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Case to watch. Biden social media case heads to Supreme Court.

Visits: 11

Case to watch. Biden social media case heads to Supreme Court. Even MSM has admitted that federal officials in the Biden administration have mettled in social media and how they should ban or delete what they think is misinformation. This from The Hill.

The Biden administration’s legal battle over social media content moderation will reach the Supreme Court on Monday, when the justices are set to hear arguments over whether federal officials violated the First Amendment by urging platforms to remove posts they deemed false or misleading.

Two Republican attorneys general brought the case in a challenge to the administration’s efforts to curb misinformation online — an effort they described as a government “campaign of censorship.” They purported federal officials “coordinated and colluded” with social media platforms to “identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content.”

Now the government lost before the 5th Circuit. Found that the White House, FBI and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention crossed the line into coercion.  After rehearing the case, the panel ruled that CISA did overstep also.

 

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Commentary Journalism. Life Links from other news sources. Opinion Reprints from others. Uncategorized

The downside to diversity.

Visits: 17

The downside to diversity.

This is an old article, and I remember when this came out the left lost it. Long read, but a good read.

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.

 

“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.

His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations

When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.

“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”

Putnam has long staked out ground as both a researcher and a civic player, someone willing to describe social problems and then have a hand in addressing them. He says social science should be “simultaneously rigorous and relevant,” meeting high research standards while also “speaking to concerns of our fellow citizens.” But on a topic as charged as ethnicity and race, Putnam worries that many people hear only what they want to.

“It would be unfortunate if a politically correct progressivism were to deny the reality of the challenge to social solidarity posed by diversity,” he writes in the new report. “It would be equally unfortunate if an ahistorical and ethnocentric conservatism were to deny that addressing that challenge is both feasible and desirable.”

Putnam is the nation’s premier guru of civic engagement. After studying civic life in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, Putnam turned his attention to the US, publishing an influential journal article on civic engagement in 1995 that he expanded five years later into the best-selling “Bowling Alone.” The book sounded a national wake-up call on what Putnam called a sharp drop in civic connections among Americans. It won him audiences with presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and made him one of the country’s best known social scientists.

Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in “social capital,” a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks — whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations — that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote.

 

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.

Putnam knew he had provocative findings on his hands. He worried about coming under some of the same liberal attacks that greeted Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s landmark 1965 report on the social costs associated with the breakdown of the black family. There is always the risk of being pilloried as the bearer of “an inconvenient truth,” says Putnam.

After releasing the initial results in 2001, Putnam says he spent time “kicking the tires really hard” to be sure the study had it right. Putnam realized, for instance, that more diverse communities tended to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents — all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have.

“People would say, ‘I bet you forgot about X,'” Putnam says of the string of suggestions from colleagues. “There were 20 or 30 X’s.”

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam’s findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

“Diversity, at least in the short run,” he writes, “seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”

The overall findings may be jarring during a time when it’s become commonplace to sing the praises of diverse communities, but researchers in the field say they shouldn’t be.

“It’s an important addition to a growing body of evidence on the challenges created by diversity,” says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser

In a recent study, Glaeser and colleague Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population. Glaeser says lower national social welfare spending in the US is a “macro” version of the decreased civic engagement Putnam found in more diverse communities within the country.

Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and Dora Costa of MIT reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

Birds of different feathers may sometimes flock together, but they are also less likely to look out for one another. “Everyone is a little self-conscious that this is not politically correct stuff,” says Kahn.

So how to explain New York, London, Rio de Janiero, Los Angeles — the great melting-pot cities that drive the world’s creative and financial economies?

The image of civic lassitude dragging down more diverse communities is at odds with the vigor often associated with urban centers, where ethnic diversity is greatest. It turns out there is a flip side to the discomfort diversity can cause. If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.

“Because they see the world and think about the world differently than you, that’s challenging,” says Page, author of “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.” “But by hanging out with people different than you, you’re likely to get more insights. Diverse teams tend to be more productive.”

In other words, those in more diverse communities may do more bowling alone, but the creative tensions unleashed by those differences in the workplace may vault those same places to the cutting edge of the economy and of creative culture.

Page calls it the “diversity paradox.” He thinks the contrasting positive and negative effects of diversity can coexist in communities, but “there’s got to be a limit.” If civic engagement falls off too far, he says, it’s easy to imagine the positive effects of diversity beginning to wane as well. “That’s what’s unsettling about his findings,” Page says of Putnam’s new work.

