Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features some christmas eve kinda tunes. Enjoy!
Charles Brown - Merry Christmas Baby
Wall Street Owns The Country
A Speech by Mary Elizabeth Lease (circa 1890)
This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs-that's what came of it. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them... We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out... We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.
News and Opinion
NSA program stopped no terror attacks, says White House panel member
A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”
While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”
“We found none,” said Stone. ...
The conclusions of the panel’s reports were at direct odds with public statements by President Barack Obama and U.S. intelligence officials. “Lives have been saved,” Obama told reporters last June, referring to the bulk collection program and another program that intercepts communications overseas. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information.”
Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” [Snowden] said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.” ...
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight in Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to supervise. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate. ...
The NSA’s business is “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf. ...
“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”
If Snowden Returned to US For Trial, All Whistleblower Evidence Would Likely Be Inadmissible
There seems to be a new talking point from government officials since a federal judge ruled NSA surveillance is likely unconstitutional last week: if Edward Snowden thinks he's a whistleblower, he should come back and stand trial. ...
These statements belie a fundamental misunderstanding about how Espionage Act prosecutions work.
If Edward Snowden comes back to the US to face trial, he likely will not be able to tell a jury why he did what he did, and what happened because of his actions. Contrary to common sense, there is no public interest exception to the Espionage Act. Prosecutors in recent cases have convinced courts that the intent of the leaker, the value of leaks to the public, and the lack of harm caused by the leaks are irrelevant—and are therefore inadmissible in court. ...
This would mean Snowden could not be able to tell the jury that his intent was to inform the American public about the government’s secret interpretations of laws used to justify spying on millions of citizens without their knowledge, as opposed to selling secrets to hostile countries for their advantage.
If the prosecution had their way, Snowden would also not be able to explain to a jury that his leaks sparked more than two dozen bills in Congress, and half a dozen lawsuits, all designed to rein in unconstitutional surveillance. He wouldn’t be allowed to explain how his leaks caught an official lying to Congress, that they’ve led to a White House review panel recommending forty-six reforms for US intelligence agencies, or that they've led to an unprecedented review of government secrecy. He wouldn't be able to talk about the sea change in the public's perception of privacy since his leaks, or the fact that a majority of the public considers him a whistleblower.
He might not even be able to bring up the fact that a US judge ruled that surveillance he exposed was ruled to likely be unconstitutional.
The NSA is Coming to Town
Snowden Slams NSA Review as 'Cosmetic'
The recommendations set forth by an internal government NSA review panel are nothing but "cosmetic changes" staged to "restore public confidence" in the U.S. government's spying activities, charged NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in an email exchange with Brazil's O Globo news station. ...
"Their job wasn't to protect privacy or deter abuses, it was to restore public confidence in these spying activities. Many of the recommendations they made are cosmetic changes," said Snowden. ...
During the O Globo broadcast, reporters said Snowden had reiterated his vow saying, "I will never exchange information for asylum and I don't think the Brazilian government would do that either. A grant of asylum should always be a purely humanitarian decision."
Snowden added that U.S. law did not distinguish between a whistleblower revealing illegal programs "and a spy secretly selling documents to terrorists," O Globo reported.
Latest Snowden revelations expose Obama’s lies on NSA spy programs
Just hours after receiving a report from his hand-picked advisory panel on National Security Agency surveillance operations, President Barack Obama used his end of the year press conference Friday to deliver an Orwellian defense of unrestrained US spying both at home and abroad.
“I have confidence that the NSA is not engaging in domestic surveillance and snooping around,” Obama said, despite the cascade of revelations proving just the opposite. These revelations, including the latest from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, have established that the agency is collecting and storing billions of files recording the phone calls, text messages, emails, Internet searches and even the daily movements of virtually ever US citizen, not to mention those of hundreds of millions of people abroad.
“The United States is a country that abides by rule of law, that cares deeply about privacy, that cares deeply about civil liberties,” he added. Who, at this late juncture, does the American president think he’s fooling? One only has to read the ruling by a Washington, DC Federal District Court judge—which was then stayed in the interest of “national security”—finding the surveillance methods of the NSA to be “almost Orwellian,” and its activities unconstitutional, i.e., criminal.
