Sunday, March 8, 2015

What Separates Us?

Yesterday, the lib-left US-American blog "Crooks & Liars" had a post entitled "Conservatives Need To Destroy Things And They Don't Care If It's YOU." It was a response to a rant by one Kurt Schlicter about "destroying" "liberal academia." I used to see writing like Schlicter's a lot more frequently in the early-2000's, when blogging was much more popular. I'm not used to reading "conservative" calls-to-arms as gleefully rabid as this:
And it shall be glorious, for the tears they shed when forced into a world that demands achievement, effort and accountability, will be a powerful tonic for productive citizens like us who have carried these obnoxious parasites for the last few decades. We won’t mourn modern academia’s passing. Once a college education was an aspiration. Now it’s a punchline.
The words "achievement, effort and accountability" and "productive citizens like us" carry all sorts of weight, and bespeak of all sorts of issues where the modern day "conservative" movement falls far short. I'll get into that. But who was this guy? Here he was writing a stupid political rant on the moronic website "TownHall." What was he contributing? What had he contributed? Was he a useless, right-wing attack poodle mediocrity in the vein of Jonah Goldberg or Jason Mattera? I decided to check him out.
Kurt Schlichter (Twitter: @KurtSchlichter) was personally recruited to write conservative commentary by Andrew Breitbart. He is a successful Los Angeles trial lawyer, a veteran with a masters in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College, and a former stand-up comic.

Post Hill Press will publish his book “Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2013-2041” on July 15, 2014.

Kurt rose to the rank of Army colonel (Infantry), commanded a cavalry recon squadron, and served in Desert Storm and Kosovo as well as multiple disaster operations. He lives in the South Bay area of Los Angeles where his hobbies include red meat and red wine. 
A protege of the late, bloated, boorish gas-bag of a mediocrity, Andrew Breitbart doesn't speak well for him. But he's got a law degree and managerial skills from his military career. So, okay, he's not himself an un-admitted parasite like Goldberg or Mattera. But what of his ideas? What of his mind? He's one of those deluded souls who thinks that the USA has been taken over by a liberal ruling class and it needs to be taken back from them. He's an "insurgent" like Luke Skywalker in "Star Wars" or something.

Sigh.

Then I saw the headline: "Liberals, Stop Lying About Everything." Really? "Everything"? Now, I'm not a liberal. I'm a socialist. A leftist-libertarian. And I'll readily admit that liberals lie about a lot of important things. (The McGuinty-Wynne cavalcade of cynical corruption here in Ontario for instance.) But jeeziz-kee-rice on a crutch! "Conservatives" lie about everything under the sun! They're shameless liars! The only time they're not lying is when they FEEL something (think of the emotional intensity of dogs) or when they're so lamentably stupid that they actually believe what they're saying.

But here's a guy who can tie his own shoes but who appears to be a red-blooded exponent of the "conservative" (read: "insanely stupid") world-view. Why does he feel this way? Is there a kernel of truth around which he's built his mental edifice? Why is he so passionate about something so detestable? ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.")

I figured a column ostensibly describing how liberals lie about "everything" would provide me with insights into this question. So, I began reading. Alas, ... I was all too quickly filled with contempt and disgust at reading the sort of drivel I used to type my fingers to the bone refuting ten years ago and quit. Then I thought that it's been a long time since I really interacted with these bozos. They're still out there. They've still got enough clout to steal elections.  I figured, maybe I should engage with this. Maybe I should see what's new in the "conservative" arsenal of dim-witted delusions. Maybe I should see what it is that separates a lefty-pinko like me from a fellow human being of the right-wing persuasion.

So, in the interest of fair comment, I'll be going through Schlicter's piece, in its entirety, "fisking" it as we used to say back in the day. I'll be responding to the bulk of it as I read it for the first time. Something like this isn't worth the bother.

