there yeah it did, let's do that now aside from that I'm pretty much done, if anyone does want to get in touch then yeah you can email me, tweet do what you want if you want to keep up to date on the project itself there's a recently relaunched Get Harmony.io which has a few things on there one of which being a user to sign up so you can do that and there's 150 people somehow on that list I've sent probably two emails over the past year that's pretty bad I'm going to click through this and any questions if there are any if not then yeah you said a few things there so I'll remember all of them sure so notifications is probably the first one I talk about this kind of vision for everything that Harmony is going to be and do and all that good stuff and communication is probably the key point in that and there is a module planned called Comstack which is aiming to be that kind of solution in providing modern intelligent means to create notifications, product messaging, live chat all these different things when I talk about Slack grade, Facebook grade even in creating like an email client that's what I'd hope that you'd be able to do with this module and that's a very, very quick kind of statement on something incredibly complex so it's on the horizon I hope to get smart people like me involved in building this thing it's on the list definitely and you're right in that when you think about forums, discussion forums now they have kind of changed and they've sort of I don't know, 10 years ago they were very different and it's kind of a place that you would sort of go to to discuss things and you'd be very involved but now things are a bit more detached and when you look at new social media it's kind of this more abstract way to interact with people and guessing people back into that community is absolutely vital to ensuring that it stays active and people are engaged and they are kept up to date with what's happening so when you part of this is notifications so this vision of what I want to build has notifications and when you think about when you consider what's happening on, say, Twitter where you at mention people that's exactly where someone to at mention you on Harmony with at JS and be aware that it's a new mention in which case sends a notification about that so it's all kind of connected together for me and I've got a very clear vision of what I want to build that's top of the list basically for I mean that's its own project entirely that's not so Harmony but something Harmony would use the cover of the questions statement yeah, yeah, absolutely and that is one of the reasons and that's how things can die and slow down a bit both of those things just use rules what that guy said since there's just entities you can make a rule that says when an entity is created so you can already do that it's a strength in building a forum system in Drupal yeah Harmony is integrated with rules in many ways you can do exactly what you said and that's the point in integrating kitchen sink style with all the things and yeah, it's been a request I have comments on my blog but how about instead of using comment module I want to use Harmony you could do that, you can glue that stuff together there's probably going to be a dedicated module to provide that in some way and it could either be default rules or something a bit more involved because there is a lot of unseen things in doing something like that but in a very sort of simple way you could use rules to do that absolutely and then you get all the benefits of inline at replying and again one of the strengths is that you can sort of leverage all this community content that will exist because it's not only now about comments it's about how many times I've been mentioned or in what content I've been mentioned and with having entity reference used like a million times in the Harmony thread or Harmony post entities you can do that and you can sort of drag everything out the hope is that you have everything you need to achieve what you want and if that doesn't exist then you can request things. Any other questions? Nope, okay, well I think we're kind of about right on time yeah, thank you very much have a good rest of the conference.


So the future of the Internet is very happily, theoretically, unknowable, because we simply don't know what people are going to invent, and people invent things that they seem trivial, but then suddenly sweep across the Internet and fundamentally change how it works, what we do with it, change the norms, see this over and over and over again. So any attempt to predict has to, you can only be lucky, that's up in your prediction, there's no ground for predicting the future, and this should give us hope, so long as we're able to preserve the elements of the Internet that make it so unpredictable, make it such a ground for innovation. So if you manage to do that, and those elements are threatened, the elements of the Internet are threatened, then the Internet will stay happily and completely unpredictable.