Rep. Mike Rogers Goes On National TV To Lie About NSA Programs And Snowden
Number 1 NSA fan (and, laughingly, the guy supposedly in charge of oversight), Rep. Mike Rogers went on George Stephanopoulos' show this weekend to talk about the latest NSA goings-on and as far as I can tell, he appeared to be allergic to the truth, because there's an awful lot of things he said that are simply, factually, bullshit. Let's take a few examples, starting with the big one about Ed Snowden:
Rogers: Here's where I think he's crossed the line now, George, he has contacted a foreign country and said, 'I will sell you classified information for something of value.' That's what we call a traitor in this country.
Stephanopoulos: You're talking about his open letter to Brazil?
Rogers: Absolutely! He has traded something of value for his own personal gain that jeopardizes the national security of the United States. We call that treason. And I think that letter, very clearly, lays out who this gentlemen is and what his intentions were. Clearly.
What he's referring to is the open letter Snowden sent to the people of Brazil, which we posted recently. Nowhere in there does Snowden do anything that Rogers says above. He does not offer to sell anything. He does not request anything. He does not offer them classified information. In fact, he does the opposite. He offers an unconditional promise to help politicians there with their investigation, if they want, but clearly stated he would only do so "wherever appropriate and lawful." And at no point did he request anything in return, let alone something of value.
Obama Priorities: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ leak investigators now target of leak probe
More than two years after sensitive information about the Osama bin Laden raid was disclosed to Hollywood filmmakers, Pentagon and CIA investigations haven’t publicly held anyone accountable despite internal findings that the leakers were former CIA Director Leon Panetta and the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.
Instead, the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office is working to root out who might have disclosed the findings on Panetta and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers to a nonprofit watchdog group and to McClatchy.
While the information wasn’t classified, the inspector general’s office has pursued the new inquiry aggressively, grilling its own investigators, as well as the former director of its whistle-blowing unit, according to several people, including a congressional aide. They requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues surrounding the 2012 movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The handling of the disclosures of protected information to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the award-winning account of the U.S. hunt for bin Laden, points up an apparent double standard in President Barack Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on unauthorized leaks.
Disclosures by lower-level officials have been vigorously pursued. ... Rarely, however, has the administration taken criminal action against senior officials for leaking.
Fed's 100th birthday: What's to celebrate - the Great Recession?
A Look at Who's Poised to Become No.2 at the Fed
The problem is that Stanley Fischer, as much as anybody else, is responsible for the kinds of economics that led us into the great depression--or quasi great depression, if you want to call it that--that we are experiencing at the moment. He is a mainstream economist who is a strong believer in the efficiency of financial markets, a strong believer in the usefulness of capital flows from one country to another. And at the IMF he oversaw the conditionality and the restructuring during the Asian financial crisis. He took South Korea, which was a pretty well functioning economy that had a financial crisis, and used the--he and the other members of the IMF and the Treasury Department under Larry Summers, and used their power to restructure the Korean economy as a neoliberal type of economy.
Generally speaking, he's very much in favor of mostly free market economics. Of course, he's not stupid. He's very smart. And he's learned over time. But basically he's one of the architects of the Washington Consensus, which is has gotten us into this mess to begin with.
But on top of that, he was a vice president at Citibank from 2002 to 2005, during the time when Citibank was developing enormous leverage, new risky products, essentially getting insolvent and helping to drive the U.S. and the global economy into the tank in the process. He was sitting there at Citibank under Robert Rubin, and as far as anybody can tell, did very little to try to stop that kind of policy, and probably profited quite handsomely from it.
Here's the Worst Part of the Target Data Breach
You know what the most infuriating part of the massive data breach at Target is? This:
Over the last decade, most countries have moved toward using credit cards that carry information on embeddable microchips rather than magnetic strips. The additional encryption on so-called smart cards has made the kind of brazen data thefts suffered by Target almost impossible to pull off in most other countries.
Because the U.S. is one of the few places yet to widely deploy such technology, the nation has increasingly become the focus of hackers seeking to steal such information. The stolen data can easily be turned into phony credit cards that are sold on black markets around the world.
There's really no excuse for this. The technology to avoid this kind of hacking is available, and it's been in real-world use for many years.