Here we go ...
The last few weeks have raised a critical question for all Americans: Is the liberal elite unbelievably dumb or unbelievably cynical? Do our over-credentialed, under-educated, would-be betters actually believe the bullstuff they are shoveling, or do they really think that we normal Americans are so stupid that they can lie to our faces and we will just take it?
How strange! I often ask myself that question of BOTH liberal and conservative elites! But right off the bat, I don't think a rabid right-winger who won the admiration of something like Andrew Breitbart should go around calling himself "normal." 
I’m guessing Door Number Two. Liberals know they are full of it; they just think the rest of us are as foolish as the welfare-guzzling mouth-breathers who vote for them.
Reality-check Mr. Schlicter. Besides leading the way in US states for pornography use and teen pregnancies, so-called "Red States" tend to take more federal money than they pay-out in taxes. But Schlicter is labouring under the shit-for-brains delusion that Mitt Romney expressed in his speech to wealthy donors during his presidential run; that is, that poor people vote Democrat and wealthier people vote Republican. One would think that somebody with political aspirations would bother to do the mental work to determine whether that gross simplification was true. One could also simply open their fucking eyes and notice that there are rich people at Democratic fund-raisers and military veterans at Democrat, and even left-wing political events, to see that things are more complicated. One would do this if one weren't an idiot seeking easy answers all the time because they're the only ones you're capable of processing.
It’s time for the lies to stop.
I'll say!
Liberals, stop lying about the weather. There is no climate change crisis. 
Oh you big fucking idiot.
Whatever changes our climate is undergoing are part and parcel of the natural processes that have been going on since the Earth was formed. 
You don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
All the massaged, manhandled, and manufactured data in the world ...
This is Schlicter's way of saying that it's too complicated for him.
won’t change the simple fact that this is a naked grab for money and power 
Ha-ha-ha! A "naked grab" is it? The shredding of constitutional rights in the Great Bullshit War on Terror isn't a "naked grab for power" to this dipshit. The bush II regime's espousal of the "Unitary Executive" isn't a power grab, but this massive collaboration of earth scientists seeking to establish that the greenhouse effect is being increased by industrial civilization pumping increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, decade after decade, and measuring the shrinking and thinning of ice-caps and mountain glaciers and the increasing temperature of the ocean, and arguing that the potential consequences of this could be catastrophic and that therefore we should fund alternative energy sources and reduce our extremely wasteful consumption patterns, and then, liberal politicians fail to put taxes on carbon use, or even to mandate higher fuel efficiency in cars, ... that's a "naked grab for money and power"????

This conspiracy theory is so nakedly stupid, that you have to wonder about the sanity of those who propose it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can see how the idea: "Environmentalist scientists delude themselves into thinking the Earth is heating up, and 'tax-and-spend' liberal politicians use this as an excuse to raise taxes and regulate the economy." ... sounds sort of plausible. Thinking about it for just a minute though, sanely, and you'll soon see the weaknesses of the theory. But people like Schlicter don't think sanely about it for a minute. They just incorporate this conspiracy theory into their loopy delusions of the Clintons hanging condoms on the Christmas tree and the Obamas being moles for the Nation of Islam, and the whole Democratic Party USA meeting in the subterranean lair of Osama bin Laden to plot the destruction of all that is right and true and only the bravery of Sean Hannity and Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent and Kurt Schlicter and (sob!) the late, great Andrew Breitbart are what stands between them and you and me and everyone we hold dear having to eat halal and watch Scarlett Johansson trying to play "Black Widow" while wearing a burqa, ... and fuck's sakes, these people are absolute idiots!!

But he doesn't even believe the scientists are genuine! The idiot actually believes that these people are checking satellite data, drilling kilometers into the ice, compiling their data from weather monitors all around the world, studying the temperatures in the oceans, building their mathematical models, ... and then making the whole thing up! In their "naked grab for money and power." Money, presumably being that "sweet, sweet grant money" which the fossil fuels industry simply can't match.

When is the pay-off going to come for these fraudulent climate scientists Kurt? Some of them have been at it for over thirty-years now! Their "naked grab for money and power" sure is taking a long time.
... by a liberal elite so concerned about carbon they choose to dump gazillions of pounds of it into the air jetting off to party with their denier denying pals.
So what's this shit? Some of it is along the lines that idiots tried to discredit David Suzuki with. Suzuki gave a lecture tour across Canadian university campuses one year, a multi-media affair, and, rather than put all his gear on a wagon and hitch it up to a bicycle, he traveled in a bus. Apparently if you claim that industrial society is behind global warming but you turn on a light-switch, you're a hypocrite and a fraud.