It's August the 26th, it's Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock, it's Trump week. I'm Tim Apachele, your host and today's show is titled, RNC, Night of Lies, Fear for the Suburbs. If you've been watching the RNC for the last two nights, I think it's been an accumulation of three and a half years of bold-faced lies at this administration and more importantly the agencies that are part of this administration and those that are in Congress that have been supporting Donald Trump's lies about just about everything. We have over 20,000 registered lies, certified lies that President Trump has told since inauguration. All I could say is that when you listen to what the many of the speakers said last night and the night before, you're going to what reality are we both on the same plane here? Without further ado, I'm going to talk to our guests right now. Welcome everyone. We have Jay Fidel, Stephanie Dalton and Winston Welch. Welcome everybody. First topic of the day is the RNC. I think that if you've been watching any of the coverage and certain some of the commentary, the most stark, the thing that stands out the most is the fact that number one, we're seeing the White House used and abused to promote Donald Trump's personal campaign. We see violations of the Hatch Act. We see the Rose Garden being misused. They tore out half the trees just so they can get a better camera angle on the Rose Garden in the audience. We're seeing Secretary Pompeo using his position as Secretary of State misusing his position and basically putting out an endorsement for this administration and Donald Trump, although he doesn't mention Donald Trump by name, but he is in Israel and most likely that was funded by the taxpayers dollars for him to go there and do so. Jay, I'm going to go to you first. What are your first impressions about the RNC and what strikes, what stands out is the most glaring of lies that have been reported in the last two nights? That's a hard question. There's so many of them. Yeah. It's a problem for me. What stands out about the RNC is that I can't watch it. It's just lie after lie after lie.   But that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that there are 30, 40 million people out there who buy them, who buy them wholesale. And most of the Senate buys them wholesale. And that's why I lose my lunch whenever I watch that. So if you're asking me about the worst lies, you're asking the wrong person, I can't watch it, Tim. Well, let me throw this out as an idea. Are we just numb after three and a half, four years, numb to all the 20,000 lies? And it's not that we don't speak out, it's just that we're just burned out. Rather, we're burned out to speak out. Do you think that's more of the syndrome that we're doing with? Not for me, not for anybody on this panel. Not for anybody who I know who is in the thinking category. But there are a lot of people out there that defend the lies and have an answer for every single one of them to support him. And that's the part that gets me. And I suppose, in a sense, that means they're burned out. In other words, 20,000 lies, and the one right after 20,000, they know at some level of their consciousness, that's a lie, but they're burned out about arguing with it. They're tired of trying to evaluate the truth of it. So that's a kind of burn out there. And as a result, every Trumper accepts every lie. And they're living in an alternate universe. It's very hard to talk to them because you can't convince them. You can't make them understand that lies are no good for our democracy. Well, I'm going to go into a few details because, the claim is Donald Trump has been lying and he's lying right now for the RNC.  But that's a claim. So every claim should be supported by evidence. So let's look at some of the speakers. Let's look at Kimberly Guilfoyle. I call her the screaming banshee. There's no other words I can describe her because her address was something to behold. But the bottom line is she was basically saying that the suburbs are going to be overrun by the Democrats, the socialists, that there's going to be crime in the streets and rioting and looting. By the way, all this that's taking place is taking place not under Joe Biden's administration, but Donald Trump's administration. Let me add something about that. Of course, it's not really true. And the demonstrators are out there. They're demonstrating quietly first amendment demonstrations. But it falls somehow to help Trump when these violent people, the skinheads in Kenosha, Wisconsin, come out and shoot people in the street. It's not the liberals who are shooting anybody. It's the skinheads who are shooting them. And my advice to the liberals is go home. We don't need this because Trump is, I don't know if you heard, but Trump is sending his brown shirts into Kenosha now. It falls, it works for him. He can use this now. It can validate the lie that he gave the other day. Probably the worst line is going on about Biden.  