This is Stink Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. What are we going to do now? This is Michelle Tom. Michelle, alone at last. Oh my god. She's a registered dietitian. And I met her in the Ornish program, in Straub. And she was really fantastic, fantastic Michelle. Thank you. Welcome to the show. I want to talk about the stuff you talk about. OK, OK. Thank you for having me today. Yeah, yeah. Great for you. Thank you for coming down. I wanted to have this show a long time ago. Finally, we're together. Yes, we got it. We got the date, OK. So what does it mean to be a registered dietitian? What does that involve? OK, I mean, there's a lot of different avenues you can take when you are a registered dietitian. So there's an inpatient setting where you can see patients that are hospitalized for things like diabetes, heart disease. You even see patients in the burn units and in the intensive care unit. So we work with patients inpatient, with tube feeds, nutrition through their veins if they need it, but also education in the hospitalized setting on their specific conditions, whether it be chronic kidney disease or heart disease. So that's the inpatient setting. And then you also have the outpatient setting where I think you can have a pretty big impact on helping patients learn more about nutrition and incorporating that into more of a lifestyle change. OK, I get two things from that. One is that a dietitian is a nutritionist. Yes. Because that meme shows. So they are actually a little bit different in terms of education levels. So we go through that four-year undergraduate program, but we also have a year. The UH, they have this at UH? They do have it at UH. Yeah. I went to Ohio State to get mine. It's just east of UH. Just east, a little bit. But then after that, we do a year-long different rotations as a dietetic internship to get experience. And then after that, sit for the R&D exam to be certified. Oh, and you've done that. I have done that. Yeah. You're very knowledgeable. I'm serious when I say that. She bolted me over every time we talked. Thank you. So anyway, the thing is, I want to go back to the Ohio State for a minute. OK. Because you go to class one morning, you're in this kind of program. Biochemistry, right? It's biochemistry? It is biochemistry, yeah. It's a lot about medical nutrition therapy, how to help people with specific conditions. So a lot of that. Yeah. And that's the second point I get out of what you said just now is that it's kind of a matrix that you have to change your strategy depending on what the problem is. Exactly. And that's a lot of possibilities. That's a matrix as big as all outdoors, isn't it? Yeah. So with that education component, we really learn the nitty-gritty on how to tailor nutrition programs for a patient with specific conditions. But you also have a majority of patients that have multiple comorbidities. So that's something that we have to take into account as well as dietitians. Are you a nurse, too? I'm not a nurse yet, but I want to be a nurse practitioner eventually. What's the relationship between a dietitian, nutritionist, what have you, and a nurse? Well, nurse practitioners specifically, they really emphasize the importance of preventative care, lifestyle changes. And for me, I want to be a family nurse practitioner in the primary care setting. So I have a broader impact of how I can help patients. Is that like a family doctor? It's so special, too? Yeah, kind of. So you become, and I want to talk about this, you become a kind of primary. As a nurse in that area, and you will track on what a doctor might do and become sort of primary nurse as opposed to a primary doctor. It's called an advanced practice nurse.  There's a lot of schools across the nation. There is a nurse practitioner school here, but there's a lot of good ones as well on the mainland, too. So you go back to school, how long do you have to study this? Good question. So it kind of varies for, depending on the school, it's looking for me going to be about four years. So the first year to two years is going to be where I learned how to be a nurse. And then I have to sit for the NCLEX exam. That's an acronym, isn't it? Yeah, OK. So that exam is just to be certified as a nurse. Yes, it's the acronym. Oh my god. It's a long one. I even have to go back and look that one up. But after that, once I'm certified, then it's the core work to become a doctorate, to get your doctorate in nurse practitioner. That's what you're shooting for. You're shooting for that. You are shooting for that. Yes, that's what I'm shooting for. Doctorate. Yes. You're completely up to that. I'm telling you now. I know, I know. Anybody else out there tells you no, no, no, no. It's going to be a rough road, I know. This is your game, I'm telling you. It's going to be a rough and long road, but I know it's going to be worth it in the end because I'll be able to help people on a broader range. Where do you stay here? I have applied to UH, but I also plan to apply to some schools on the West Coast as well. Ohio State? I think I'm going to stay away from the cold weather. That's severe cold weather. It's a practical consideration. Yes, it is, yeah. But I think West Coast would be a good choice for me as well. And when you get the PhD, God, I hope you're coming to see us, talk to us again. Of course, yeah. When you get the PhD, what kind of money can you make? Give me your broad range. I mean, it's six figures, so. Right out the box, yeah? It's about, national average is six figures. No, that's fabulous, so yeah. But you're not doing it for the money, I know that. No.  That's actually one of the reasons why I want to be a nurse practitioner is, so last year, I went on a medical mission to denying Vietnam. And I worked at different hospitals to learn more and teach other people about America's practice in medical nutrition therapy. So whether it be for people with ulcers or different conditions, we kind of would go back and forth to see the similarities and differences in our nutrition care. And so that's why I want to be a nurse practitioner is because I can have a bigger impact on patients and help people abroad. So when I'm not working in the US, I can take vacation from here and then go abroad to help people. Wow, how nice of you. Yeah, that's the goal, so. You're an altruist in the finest way. In the finest way. Well, we were talking about the kinds of places you can go. I mean, the world is your oyster, and there are a lot of organizations, and it doesn't stop with medicine on some frontier. We have a low-high medical mission right here, because it's Nepal and the Philippines and other places, too. So you have a great assortment of possibilities there to make the trip. What strikes me, though, is that they don't necessarily focus on nutrition as a specialty they take into the woods. Right, right. You're going to cut some new territory with that. I hope so. Yeah, I mean, I think having a nutrition background paired with a nurse practitioner degree is a really good combination, so. Yeah, because you can do other things as well. Yes. But what I get from what you were saying a minute ago is that you can actually affect health. Maybe this is an overstatement. Actually affect health by diet. Oh, yes. You can cure people of diseases, maladies, conditions by diet. Is that the way it works? In certain cases, there has been research done for reversal of certain diseases. Wow. If you think about it, a lot of chronic diseases are caused because of the lifestyles that we live. So our society today is based on convenience. We're so quick-paced that we want to grab anything that's the most convenient. That's why there are so many fast food chains. But with those fast food chains, high-fat diets, high-sugar diets, that's when you start to see a lot of problems. So it's really important that you recognize, and I'm going to talk some more about this in the next part of our show. It's really important you recognize there's a connection between what you eat, and I was saying, it's not what you eat is what you are.  You can actually affect your health and therefore your life expectancy and everything by following a few simple rules, which we are going to examine right after this break. We're going to take a break now, OK? Let's do it. We'll come back for the break. When we get to the nitty-gritty, then you're going to help the people who are listening to the show live longer, be healthier right here at Think Tech. Wow! Think Tech Talks. All right. That's Michelle Tom. Fabulous. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha. I'm Kay Lee Ikeena. And I volunteer at Think Tech Hawaii as a host of the program, Hawaii Together. Why? Because Think Tech Hawaii is doing a very important job in making sure that there is a conversation ongoing between people of all backgrounds and all views. That's what Citadel Discourse is all about. And Think Tech is an important part of finding solutions for a better Hawaii. For the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. It's called Give Thanks to Think Tech. And it will run only during the month of November. And you can help. Please donate what you can so that Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. Please send your tax-deductible contribution by going to this website on the screen, www.thanksforthinktech.causevox.com. On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30-plus weekly shows, thank you, mahalo, for your generosity. In case you were wondering, that is Michelle Tom, dietitian and altruist. She is organizing her life to help people, which is so sweet and kind and nice of you. Not everybody does that, you know. I can take us some names to name in Washington, for example. So let's talk about the substance of this. And your PhD role as an advanced practical nurse, you're going to be covering much more. But the core for me, anyway, and maybe for you too, is the dietitian. Because that's always present. It's always a factor, no matter what. Whether you're well or sick, it's always a factor. So I want to talk about some of the basic rules. We'll start with my notion of the food store, the food market as a minefield.  