June 29, 2004

IS JACQUES CHIRAC THE FATHER?

Iranian Woman Gives Birth to Frog

According to Memri: "The Iranian Republic News Agency published a news article titled "Iranian Woman Gives Birth to Frog." The following is the article that appeared on June 27: [2]

"An Iranian woman gave birth to a frog in a bizarre labor in the southeastern city of Iranshahr Saturday. Gynecologist Varasteh, who confirmed the report said the woman, whose period had stopped for six months, underwent a sonography in May which showed she had a cyst in her abdomen, wrote the Farsi-language daily E'temad in its Sunday's edition. Following severe bleeding, the woman, who has not been named, gave birth to a live gray frog accompanied with mud. Varasteh believes the frog larva has most likely entered and grown in the woman's body.

"Other physicians argue that the larva has found its way into her body while she was swimming in a dirty pool, turning to a frog after the fetus has grown. And some specialists blame genetic disorders, saying the so-called frog has similarities with the human's fetus. The woman has two healthy children..."

June 28, 2004

THIS WON'T APPEAR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Horsefeathers remains skeptical of the prospects for democracy in Iraq. Nevertheless, these words from an Iraqi blogger indicate that there are many Iraqis who wish to ally themselves with the United States.:

" ...Hail our true friends, the Great People of the United States of America; The Freedom giving Republic, the nation of Liberators. Never has the world known such a nation, willing to spill the blood of her children and spend the treasure of her land even for the sake of the freedom and well being of erstwhile enemies. The tree of friendship is going to grow and grow and bear fruit as sure as day follows night. And the people deep down at the bottom of their hearts, they appreciate. Make no mistake about that. The people have voted today, the pulse of the street is clear, without any hesitation I would give 90% of all Iraqis are hopeful and supportive of the new government, and this is a tacit indirect yes to the U.S. which has been the prime mover of all these events. This is what the foolish fail to understand. Why is this a different situation from that for example of a Vietnam? The answer is very simple: Because, the U.S. has achieved something very popular around here; which is the removal of the Saddam regime. Those who are really against the U.S. from amongst the Iraqis have been and remain a small minority; all other forms of resentment are simply disappointment and disgruntlement resulting from the discomfiture of the present situation and will simply disappear with progress and gradual improvement.

As for the enemy, he will not reap but failure and the bitter taste of defeat.

Glory and honor to the U.S. and Allied men and women whose blood is irrigating the tree of freedom in this land; and their sacrifices, suffering, and toil is laying the foundation for a future renaissance of the Mesopotamian People. Hail soldiers of freedom and enlightenment. Do not be dismayed by the trouble and turbulence of the present, for the future generations will remember and appreciate.

And last but not least; Hail, Great El Bush, a leader not only of the U.S. but a true hero of mankind. And Hail Mr. Blair and the other Leaders of the Free World.

God Bless the New Republic of Iraq; God Bless America..."

A REQUEST FOR HELP

Horsefeathers received the following e-mail and hopes our caring readers will have some helpful suggestions.

I am a senior citizen and during the Clinton administration I had an extremely good, and well paying job. I took numerous vacations and had several vacation homes. Since Pres. Bush took office, I have seen my entire life change for the worse. I lost my job. I lost my two sons in the terrible Iraqi war. I lost my homes. I lost my health insurance. As a matter of fact I lost virtually everything and became homeless. Adding insult to injury, the authorities found me living like an animal. Instead of helping me, they arrested me. I will do anything that Sen. Kerry wants to insure that a Democrat is back in the White House come next year. Bush must go. I just thought you and your readers would like to know how one senior citizen views the Bush administration.
Thank you for taking time to read my letter.

Sincerely,
.
Saddam Hussein

IRISH SURPRISE!