And he's going to wreck the country. What's remarkable about that is the one wrecking the country. And they're all talking like, all of the Trump speakers are talking like this, that Biden is going to wreck the country, that Biden is going to be created a huge deficit and all. It's turning the tail, isn't it? Turning the tables on Trump. Trump does this stuff and then he blames Biden. That is out of 1984. It's criticizing the other guy for what you're doing. It's right out of Hitler's playbook. Yeah, well, what I think the Democratic convention tried to do is portray where they're moving in the future. There's actually a platform with the Democrat National Convention. What we know here is that the RNC has no platform and they announced in writing that they weren't going to have a platform for the 2020 election. They're going to use the 2016 platform. And the key point of their platform for this election year is quote unquote, undying support for Donald Trump. I mean, where's the vision of the RNC? Where's the vision of the GOP about where we're moving in these times of turmoil and a wrecked economy? And we see no vision, no vision of prosperity in 2021. I find that really glaring as the difference between the RNC and the DNC. Your thoughts? It's called following. That's what they're trying to achieve. And when you do that, you criticize anyone who was on the other side. That's what he did in 2016, lock her up, lock her up. And now it's sleepy Joe trying to hang labels on the opponent in such a way to diminish his credibility. And Trump to say, you have to rely on me. I'm the one who can take you to the Promised Land. And the great big huge hit Larry and lie there is that he's had four years of taking to the Promised Land and he's taken us to the seventh circle instead.  I have such trouble watching that. As I said, I have more trouble believing that there are some people, tens of millions of people in this country that buy all of it. If you remember the statement, what projection is, is to take your ills and the things that you have deficit and project them on everybody else. And that's certainly what I see in the RNC completely in the last two nights is taking everything they're guilty of and trying to basically blame it on the future Biden administration. So let me go ahead to that. Back in 2016, he made himself a cult. He lied about the other side and it worked for a lot of people. And the big question I'd be very interested in everybody's thought about this, is that working? Because if it's working, we're in deep kimchi.  The innuendo is unbelievable. I think one of my biggest difficulties in watching any of it and people talk about it is what is listed as one of the reasons we don't want Biden because he's so social, going to be socialism. It's also because he's going to unfund the police. And that was something that I heard talked about this morning in Florida and in Texas. They're very concerned. Well, Stephanie, let me ask you this. I mean, Joe Biden now has, he has a microphone. Why isn't Joe Biden coming out and addressing these damaging points? I think that are being made at the RNC. I think they're, they're hitting their mark in some, some circles. And why isn't Joe Biden coming out and saying, I'm going to set the record straight right here, right now. Why isn't that happening? Why aren't the Democrats, they should have put the kibosh on this in the beginning, because some group in Seattle or wherever said defund the police. That's not what they meant was to actually take the money away from the police. As you all know, it was a restructuring and a redeployment of the money to assist the police to do the best job, have more choices than run after them, grab them and shoot them. I get that, but Joe Biden is the figurehead of the Democratic party right now. Why isn't he taking to the podium and addressing these specific criticisms properly? Because they're not, because we've got this other problem, which is huge. And it's the level of this activity. The level is not what we want. This role, the president, these challenges, our status, our issues, these are not at the tic-tac playground, fifth grade level. Oh, no, you didn't say that. No, I should get about it. I learned something a long time ago. You never leave a room when someone has laid a lie against you and hope that people didn't take it seriously or will forget about it. You never leave a room. Now, that's contrary to maybe previous generations on how you handle criticism and how you don't lower yourself to that level. We're in a street fight right now, and Joe Biden needs to take everything that's laid against him and take it seriously and address it on the spot. And I think that's going to be a big mistake for the Democratic party if they don't start doing it. Well, are there advisors that would give, who's advising him? What about a little analysis here? What about? Joe Biden doesn't need an advisor. He should be smart enough to know this, and he should take it upon himself to get to that podium and do what he needs to do. Well, it could be true, but on the other hand, this is a big deal. It is a big deal. And it's a lot to be thinking about. So if he needs a tweak, he needs a tweak, but they should have done it. My blame is on the Democrats. When that first happened, that should have been clarified. I think we agree on that. Let me just point out something that there is actually some statements of truth that have been thrown out here at the RNC. And I like to talk about one of them because it's a big one. I don't know if anyone listened to Lawrence Kudlow when he had the