Oh, I know. I know it, Jay. You can taste the salt and the fat. You can taste it so good and so bad for you. Yeah, not ideal. You can walk around the store, and it's like little voices are calling you, like sirens, the odyssey at the mast. Sirens directing you to a bad place. So you've got to resist that. So what do you have to resist most as you walk through this minefield store? Okay. I would say one of the hugest things is fat, right? So average American consumes around 40% calories from fat. And so you actually only, you need a low-fat diet. That's ideal. Everyone. It's ideal for health. So people that don't necessarily have heart conditions or things like that, I think they have more wiggle room, but as far as overall health, fat, a large amount of fat is not actually that necessary. Research has shown your body actually only needs about 5% total calories from fat in order to prevent fatty acid deficiency. So when I worked for the Ornish program, we specifically recommended a diet that was 10% total calories from fat. So the reason why heart disease is the leading cause of death is because we eat so much fat. Saturated fat and cholesterol directly linked with heart disease, and a huge source of that is going to be animal-based products, right? When we're looking- Wait, this is an important point. Okay, yes. Animal-based products have an inordinate amount of fat in them as a general rule. And we've talked about cholesterol, too. Right, so total fat, cholesterol, and saturated fat. Therefore, if I stop eating animal-based products, we'll have to define what that is, then I'm gonna be better off. Yeah. I mean, if somebody came to you and said, Michelle, and I've heard of you around the world about your expertise in this area, what should I do? You would never tell them, you need to eat more fat. I- You would never tell them that. No, I don't think I would tell them that. No. You would never tell them that. You need to eat more red meat. No, no. I definitely- Protein and red meat. There is protein, but there's also protein in tofu or beans and things like that. Without the fat. Right, without that significant amount of fat and cholesterol and saturated fat, so. Okay, so how can I assure myself and my future of avoiding fat?  That's good. Anything fried is fat, right? Yeah, I would say away from fiber. And meats have fat. That's fish have fat? Fish has fat, yeah. Chicken? Chicken has fat, shrimp has fat, yeah. This is the eye theory here. It is the eye theory, but people do tell me, well, clams don't have eyes, and I say they still have fat, so. So not everything. I actually don't say eyes because they always get me with that one. You gotta be careful of those clams anyway. I know, I know. Wow. Clams. Beyond fat in our contaminated environment. Yes. Okay, so then how else, where else do I find the fat? I find the fat in cheese. Cheese, yep. That's a new product. Animal product, animal product, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Butter? Butter, butter, yeah. What else? Cream cheese. Cream cheese. Any kind of dairy? Milk, yeah, dairy too. Okay, and I mean, some of this is permissible, but you really have to put a lid on it, right? Yeah. Well, there's none of it permissible. I mean. Can you live as a human being on this planet without any fat at all?  So people think that vegetarians don't get enough fat, but that's a huge misconception. You're getting it naturally occurring from the whole grains, the beans, the soy products, all of those things.  Okay, what about cholesterol? You mentioned that what is cholesterol and where do I find it? Just in case I wanna have a pure cholesterol diet, where do I find it? Oh, perfect, okay. So cholesterol is what builds up in your arteries, right? So that is only gonna be found in animal products. So that's one of the biggest reasons why we recommend that you avoid animal products as much as possible is because of that cholesterol component. So if I have no animal products, and that includes the meat, plus the cheese and all that stuff, then I won't have any cholesterol coming with my body, is that right? You won't have it coming into your body, but your body naturally makes all the cholesterol that it needs. So anything that you eat that has cholesterol in it is gonna be in excess of what you actually need. In excess of what your body is creating for you. So it goes beyond your normal systems and gives you too much. And one gram of cholesterol from any outside source is more than what you need in your body. That's really kind of a shake-up, isn't it? Cholesterol is not good for you, is it? I mean, there's the terms good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, right? But your body makes all the cholesterol good that you need. So if I came to you and I said, Michelle, Tom, I've heard far and wide about your skill, this area, would you ever recommend to that person to get on a cholesterol diet? No, never. More cholesterol. I would never say that today. Never. Okay, all right, what about salt? We've heard so much about salt and I wanna tell you, I'm gonna admit disclosure, I love salt, I'm sorry. I know a lot of people do. It gives it that kind of umami flavor to it, to the food that you eat. I almost feel it's healthy, I almost feel that. Oh, I don't know why you would feel that way, though. You see it actually. So, okay, salt is a good topic. So American Heart Association guidelines, 2,300 milligrams of salt per day. How much is that? So in a teaspoon of regular salt, table salt, you've already met that specific amount, right? If you're going to the grocery store and looking at food labels, an item can be termed low sodium if it's 140 milligrams of sodium per serving. So special kind of salt is what it is? No, no, no. It's not salt, it's sodium. I mean, salt, salt, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's low sodium salt, or does that mean just low salt? Low, okay, so if it says low sodium on a package, that means it's low salt. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So that means, I mean, I know the answer to this myself, but that means that there are products out there which have salt in them and you can't control them. So you can always look on that food label to see how much salt is actually in it, but that's why it's always good to cook your food as much as you can, because then you know exactly what's going into it, right? And you can control the amount of salt or herb spices. Or did I not, yeah. Right, yeah. Should I have zero salt, zero? Would you tell me, hey, find out, cut it out completely? It doesn't help you, it only hurts you, so don't do it. I mean, we encourage patients not to add salt to their food, because as you know, a teaspoon if that already contains your daily recommended amount, sprinkling it on on every meal that you have can easily add up, right? So we don't recommend that you add salt to your food. You're getting it from the packaged food items that you buy already. Yeah, so you don't need to sprinkle it on anything. Not really, no. But if you start with ingredients that have no salt in them and then you put a little on, that's okay. If you don't have that, like. See, the thing about Michelle is that she's kind of flexible too. It's not hard, hard white line rules. There's a humanity involved in this. I mean, I try to keep it real, Jay, I do. I would say it depends on your situation, right? So if you do have heart disease or you have congestive heart failure, something like that, I would say try to be as strict as you can and not add salt to your foods and choose low sodium options. But there is wiggle room for people that don't have many chronic diseases, right? So it just kind of depends on your health. On your health in general, yeah. But your health would be better if you didn't. I mean, even if you're healthy, it'd be better in the long term. I suppose you could take a kid like four years old, right? And teach him these things as a habit kind of thing. And he'd have a better life because then he'd be used to it from early on. Yeah, I mean, teach them just general healthy eating, having some of their favorite indulgences occasionally, but overall trying to raise them as healthy as possible so they have those tools. So I know, for example, that contemporary civilization is not taught in the schools of Hawaii. Probably not taught in the mainland either. And I know that don't do a lot with history. And music is not so interesting anymore and don't have time for it, right? And so forth. And you sort of get a skinny down kind of curriculum as against the things we might have studied a few years ago, which we felt were making us renaissance people and all. Do they teach this kind of stuff in the schools? Like nutrition and, so since I haven't gone through the actual programs yet, I can only go off of what I've heard from people that are already in it. I know a lot of med schools don't incorporate a significant amount of nutrition into their program. They do not. For, I know for the prerequisites that I'm taking, for a nurse practitioner school, I am required to take one nursing, or one nutrition course. So that's good. But as far as a lengthy amount of nutrition classes, I don't think that that's incorporated into a lot of programs out there. Yeah. Too bad. It is too bad. Because we want to be healthy and avoid issues around health insurance and what stuff. Right, yeah. We should learn this stuff early on and build it into our whole system, yeah. Exactly. So I want to talk