While hordes of aggrieved Eurabian appeasers, Michael Moore loving, America and Israel hating leftists dominated the coverage of President Bush's recent visit to Ireland, here's one eloquent Irishman's alternative view:

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

Honey-talking Bill lacks George's guts and honour

MOST of the crazies who called for George Bush's arrest this week believe we were safer when Bill Clinton was bedding interns in the Oval Office.

These political adolescents think the ex-president possessed qualities of leadership that are lost on his simple-minded successor. But those who seriously study the record will know it is actually George Bush who fits the description of a truly great leader.

Glancing through the ego-soaked pages of Clinton's new memoir - My Life, you would never guess that he abandoned reason and scruple by making statesmen out of people like Yasser Arafat and Gerry Adams, thereby destroying any hope for long-term peace in either Northern Ireland or the Middle East.

Bill Clinton, during his time in office, quite simply squandered America's moral authority that Ronald Reagan restored in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.

He did so by vetoing intervention to stop the Rwandan genocide, refusing to stand up to Slobodan Milosevic until he had wasted most of Bosnia and Kosovo, and by abandoning countless innocent Somalis once the going got a little tough. Under his nose, Kim Jong Il restarted his nuclear programme, Saddam bored holes in the sanctions and expelled the arms inspectors from Iraq, while Al-Qaeda used the protection of the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan.

In response, Clinton bombed Iraq for the duration of his impeachment trial without United Nation approval. If it's war crimes the anti-war loons are concerned with they need first prosecute their darling Bill.

In contrast, George W Bush has rid the world of Saddam Hussein's regime and the vile Taliban - killers of 2.5 million innocent Muslims between them, thereby depriving Al-Qaeda of its sole state sponsor.

Thanks to the President's moral courage, Iraq has now the most ethnically diverse government and most liberal constitution in the Middle East.

The 400 towns that Saddam destroyed have now been rebuilt and all of the country's schools, hospitals, and universities have been refurbished and reopened.

Libya has been disarmed, North Korea and the Iranians are being forced to follow suit, and a worldwide underground nuclear network has been exposed and shut down.

Bill Clinton liked to honey up his speeches with talk of combating Aids, but as Bob Geldof rightly insists, it is actually George Bush who has done more to alleviate Africa's misery than any American president in history.

That combined with the fact that he has rejoined UNESCO and paid all of America's outstanding debts to the United Nations, makes George Bush's period in office one of the noblest on record.

Bill Clinton's eight years of dithering led to unmitigated disasters that could well have been avoided had he possessed even a smidgen of the current president's honour and grit.

It has taken George Bush less than four years to clean up his predecessor's mess and restore the moral balance.

And that is why calls for his arrest are as contemptible as they are stupid.
---Mark Dooley.

June 26, 2004

BILL CLINTON: STILL MASSA OF THE LIBERAL PLANTATION

        Contemporary liberal utopianism is the perfect faith for our therapeutic age. It asserts the primacy of "feelings" and contends that we are all victims. There are no "bad" or "evil" people, but rather, troubled and conflicted individuals needing to be empathically understood. Some unfortunates, however, are accorded higher victim status than others. Thus black people, no matter how successful, are told by their liberal plantation masters that they are, in reality, the unfair targets of cruel racism. No matter that they amply share in the fruits of our gloriously successful democratic capitalism, no matter what their individual achievements, they're to be pitied and condescended to as victims who wouldn't have made it without liberal affirmative action programs. Bill Clinton understood this dynamic: present oneself as a victim and any transgressions will be forgiven, even welcomed as the understandable reaction to unjust treatment. He was and remains a supremely talented and charming con man, our Felix Krull. One of his most extraordinary feats was persuading blacks that he was really one of them. This soft and cowardly Mama's boy who successfully evaded adult responsibility, was indulged at every turn, became the darling of the black community. Why? Well he surely knew how to play the victim gambit, how to share that frisson of pleasure at pulling the wool over hapless liberals while gaming the system. Now it turns out he liked their food---especially when prepared by celebrity chefs.