Of course, there are hypocrites amongst the liberal global warming proponents. Al Gore might be one of them. But if you're a sane person, and not a shit-head, you'll remember that the scientists proving the case are not the same people as the millionaire liberals. (If you're a shit-head, you'll believe that the millionaire liberals and the "scientists" are all part of the same conspiracy. All sipping champagne in Osama bin Laden's subterranean lair, which he shares with his new girlfriend, Barbara Streisand, as they plot .... argh!)
Forty years ago we were going into an ice age,
This asinine complaint has been completely debunked.
 and the solution was to give more power and money to liberal elites.
Is that why Jimmy Carter got elected? Because of that "new ice age" story that was in the media for a few months back in the 1970s? Did that small cabal of "new ice age" scientists (or "scientists") get their reward? (Before they were muscled off the stage by the new global warming "scientists"?)
Ten years ago, we were a decade away from the Arctic ice cap melting and the polar bears being parboiled, ...
Sigh. Now here's the thing, ... I'm not a scientist of any sort. But I've read books about the subject. (The global warming deniers couldn't decide if the world was, or wasn't heating up. Now, they supposedly believe it is warming up but there's nothing we can do about it because it's natural. All the carbon humanity has released into the atmosphere since the 1880s has had ZERO impact.) And not being a crazy conspiracy theorist, I think the threat sounds plausible.  And enormous.

When you consider the FACT that a lot of the "skepticism" came out of the same goddamned public relations firm that engendered "skepticism" about cigarettes causing cancer, and that a lot of their funding comes from the fossil fuels industry, it really oughta shake your hare-brained notion that the global warming theory is a "naked grab for money and power."

Not being a climate scientist though, I'm not qualified to really debate the topic. But I've read a few of the deniers' complaints and the back-and-forth with the proponents. It has ALWAYS been the case that the denier was cherry-picking data, making shit up, or simply misinformed. ALWAYS. For that reason, I'm not going to enter into a pointless debate with these dweebs myself. Schlicter's mockery of the Arctic ice cap melting here is based on misunderstanding that the winter spread of sea ice means that there is no melting. You can have more water vapour (say, from global warming!) and a cold winter and voila! You have a wider spread of ice. But the arctic ice-cap itself is thinning. The arctic is melting.
...and the solution was to give more power and money to liberal elites. I don’t even want to guess what the next lie is going to be about the perpetual crisis around the corner, but I know to an absolute certainty that the solution is going to be giving more power and money to liberal elites.
Except, Kurt, that this "naked grab for money and power" exists only in the heads of fevered morons such as yourself. Your conspiracy theory makes no sense! It's laughable and ludicrous. I mean, the "money" side is ridiculous for the scientist/conspirators. And "power"? What "power" does a fucking climate scientist get to enjoy? What "power" do the liberal politicians expect to get? The power to regulate auto-emissions? The power to set efficiency standards? I suppose if you're the sort of creature who gnashes his teeth at being subjected to the tyranny and oppression of stop-signs at intersections, or who feels that letting violent psychopaths shoot-up grade schools is an acceptable price to pay for you to have the freedom to buy almost any sort of handgun or rifle you wish (so that you can accidentally murder your children when they're trying to sneak to their room after partying all night, or deliberately murder your wife because she's driving you nuts, and then commit suicide with it because now that she's dead you realize you loved her and you were fighting over something stupid), ... then the sorts of "powers" that the state would have to re-direct the economy to meet the challenge of global warming, would strike you as a liberal wet-dream power-grab.