US Government Spends Over $1 Billion a Year on Sweatshop Buying Spree
New York Times report cites international trade agreements as catalyst behind poor federal procurement practices
Despite pledging zero tolerance against overseas factories that scorn fair labor and safety practices, according to a New York Times investigation published Sunday, the United States federal government, "one of the world's biggest clothing buyers," spends over $1.5 billion a year purchasing items from reported sweatshops.
According to a series of interviews and audits obtained by the Times, American government suppliers frequently purchase military apparel, federal employee uniforms and other supplies from companies with reported safety violations and harsh working conditions including padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records, underage workers, worker intimidation and, in some cases, torture. ...
Speaking to a number of federal procurement officials, Gordon notes that supposed "free-trade" agreements and low-cost-above-all-else mandates have incentivized the federal government away from pushing for fair labor reform or buying practices.
He writes:
The Obama administration, for example, has favored free-trade agreements to spur development in poor countries by cultivating low-skill, low-overhead jobs like those in the cut-and-sew industry. The removal of trade barriers has also driven prices down by making it easier for retailers to decamp from one country to the next in the hunt for cheap labor. Most economists say that these savings have directly benefited consumers, including institutional buyers like the American government. But free-trade zones often lack effective methods for ensuring compliance with local labor laws, and sometimes accelerate a race to the bottom in terms of wages.
An international fair labor law "doesn't exist for the exact same reason that American consumers still buy from sweatshops,” Daniel Gordon, a former top federal procurement official, told the New York Times. "The government cares most about getting the best price.”
Wow, what was it they say about justice delayed?
NYC Settles 2004 RNC Protest Claims
New York City has reportedly settled hundreds of lawsuits over the mass arrest of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Over 1,800 people were detained during the RNC, with many held in squalid conditions and for far longer than legally allowed. According to The New York Times, the new settlement would cover most or all pending lawsuits, with some payments totaling several million dollars.
Californians outraged after police acquire military armored vehicle to patrol city
Police in Salinas, California are under fire after the department acquired a heavily armored military vehicle for SWAT team operations.
The $650,000 vehicle was gifted to the Salinas Police Department from the government through the 1033 program, which redistributes used equipment to other agencies. According to KSBW, the truck was used in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...
Posting on the police department’s Facebook page, citizens criticized the acquisition as excessive, as well as a sign of the militarization of law enforcement.
“That vehicle is made for war,” wrote one commenter. “Do not use my safety to justify that vehicle,” another one wrote. “The Salinas Police Department is just a bunch of cowards that want to use that vehicle as intimidation and to terrorize the citizens of this city.”
Mandela received Mossad training
Nelson Mandela received training from Israel’s Mossad in the 1960s, an Israeli government document has revealed.
Mandela, the former South African president and anti-apartheid leader who died earlier this month, was trained by Mossad agents in weaponry and sabotage in 1962, according to a report Thursday in Haaretz that was based on a document in the Israel State Archives labeled “Top Secret.” ...
The letter noted that Mandela “showed an interest in the methods of the Haganah and other Israeli underground movements “ and that “he greeted our men with ‘Shalom,’ was familiar with the problems of Jewry and of Israel, and gave the impression of being an intellectual. The staff tried to make him into a Zionist,” the Mossad operative wrote.
South Sudan sees 'mass ethnic killings'
New evidence is emerging of alleged ethnic killings committed during more than a week of fighting in South Sudan. ...
A reporter in the capital, Juba, quoted witnesses as saying more than 200 people, mostly ethnic Nuers, had been shot by security forces.
The UN says it has discovered a mass grave in Bentiu in the oil-rich Unity State, containing about 75 bodies.
"There are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba," UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for the Geneva-based human rights office told the BBC the ethnicity of those killed in Bentiu was unclear - but there are reports they are ethnic Dinkas. ...
The official death toll stands at 500, but aid agencies say the true figure is likely to be much higher.
There has also been fighting in Upper Nile State but few details have emerged.
Another 81,000 people have been displaced, the UN's humanitarian agency says, with about half seeking shelter at UN bases.
How South Sudan leaders squandered nation-building effort
Whether South Sudan tips into a broader ethnic war or draws back from the brink largely depends on two men who have long tussled for power: the president from the dominant Dinka tribe and the ambitious deputy he sacked in July, Riek Machar, a Nuer.