podium, but when he said that the administration plans to cut social security payroll tax, that caught my attention. And if you're a recipient of social security or social security disability, that might catch your attention as well. Did you happen to catch that, Stephanie? I did. It's another part of this whole lie thing. It doesn't matter what they're saying. They can say anything they want that they think at the moment will make a dent for them or get them another point. And then it doesn't stick. When Trump did his proclamation two weeks ago, the one that seemed to drift away into nothing, one of the elements of the proclamation is that he was going to defer payroll tax. In fact, we're having a show about that later today. If you defer payroll tax, that means you're not making contributions to social security and Medicare. And that will cripple social security and Medicare. Well, one of the things he said, Jay, was that he's already done it. Well, one of the things that he said he was going to have it funded out of the general fund. Now, we know how the general fund gets sliced and diced a thousand different ways by everyone in the Senate and the House. It's basically saying social security, as we know it, will not exist. That's just the bottom line. It just didn't depend on it to follow up. Anything that's left, that's why we have the Congress. That's why we have the two Houses. That's why we write all these 10,000 pages because you have to have the follow-up. Yes, okay, we'll pay it from the general fund. Well, even if that actually would be accepted, then the whole thing has to be how, when, and what's that going to hit up? Because we're talking six, seven percent from each of us worker bees for that FICA. You may not notice it. In fact, it's not that big a deal. Everybody likes a break from it when it comes, but it's not that big of a deal. They may not notice it. Well, without it, social security disability goes away in six months. It is a big deal. Well, I know if it went away, but I'm talking coming out of the payroll, coming out of your check. Yeah, it's a nice relief, but it's six, seven percent, times 300 million. Anyway, that is a big deal. Thank you so much. Winston, let me come to you and what struck out in your mind over the last two nights about the RNC and if any particular speaker came to your mind or just the setting itself or what pivotal moment has struck a chord within you? Well, the whole thing is a little bit more than a little bit off. I think Kimberly's bill foil speech was certainly a Kool-Aid moment where she was screaming to people. I don't think she understands, though, that Donald Trump proposed selling Puerto Rico, which is where her father is from. Would he retain his citizenship if Puerto Rico got sold? I'm not sure she figured that one out yet, but she is the boyfriend, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. and the ex-girlfriend of the governor of California. So that's an interesting mix right there. It is interesting. What happened to Newsom? We're dating her too. Yeah, so that one was an interesting moment. Another moment where they said nobody cares about the Hatch Act outside of the Beltway. Actually, there's laws that exist for the whole nation that exist outside the Beltway that we don't have. Our civil servants working on political campaigns. What Melania said was, total honesty is what we citizens deserve from our president. Okay, that's great. She didn't say that he gives us honesty. She says, whether you like it or not, you always know what he's thinking. That may be. She actually had probably the most human speech of many, but it's all meaningless. It's like Jay said, this is preaching to the choir. Who's tuning into this? Can you watch it with a straight face even for humor? I mean, when you look at it, you're thinking, wow, but... Let me address that. What's happening to that 12% between 40% and 51% that have not made up their minds or they just don't know what to think about Biden or Trump? What about those people? What are they thinking as they watch this? That's the million dollar question. And Stephanie's right. What are the Democrats doing? If Joe Biden doesn't want to do it, he needs to send out his attack dogs. He's got Kamala Harris, and he's got a whole bunch of really good, smart people that can act in proxy form if he doesn't want to do it. That's fine. We are playing for the soul of the nation. But I think, Jay, when you say they don't listen to anything, there's no argument to get there. They say the same thing about the other side. They think that we are delusional. And so how do you bridge this? I don't have any good answer for that. But I mean, when you listen to Donald Trump speak, he says, you know, he's saying that God is talking to him about the God is testing him for the coronavirus after he's blamed a lot of different agencies. I would go with what his... He declared himself the only barrier between total anarchy, madness, and chaos. Well, coming from a king of that, he's the barrier to it. I think he's the gateway to it. But I would go with what the president's sister had to say. Now, I noticed she's probably not going to be on the RNC's lineup. She said, all he wants to do is appeal to his base in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary Trump. He has no principles, none, none.  