"...At one point, we were all in the kitchen with a soul food feast prepared by Wolfgang Puck," Harris said. "Clinton cracked me up. Here was the president of the United States, sitting in the kitchen with us chomping on a slice of sweet potato pie and shooting the breeze, just like a brother. I thought to myself, 'A lot of people fake it and try to be hip and cool and connected. But Bill Clinton was really comfortable and vested with us. He may not have been the first black president, but he was reasonable facsimile thereof...'"
See the rest here.

OUR FRIENDS THE SAUDIS

The Prophet's Mosque in Madinah is the second most revered place of worship for Muslims around the world. Millions of Muslims visit the Mosque each year, to worship, to visit the Prophet's grave, and to see the city that gave birth to Islam. Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch quotes the oily Prince Bandar as saying recently: "senior religious scholars in Saudi Arabia have continually and unequivocally condemned terrorism. In our war against terrorism, these condemnations are a powerful weapon." Here's the latest from one of those "senior religious scholars" speaking to thousands of worshipers at the Prophet's Mosque.

Muslims Told Not to Be Swayed by Foreign Ideas
Mahmoud Ahmad, Arab News

MADINAH, 26 June 2004 — "An imam of the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah yesterday lashed out against “infidels” whom he accused of being bent on the destruction of Muslim societies.

“The enemies of Islam including the Jews, Christians and atheists and those who follow the Westernized and the corrupt (in Muslim) society are waging relentless campaigns against the Muslim nation,” Saleh Al-Budair said in the Friday sermon.

“Using various methods to further their aims, they want to destabilize the Muslim nation, destroying its morality, obliterating its identity and preventing it from fulfilling its message,” the imam said.

Sheikh Al-Budair said Muslims had allowed “infidel nations” to take over their societies and dictate to them what they should do.

“It is extremely regrettable that many Muslims have opened their countries, their businesses, their homes and their hearts to those alien trends and handed over their societies to the infidel nations who deviated from the right path,” he told thousands of faithful who thronged the mosque complex.

He said Muslims must protect the sanctity of their religion and not be carried away by “deviant ideas”. Instead they must stick to the Shariah. Muslims “are too honorable, noble and righteous to imitate or copy corrupt, miserable and confused infidel nations that are only concerned with pursuing their own lusts and that are ready to stake their own life in order to enjoy pleasures and delights,” the imam said.

Al-Budair warned following non-Muslim examples was the road to perdition but added Muslims, equipped with the best of teachings, were capable of fighting their enemies..."

June 24, 2004

REASSURING NEWS FROM THE RELIGION OF PEACE

How long will political correctness prevent us from naming our enemy? Here's how so-called "moderate" Muslim spokesmen are reacting to the televised beheadings of innocents by cowardly savages shouting "Allahu Akbar".:

According to Sam Hamod, former director of the Islamic Center in the District (of Columbia)who is now a lecturer and writer near San Diego"...If they are going to have an execution, the [executioner] must say a prayer and ask for forgiveness from God for what he is doing and pray for the person's soul being killed," he said. "You can't do it like the idiots on TV. The right thing to do is slit the person's throat, not cut off the entire head..."
See the rest of the Koranic exegesis here.

June 22, 2004

TORTURING SADDAM

        Ignoring the Geneva Convention, U.S. interrogators have utilized a prohibited and diabolical form of torture to extract information from Saddam Hussein. Obtaining permission from Sonny Mehta at Knopf, they connected Mr. Hussein by earphones to an endlessly looped audio tape of Bill Clinton reading his memoirs. After the very first paragraph--"Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered "no"—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship..." Mr. Hussein was screaming for mercy. He pleaded (through a translator): "Please, I beg you, feed me through the woodchipper and put an end to the horror." The highly trained interrogators fought against their natural inclination to sympathize with his torment, but in accordance with their training reminded him of the novels he'd inflicted on his own helpless countrymen. He argued that his own fantasies were clearly labeled as fiction, while Mr. Clinton's fictions were recounted as historical fact. "I beg you", he pleaded "do anything to my body, but this mental torture is unbearable."
        Interrogators continued the pressure until, holding up, and threatening to read aloud a copy of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Mr. Hussein finally cracked.