about meat for a minute. That was when we were together in the Onish program, I was so impressed. I mean, that one lecture, you sort of changed my whole view of the whole universe of food. Okay. I know what you're talking about, Jay. Yeah, you remember that. I do, I do. Okay, so basically animal products have this amino acid in it called carnitine. Okay, so what? Can you spell it? C-A-R-N-I-T-I-N-E. Thank you, thank you. You're welcome. Sorry I am. Okay, so what happens is when you eat this, right, you're digesting the carnitine and your gut bacteria actually turn and metabolize that carnitine into this end product called T-M-A-O. And I know you're gonna ask me what that is. No, no, no, I'm not. Well, I can tell you, I can tell you. So this one is, it's thymethylamine N-oxide. Okay. And so we'll- I hope you're writing this down because it's gonna be in the final exam. Yes, I know. It's important that you know this and the final exam is very important. It's personal. Okay, sorry, Michelle. So what research has shown is that people with higher levels of T-M-A-O in their system actually have a two and a half times increased risk for having some kind of heart related event. Interesting, so you got real numbers that are real studies here which are undeniable. Right, right. So very clear. But you know, do we know all the side effects of this T-M? T-M-A-O. Yeah. Is it just heart disease? Is it more than circulatory? What about the biochemistry in general? If this is not native to us, is this creating problems in the circulatory system maybe it's somewhere else in our, you know, in our cellular structure that has another secondary effect? So I know what I've read is that this specific compound T-M-A-O increases the likelihood that the cholesterol is gonna stick to your arteries. So given that, that's why you have an increased risk for having a cardiac event. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's pretty scary actually. It is scary. And ever since you told me that, I mean, not that I was doing a lot, I was not doing a lot of meat.  Good. You know, I do slip little tuna fish once in a while but that's all. I should add, you fully understand what's going on. In the Ornish program, and Michelle was, you know, an essential part of that, they do vegan. Okay. Not vegan, not vegan though. Remember, because you have the non-fat dairy and then the egg whites. Okay. So, borderline. Borderline. Borderline vegan, yeah. So can you talk about vegan for a minute? What is it exactly? What are the exceptions? What are the surprises about being a vegan or not? Okay. And why in general, you think that's a good idea. So the difference between vegetarian and vegan is, vegan is exclusively plant-based products. So there is no, there's no eggs, there's no milk, there's none of that. Everything is plant-based. Whereas a vegetarian diet, they'll sometimes incorporate eggs and dairy products as well. So that's where that difference is. So with even milks and cheeses, even eggs. So eggs in the egg yolk, there's over 200 milligrams of cholesterol just in one yolk. Okay, so that's why... It's so bad it's almost a yolk. Yes, okay, yeah. You can use that. I will, I will, I will use that. But that's one of the reasons why sometimes people will avoid egg yolks and they'll still have the egg whites for the protein. But because of that high cholesterol component in the egg yolks, that's why people will avoid it. Yeah. That's okay. So there you go with all vegetables, a lot of salads, a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruits. What about fruits? Fruits have what do you call them? Fructose, they're loaded with fructose. We hadn't talked about sugar yet, not in any detail. So what about fructose as compared to sucrose as compared to all the coffee houses that have a big table full of sugar there, right? Okay, that is a good question. So fruits are, they naturally have naturally occurring sugars inside fruits, right? Fruits are really good because they have antioxidants, a lot of different vitamins, right? So that's why we recommend people do eat fruits. But we don't want people to go overboard in eating fruits because it still has sugar, no matter whether it's naturally occurring or added in. So that's why we limit that, right?  I want to ask you ultimately about the effect of the worst kind of sugar, sucrose. Sucrose, yeah. Pure sugar, cane sugar, for example, what does that do to you? Does that create a TM, TMA, TO kind of thing? It doesn't create a TMAO thing, but just simple sugars in general, what it'll do is, especially for diabetics, it'll raise their blood sugar really quickly and then you'll see drops. So that's why, for instance, eating a whole fruit instead of fruit juices is because you're getting all of that additional fiber in it so you get a more balanced blood sugar level. It's not going up and down, up and down. I suppose you know when you're in a bucket list kind of approach that Dr. Cumsy is, you're done. You have three days to live. Oh no. Instead of, okay, bring me all the potato chips you can find, pile them high. I want potato chips, I want salt. I want cholesterol. I want animal products. I want filet mignon everywhere. And I want sucrose, piles of it. If you had three days to go, it wouldn't make a difference. You know, if the three days is set three days and that makes you happy and that's what you want, then I would say you get it, you get it. I have one last question. With all of this careful eating, you still have to moderate your portions, don't you? Oh yeah. Because you can follow every rule perfectly and still blow up from perfectly healthy foods.  There is issues if you eat too much, way too much fruits or drink way too much juices and things like that. But if you're eating more whole foods instead of packaged foods, it's very hard to blow up like that, right? Okay, that's comforting, comforting. That's Michelle, Tom.  And it's wonderful to talk to her, sort of get real again because we often, you know, our food habits are based on habit and we don't think, we don't use our critical thinking skills in order to select those foods in the landmine food stores. And I mean, it's really important to make the connection and that's what Ornish was about between the one and the other and then try to build that into your daily life. And so you are really altruistic, helping people like that. Thanks, Jay. Yeah, do you follow these rules yourself? I try to do as much as possible. I believe that. Michelle, Tom, dietitian extraordinaire and altruistic at the same time. Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you, Jay. Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.


I volunteered to come here check in not knowing what to expect and then one push later, two push later, then six push later I would have did 10 straight if they'd let me. It's a win-win. On the first hand you step out of your conference zone and it does amazing things to your career. I checked in here second class and no being on push ended up getting my MTS, STT, all the qualifications you can get here then getting promoted to first class and it kind of hits you that my replacement is literally sitting in P-days right now. To them you are it as far as everything goes. It's a definite win-win like there's no other duty station like this. I'm a gardener. My goal is to water all the seeds that are here. We train 44,000 recruits a year. That's a lot of seeds and when they start breaking ground you'll start to notice if the nurturing around them actually helped and you can say man you know what I helped to plant that. I was watering that tree. I wanted to do something different. I want to do something outside the box. I wanted to have that. I wanted to see a visible reward. When you're in the fleet you do your maintenance, you do your paperwork, you do what you have to do and you help your sailors but they also could help themselves. They know what they have to do. They've been to bootcamp but here no one knows what to do so you're here giving someone that sense of purpose. You're here to see an actual legit end result. You see something from zero all the way through. We actually get to see them the very first week they're here and all their mannerisms and over a period of time we get to see them change really and learn to have bearing, learn the ways of the Navy and basically become motivated sailors at the very end and I've added a bonus of working here at the midway swimmer drill hall and I could see them graduate also. So I see them from the very first day they're here really until the last day they're here. They say the recruit training command were the top 10% that are up here in this area and the leadership here I hands down totally believe it. There's so many years of experience here. We have the leadership capabilities here to answer any question that we have when it comes to promotion time or even how to write an evaluation here it's just amazing how much knowledge that's here and is available for us. The most rewarding part of being assigned to recruit training command specifically as an RDC is that I get essentially leadership training every single day so we get so much exposure to different kinds of problems. We get to have conversations about different solutions to those problems in an environment that is constantly changing. So it's definitely taken me outside of my comfort zone. I had 14 years experience as a naval air crewman. I was very comfortable with that. I knew exactly what I was doing. I came here feeling that same way and quickly realized that I had a lot of learning to do. If you've been thinking about it I suggest you just do it. Again that fleet experience that you got just all experiences welcome here. It's absolutely worth the challenge and at the end of the day three years is up you won't be ready to leave at all.