Mary, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. His goddamn, excuse my French, tweet and lying. Oh my God. She said, I'm talking to you freely. But, you know, the change of stories, the lack of perspiration, the lying, holy, that's what the president's sister has. And she's known him all of his life and rather intimately. And if you don't believe her as a sister or a disgruntled person, she's also a federal judge or was a federal judge.  I think the brother had some unchoicing to say about him, too, you know, not that he's passed away, but before they were. I think these are good points you're making, Winston, is that the fact that, you know, again, the title of the show is The Night of Lies. And everything serves his purpose and through everything goes through the filter of being reelected as president of the United States. I guess if you have someone like the sister, though, that's meaningful for people. If one of our siblings came on and said this about us, we would hopefully recoil and rightly so, if that's how our character would be described. So that may be the way to reach the 12 percent. It may bleed through in whatever the 12 percent reads, whether it's People Magazine or I don't know what they read because people are so into their camps already. I don't know. Let me change the subject and ask you this. Did you have any response or reaction to the citizenship, the naturalization ceremony that took place in the White House? And I did. I thought those poor souls are being used as props. I also didn't like the fact that there are two Marines being part of that ceremony. And that's definitely not allowed in the military. So what was your reaction to that? And also, did you have any reaction to the power of pardon as if Donald Trump was the great Nero deciding the fate of our next convict and granting him pardon? I thought that was a little bit of the Roman Coliseum days. Yeah, it's just theatrics. I think we need to not pay any attention to that and not get distracted by where it's happening or someone shouting too loud or giving someone a pardon. Look who's coming the gun-toting couple from St. Louis. They're speakers of the convention. What are they going to be talking about? I mean, it's interesting to watch other people like Nikki Haley. There's an interesting article in Politico. I think it was about the future for the GOP. Is it going to be John Trump Jr., whose eyes were so glazed over? I don't know what was going on there. Or Nikki Haley, who really had uncharitable things to say about Donald Trump four years ago. And now she's in line just like Lindsey Graham and so many other people where they were saying, this man is the wrong choice for America and the wrong choice for our party, period. And now they're towing a different line. So we'll see what happens out of this, but we have to look ahead. We'll see. Candid disclosure here. Candid disclosure to everyone here. I had to watch the first night and the second night to prepare for the show. I don't have to watch Thursday night or Friday night as much or nearly as much. So read the summary online. You know, watching it can, you know, it's important to stay informed, but too much is going to be toxic. And you know, the thing is, Tim, as we look at this and we say getting news from such different sources, how are we going to come together, post-election, and get any sort of healing or, you know, a sense of shared values again. And that's going to be the trick for Joe Biden. We have a lot of challenges to this election, but I hope that this and other things coming out in the next 70 days will expose a lot of the unsavoriness of this administration. Good point, Winston. Thank you. And all the ugliness in that sense. Yeah, good point, Winston. Thank you for your thoughts. Hey, Jay, this week we had two things on the coronavirus front. Number one is the FDA basically in lockstep with Donald Trump announced to the great miracle of the convalescence plazo therapy. Number one. And number two is, as of this morning, the CDC now is saying, and I think under pressure of the administration, that if you've been exposed to the coronavirus, you don't necessarily need to take a test because if you're asymptomatic, I don't know, it's not important, but if you're showing symptoms, maybe you do get a test. Your thoughts on that. These two, what I think is administration influenced on an independent health organization. Well, it's been weaponized. It's been politicized completely. If you thought the CDC was above the fray, it's not. And that guy who was now running it, he's been compromised. He can't say no to Donald Trump. And both of the issues you mentioned are, you know, from Donald Trump and the White House and with due regard for the fact that there's a Republican convention going on and there's an election in a couple of months. Both of them are crazy. That particular plasma therapy has been in use for a while. It's not brand new. Last Sunday night, it was supposed to be a big revelation, but in fact, it's been used without great success. That's one thing. That's correct. Does that 12% buy into the fact that this is not the miracle cure that Donald Trump's saying is a miracle cure? Almost like it's a hydroxychloroquine? Well, let's assume the 12% read the newspaper. They probably picked it up because it was all over the newspaper. But if they didn't read the newspaper, or if they focused on Fox News, they won't know. And I think one of the big problems in this country is not only education, but self-determined ignorance. Ignorance as a benefit, as a positive attribute.  