Category: Civil War

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It’s Here – Election time

It’s Here

Election time

10/30/20

There’s going to be an election next Tuesday.

People who read me are more woke and aware than the common rabble, so chances are many of you already knew that. Anyone who didn’t know that, drop everything and start doing a lot of reading over the weekend. Prepare for some nasty shocks. Yes, Donald Trump is the incumbent. Believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

So, what should we expect from this election?

The signals from the polls are significantly stronger this time then they were in 2016. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) it’s still over 8 points.

There’s been a lot of propaganda about how the polls are meaningless, and of course, polls taken more than a couple of weeks before an election generally are meaningless. And there are a lot of crap polls out there. Rasmussen is little more than a GOP cheering squad, and Zogby doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke. We all remember one poll that nobody had ever heard of before (or since) that showed McCain leading Obama a few weeks before the election by 20 points.

But the legitimate polls are accurate. Those showed Clinton winning the popular vote by 2-4 points, and she won by 2.5 points. Well within the range of error. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) the Biden lead over Trump still over 8 points.
I’m expecting that come Wednesday morning, Trump may actually be leading in the electoral college count. The reason for that is that early voting has been mostly Democratic, and come election day, as many as 100 million people may have voted. That would be nearly as many who voted in total in 2016.

Now, if we wake up Wednesday morning and Trump is leading in all fifty states, then it’s safe to assume that Putin and/or the people conducting the cyberattack on hospitals this week have taken over counting the votes, in which case the question you have to ask yourself is not “Who won?” but rather, “Will I still be alive three months from now?” If Putin does scramble the election results, it won’t be because he has our best interests at heart. No, Donald, not even your best interests. He isn’t your buddy. He would find an America in chaos and severe civil strife most amusing as he started swallowing eastern European republics like they were popcorn.

But if you wake up that morning, and the electoral maps on the TV are similar to those of 2016 and show a Trump win, don’t panic.

There is a tidal wave of blue votes yet to be counted. Remember all those banana-republic type eight-hour lines to vote we’ve been seeing for the past month? That’s the early voters—85 million of them as of yesterday. Most of them are Democrats, and there’s a fair number of Republicans who are furious at the party for fucking up the mail service, messing with their ability to vote, and jamming their nasty little fascist theocrat down our throats that they decided to make a protest vote.

But all the early votes get counted—by hand—starting when the polls close. Those will take days, and even weeks to tabulate.

And that’s OK. It used to be that it was normal to have to wait a month or two to find out who won the presidential election, and it was the reason why the actual transfer of power took place four months after voting day. As recently as 1960, it wasn’t clear from the voting who the president was by New Years’. It may have taken a few weeks to determine who won the election in 2000, were it not for a decision by the Supreme Court that was so illegal they make the unique stipulation that Bush vs. Gore never be used as a precedent. (Kavanaugh the Klueless proceeded to try to do that just last week, of course.)

It may take a few weeks to know definitively who won. The Republicans will do everything to stop the counting, including trying to get their toy justices to rule that Trump is God because GOP. Those six clowns will have to decide whether they want to please Donald and lose their credibility and authority forever, or take a stand and prepare for a miserable couple of months compared to risking their lives betraying their country.

Oh–and even if you live in a state where the Presidential race is all but settled, such as California or Kansas, vote anyway.  The downticket races are a lot more fluid, and this year especially, more important.  Its a Census year, and your vote now determines the influence your vote will have over the next ten years.

There’s a lot of speculation about post election violence, but I don’t really see that happening while it’s still being decided who won. After that, well, we’ll just have to see. Hopefully the results will be clear enough, and have enough legitimacy, that the losing side will feel a patriotic duty to accept those results.

When the dust settles, probably around the 15th, Biden should have 350 of the 270 EVs needed to win. And the US will have taken its first big step back toward being a free and democratic republic.

Then we have the next nightmare to endure: a panicked, furious, frightened Trump. Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide the world must pay for failing to adore him.

 

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Intimidation – Voters getting nasty emails

Intimidation

Voters getting nasty emails

October 21st, 2020

Voters have been reporting that they have been getting threatening emails that if they vote for Biden, great harm will come to them and their families. It isn’t just campaign persiflage; these are direct, criminal threats of physical harm Apparently the threatening emails are fairly widespread, and today the DNI director and the head of the FBI had a press conference that was an exercise in strange behavior from a strange government.