Meanwhile, by drawing a portrait of civic engagement in which more homogeneous communities seem much healthier, some of Putnam’s worst fears about how his results could be used have been realized. A stream of conservative commentary has begun — from places like the Manhattan Institute and “The American Conservative” — highlighting the harm the study suggests will come from large-scale immigration. But Putnam says he’s also received hundreds of complimentary emails laced with bigoted language. “It certainly is not pleasant when David Duke’s website hails me as the guy who found out racism is good,” he says.

In the final quarter of his paper, Putnam puts the diversity challenge in a broader context by describing how social identity can change over time. Experience shows that social divisions can eventually give way to “more encompassing identities” that create a “new, more capacious sense of ‘we,'” he writes.

Growing up in the 1950s in small Midwestern town, Putnam knew the religion of virtually every member of his high school graduating class because, he says, such information was crucial to the question of “who was a possible mate or date.” The importance of marrying within one’s faith, he says, has largely faded since then, at least among many mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

While acknowledging that racial and ethnic divisions may prove more stubborn, Putnam argues that such examples bode well for the long-term prospects for social capital in a multiethnic America.

In his paper, Putnam cites the work done by Page and others, and uses it to help frame his conclusion that increasing diversity in America is not only inevitable, but ultimately valuable and enriching. As for smoothing over the divisions that hinder civic engagement, Putnam argues that Americans can help that process along through targeted efforts. He suggests expanding support for English-language instruction and investing in community centers and other places that allow for “meaningful interaction across ethnic lines.”

Some critics have found his prescriptions underwhelming. And in offering ideas for mitigating his findings, Putnam has drawn scorn for stepping out of the role of dispassionate researcher. “You’re just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “I don’t expect academics to fret about these matters.”

But fretting about the state of American civic health is exactly what Putnam has spent more than a decade doing. While continuing to research questions involving social capital, he has directed the Saguaro Seminar, a project he started at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that promotes efforts throughout the country to increase civic connections in communities.

“Social scientists are both scientists and citizens,” says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, who sees nothing wrong in Putnam’s efforts to affect some of the phenomena he studies.

Wolfe says what is unusual is that Putnam has published findings as a social scientist that are not the ones he would have wished for as a civic leader. There are plenty of social scientists, says Wolfe, who never produce research results at odds with their own worldview.

“The problem too often,” says Wolfe, “is people are never uncomfortable about their findings.”

Michael Jonas is acting editor of CommonWealth magazine, published by MassINC, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank in Boston.

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America's Heartland Commentary Education Elections Just my own thoughts Opinion Politics The Law

One Law. One Page. Part 7. College students go home and vote.

Visits: 6

One Law. One Page. Part 7. College students go home and vote. Very simple law for all fifty states. If you live in one state but go to school in another, or outside of your home district, you have to vote in your home state.

No registering in the state your going to school in unless you sign a form that you intend to live in that state for at least a year after graduation. This is where a mail in ballot would be legal.

Each state has its own set of voting laws – some states require voting ID, some have different voter
registration and early vote deadlines, and different methods to vote(e.g by mail, early in person,
in person on election day). We need the same rule for all 50 states.

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Biden Biden Cartel Commentary Corruption Crime Leftist Virtue(!) Links from other news sources. Opinion Progressive Racism Reprints from others. Un documented.

The Myth of Low Immigrant Crime.

Visits: 11

The Myth of Low Immigrant Crime. Ann Coulter gives us the rundown on the future members of the Democrat party.

With the Biden administration hauling in millions of “newcomers” (the latest euphemism for illegal aliens) from booming economies like Venezuela, Senegal and Haiti, we seem to be getting a Kate Steinle every day.

Among the recent atrocities committed by Our Greatest Strength is the savage murder of 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal alien released into our country by the Biden administration. The “newcomer” beat Riley so badly that he disfigured her skull.

MEDIA ALERT: Time to roll out the fake studies on low immigrant crime!

The one-man factory producing these studies is Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute. (Take our country, just don’t raise taxes.) He fudges the data, slaps a false title on his report, and journalists copy his work like they’re Claudine Gay writing a thesis.

Thus, in its story on the murder of Riley, The New York Times cited “studies” showing “no causal connection” between immigrants and crime. Indeed, the Times said, studies “have concluded” that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.

The article links to 1) Nowrasteh’s sham study and 2) a 2017 Times story that cites Nowrasteh’s sham study.

That same day, the Times’ Angelo Fichera ran a “fact check” on Donald Trump’s claim that “the United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime. It’s a new form of vicious violation to our country.” Fichera’s ruling: “This lacks evidence.”