Non-idiots, on the other hand, simply don't see the world that way.
Liberals, stop lying about our war with radical Muslims. 
And, right on cue, the moron goes from mistaking a challenge to our use of fossil fuels for a giant conspiracy, to falling hook, line and sinker for the biggest con-job in the history of the world; the Great Bullshit War on Terror. If anything is "a naked grab for money and power" it is this.
This bloodshed isn’t “random.” This isn’t about “violent extremism.” 
Here, it appears the dunce forgot to define what he's talking about. What "bloodshed" are you referring to? The Charlie Hebdo Shootings? ISIS? Palestinian suicide bombers? What? Worse than that though, he doesn't even know what words mean! "Radical Muslims" who cause "bloodshed" aren't "violent extremists"??? Wha-a-a????
Mass enslavement, mutilation and murder isn’t “workplace violence,” and these semi-human freaks aren’t going to stop if someone hands them a mop, bucket and paycheck.
Now here, I have a tiny bit of agreement with the liberal and leftists "root causes" argument. Because the whole liberal meme about poverty being the root cause of terrorism ignores the fact that Osama bin Laden, and a lot of the other heavies in this movement were very wealthy, or at least comfortable. More importantly, it helpfully ignores the reality that it is US and Israeli imperialism that is the real "root cause" of this terrorism. Or, in the more polite terminology of the United States Department of Defense, US foreign policy inspires terrorist attacks against the United States. They don't hate you for your freedoms. They hate you for your policies.

On the other hand, there is something to the idea that grinding poverty, hopelessness, discrimination, are causing terrorism. That's certainly been the case in Palestine, where Israeli theft of Palestinian land, and daily brutalization and humiliation whether they fight back or not has bred terrorism. And, the sickening racism in North America and Europe, combined with the lack of economic opportunities, the Christian "crusade" taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq and etc., ... some of this is responsible for young Muslim men answering the call of Saudi Arabia (and other US allies) to fight a holy war against the Baathist dictatorship in Syria. (Of which, more in a moment.)
We are at war – war – with radical Islam, and we need to end the lies, the equivocation and dissembling and speak the truth. Our enemies think they are Muslims, and they think the Koran commands their actions. This isn’t about theology – whether their version of Islam is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation is utterly irrelevant. They think they’re pious Muslims even if we, as well as most of the world’s Muslims, disagree.
Here, Schlicter appears to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. The Obama administration is trying (belatedly) to tone-down the extreme Islamophobic racism that's developed in the USA (and Canada, and Europe) because it has gotten unhelpful. So, he's arguing that ISIS isn't Islamic. He's trying to divide ISIS from Islam in people's minds, so that he can tell the billion Muslims in the world that they're not targets (even though they are). It is dishonest, but so is Schlicter. Schlicter is trying to pretend that all of these fundamentalist whack-jobs have not been aided and abetted, either by the USA or its allies, for decades now. He's trying to pretend that sites like Townhall, and right-wing "luminaries" like Mark Steyn or Ann Coulter or any of the rest of those sickening vermin haven't been calling Islam a hate/death cult since forever. They haven't been calling them "animals" and "sand-niggers" and "camel-fuckers" for years and years and years.

This "war" that Schlicter describes is a naked grab for money and power. Money for the military-industrial complex, and power, in the shredding of civil liberties and freedoms and the expansion of police-state powers that are "justified" (to imbeciles like Schlicter and the mouth-breathing cretins who read him) by the miniscule threat of Islamic terrorism.
Liberals babble about how we Americans don’t understand other cultures, but when understanding other cultures becomes inconvenient to their progressive ideology, liberals cease trying to understand and mask the inconvenient truth by applying their own prejudices and preconceptions. That’s what they’ve done to the jihadis. These guys aren’t upset about the 1% not paying them a living wage; they’re upset about the other 99% living at all.
Right. So, according to Schlicter's diseased mind, ISIS wants to kill everyone beneath the top 1% income level? What? They're servants of the 1%? Like the Republican and Democratic parties? What stupid drivel. Self-evidently stupid drivel. From a stupid, stupid man.
Well, here’s a conservative who says it’s critical to understand the radical Muslims. We need to fully appreciate how they think, their goals, their ideas, their feelings. Understanding them will help us more effectively hunt down and kill them.
Whoa! Check out the tough guy! And the comedian! "It's funny because it's true." Except it isn't true. This guy is astonishingly ignorant about pretty much everything having to do with the Great Bullshit War on Terror. It's a waste of time to engage with such an airhead, unless and until he begins to say something even approaching relevance and fact.
Liberals, stop lying about sexual assault. We need to teach liberals not to rape. Where’s the study showing the political affiliation of the majority of incarcerated sex criminals? You know there isn’t one that finds it’s “Republican” because if there was, we’d have seen Brian Williams yapping about it between stories about how he raised the flag at Iwo Jima.
I don't know where he's getting his information from. As I said above, it's clearly documented that so-called "Red States" have the highest levels of pornography use (Full disclosure: I'm probably doing my best to balance the scales between liberals and conservatives here in Canada.) and teen pregnancies (Full disclosure: Don't even think about it.).  I've heard that socially conservative men are more likely to abuse their children and beat their wives (out of notions of patriarchy, male authority, male privilege, etc.,), but then there's this guy, who says that religious males are less likely to be abusive (while also saying that pre-marital sex should be outlawed). Bear with me as I attempt to dig deeper.