According to them, foreign actors—Iran and possibly Russia—had gotten hold of voter registration rolls and run mail merge to mass send these emails. It’s isn’t technologically difficult—the polls can be requested at the offices of most country clerks, and any junior in a high school computer class to convert the listings to a database file and mail merge them. It’s a bit surprising it hasn’t happened before now, really. I remember in 2004 it crossed my mind to do that sort of thing—not to threaten and intimidate anyone, but just as a get-out-the-vote thing. But back then a lot of voters didn’t yet have emails, and those were the very ones the Dems wanted to contact to vote. Now, of course, both local Parties are presumably maintaining emailing lists for legitimate purposes.

At least some of the emails claimed to be from the Proud Boys, although at this point there’s no evidence that they were involved.

The DNI director, John Ratcliffe, made the somewhat odd assertion that the threats were meant to harm the Trump campaign. Adam Schiff flat out wondered it that was “Ratcliffe spin or the assessment of the analysts.” The New York Times was of the opinion that the emails were more general in nature, meant to scare voters and undermine the entire voting process. It might be illuminative to determine which voters were targeted, and in what numbers. If all the emails started with “If you vote for Biden…” then it’s safe to assume that the people behind the emails were working on Trump’s behalf. Trump supporters might argue that it was a false-flag effort designed to make Trump look bad, but since when did Trump mind looking bad in the name of deceit?

But for now, we don’t know, and we should just assume that it’s nonpartisan fuckery. The truth will come out in due course. As for who sent the emails, I’m guessing the true address would be something ending in “.ru”. That would explain why Trump himself hasn’t had anything to say about the mailings.

There’s supposed to be a second debate tomorrow, but it’s anyone’s guess if Trump will show up. Apparently he’s furious that they’ll be using a mute button so he can’t simply try to scream down Biden. Each candidate will be muted during his opponent’s two minute response to the moderator’s questions. Trump can’t imagine American peons making him behave.

Senator Chuck Schumer announced that the Dems will boycott the committee voting on the Barrett nomination, denying the Republicans a quorum. Chances are McConnell will just steamroll over the Senate rules in his mad drive to put any old nut on the court who will negate the power of the people. Barrett’s cult, People of Power, is so toxic that even the magazine that represents the National Catholic Churches said she was a poor choice for the Court and asked the Senate to hold off until after the new government is seated in January. That vote is supposed to take place tomorrow. In the meantime, new allegations of trauma and sexual abuse appeared against Barrett’s cult. Vicious stuff, Jim Jones-type stuff.

And the fuckery continues. In Florida, the most corrupt state in America, the Republican government announced a new sweep of the voting rolls, designed to eliminate anyone who had any debt to anyone related to a felony conviction. This despite a state law that forbid removal of anyone from voter eligibility within 40 days of an election. Republicans, former Americans, don’t give a shit about the law; they just want to maintain power.

In one of the weirdest twists of an already psychotic year, Rudy Giuliani apparently was conned into a compromising position with a woman he had been persuaded was an underage girl. The movie, released later this week, apparently shows him fondling himself in front of a supposed minor. Or at least he thought she was a minor. She’s an actress, Maria Bakalova, who is supposedly the daughter of Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Giuliani is seen reaching down his pants and playing with himself, and Borat bursts in on the pair, shouting, “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.” Sigh. America’s mayor has seen better days, it has to be said.

And Barack Obama hit the campaign trail on Biden’s behalf, blistering Trump, pointing out that he’s not going to protect America from COVID when he can’t even protect himself. He noted that if Biden and Harris were in the White House, Americans wouldn’t have to worry about what crazy bullshit our leaders pulled today. (Yes, I’m paraphrasing Obama on that one. He actually said “crazy things they said every day.” Not the most flattering thing anyone’s ever said about the leader of the free world, right?).

The national polls are holding steady with Biden showing a 10+ point lead. State polls are more muddied, partly because they have smaller pools of voters, and as a result the MoE can be from 3 to 5 points. And voter intent in those polls can be less certain as well, especially in swing state.

No matter what you get in your email, no matter how much your republican state governments try to mess with your right to vote, no matter how bad the polls look, vote. If Trump can’t steal your country, he can’t steal your life.