Both ethnic groups, spurred on by their leaders, have clashed in the past, giving the latest spiral of violence an air of depressing inevitability for many South Sudanese, desperate for development in one of the poorest places in Africa.
"Neither cares much about their people," said Chuo, who repairs motorbikes in Juba. "Instead, they are focusing too much on personal grudges - the left-overs from their old days."
The United States and other Western backers of the new nation are scrambling with regional African states to broker talks, but have limited leverage to end fighting that has killed hundreds of people and driven 40,000 to U.N. bases for shelter.
Fears over disappearance of 150 Syrian refugees from Greek village
Activists, lawyers, human rights groups, opposition MPs, immigration experts and international officials are becoming increasingly concerned about the heavy-handed tactics Greek authorities use to keep immigrants away.
In a recent report released by Amnesty International, Greece was strongly criticised for its "deplorable treatment" of would-be refugees, especially Syrians desperate to escape their nation's descent civil war.
Enforced deportations – highlighted by an alarming rise of migrant deaths – have spurred the criticism.
In contravention of international conventions signed by Athens, coastguard officials and police officers have waged a concerted campaign to stop thousands from accessing EU territory via Greece. Illegal pushbacks have been the focus of those efforts, according to human rights groups.
The drive has intensified as Greece – long seen as the EU's easiest backdoor entrance – has struggled to keep its economic and social fabric together in the face of the country's worst crisis in modern times. Since prime minister Antonis Samaras's conservative-led coalition assumed power in the midst of the crisis last year, authorities have faced charges of violently apprehending migrants, beating them and stripping them of their belongings. Special coastguard units – often masked and dressed in black – have been accused of dumping migrants, without any consideration for their safety, in Turkish territorial waters.
It's a neoliberal christmas in Britain:
Brit-Grinch: UK govt tells people not to binge at Christmas, pay rent
'What Part Of Sacred Don't You Understand?'
The Paris auction of 27 sacred American-Indian items earlier this month marks just the latest in a series of conflicts between what tribes consider sacred and what western cultures think is fair game in the marketplace. ...
Many tribes have run into this problem when it comes to sacred land. The issue came to a head for 13 tribes outraged by the idea of the Arizona Snowbowl in Flagstaff making snow out of reclaimed wastewater on a mountain they consider sacred. In 2008 the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that making artificial snow, while offensive, posed quote "no substantial burden" on the tribes' exercise of religion on the San Francisco Peaks. Today, treated wastewater is pumped several miles up the mountain to make snow. ...
[Navajo activist Klee] Benally said tribal members had difficulty explaining to judges how spraying a mountain with treated waste water snow was desecrating it. Sure, they could still hold ceremonies there. And Navajo medicine men could still pick herbs there, and the mountain was not going away, but the mountain was now contaminated, defiled. ...
Whether it is the auction of the Hopi sacred objects or discussions about the economic development of mountains that many tribes consider to be holy ground, the resulting conflicts often boils down to how you define what is sacred.
"Christianity is not a religion rooted in the land as is indigenous spirituality," says Professor Riding In. "Christianity is portable. It can be taken anywhere."
The Evening Greens
Millions in Dark Money Funding Climate Change Denial: Report
“It is not just a couple of rogue individuals doing this. This is a large-scale political effort.”
According to the study titled "Institutionalizing Delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations," while the largest and most consistent funders of climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative foundations and industry groups, the majority of donations come from "dark money," or concealed funding.
Delving into what he calls the climate change counter-movement, or CCCM, report author and Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert Brulle uncovers the various players behind the powerful global warming misinformation campaign.
"Like a play on Broadway, the countermovement has stars in the spotlight—often prominent contrarian scientists or conservative politicians—but behind the stars is an organizational structure of directors, script writers and producers, in the form of conservative foundations," he says. "If you want to understand what's driving this movement, you have to look at what's going on behind the scenes."
What Brulle found is that since 2008, many of the big name funders of climate denial including ExxonMobil Foundation and Koch Affiliated Foundations have noticeably pulled back from making publicly traceable contributions. And coinciding with this decline in traceable funding, "the amount of funding given to countermovement organizations through third party pass-through foundations like Donors Trust and Donors Capital, whose funders cannot be traced, has risen dramatically."