On to the girls side Winnie Mac visiting Sacred Heart first half-action off the steel Tyra Wilson passes ahead to Lauren Storm who gets the end one off the lay-up in transition still in the first in transition Storm finds Tanya bringing Tanya bring spotting up from deep four to three but this one was just too much Sacred Heart Anya Edwards finds sister Ivy who drives through the bucket and the foul and Sacred Heart rolls over Winnie Mac 73 to 37 if you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television


The title of my talk tonight is a foreign policy for a republic, and that's a shorthand way of addressing the issue of what kind of foreign policy is appropriate for a constitutional republic based on the principles of limited government and individual rights. And I would argue that it is just as important for the government of such a republic to conduct itself in an appropriate manner internationally as it is for it to conduct itself appropriately in terms of domestic policy. That, unfortunately, I think is a point that eludes many people, even those who say that they are committed to the values of limited government. It even seems to elude some who term themselves libertarians. Give you one example, an encounter I had a few months ago with a staff member on Capitol Hill who described himself as a libertarian conservative, but he proceeded to defend at least in a limited fashion foreign aid. I found that rather curious, and I asked him why. Why would you justify taking American tax dollars and sending them overseas? And he said, well, foreign aid really acts as a cushion for a lot of third world societies. That it takes away some of the pain of the poverty. It gives them an opportunity perhaps to develop to progress economically. And if we don't do that, the degree of disorder in the world is going to increase the likelihood of aggression and perhaps even aggression directed at the United States. And I then responded, would you then support a government directed anti-poverty program here in the United States directed at the inner cities to pacify the populations there, to ease the pain of their suffering, which is often very real. Because if we don't do so, the crime rate is going to go up. And that crime could be directed at us. No one who would call himself a libertarian or even a hyphenated libertarian conservative would advocate such a program. And yet internationally, that kind of policy was deemed quite respectable. We must focus not only on the international consequences of U.S. foreign policy. And we have now had nearly a century of a highly interventionist foreign policy. I think only the two decades between the two world wars were a partial exception to that. But we've seen a rising tide of an activist interventionist U.S. foreign policy that has, I would argue, created at least as many problems in the international system as it has solved. But it's not just the international consequences that are disturbing. We also need to look at the domestic consequences. In that respect, Robert Higgs, with his book Crisis and Leviathan published now a decade ago, really provided some path-breaking analysis. Because the conventional wisdom, I think, almost across the political spectrum was that the growth of government power in the United States was due largely to domestic matters, particularly the explosion of power during the New Deal period to an important extent as well with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Higgs questioned that. He acknowledged that the New Deal was important in terms of the growth of governmental power. But he also said there were two other very important episodes, in some ways perhaps even more important. And that was the mobilization for World War I and the even more comprehensive mobilization for the Second World War. What his analysis showed is that government power increased almost exponentially with the First World War. And although that power then receded once the war ended, there was nevertheless an important residue of power that remained. In other words, the size and scope of government did not retreat to what it had been prior to World War I. The same phenomenon occurs again in World War II to an even more severe extent. This is a point that is now acknowledged, I think, far more than it used to be. David Brinkley in his account of Washington in World War II makes the rather startling admission for a liberal that the great consolidation of federal power occurred not during the New Deal, but during World War II. And he was quite correct. We come up with rather startling examples of how much of a residue of the successive power remained long after the the wars that that gave rise to them were over. I wonder how many people, for example, realize that when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, he did so under the authority allegedly granted by the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. That's how it came back to haunt Americans many decades later. We have the income tax withholding provision, which does so much to disguise the total cost of government and the total burden on American taxpayers, this almost painless extraction of wealth from taxpayers. That was a temporary measure adopted during the Second World War. We see the growth of the imperial presidency. It would have astonished constitutional scholars as little as a half century ago to hear the assertion that the military forces of the United States are the personal property of the president to send wherever he wishes, whenever he wishes, for whatever purpose he alone deems appropriate. Again, today that is regarded almost as the conventional wisdom. That is very much a product of our interventionist foreign policy. In my research for the captive press book, I was surprised at the number of ways in which important First Amendment rights were constricted in the name of national security, and I went in with the suspicion that I was going to find a great deal of evidence, but frankly I was astonished at how much I found that a degree of public debate on important defense and foreign policy issues that would have been regarded as routine in America a few decades ago would now be highly controversial and raise questions about whether it would jeopardize national security. That is what we have from the two world wars and the garrison state that grew up to wage the Cold War. That is the heritage of an interventionist foreign policy. There are a lot of people on the political right in particular who contend, well, yes, this may be true. This is really an aberration because of the two world wars and the long Cold War, but now that the Cold War has come to an end, America will gradually drift back toward normality. Well, that's certainly possible. One can hope so, but I must say the early evidence at least is not all that encouraging. If one examines the principal schools of thought in foreign policy, the ones that dominate the debate to this point during the initial years of the post Cold War era, that evidence is not very encouraging at all. Two of those schools of thought are absolutely dreadful in terms of furthering the values of a constitutional republic and one is at least highly imperfect. Let's take a look at the first contender and that is the policy essentially that we're pursuing now, which I have termed the Cold War plus foreign policy. Now, if you ever get involved in debates within the foreign policy community and this is something I really wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, but if you have to do so, what you encounter immediately is a tremendous gap between rhetoric and substance. Most practitioners in the foreign policy community will say that, oh yes, the Cold War coming to an end really transformed international affairs. Everything is different. But when you examine the substance of the policy they advocate, you come up with a very different conclusion. A few weeks ago I had an encounter with a foreign policy expert at a Washington based think tank that shall remain nameless, although it purports to emphasize America's heritage. And this institute insists that it is developing a foreign policy quite different from Cold War policy and really attuned to the world today. I said, all right, fine. Let's get down to specifics. Since I have an interest in America's alliances, what alliances can we jettison? Can we get rid of NATO, for example? After all, this was an alliance created in the late 1940s so that the U.S. could help guard a devastated and demoralized Western Europe from an aggressively expansionist totalitarian power of the Soviet Union. Today the Soviet Union has disintegrated. The member states of the European Union collectively have an economy of about seven and a half trillion dollars a year. The size of the Russian economy is at best about six hundred billion. The European Union has twice the population of the Russian Federation, so I assume the Western Europeans can take care of their own security, right? Oh no, we can't get rid of NATO. Absolutely not. This is the keystone of America's security system. Indeed, NATO is and you will hear this refrain in the news media incessantly more important than ever before. So I decided to move to the other side of the world. All right, how about the alliance with Japan? Japan is the world's number two economic power, certainly capable of building military forces needed for its own defense. Can we get rid of the U.S.-Japan alliance? Oh no, absolutely not. In fact, we don't want the Japanese to play a more active political and military role in world affairs. Who knows where that might lead? I mean, someday they might attack Pearl Harbor again. Absolutely not. The U.S.-Japan alliance, the keystone of our policy in East Asia. All right, how about the U.S.