Here's an abstract where the researchers found that the only constant for abusive husbands was the tragedy of these men having been abused as children or having witnessed abuse in their families as children. The only noteworthy thing about conservative men said is that they tended to refuse couples-counseling.

This one says that regular churchgoers don't have lower reportage of domestic abuse, but that couples with highly socially conservative husbands and more liberal wives have higher incidences of abuse.

This one says that a number of factors cause college students to believe in myths about rape ("attitudes and beliefs that are generally false but widely and persistently held and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression towards women") but that one of them is a social conservative set of values.

Now then, ... in case there are any women reading this who are finding it pathetic and/or sickening that two males are engaged in a pissing-contest to assign blame for male violence against women to the other's ideological camp, I will assert that it appears that there are inherent psychological differences between "liberals" and "conservatives." If it's the case that one psychological disposition, especially if it is created by environmental factors, leads one more towards violent solutions to social problems, racist viewpoints, self-centered behaviour, or sexism, then this question is an important one.

This article's abstract says that "previous research" has established that conservatives are more likely to blame the victims in cases of rape and concludes that among the various worldview beliefs of conservatives, the desire to preserve traditional power imbalances between groups is the determining factor in this.

I'm going to conclude from this little survey that it's basically an open question as to whether "conservatives" or "liberals" are the worst when it comes to male sexual violence.
And no, there is no “rape culture.”
Oh for fuck's sake! First of all, there is definitely such a thing as "rape culture." (More on that in a moment.) But please note; first the dim-wit asserts that the culture of liberalism produces rapists. Then he asserts that there's no such thing as a "rape culture." I mean, this right-wing fellow here says that liberal males will bash women more because liberal men have drunk the kool-aid of feminism and have renounced "chivalry" for treating women as their equals. And since nobody can push your buttons like somebody close to you, in arguments between male liberals and their female lovers, these liberal males, unencumbered by the regressive need to treat women as delicate flowers, are less restrained when it comes to lashing-out physically. So, there's your "culture" of "male violence."If Schlicter wanted to be at all consistent with what he just got finished saying, he should have said "There is a rape culture, but it's a liberal problem, not a society-wide problem."

But, I guess, having been spewing and venting about the disease of liberal values infecting a substantial part of US society, Schlicter still thinks that all is right with the world and that "normal" people (like him) are still, by far, the vast majority. And that there's nothing wrong with it, at least as far as attitudes towards women go.

But that just isn't true. It's a no-brainer that there's a pervasive rape-culture in North American society. You know, a song like "I Stole Your Love," what's that about? Here's AC/DC: "Don't you struggle/Don't you fight" (and then, bizarrely) "Don't you worry/Cause it's your turn tonight." The whole idea that men have to "trick" sex out of women, that it's a prize to be gotten by hook or by crook, that leads to rape and that's rape culture. When a cop says one way to not get raped is to not dress like a slut, then that's rape culture.

This is so blindingly obvious that I really don't know what else to say.
That’s a lie liberal feminists constructed to solidify their politically-useful victim status and to indict their political opponents without the inconvenience and hassle of actually offering facts and evidence in support of their positions.
No. No it isn't.
Like the big lie that both frigid cold and burning heat conclusively prove global warming, ...
Jesus Christ! Would you shut-up about that you fucking ignoramus!
the existence of an all-encompassing rape culture is demonstrated both by the agreement that it exists and the denial that it exists.
I have no idea what this babbling idiot is trying to express with that.
No wonder liberals hate due process – they can’t afford a search for the truth because the risk is too great that someone might find it.
Whatever shithead.
Liberals, stop lying about illegal aliens. They aren’t all hardworking and they aren’t all here because they love America and have dreams and stuff. Some are criminals. Some are bums. None were invited. Their problems are a result of their choices. We owe them nothing. Want out of the shadows? Go home. 
No, asshole. We just destroy their economies, foist corrupt, murderous puppet-governments on them, thereby destroying their chances for a decent life in their home-countries, forcing them to migrate to survive.