Former BP geologist: peak oil is here and it will 'break economies'
At a lecture on 'Geohazards' earlier this month as part of the postgraduate Natural Hazards for Insurers course at University College London (UCL), Dr. Richard G. Miller, who worked for BP from 1985 before retiring in 2008, said that official data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), US Energy Information Administration (EIA), International Monetary Fund (IMF), among other sources, showed that conventional oil had most likely peaked around 2008.
Dr. Miller critiqued the official industry line that global reserves will last 53 years at current rates of consumption, pointing out that "peaking is the result of declining production rates, not declining reserves." Despite new discoveries and increasing reliance on unconventional oil and gas, 37 countries are already post-peak, and global oil production is declining at about 4.1% per year, or 3.5 million barrels a day (b/d) per year. ...
Dr. Miller, who prepared annual in-house projections of future oil supply for BP from 2000 to 2007, refers to this as the "ATM problem" – "more money, but still limited daily withdrawals." As a consequence: "Production of conventional liquid oil has been flat since 2008. Growth in liquid supply since then has been largely of natural gas liquids [NGL]- ethane, propane, butane, pentane - and oil-sand bitumen." ...
The fundamental dependence of global economic growth on cheap oil supplies suggests that as we continue into the age of expensive oil and gas, without appropriate efforts to mitigate the impacts and transition to a new energy system, the world faces a future of economic and geopolitical turbulence:
"In the US, high oil prices correlate with recessions, although not all recessions correlate with high oil prices. It does not prove causation, but it is highly likely that when the US pays more than 4% of its GDP for oil, or more than 10% of GDP for primary energy, the economy declines as money is sucked into buying fuel instead of other goods and services... A shortage of oil will affect everything in the economy. I expect more famine, more drought, more resource wars and a steady inflation in the energy cost of all commodities."
Scientists Link Spike in Thyroid Disease to Fukushima Disaster
DESVARIEUX: Okay. So in your study, you talk about hypothyroidism happening in children. Can you elaborate?
MANGANO: Right. Well, not only do we know that the radiation has come here and that the greatest amounts were on the West Coast, but we also know in general that the people that are most susceptible to radiation exposure are the very young--the fetus, the infant, and the young child. A dose to an adult would not nearly be as harmful as the same dose to a fetus or a newborn.
We also know that the thyroid gland is extremely susceptible to radiation. The thyroid gland is a gland--looks like a butterfly kind of wrapped around the throat. One of the chemicals that's in that radioactive mix is radioactive iodine. And when you ingest iodine, it goes immediately from the stomach to the bloodstream to the thyroid gland, where it attacks and kills cells.
So at the time we started the article, really the only data from 2011 that we had was on newborns with hypothyroidism. Every baby in this state, in this country, every newborn baby is tested for certain diseases, one of which is hypothyroidism. And we looked at California, which, of course, is the most populated state, and we looked at the changes in the rates of hypothyroidism for the nine months after Fukushima compared to the previous year, and we found a 26 percent increase in the rate of hypothyroidism
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
Ellen Brown: 100 Years Is Enough: Time to Make the Fed a Public Utility
The Hard-to-Believe, Cruel Things Corporate Executives Say About Americans Struggling to Get By
A Little Night Music
Detroit Junior - Christmas Day
John Lee Hooker - Blues for Christmas
Lil' Ed And The Blues Imperials - I'm Your Santa
Clarence Carter - Back Door Santa
Bobby Parker - Sandy Claw Stole My Woman
Lowell Fulson - I Want To Spend Christmas With You
Albert King - Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin
Chuck Berry - Run Rudolph Run
Brian Setzer Orchestra - Jingle Bells
Jimmy Butler - Trim your tree
Freddie King - Christmas Tears
William Clarke - Please Let Me Be Your Santa Claus
Santa Baby - Santa Baby!
Pearl Bailey - A Five Pound Box Of Money
Rod Piazza - No Pretty Presents
Johnny Guarnieri - Santa's Secret
Jimmy McCracklin - Christmas Time
Louis Armstrong - Christmas Night In Harlem
Drifters - White Christmas
Keb' Mo' - Jingle Bell Jamboree
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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