-South Korean alliance? This clearly isn't as important. South Korea faces only one feasible enemy, communist North Korea. And South Korea is a population twice that of the North and an economy by most estimates 18 times the size. So it doesn't have to remain an American security protectorate anymore, right? Absolutely, we don't want to make any disruptive changes there. This also is an important part of our presence in East Asia. Then I thought I had him. I said, all right, ANZUS, the alliance with Australia and New Zealand. Now ANZUS was an alliance that had a rather obscure purpose even in its heyday, if it ever had a heyday. And even with a Soviet fleet prowling the Pacific instead of rusting in port as it is doing today, the threat to Australia and New Zealand was rather far-fetched. Today it's extraordinarily difficult to identify a threat to Australia, and the principal threat to New Zealand would seem to be an influx of penguins from Antarctica. We do not seem to have a justifiable security mission here. Believe it or not, no, we can't get rid of that alliance either. So what we see is that the more the world has changed, the more we need to keep our policy the same. And that extends beyond things like alliances. The Clinton administration insists that we have to keep our foreign aid budget. Absolutely critical to our influence in the world. Now the Republicans, of course, are having none of that. They're not going to tolerate a $13 billion a year foreign aid budget. They've proposed radical cuts that would bring it down to about $11.5 billion a year. But I said this is a Cold War plus foreign policy. It's not just that we're going to keep all the commitments that we acquire during the Cold War. Now we have to take on some new obligations. And we see that in a number of places, but I'm just going to mention, too, the increase of our mission in the Persian Gulf, which is escalating dramatically, and I don't mean just the Persian Gulf War. We have acquired an array of bouncing baby protectorates in that region. And the mission of the United States quite literally is that of the of the stabilizer and protector of that whole area. The other area is Central and Eastern Europe. Not only do we have to maintain NATO in its current incarnation, but we need to enlarge it to take in the countries of Central Europe. And if some of the advocates of expansion have their way, extend NATO into Eastern Europe right up to the doorstep of the Russian Federation. The underlying logic with regard to the Cold War plus foreign policy was expressed perfectly by Senator Richard Luger. He said, and I quote, the United States has an unprecedented opportunity to manage the world. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is the social engineering mentality, international division at work. Now, what's wrong with that? I mean, it's a policy that will defend American interests supposedly. Well, there are a number of adverse consequences. The most obvious one is that it imposes an enormous burden on American taxpayers. The United States spends more on the military than all of the other industrial powers in the world combined. That is a rather startling realization. It costs each and every American more than $1,000 a year to support the military. It costs each Japanese, for example, about $360 each German, about $350. That's one measure of the cost of, quote, global leadership. But that's not the most important objection to this Cold War plus policy. The most important one is that it creates excessive risks. It quite literally puts the United States on the front lines of crisis after crisis around the world. During a visit to Tokyo this past July, where I met with a number of officials with the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Defense Agency, I asked them about three hypothetical situations. So what would Japan expect of the United States if, let's say, a war broke out on the Korean Peninsula again? Or a fight broke out over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea? Or something very much in the news today? What would they expect if a war broke out between mainland China and Taiwan? Officials answered without hesitation. They would expect the United States to take whatever military action was necessary to repel aggression and restore the peace to the region. Fine. I don't like that, but all right, that's fairly clear. But what would Japanese military forces be doing? The answer was equally clear. Unless an attack occurred on Japan itself, Japanese military forces would not be involved in any way whatsoever in dealing with such crises. It's a little bit difficult to come away from that setting without the feeling that this country was being used. The main competitor to the Cold War Plus foreign policy though is, if anything, even worse. And that is a policy of Wilsonian internationalism. Now this is an approach that has great appeal to many officials in the Clinton administration. UN Ambassador Madeline Albright is certainly one person who is an ardent Wilsonian. To a certain extent, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and there are others. For Wilsonians, the main objective is to strengthen the United Nations. And they have come up with a variety of proposals to do that, including the creation of a standby UN army to deal with global crises. They want to establish a kind of a trusteeship authority for the UN to deal with so-called failed states like Somalia. They would simply have the United Nations bureaucracy move in, take over the government, and operate the country under an international mandate. Some have suggested, believe it or not, giving the United Nations control over nuclear weapons. Resurfacing of the plan first proposed by financier Bernard Baruch back in the 1940s. And the favorite panacea advocated by Secretary General Butros Galli and many others is to give the UN independent taxing authority to levy very, very small tax. Nothing major at all on things like airline tickets and international financial transfers. As I said, if anything, this is even worse than the Cold War plus foreign policy for a number of reasons. For one thing, it would globalize every conflict. And in particular, it would involve the United States in a bewildering array of conflicts around the world. You would find American troops in more Somalias and Bosnias in the coming years. And if the Cold War plus foreign policy is a form of international social engineering, Wilsonian internationalism is international social engineering run amok. Then we have the third competitor. And this one, I think, has tempted some advocates of limited government, and that is Buchananite nationalism. And I have to admit the approach by Pat Buchanan and some others in this camp is fairly decent if you just look at narrow security issues. He is the only candidate, for instance, who advocates phasing out America's alliances and abolishing foreign aid. No one else has even come close. But Buchananite nationalism comes along with some rather unpleasant ideological baggage. The most obvious one is the commitment to economic nationalism or trade protectionism. It's not just bad economics. A policy of protectionism means automatically a terribly intrusive political state. The government is going to dictate from whom consumers may buy products and at what price. It's a little difficult to square that with the concept of limited government. There's also the hostility to immigration, which I think is particularly offensive for people in this country given the heritage of this country on that issue. And I think that's indicative of a rather nasty undercurrent of xenophobia. So although Buchananite nationalism is not as offensive on balance as the other two schools of thought, it too is not appropriate for the foreign policy of a constitutional republic devoted to liberty. Do we have another alternative? Well, I certainly think we do. But to get to that alternative, we're going to have to really change the dynamics of the foreign policy debate in this country. We have to get beyond the light switch model of American global engagement. The light switch model basically assumes there are only two possible positions, on or off. Either we have Americans dying in snake pits like Somalia and Bosnia, or we have a fortress America in a hermit republic. We want nothing to do with the rest of the world. Well, those are false alternatives. It is important to recognize that there are multiple axes of engagement, different types of engagement, of which the military form is only one. There are also the diplomatic, economic, and cultural axes of engagement. And the last two, I think, are particularly important because they're predominantly non-governmental, which is why I think the would-be architects of American foreign policy are uncomfortable with them. The fundamental reality is that there is no need to have identical positions along each axis of engagement. It is entirely possible to have a very restrained position in terms of military engagement, but to have a very active and creative diplomacy. There's absolutely nothing wrong, for example, in using our good offices to try to bring combatants to the peace table, to end suffering. And we can have full bore, maximum engagement culturally and economically. The major change needs to take place in the military realm. That is where we need to adopt a policy of strategic independence. Strategic independence would mean very simply that the military forces of the United States would be used solely for the defense of the vital security interests of the American people, not to promote democracy or to save failed states or to promote international stability or all the other wonderful goals that policymakers can come up with. In this respect, I think it's very important to make a distinction between what government may rightfully do in the name of the American people and what Americans may do acting in their private individual capacities. The government has a fiduciary responsibility to its citizens. And that means very simply it has no right to risk the lives or treasure of Americans for anything other than the most crucial defense purposes. The lives and fortunes of Americans are not rightfully available for whatever foreign policy whims might suit the political elite. Now, again, individuals may reach a different decision, particularly when there are human rights outrageous taking place in the world. I've had many people come up and say, how can we stand by and watch the carnage that has taken place in the former Yugoslavia? And after I point out that that carnage isn't all that different from the carnage taking place in a lot of other places in the world, except that CNN happens to have its cameras there. I asked them if you feel so strongly about that, why haven't you joined the Bosnian Army? Why haven't you sent money to relief organizations? Why have you not put yourself on the line to deal with this problem? If you feel so strongly about it, please do so and you certainly should have the right to do so. Any legislation to the contrary ought to be rescinded. But you have no right to spend the wealth of your fellow citizens or to put their lives at risk through the actions of the United States government. The foreign policy that is appropriate for a constitutional republic based on liberty was outlined by John Quincy Adams more than 175 years ago. When he said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the defender and vindicator only of her own. That was a good policy then. It is a very good policy indeed an essential policy now. Thank you very much.