 

His proof:

“One recently updated analysis by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, found that the homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants in Texas in 2015 was slightly lower than the rate among U.S. citizens.”

(If they’re so law-abiding, why are they fleeing the crime in countries full of people just like them?)

The Nowrasteh “study,” and others that perform the exact same error-ridden analysis, is the heart and soul of the immigrants-commit-less-crime scam. If it’s wrong, liberals have nothing, and you can go back to believing your lying eyes.

Needless to say, his study is not merely off by a homicidal illegal or two. He — and others like him — aren’t even comparing illegal aliens to citizens. They’re comparing illegal aliens to a group that includes both illegal aliens and citizens.

As I pointed out in “Adios, America!” (and apparently will have to keep pointing out for the rest of my life): Texas’ crime data only counts illegal aliens who have already been caught and fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security.

That leaves out a lot of illegals. Is the DHS even fingerprinting migrants at the border anymore? If not, then by Nowrasteh’s calculations, illegals’ crime rate in Texas is zero.

How about we only count the murder convictions of citizens who’ve previously been fingerprinted by the Denver police? Why would we do that?

Obviously, a lot of the inmates originally classified as “other/unknown” will later turn out to be illegals. But all these Nowrasteh counts as “citizens.” He had his headline, so why bother updating the data?

According to the more accurate count of illegals in Texas prisons, they commit 30% more murders than U.S. citizens — not to be confused with a “slightly lower” rate than citizens.

Not only that, but the longer inmates are in prison, the more of them will be found to be illegals, whereas the reverse is not true. Consequently, the number of illegal alien murderers continues to grow, while the “other/unknown” — all of whom Nowrasteh calls “citizens” — continues to shrink.

Apart from Nowrasteh’s “study,” the main argument for the peacefulness of illegal aliens relies on “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” reasoning:

The national crime rate declined since 1980, even as illegals poured in. Therefore, illegals cause crime rates to drop.

Cities with lots of illegals have low crime rates. Therefore, illegals are law-abiding.

This is how primitives think. Heard of Rudy Giuliani? Ed Meese? COMPSTAT, California’s three strikes law, the boom in prison construction or the sentencing commission? The cause-and-effect argument about immigration and crime employs the logic of a witch doctor, which may be where this country is headed.

One September day, New York City was 65 degrees, the skies crystal clear, and 3,000 people were murdered. Therefore, cool, clear days cause mass murder.

The media seem to think the criminality of immigrants is a critically important fact, judging by how often they wheel out these nonsense studies. But they don’t have the necessary information. There are no such “studies.”

Why doesn’t the government tell us? The fact that it won’t — and that the media aren’t asking for concrete numbers — tells us more than a million phony studies.

 

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Biden Commentary Elections Opinion Politics

Winning: Biden LOST a primary – and more Democrats are voting for “uncommitted”

Visits: 5

President Biden made his second gaffe on the week at campaign events in New York, claiming he spoke with the late German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, at the G7 meeting in 2021. (Screenshot/Biden speech).

The good news for Democrats is that President Joe Biden managed to get through Super Tuesday without a loss to “uncommitted” or to so-called “spiritual guru” Marianne Williamson. The bad news is that his one loss in the campaign primary season was even more embarrassing by comparison.

In American Samoa, Biden managed to get beaten by entrepreneur and really, really, really long-shot contender Jason Palmer by 11 votes.

The worst Super Tuesday news for Democrats, though, were the “uncommitted” votes that shadowed Biden’s results. After a whopping six-digit number of ballots were cast for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Feb. 27 primary, several states that allowed some form of uncommitted vote on Tuesday saw huge swaths of voters show how shaky Biden’s support is in his own party.

Minnesota, for instance, has a large Muslim and progressive population centered around the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that’s ready, more than willing, and able to use their votes to send Biden a message about supporting Israel in its war against the terrorist killers of Hamas. Almost 19 percent voted “uncommitted,” according to Axios.

North Carolina was also a surprising double-digit uncommitted result, with 12.7 percent of Democrats voting “no preference.”

Five other states allowed some form of uncommitted on Super Tuesday. Besides Minnesota’s high and a low in Iowa, which recorded only 3.9 percent uncommitted Democrats, it was the choice of anywhere between 6.0 percent of Democratic voters in Alabama to 9.4 percent in Massachusetts, according to Axios.

Political Cartoons - Campaigns and Elections - Biden's 2024 Run ...