June 21, 2004

CONFRONTING THE U.N.

The United Nations exists on two planes: 1)reality and 2) fantasy. Professor Anne Bayefsky had the courage to confront the latter with the former. While it prattles of peace and human rights, it promotes fanatical hatred and genocide. Ms. Bayefsky went to the heart of darkness, the UN itself and spoke truth to power. The entire speech should be read here.

"...The U.N. has become the leading global purveyor of anti-Semitism--intolerance and inequality against the Jewish people and its state.

Not only have many of the U.N. members most responsible for this state of affairs rendered their own countries Judenrein, they have succeeded in almost entirely expunging concern about Jew-hatred from the U.N. docket. From 1965, when anti-Semitism was deliberately excluded from a treaty on racial discrimination, to last fall, when a proposal for a General Assembly resolution on anti-Semitism was withdrawn after Ireland capitulated to Arab and Muslim opposition, mention of anti-Semitism has continually ground the wheels of U.N.-led multilateralism to a halt..."

June 20, 2004

MUST READING FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN

     Bill Clinton's much hyped memoirs are already #1 on Amazon. What did we expect? The perfect representative of our therapeutic culture, Bill Clinton, turns out enough platitudinous psycho-babble to fill 937 pages. He is throughout, the noble victim- betrayed, disrespected and misunderstood. He's proud though, because he cared. He loved us, perhaps too much. In the end, this charming psychopath managed to avoid being expelled from office, while America slept through the roaring 90's. Bill Clinton played Gatsby while our enemies plotted to kill us. We should have no fear, however, for Mr. Clinton has the answer. He knows what to do. Our enemies are very angry and we know that anger is pathological. Anger is a maladaptive reaction to childhood mistreatment and frustration, and therefore we should empathically understand our adversaries. "I'm hoping that by writing this book, I'll make other people feel free to let go of their anger and resentment and not be afraid to admit what they've done wrong," Mr Clinton tells Time. Thanks so much Bill; let's tell that to the Islamo-Nazis who are beheading Americans. If only we could get them to "let go of their anger and resentment..." Perhaps Bill Clinton could send a copy to Osama bin Laden.

June 19, 2004

NOT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

        In yesterday's speech to soldiers at Ft. Lewis, President Bush had a message to the handwringing appeasers at the NYTimes Editorial Board. Describing our efforts in Iraq he said: "...At the same time that we're helping the Iraqis bring the terrorists to justice, we're helping the Iraqi people to rebuild the basic infrastructure of their country. This is tough work. It's hard work. It's hard work to go from a society terrorized by a tyrant to a free society. But we have done this kind of work before. I want you to listen to how The New York Times described conditions in Germany in November, 1946. This was 18 months after the fall of Berlin. "Germany is a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. The basic elements of recovery and peace are lacking. European capitals are frightened by the prospect of a German collapse. In every military headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their best to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy they admit has failed..."

        Guess what part of this speech was not reported in the NYTimes?

June 17, 2004

JOE LIEBERMAN, DEMOCRATIC FOSSIL

It's unfortunate that Joe Lieberman sold his soul to Al Gore and the Demo-appeasers. His wise words now, fall on deaf ears amongst his fellow democrats, and worse, sound hypocritical to those of us who once identified with the party of Roosevelt, Truman and Henry Jackson. But that was a long, long time ago. Still, Lieberman's words are a nostalgic reminder of a vanished age, when liberalism was more than a self-flattering pose.
"...What we are fighting for in Iraq and around the world is freedom. What we are fighting against is an Islamic terrorist totalitarian movement which is as dire a threat to individual liberty as the fascist and communist totalitarian threats we faced and defeated were in the last century..." See the rest here.