The eruption of the Hungatonga-Hungahapai, HTVH, volcano on January 15, 2022 injected large amounts of water vapor, H2O, directly into the stratosphere. This caused significant changes in the atmosphere's refractive index, which can be measured using radio occultation, RO. By comparing these measurements with temperature data from the microwave limb sounder, MLS, researchers were able to identify the presence of H2O in the stratosphere. They found that the amount of H2O was between 110 and 140 TG, or about 8% of the global average for stratospheric H2O. The H2O was also found to have descended at a rate of minus 1 kilometer per day for the first few days after the eruption, before slowing down to minus 200 meters per day over the next week as it spread out. This article was authored by William J. Randall, Benjamin R. Johnston, John J. Braun, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


I'm John Albin Wilkins. I'm a longtime Drupal contributor. I've been doing web development since 1993, so over 20 years, and Drupal development for almost 11. Been around a bit. I am a senior front-end developer for previous Next. They're pretty awesome. I live in Taiwan, but they flew me out here just for this conference. So thank you for that. And I've got a lot of free gifts, open-source software that I work on. ZenGrid is a SaaS-encompass library that allows you to easily create layouts, normalized SCSS for SaaS-encompass. KSS Node, I'll be talking a lot more about this one later in the presentation that does automated style guides. Get SVN Migrate, which if you have any subversion repositories running around, this can automate the process of getting rid of all of them. And then, of course, the Zen thing for Drupal. And today, I wanted to talk about where we headed in front-end development. I'd like to start with actually a quote here from Nicholas Gallagher. Yeah, it just doesn't sit up there very well. Is there a way to angle it so it doesn't, my laptop isn't? I don't have it. It's got that nice Mac bevel on the bottom that just goes, whew. I think it's going to make it worse isn't my long end. Oh, you mean from, oh, that's tricky. Angle it more, even make it, or yeah, gaffer tape. Thank you. Excitement. I'd like to start with a quote from Nicholas Gallagher. He said, are you new to front-end development? Here's a secret. No one really knows what they're doing either. This is completely understandable, because we have tons of front-end blog posts that are talking about all these different things. Vagrant web components, the Twig Handler is Jenkins, CSS, JS Minting. And we're sort of expected to know about all of these different things. And it's really, really overwhelming. And you can't really make any sense of it all. Frank Chamarro said, everyone is describing the one little piece they've created, but they don't explain or even reference the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together. And this is sort of understandable. We're at a tech conference right now. People like to focus on the technology and what they're in world, mostly geeks here. And so, yeah, we tend to focus really intensely on that technology. And it's sort of like getting up really, really close to a painting and sticking your eyeball and seeing all these wonderful brushstrokes. You can see the paint palettes that they're using. And it's great. But you can't tell what painting is. You can't tell the bigger pressure until you start looking at the process. And then all of those, the technology details make much more sense in the context of what's actually going on. So when we step back and try to figure out what's going on in the front end and trying to make sense of the front end technology, basically, I'm going to describe any project, any front end project on GitHub, I'm going to describe one of these three things or combination. Front end performance, components, or continuous integration. Front end performance, I'm sure everybody's heard of that. And you're trying to make things faster. The components, continuous integration, these are getting a bit jargony.  OK, that's it. Those three things, that's the entire spectrum of all front end technology, OK? So I've given this talk a few times. It keeps improving upon it. And I gave a talk very similar to this at the last Drupal South in Wellington. But one of the things that happened right after that was that previous NXX was sent me to a scrum training. And I learned about agile development. And I want to talk about that was a really profound experience for me. And I want to talk about the problems that we're having doing CSS is directly related to some of the ways that we're doing projects. Here's a traditional waterfall project. You have planning, designing, and developing and theming. Usually it works in this direction. Maybe there's some overlapped development and theming. But you have all of your designs done ahead of time. And then you do the theming bit. And the problem is that if this starts to slip and take longer, then you get to this spot and you realize, I don't have enough time to finish all the theming. And then you have to negotiate with the clients. Oh, we're not going to do that bit of the design or that bit of the design. And effectively, what you end up with is half of the stuff is done. And that means you've wasted this time and this time. And you basically could have completed the entire project in half the time if you'd known that you were going to miss the date. That's not so good. So people, they start to get better at it. Maybe they'll reevaluate things here at the end of the design. They're like, oh, we're not going to hit the deadline. We can already tell. And then they're like, OK, we're going to design or over-designed it because we can't implement all these designs. And we'll take off those bits. And then give them a style guide. And then bend the project. They're reviewing it like, well, what on this is missing? Oh, remember, we talked about that. It's not going in like, oh, yeah. But there's a lot of conflict then between clients and the team that is actually developing it. And agile development really tries to solve these problems. And the sort of core concept in any agile development is reducing your risk by controlling and minimizing your risk. So here's what an agile project would look like. You have these same start and end deadline. But instead of just starting and doing all of your steps until you get to the deadline, you divide that time into a series of sprints. Typically, they're two or three or four week sprints. They have a very defined start and end time. And then you work with your client and you come up with a feature backlog, which basically is a list of all the features that they want to have in their project, on their websites. And you prioritize it. You say, these are the most high priority features that the client wants. I should say, when I say you prioritize it, the client should be prioritizing. The owner of this project should be prioritizing these things. And then you start with the first sprint. And basically, you guys say, we're going to work on these first couple of things. And we're going to complete them inside this sprint and then show the client what we've finished so far. And then you go into the next sprint and you pull in some more features like that. And at the end of each sprint, you're reprioritizing what's going on with left on the list. So the clients are always aware of what's the most high priority stuff. And you really do need to reprioritize at the end of each sprint because they're understanding the project will change as the project continues. You always have these problems where you're like, oh, we asked for this. Well, actually, I know you asked for this other thing. You didn't explain yourself well. This can get rid of those problems because the worst case scenario is at the beginning of the sprint, they tell you something bad. At the end of the sprint, you discover there was miscommunication. And that just means that in the next sprint, you iterate over that feature and get it right the next time. And then it really reduces the risk because they're not going to wait until the very end to discover that the client didn't communicate with the client very well. So each two sprint, prior trades, project goals, completes a set of features, and then creates sort of a minimally-releasable product. I won't get into a lot of these agile specifics, but I just want to talk about how what does it mean for agile and the web to work together? When I got hired by previous NEXT, my boss, Kim Pepper, was like, OK, I know you've been doing a lot of stuff with CSS, trying to make that very modular. How do we get designers into this agile process? And I hadn't yet trained on agile. And I said, no, I have no idea. We'll figure that together. And then once I did the training, it became really, really obvious. It became simple. And basically, agile to the web plus the web means style guide-driven development. And the only two requirements of style guide-driven development are component-based design and automated style guides. Now, if you remember from the earlier slide, components that means modular, automated style guides, that's the automation part. So we're talking about making our designs modular and then automatically documenting those designs inside a style guide. That's the core of what style guide-driven development is. And I want to talk super briefly about what we're doing wrong with our CSS currently to help you understand why making component-based design is so compelling. I used to have four or five slides here that talked about specifics of how you're doing stuff wrong. But I want to make this fast. And maybe we can spend some more time at the end discussing things and go ahead and go over some demos. So let's do a quick survey instead to talk about what we're doing. Drupal 7 CSS. How many people here really like Drupal 7's core CSS? Yes, nobody has raised their hand. Yeah, so I was heavily involved in the Drupal 7 development. You know, I'm sorry. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When you work with it day in and day out, you start to see some of the issues that you have. You have super high specificity on some of the CSS selectors, overly generic class names, like title and content, just bad CSS class names and general node. It's not particularly good CSS. And design components are basically a way to give us a framework for writing better CSS. And when I say design components, the front end development community is starting to get together and consolidate and understand this concept. But for some reason, we can't decide on what to call it. So component is the same thing as object and OO CSS, which is object-oriented CSS, module in SMACs, which is scalable and modular architecture for CSS. And it's the block and BEMs, block element modifier. And also sometimes called a UI pattern. Pattern library is full of components, basically. So I'm trying to like, it's a component. It's a design. But anyway, that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about all these things. They're all the same thing. So CSS design components is basically it's applied to a loose collection of HTML. I'm not trying to enforce any particular DOM structure in the HTML. It's repeatable, which means that you can apply that design multiple times on a page, even if it's never repeated. So your header should be a component. It should write it in a component way so that it's modular, compact. It applies exactly that header design. And theoretically, you could apply it multiple times. But if you just write everything as a component, it's going to make your life easier. And it's also specific. Like I said, it applies that design specifically to the elements that you apply that class to. And self-contained. The style shouldn't bleed off into other things. And finally, nestable. So you can have a component inside like the HTML DOM of another component. That's perfectly fine. And let me show you an example. This is a PRI website, which I helped to do the CSS for this, is one of the first sites that I tried out these ideas of component design. And you can see here, there's this little, it's hard to see on the screen, but there's a little circle there with a number in there, which is like the share count or something that can predict what it does. But that is a repeated design element. Actually, I'll show you at the bottom here. You can see that it's also, that share count is also over here. So I made that a very simple as basically, I think there's a span or a div or something wrapped around that number that says that it is the share count design component, right? And then we also have here at the top with this, the main picture, the main title and the teaser text here. This is the feature components. So like showing off the feature story on this page and then includes different pieces. We have the sort of taxonomy, politics and society, the feature image, the feature title, feature dates, feature text. Those are different parts of a more complex design components. It has multiple laced amount elements. It's gonna have a couple of different classes on there and you can see there that the, that other share count component is nested inside it and basically went through the entire site and tried to find these repeatable patterns and made those into components. And how many people have heard about SMACS? Fair for you. How many people have actually read the, you know, even the free book or the paid book, few of you. So Jonathan Snook tries to categorize different CSS using SMACS, base layout, modules, date and theme. It's like he looked at Drupal and said, how can I troll them as much as possible? So when we, in the Drupal community started looking at this, we were like, oh, this is awesome, but we kind of need to use different terminology or we're gonna get really confused. So we usually use base layout, component, state and skin, but they're the same categorizing ideas. And so when I started working on PRA and other websites, I thought this was pretty good, but I was having a little bit of hard time actually implementing it on my CSS. And I realized that it was, that really the state and skin are describing, they're describing components themselves, they're not really, they're not equal to components, they're parts of components. So that was why I was having a little bit of trouble understanding SMACS. And then there was also some missing bits here, which BEM helped out understanding as well. So we have like the component wrapper, elements, modifiers, states and skin. And so let me go over all of these different pieces here. Base. So in SMACS, base is basically, all of your rules that are using HTML elements as the selector, that's your base styles, okay? You're describing what the default look and feel of an HTML element is on your website. I use the base styling as, I try to target that styling to be the styling that you would see in the main part of your site, in the main content area of your site. So like, WissyWig editors are famous for having, making it difficult to get the right HTML that you really want. So I usually let the WissyWig editors do whatever they want for HTML and that base styling then is trying to apply the design that I want to those elements in the main part of the content page. And then everything else is overriding that those base element stylings. And I should say that as I started thinking about this more and more, base and layouts, they're not separate from components. They actually are components too. They're just a specialized kind of component. So layout components are basically, the only thing that they do, they're specialized in that instead of applying colors and background colors and all that stuff, all they do is move large sections of your page route. That's all they're concerned with. They want to put the left side bar over there on the left. They want to put the footer down at the bottom below the other stuff. That's what they're concerned about. And that's the only thing they do. Whether you consider padding part of the layout or not, it doesn't really matter to me. I usually put padding inside my layouts because my content goes inside the layouts and therefore I need gutters between my content. And that's the only thing they do. They shouldn't add any other kind of styling. And then next, these are the different sections, different parts of a component, components, element modifier, statements, again, I'm going to go through several different slides here that really help you to visualize what these different parts here. I used to ramble on and point at the slide or if this is an element and it was, I decided to go with a visual metaphor. So I got this idea from this quote. This is, I tried to describe, explain radio to people who have never heard radio. This is back in the early 1930s, 1920s. I said, you see, radio is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in Los Angeles and it's meowing in New York. The only difference between radio and this is that there is no cat. That's Albert Einstein, brilliant quote. So I'm going to try to describe these things using the flower component. So the component itself oftentimes has some sort of wrapper elements. The class that you would apply to that is just flower, dot flower, that's our selector, right? And then if we start breaking these down into elements or different parts, we will have the flower petals. This double underscore thing here is a BEM methodology of separating these different concepts of, our component is the first part of it and the element is the second part and we need some sort of thing to go in between them so you can easily tell which is which. You can use other things if you don't like double underscores. The double underscores and the double dashes that I'm going to show you in a second here are the Drupal 8 standards that we decided to adopt. So these are petals. We also have flower underscore underscore face, flower stem, flower leaves. These are all different pieces that require specific styling within the component. But I want to point out that we are not talking about a DOM structure when we're defining this name. This does not mean that leaves has to be a child element of the flower parent element. This is a loose collection of HTML elements, as I was saying before, because you can also have flower bed. And obviously, a flower bed is surrounding the flower. It's not inside the flower and yet it's completely related to the flower. You're not gonna have this flower bed styling anywhere else except with the flower. Next we're gonna go on to modifier here. This is a variant of our components, our flower component. It now looks like a tulip because we're applying this flower dash dash tulip class to the element. And so you can see that we've changed the way that the petals look, but everything else is the same. The face, the leaves, the stem, everything else the same. Now a lot of times when people see this double underscore and double dash and they start writing their own components for the first time, they get a bit a little bit crazy. Don't make it complicated. It should be very, very simple. I pulled this next selector from an actual website. I'm not gonna tell you which websites. But you can see here, they went crazy with their double underscores. Channel dash, tab underscore, underscore, guide underscore, underscore, upcoming dash, video underscore, underscore, info underscore, it's your time. I was really happy to learn yesterday that we were gonna display our slides in widescreen format because this is the first time I've been able to show the entire class on screen. Make them simple, please.  On the meaning of semantics, right? Content semantics, like what your actual content is, like articles, blog posts, news, events, that sort of stuff, that's handled by HTML5 semantics really. So let's make our class names be design semantics, right? You're trying to describe the design that you're applying, right? I mean, this makes sense. You're adding styling with these CSS rule sets. The name of the selector should also be the name of the design, right? So those class names should be meaningful to the developers and designers. And they don't need to be meaningful for anybody else. And also, don't stress out, I mean, I know that naming things is really hard in CSS in computer science. Don't stress out about too much. You can name it whatever, as long as you convey some meaning to the group of people that you're working with. You can always rename it later, that's easy. So let's jump back over to our component again. So here's a state. This is what happens when you hover over the flower component. I have a nice little v-styling on there, colon hover. In addition to these pseudo classes state, you can also have like a JavaScript state. So you had some sort of form or something that you filled out and then suddenly it's, you're adding a new class with JavaScript so that is pollinating, right? That's another kind of state. There is also a media queries, right? A media query is a state of this component. For example, this is the desktop version of our flower component, right? So at medium and with the 48Ms, that's what it looks like. And of course, print styles, those are also media types. That's another kind of state. So here's our print styling. And then lastly, skin. I didn't used to have a slide for this, but then I gave these slides, I presented them, the last time I was in Australia, at a meetup and somebody says, do an is Knights skin, right? So, new slide. A skin is basically, let's see here, there we go. It's a global modifier. So it creates a new variation of how this looks, but it's applied to every component on your site, right? So the actual CSS rules for this will be next to all the other CSS rules for this component, but the selector itself, that is night, you know, and that class name is gonna be on like the body tag or something, or some sort of div that's apparent of a lot of different components. So this skin is basically just a global modifier. If you wanna take a look at these, there's actually a copy of all of these in CSS form and automated style guide of this is available here, johnelman.github.io slash flower dash power. And here's an overview of all the selectors in one go here. So we have the components. Sometimes you can't name a component except with two words, just can't figure it out. You can either use camel case and people in Google are like, oh, we don't wanna