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The Abyss Stares Back – If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

The Abyss Stares Back

If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

October 17th, 2020

Well, nobody said the home stretch of the 2020 election was going to be boring. OK, so we all thought the polls would be a lot closer now than they are, portending as they do an utter bloodbath for the GOP. And of course we all worried about how many dirty tricks Trump and the GOP had. Some were predictable: the Hunter Biden “bombshell” in which a computer turned up at some repair shop on which there was supposedly a whole bunch of emails that said stuff like “Hey, my dad wants you to have a bunch of military secrets if you’ll just fire this one judge.” Some of the emails were tracked back to a Russian disinformation outfit, but what really made the whole thing moot was that the right-winger truther who owned the repair shop said the computer, along with two others, were dropped off by someone who could have possibly been Hunter Biden on April 12th, 2019, but the firmware on both the computer BIOS and the hard drive showed that the system had been manufactured on April 19th 2019, a week after Hunter dropped it off. My god, the man can TIME TRAVEL! He’s an existential threat to the entire universe, and you libtard sheeplings are just sitting around making Guiliani jokes!

Voting fuckery is widespread, of course. Abbott, the fascist running Texas, arbitrarily decreed that each county should only have one dropbox. Other GOP states reduced the number of polling places, resulting in line of voters in scenes one expects in fascist banana republics. Like the sort the GOP wants to turn all of America into. In California, GOP outlaws set out phony dropboxes.

Trump has openly said that one reason he wants the godstruck vacuity Barrett on the court by the election is in case he needs the court to rule that those silly old votes don’t matter, and the GOP gets to appoint electors in order to ensure a Trump victory. Given the size of the popular blowout the polls forecast, such a move would result in a popular revolt and even possibly a civil war, but Trump figures he has command over the military, and should the Pentagon decide that they promised to spend some quality time with their cats rather than gunning down Americans, he also has a pack of heavily armed street nazis.

It’s not clear what the military would do in the face of a coup. Trump is commander in chief; but his orders would be illegal if not flat-out treasonous. The street nazis would be faced with a situation where even if they did prevail, they would have absolutely no popular support, even among most Trump supporters. And a hundred million or so people looking for ways to ambush and kill them. They might be vicious crazy bastards, but they aren’t stupid. The leaders know they can’t possibly hold power with a coup that has absolutely no popular support.

Trump himself may be aware of that, or at least suspect it. He joked the other day about leaving the country if he lost the election because losing to “Sleepy Joe” would be so embarrassing. Trump very famously does not joke, but he does have plenty of reasons to flee if he loses. There’s a tidal wave of criminal and civil proceedings awaiting him the minute Biden is sworn in as President, along with many angry creditors, including quite possibly organized crime.

He may well owe hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian interests, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Putin has assured him that if he defects with most or all of America’s military and strategic secrets, Putin would take care of all those nagging debts and set him up in a dacha on the Black Sea. Trump would certainly be willing to entertain such an offer, especially if Putin assured him he would be a hero, nay, a GOD to the peoples of all the Russias, and they would praise him and lionize him for the rest of his life. Oh, and think of all the American liberals who would be sooooo pissed off if he did that!

That would leave Mike Pence as acting president, and he would be an extraordinarily unpopular leader of a country in chaos, head of a party reviled by 70% of the population as traitors. Pence will try to present himself as an expression of God’s Will, and when that falls apart, he’ll resign. The Senate will note that Trump didn’t formally resign, and vote that treason and fleeing the country are not impeachable offenses. It’s not like the GOP will have anything to lose at this point, and chaos might result in a long-hoped-for corporate takeover of the country. Except the country would be disintegrating at that point, with several powerful blue states voting to secede. The Senate will then convict Trump, accept Pence’s resignation, and dump the whole mess in Pelosi’s lap. That may be enough to avert collapse, assuming the Qanon nuts don’t just assume that Pelosi is an intergalactic lizard with a taste for human babies who wants to take their guns. Which she is, of course. The tail is a dead giveaway.

Now, people have said that I’m too conventional, too cautious in my political forecasts, and that may be true. I didn’t even mention North Korea invading the state of Washington, or proof that there is no such thing as COVID-19 coming out. Those could muddy the waters, sure. But I live and die by Occam’s Razor, and manage to look unshaven despite that.

So there’s your immediate future, America. Jokes by Friedrich Nietzsche, screenplay by Garth Ennis, directed by David Cronenberg.

Get a good night’s sleep, folks. You’re gonna need it.

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Trump Must Go — Insane President crosses the line

Trump Must Go

Insane President crosses the line

September 24th, 2020


Brian Karem: “Will you commit to make sure there’s a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”

Trump “We’re going to have to see what happens, you know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

Karem:“I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to make sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?”