THE WAR WITHIN

Michael Moore is a hero to those who believe that defeating George Bush is the most important goal of the war on terror. Apparently they share that goal with the noble idealists of Hezbollah: Moore's latest, "Fahrenheit 9/11 gets help offer from Hezbollah" "...According to Screen International, the UAE-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has been contacted by organisations related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon with offers of help..."

The war declared on us by Islamo-Nazis is being fought on many battlefields, not just in the steaming deserts of the Middle East. Our enemies know that they can count on a certain number of our aggrieved wordsmith intellectuals, to rally around the totalitarian utopian, anti-American cause. Listen to the 9-11 commissioners and hear the truth of Cicero's observation two millenia ago.:

''A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.''
--Marcus Tullius Cicero 42B.C

SULLLIVAN CONTEST UPDATE

        Back in March Horsefeathers announced a contest to predict the date on which Andrew Sullivan's staunch post 9-11 support for President Bush would give way to an endorsement of John Kerry. Well, we thought the day had come and were expecting to name a winner when Sullivan explained in the current issue (May 11) of The Advocate that: "...it’s time to say something very clearly: Bush’s endorsement of antigay discrimination in the U.S. Constitution itself is a deal-breaker. I can’t endorse him this fall. Like many other gay men and women who have supported him, despite serious disagreements, I feel betrayed, abused, attacked..." We carefully read the rest of the article and...still no endorsement of John Kerry. As the song says: "Breaking up is hard to do", so it looks like it will take a bit longer for the expected endorsement.

June 16, 2004

BOOK REVIEW: THE RIGHT NATION

The war declared on us by Islamo-Nazi totalitarians forces us, once again, to be clear about what makes us Americans. To that end, friend of Horsefeathers, Richard K. Munro, reviews THE RIGHT NATION, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.:

THE RIGHT NATION by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge is a worthy, timely and ambitious book. The authors try to explain the nature of American conservatism, its unique nature, its current ascendancy, its future. These English gentlemen do a reasonably good job but I do not rate this book with Lord Bryce’s American Commonweath or Tocquevilles’ Democracy in America.

THE RIGHT NATION is at its best when it deals with current history. The authors display some understanding of what makes Texas and the American heartland tick, though I got the impression they never attended an American sporting event, barbecued, pulled a trigger of a gun or skinned a deer. The authors are strictly first class hotel Englishmen with soft hands. I found their sympathy for gay rights repetitive, predictable, very fashionably European, and frankly tiresome. They understand that Liberalism is intellectually bankrupt and in retreat but do not link this to the cult of childlessness and abortion rights of the Sangerites and the healthy demography of family oriented religious conservatives who out breed “pro-choice” liberals two or three to one.

The scope of THE RIGHT NATION is broad. Their basic thesis derives from Turner- that the conditions of America and her frontier helped shape her character and the “conservative” movement. The authors, following Edmund Burke, characterize traditional conservatism as being based on six principles

1) Suspicion of the power of the state, though I believe it would be better to characterize this as a belief in limited government and the idea that the purpose of government is to protect individual rights which include property.

2) Preference for liberty over “equality”, by which I suppose the authors mean socialist “leveling”. I believe this is a mischaracterization of what most Americans believe is equality. Americans do not believe in equality of condition, just fairness. Americans have always understood liberty needs be a married woman, married, that is, to other values such as order, morality or rule of law.

3) Patriotism. Americans are patriotic but the authors appear mystified that a modern people could be so flag-loving and nationalistic. Loving the Marine Corps, the Airborne or “regiments” is not “obsessive” but necessary and honorable if one is to have a free country. Freedom is not free. Where they come from, concepts like the “regiment”, nationalism and patriotism are obviously passé (at least among the elites).