use camel case. So we ended up with this dash in between each of the words. This is why of course in the modifier has to be double dash, right? So then our modifier is creating a variant of the components. Our component has lots of pieces. So we have multiple elements. And again, an element might require two words to describe them. Sometimes that element will have a variant styling depending on the global modifier. So there are two ways you can do that. You can either write this more complex CSS class name with the modifier here, or you could actually create a selector that use that first one there and then this third one, right? As your selector, that would be fine too. The same selector. But my point is that this is the most complex class name you should ever write. There shouldn't be anything more complex than that. JavaScript state, pseudo class states, media query states, and then our global modifier skins. So that's it. It's not really that complicated. If you write all of your CSS using these as the selectors of your rule sets, you're gonna end up with much better CSS. Here it is again. Sign components, they're applying to a loose collection of HTML. You should be able to apply the same design to a different kind of HTML. There's no reason why you couldn't apply that share count to a different HTML element. Repeatable, specific, self-contained, nestable. One last time here. Base components, layout components. Again, those are just specialized kinds of components, and then components are these different things. Elements, modifier, states, and skin. I have a, there we go. What I just described is basically the jubilate coding standards. We have, these are completely new. We had like draft CSS standards for like three years. And then finally I was like, this is enough, enough. Let's actually decide on something. So last year we finally have official CSS coding standards and they are there. And they will also describe a really great documentation about all of these classes and modifiers and stuff are all up there too. And also the pitfalls. They go into detail about what we're doing wrong so that as you're writing CSS, you can go back and like, oops, I shouldn't be doing that because this is why it's a pitfall. Really great documentation. So when I'm writing CSS, where do I put it? I'm using the SAS.  This is my organization. It's very simple. I have an init partial that has defines, or sorry, it actually loads the variables at the top. Then it loads all of the third party libraries that I use like the breakpoint module which is awesome for control night v decrees. And then some sort of layout module. Singularity or Zen grids or whatever you want, or Susie. Those are all good ones. Then inside the base folder, I'll have all of my base components, the styles that are designing the HTML elements themselves going there. Then I'll have layout with all of my individual layouts that are completely repeatable. They go in there, and then everything else is inside components. And I mean everything. Each component, oh yeah. Each component goes in a separate file. I'll open up that in a second. Sometimes I have custom mixins or custom functions. I'll put this into the library folder. But that's the entire structure. Styles.scss, that's the actual main style sheet that gets generated in the styles.scss. That's the only bit that goes inside my .info file of my theme. And then everything else is loaded by styles. See, imports the init, imports the base, imports layouts, components. How many people here use Magda? What's the name of the, globbing, sask globbing? That was an old deal. Yeah. Go ahead and use that, it's fine. You don't have to do, spell it out like this. We use sask globbing as well, but if you don't use sask globbing, that syntax can be confusing. This is how you load it. So here I've opened up the components folder, and you can see that every single component is a separate file. When I tried this out the first time, I had been working on a project and then it was like it was crunch time because we weren't yet doing Agile. And so they brought in another friend and developer to help me finish. And he took a look at this folder, showed up and he was like, oh my God. And he was freaked out for a good five minutes. I wasn't next to him, so I didn't know about this until later. But he was like, okay, breathe. And he had this ticket, he was like, okay, I need to, there's a bug in this one, styling. So he did this, he inspected the Dom. He saw that there was this class name on that thing and then he went and looked on the components folder and lo and behold, there was a file name that had that exact same class name. He was like, open it up, and there it was. It's ridiculously easy to find your components when you're doing development. If you use this, it looks crazy because I'm only got to down to the Ds on this list. But it's incredibly simple organization. Some people like to have subfolders. The subfolders confuse me. I can't figure out where anything is. I have to look at all the different subfolders then. Anyway, but this is less of an issue now that we have source maps where it can like show, in the inspector can show you exactly the file name of the SAS part. Oh, that's pretty awesome. So then you can use a subfolder to use source maps. So now, I know that some of you are thinking, this sounds great, this is awesome, but I'm a Drupal developer.  But there's good news. There's the fugly selector hack. What I do, this requires SAS. You can't do this with CSS.  Basically, I write the selector in the DOM that I couldn't change because I could not figure out how to like insert the class I wanted into that link inside this piece of content. And then I write the class name. I wish I could use in the DOM as the thing that I'm extending, right? So this goes in the bottom of each of my component files. So I've written a design at the top using these amazing, wonderful class names that I can actually get into the source. And they have this percent sign at the beginning, which means it's a silent selector inside the selector. So like I'll have, at the top of this file, I actually have dotfeature underscore title dash link under the assumption that it could eventually get into the DOM and then comma and then percent sign feature underscore title dash link.  And then I just extend into the actual thing. And I wasn't sure this would work. And it works great. It's amazing. You don't end up with bleeding. As long as you use the right specific Drupal cluster, it's not gonna bleed. Next question? Oh, five minutes. Five minutes, okay. Thank goodness I'm on slide 52 of 55. So automated style guides. This is a thing that pulls it all together. Okay. Because understanding the concepts of the CSS component design is great, but it's still, it's hard to do when you have Drupal as the thing that you're trying to compare it against. And I found that by automatically generating a style guide from the SAS files that I'm working on, it made it much easier to visualize. What do I mean by automating the style guide? So basically I've got a component library here, which means like I have a Drupal theme and inside the Drupal theme, I wrote all these different design components, individual design components. And CSS source that goes from the preprocessor or it's SAS source actually, goes through the preprocessor, it becomes CSS files. Sometimes you can also have HTML stuff if you're using what's the JavaScript preprocessor. Coffee scripts, yes, I don't use it, but yeah, coffee scripts. KSS, it stands for Nile Style Sheets. Some guy named KNYLE Nile. And he wrote this spec that describes automated, describes a comment syntax. Basically you write a comment in a very specific way and this script then can go through and read and parse all of your SAS files and then generate a set of HTML static files that become your style guide. And now we're gonna jump over to the demo part of the presentation, let me pull up. So this is a, whoops, I think I can fix this real fast. I need it, because this is local to my own machine. I'm working the other day, if I reload now. So this is a style guide that is automatically generated from the source and let me show you here, this is the spec that describes how you write these comments and this one's better. So this is a comment that you can put inside your SAS and it'll work with CSS as well. You can use the standard CSS comments, one at the top, one at the very bottom and none of the slashtuff of raw CSS. But the only thing that's required here inside this documentation for your component is the name of the component and then where in the style guide you want it to be. CSS requires you to define sort of the hierarchy of what you wanted to have for your style guide.  So that and this are the only bits that are required. The second part there is a description about it. If you've got modifiers, you put them here. So we have an or states. So this is a hover state, disabled states. This is a primary and smaller modifier for it. This doesn't use the Drupal 8 standards as documentation here because it's not a Drupal thing. This is just a CSS thing. And if you run CSS node, it will go and generate a style guide from these documentation and you'll end up with something that looks like this. So here we have like all of our colors documented, base styling here, heading levels. We'll jump over the components here. And you can see, this is the style guide that I'm right now adding to Zen 7.x, 6.x. So out of the box here, as soon as I tag release here, it will have all of its CSS documented with KSS comments so that you get a style guide for everything. You know, auto complete styling, the highlight mark like new and updated comments, message styling, breadcrumb navigation, tabs. It's all gonna be in here. Responsive video, we should resize this. You can see it's shrinking and getting bigger. This is amazing when you're developing. You write something, you have like a gulp or a grunt task that's automatically watching out of your code. It generates the CSS, it generates the style guide. You go and look at it. It's wonderful. I set up a buff for the last slot of the day where we can actually go over and I can show you like how to get KSS node running and stuff. But this really, really ties everything together. It makes writing your components much easier because you can actually see it as you develop it. And it also helps tremendously with the agile process because you don't wanna do all the designs ahead of time. For every feature that you start at the beginning of a sprint, you have your designer and front-end developer work together to create a design. And as you write it, it goes in the style guide. The next feature that comes, you look at your style guide and go, hmm, is there an existing design I can reuse? And if not, then you create a new one. If you see one that's designed that's almost right, you can make a variation, a modifier of that. That's your process then. Each new feature, look at the style guide. Yes, no, something new. Those are your designs, it becomes really easy. I love this process. I know that everybody is gonna be doing agile development in 10 years, but we're just not there yet. This is gonna be the road ahead, I promise you. Thank you.