So I think a lot of people don't know this. And they buy what he has to say because that's all they hear. The other issue that you raised was the issue about testing. Back in Tulsa, Trump said, I'm going to cut back on testing. And I thought he was kidding.  But no, he really meant it. And he's taken a lot of steps to do that. And now to have the CDC say on his behalf that you don't have to test, test is not as important anymore. And cutting back on the number of tests, that's incredible. And the medical community is fighting that tooth and nail. And yet, though, he's the leader. He's making these statements. And people are buying into these statements. And the net effect will be, there'll be less testing. And we won't know what's going on. So you have all these things. It's sort of like the election, but you have all these things layered, which are dedicated to try to make it sound like the coronavirus is not as serious as it really is. You have less testing. You have less cases. You screw up the medicine and confuse everybody about the medicine. Nobody knows which way is up. And if you're part of that 12%, you're confused. Yeah. This is really dangerous for a country which is number one in coronavirus cases. I agree. And I think if there was the big lie, if there was a number one lie of the RNC, it was the great job Donald Trump and the administration has done with coronavirus pandemic here in this country. That's the big lie. I guess, oh, we just got a question come in. And the question is, Jay, I'll take this to you. How do we stay informed but remain sane at the same time? Well, that's a really difficult question. For myself, you know, I watch MSNBC and CNN proudly. I read The Times, The Post, The Guardian. And I learn, I think, which way is up from them. I go on Fox News to see how long I can stay there before the first lie happens. And usually it's less than 15 seconds. I turn off Fox News as soon as I spot the first lie. And you know what? I talk to people. I want to get pushback. I want to get feedback. I want to hear what other people, sometimes I just call people up. As you guys know on the phone, tell me, validate me. Am I crazy or what? And I think, you know, in the time of COVID, we don't do enough of that. We should be testing our thoughts out on our friends. And on Trumpers too, see what they have to say, although you're not going to change their minds. Thank you, Jay. Stephanie, hey, we're out of time. You get the last comment. Your impression about this CDC influence in the FDA? Last comment, please. Keep it short. Yeah, very sad because the criteria and their status has been eroded and they're going to have to work it back. Also, thinking forward, got to get along with all these people. And that's what I'm trying to do an answer to the question. And it hurts to have to do it. But and I don't know if I want to be American anymore. But these are my citizen colleagues. And we're going to have to get it on together one way or the other. You know, one way, some way. Yeah. All right. We're out of time. Everyone, we have less than 70 days left to the election. I ask you to grab on and hold on to your fortitude and your patience. We have two more nights of these RNC best wishes to all of us that can watch it. And that's all for this week. I'm Tim Epicella. Come watch us next week, Wednesday, 11 o'clock for Trump week. Aloha, everyone.


are still tweaking things. They've come to a verbal agreement with the veteran pitcher Gio Gonzalez and that that could help. Well no doubt about it I think the Brian Cashman realizes I mean with their offense and their bullpen the only thing you really add is starting pitching and with Severino going down Sabatheon not quite back yet always add extra pitchers and Gio Gonzalez is just not an add-in I mean this guy has had a good career and he can be dominant at times.


We get to this third density, this human density. Now, this is very highly sought after, obviously, because you become self-aware.  You become aware that you have choice, that you have will. That when you're exposed to the choice of do I serve myself or do I serve other people, which we'll talk about as STS, service to self versus STO, service to others. You have will, you have choice, you have polarity, right? So self-awareness and polarity. This is typically what's also called the third density or 3D matrix. So when people talk about the matrix, they're referencing something, of course, that's also used in mathematics, but they're talking about it in a sense of the government, in terms of the economic machinery, in terms of politicians, in terms of propaganda, in terms of all of the main media companies, in terms of all of the fast food and high fructose corn syrup, and all of the endarkenment and asleepening mechanisms that keep people like algorithmic sheep, rather than liberated, sovereign, gnostic beings that know their true infinite nature.


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