In this case, it's difficult to know where Schlicter's ignorance and delusion ends and his callous racism begins.
Liberals, stop lying about race. 
Oh! This should be good.
There’s a word for people who do as liberals do and assess an individual’s every action, opinion and idea based upon where the subject individual’s great-grandfather came from. That word is “racist.” Here’s some truth: The only mainstream ideology within the American political spectrum that is in any coherent sense racist is liberalism.
I think widdle Kurty Schlicter is getting tired! That was laughable. As with rape culture, the prevalence of racism in North American society is an inarguable fact. Or does the "widespread agreement that it exists and the simultaneous denial that it exists" somehow "prove" that there's no racism? What? It's obviously too great a strain on Schlicter's limited resources to pretend that the demographic of mouth-breathing cretins he's pandering to aren't themselves racist.
Liberals, stop lying about welfare. We all know that your place in life is the result of your good and bad choices. The poor aren’t poor because the Koch brothers went and made them drop out of high school and focus on bong hits instead of calculus.
Yeah. Kurt's getting tired. Only one paragraph (of moronic generalizations) a piece for the last few "lies" of the liberal world view. This lying hack has nothing to say about bankruptcies caused by medical bills. He's got nothing to say about the shameful treatment of wounded (mentally or physically) veterans. He's got nothing to say about racism among employers. He's got nothing to say about de-industrialization and the assault on unions. He's got nothing to say about US corporations setting up overseas to exploit cheap labour while benefiting from public sector investments in the USA. He's got nothing to say about the increasing trends towards lower-paying, uncertain contract work.
Liberals, stop lying about taxes. People like us who actually contribute to society by working aren’t bad or greedy because we get mad at our money being taken to subsidize freeloaders. We’re normal.
Already been established. Republicans and Republican red-states are the biggest freeloaders. Stop lying Kurt. And corporations and the wealthy are the biggest tax-cheats and the super-rich are the receivers of the biggest taxpayer-funded bail-outs in the history of the universe.

So shut the fuck up you lying piece of shit.
Liberals, stop lying about Obamacare. That would mean you can never speak of it again.
It's a crappy plan based on a Republican precedent. But, by all means, stop lying about the health care crisis in the United States Kurt. That would mean shutting your gob for all time.
Liberals, stop lying about Christians and Jews. Our country was built upon a Judeo-Christian foundation, and without it America would just be another festering boil of hideous pathologies like the majority of this planet. There’s no secret cabal of cross and star-clinging theocrats out there just waiting to ruin the liberal’s party – America is not about to be Footloosed even in the off chance it was to elect a Mike Huckabee. Hell, the only people interested in getting into Americans’ bedrooms are the liberal feminists who want to crawl through the window with a notary to ensure there’s proper documentation of the horny co-ed’s consent to let her beau ‘round second base.
Once again, Kurt Schlicter is either lying or completely ignorant and delusional. The religious right is already restricting women's access to abortions. They want to control everyone's access to birth control. They want to take away the rights of homosexuals. Fuck! That one dude quoted above wants to outlaw premarital sex!
Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton. Lena Dunham. Jon Gruber. That woman with the glasses who thinks we should carpet bomb ISIS with want ads. All liberals. All liars.

Liberals, stop lying about everything.
So, in other words, taking the time to engage with "conservatives" such as Kurt Schlicter, turns out to be a complete waste of time. The question is; is he really that stupid or is he just lying and hoping that we'll believe him? Or is he only lying for the mouth-breathing cretins who vote Republican? Why can't he be BOTH stupid and a liar?

I'm sure he's not stupid enough to believe EVERYTHING he's written. But very few people are con-artists, 24-7. There must be enough in that mental swill that he's a true-believer in that he qualifies as one of the morons he's writing for.

Notice we say the same things about each other, he and I. That's indicative of the tragic futility of sane, informed people to penetrate the encrusted shell of self-righteous stupidity of people like Kurt Schlicter.

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