4) Belief in established institutions and hierarchies. Perhaps traditional conservatives have believed in something similar to this but I think it better to say a deep RESPECT for legitimate authority as well as a respect for traditional values. Reaganism showed respect but not subservience to man-made institutions which American conservatives are pragmatically willing to adapt and modernize and throw out if necessary for the good of society and the individual. American conservatives are not dinosaurs but survivors, “men of the west”, looking towards the future and adapting to new challenges and new circumstances.

5) A pessimistic backward looking pragmatism. The authors are right when they say Reaganism and American conservativism is not pessimistic at all but confident and optimistic. Americans believe their Constitution will give them ordered change and reform not utopianism, anarchy and revolution

6) Elitism, or the belief that certain groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority of intellect, or financial resources. The authors of THE RIGHT NATION are correct when they characterize Americans as essentially equalitarians who have a deep distrust of elitism, inherited privilege be it Ivy League or Affirmative Action. No American would ever stand for an educated “clerisy” to tell him what to do or what to believe, hence the populist revolt against the liberal quasi-socialist establishment of the interlocking Ivy League and Washington elites.

There are historical errors in THE RIGHT NATION. The very proud American by choice, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer, was not a “visiting Frenchman.” The authors write “in the decades after its birth the new republic sided with revolutionary France”; the authors never seem to have heard of Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality and Adams’ undeclared naval war with France. The authors also say the USA has never had a “left-wing government”. If by that they mean we have never experienced a communist take-over they are right, but men (and women) of the left have ruled cities, states and presided over the federal government.

If there is a villain in the book it is Attorney General John Ashcroft who is unfairly compared to Oliver Cromwell. The authors do not mention the integrity and hard work that even critics of Ashcroft have noticed in his administration of the Justice Department. They are more concerned with Ashcroft’s personal Puritanism than with Bin Laden and his Islamofascist movement which is mentioned only a few times. This will make liberals happy but personally I am not worried about being dragged into Mr. Ashcroft’s church and being deprogrammed anytime soon. I am worried about Americans (and their friends) being blown up and murdered and Ashcroft seems to be doing a good job of stopping the bad guys.

They worry about the terrorists in Guantanamo but never seem to have heard of Executive Order 9066, the Korematsu case or the Quirin case. Strong executives like Lincoln and FDR have known that in times of war order and victory must trump civil liberties, if only temporarily, and in any case the civil liberties of citizens are not the same as rights enjoyed by spies, terrorists or foreign nationals.

Unlike Tocqueville or Lord Bryce, Micklethwaith and Wooldridge cannot quite achieve genuine objectivity. The influence of a pinkish Oxford education shows- in the authors’ ridicule of (“dumb”) Southerners who mistake their magazine for the “Communist”; it shows in their disdain for (‘big hair”, i.e. “dumb”) Fox television blondes whom they call “media vixens”, as well as in their quoting the anti-Semitic Marxian economist Werner Sombart, and making obscure references to Gosplan “the Soviet State planning Commission.” Stalin is mentioned once in the entire book, and Castro only twice, but Joseph McCarthy over and over because for many liberals he characterized American Conservativism in the 1950’s, though Eisenhower and Reagan not McCarthy or the John Birch Society more genuinely represented the American idea.

If we want to understand the appeal and essence of American neo-conservatism THE RIGHT NATION a flawed book. How can a book on American conservatism not even mention Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Harry Jaffa and barely mention John Locke, Winston Churchill or Lord Acton ?

The authors are right when they say American conservativism is about ideas, and when they say Hayek is the “John Calvin” of the new individualistic American nationalism- which is something more than “conservatism”. At its heart America is about FREEDOM and the values of the Declaration and the US Constitution: life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. The power and appeal of American conservatism is in its deeply held belief that America is one nation, with liberty and justice for all, under God, only then under the Constitution, because there is always a higher law and the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

Richard K. Munro
Teacher of history, English and Spanish
Arvin High School, Arvin, California
The Red-Bricked Nook of the Many Welcomes

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