The huge number of “uncommitted” Democrats underscores Biden’s vulnerability. Only four of the states that allow an “uncommitted” vote (or the equivalent) have the slightest chance of swinging either way, and for the most part they’re considered pretty safe — Iowa and North Carolina in the Republican column, Colorado and Minnesota in the Democratic.

Colorado and Minnesota saw 8.1% and 18.9 % of Dems telling Biden to go full lunatic and support a murderous Hamas against Israel, a key U.S. ally, or he doesn’t get their vote.

Actually closer to FIVE MORE YEARS! - Imgflip

However, according to Axios, Colorado and Minnesota saw 8.1 and 18.9 percent of Democrats, respectively, telling Joe Biden to go to the fringe and support a murderous terrorist group against a key U.S. ally or he doesn’t get their vote. In a general election, those kinds of numbers can turn a state that leans Democratic into a potential toss-up, and toss-ups like Michigan (where “uncommitted” drew 13 percent of Democratic votes) into Republican victories.

Considering the fact that both Biden and Trump became near-certain locks for their parties’ nominations with Super Tuesday, the attacks from Trump are only going to get more brutal from here. Without his own party being willing to turn out for him, this could get very ugly for the incumbent very quickly.

 

PHOTO Vote Democrat Or Else MemePolitical Cartoons - Around the World - Biden Defeats Trump ...

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Commentary Elections Just my own thoughts Opinion Politics

Most states have the voting results in a few days. Except for California who takes weeks to count and translate all the undocumented ballots.

Visits: 24

Most states have the voting results in a few days. Except for California who takes weeks to count and translate all the undocumented ballots.

With millions of undocumented voting and counting all the dead folks who vote in California, it’s a long process counting all these ballots. California can eliminate the wait tomorrow.

If California had only the legal folks voting at the polls where the machines count the votes, the 30 days or so would not happen.

Also with partisans sitting on the ballots for 30 days is a recipe for fraud.

Most of the state’s 22 million registered voters cast mail ballots — and to an extensive review process that requires more than placing a ballot through a machine.

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Biden Cartel Just my own thoughts Opinion Politics

Time is now. Deter China. Place a military base in Taiwan.

Visits: 6

Time is now. Deter China. Place a military base in Taiwan. It’s a known fact that Biden has no issues with China. If he was serious, he would place a military base their now.

At the very least, place part of our fleet and Airforce fighter jets. Maybe a Nuclear sub or two. Countries like China respect and fear strength.

We were in Taiwan up to 1979 with our military. Now’s the time to return. Peace through strength.

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Back Door Power Grab Biden Cartel Commentary Corruption Elections Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics White Progressive Supremacy

What a sly dog. Schiff plays the long game eliminate other Democrats.

Visits: 24

What a sly dog. Schiff plays the long game to eliminate other Democrats.Schiff has decided that he can’t beat Porter in a one on one, so he’s built up Garvey hoping Garvey finishes second.

In a two way race Schiff leads Garvey 52-38%. But in a two way race with Porter, it’s tied. In the California races, the top two go on to the next level.

Who supports Schiff?

Democrat mega-donor Ed Buck – who was convicted of two counts of distribution of controlled substances resulting in death in 2022, as Breitbart News reported – was another donor to Schiff’s campaign and was also “a social acquaintance” of the representative.

Furthermore, a “Schiff booster” and lawyer named Arthur Charchian, “the head of the Southern California Armenian Democrats,” was implicated in a money laundering scheme.

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Commentary Corruption Just my own thoughts Links from other news sources. Opinion Terrorism

If true, there can be no peace with Hamas and their allies in Gaza.

Visits: 20

If true, there can be no peace with Hamas and their allies in Gaza. Hamas has announced that seven more hostages have been killed in the retaking of Jewish land.

Israel must give Hamas 24 hours to release all hostages. Civilians and Soldiers. After 24 hours call in the families of those prisoners and tell them that Gaza will be destroyed. Leave no building standing.

Then issue a warning to the West Bank and Hezbollah that they are next.

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Commentary Just my own thoughts Opinion

One Law One Page. Part 5. Allow Israel to go Biblical. None of our Business.

Visits: 9

One Law One Page. Part 5. Allow Israel to go Biblical. None of our Business. Regardless of who’s President, the United States has mettled in Israel’s affairs. That needs to stop. Israel has an issue with folks who created this phony narritive that there’s folks called Palestinians.

Arabs from other countries claiming that Israel is their homeland. It’s not. My bill would propose that the US stand behind Israel and let them fix their own problems. Sign a peace treaty and only get involved if asked.

Israel should be allowed to wage war on its enemies as it sees fit for its security, without interference from the U.S. or the rest of the international community

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