Trump: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The only decent thing Trump could do after a statement like that is to resign his office. No President has ever said those sort of things, that no matter how the vote went, he would be staying. Not Madison during the War of 1812. Not Lincoln during the Civil War. Not Hoover during the economic crisis of 1932. Not FDR during the second world war. Not Nixon. No president has ever effectively said, “Fuck how the vote goes; I’m staying.”

Trump has been signaling for months that he would lie, cheat, steal, even stage a coup to stay in power. He knows that once out of office, his only realistic future is prison. He may even suspect that after years of lies, vilification and murderous disregard for the lives of Americans, nobody outside of his worshipful cult is interested in cutting him any slack. He might argue he made too many enemies; the fact is that he simply betrayed and hurt too many people.

We’ve watched him subvert the entire governmental apparatus, filling hundreds of positions with servile and corrupt lackeys. He has even trashed the integrity of the CDC rather than have any authority admit that due mostly to his cruel incompetence, the US still has a raging pandemic that is likely to kill another two hundred thousand people in America before the spring arrives. The GOP was on a steep downward moral and ethical trajectory before Trump ran for office, but now it is nothing but a pathetic collection of hypocrites, apparatchiks, cowards, traitors and brownshirts. The best of Trump supporters are blank-eyed cultists. The worst are pure filth, the sort of people who enabled Hitler in the 1930s.

An electrifying article the day before in the Atlantic detailed a scheme the White House was contemplating to have the republican-held assemblies in such states that go blue in November simply select their own cadre of electors so the state would vote for Trump in the electoral college, regardless of public vote. It’s not clear as to whether this subverts the Constitution or not, but it was a clear move to override the will of the people.

The best thing Trump could do right now is resign, and throw himself on the mercy of the public. He won’t do that, of course. Even to save his life he won’t do it, because his entire pampered, wastrel life was spent simply bullying and lying his way through every crime and breach of decent behavior he ever committed. He even robbed and cheated the people who helped him commit those crimes and transgressions.

That should be a warning to his supporters (a warning vividly made by Michael Cohen his book, “Disloyal”). If you think supporting Trump after all he’s done will protect you and put you in positions of power afterward, remember what happened to the brownshirts in Hitler’s Germany. Trump won’t respect you, he won’t protect you, he will betray you. He doesn’t appreciate you, and he won’t trust you. After all, by supporting him and making him emperor, you’ve already betrayed your country once. You’re weak links. You need to be voted off the island.

And he would be right. If you support Trump now, you support a traitor, and whether you believe it or not, you are betraying your country. Trump knows that, and doesn’t mind taking advantage of you now so he can discard you like a used condom later.

As for Trump himself, we know he won’t resign. If he manages to destroy the election (and he’s doing everything he can to destroy a fair and full election, including destroying the post office and brainwashing people into thinking America is incapable of an honest vote count) then the American people will have to come for him, and dig him out of the White House like a rat from its hole. If he rejects the election results, don’t wait for inauguration day: take him out of office and throw him in prison right way.

Trump, pampered and isolated his entire life, has no idea what he is fucking with. When the people decide enough is enough, no force can stand in their way.

Yes, that’s a coup. But it’s a counter-coup, a coup FOR America. You aren’t overthrowing a legitimate president.

You’re taking out vicious, malicious trash. You are saving America.

Trump must go. It’s either him or us.

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The Cultivation of America — Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

The Cultivation of America

Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

September 18th, 2020

As this is being written, the horribly sad news broke that the great Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died from complications of pancreatic cancer. An extraordinarily brave and determined woman, she represents the best America will be.

Now is the time to remind Republicans that eight months before the election in 2016, they announced they would not consider a nomination to the court in an election year. If their lust for power causes them to forget that stand, remind them that people have had enough of this criminal and corrupt reign of GOP power, and an attempt to ram some third-rate Nazi onto the court over the next 45 days will result in severe civil strife.

Talking with Trump supporters, one is struck by the things they believe that are patently false. The economy is not great under Trump. In fact, it didn’t grow as fast in the first three years of Trump as it did in the final three years of Obama. And the fourth year has been a catastrophe, one created by the pandemic but made far worse by the Republicans taking advantage of the crisis to steal trillions from the country. Biden isn’t a socialist. I’m a socialist, and I wish to hell he was, but he isn’t. Neither of us are communists. Wearing a mask is no more an infringement on rights than requiring shoes in a restaurant, or having to drive on the left-hand side of the road. Nobody’s coming for their guns, or making them be atheist, or forcing them into same-sex marriage.

The range of belief is from simply uninformed to utterly ridiculous. Obama isn’t a Moslem, and nor is his minister. Antifa isn’t intent on burning Oregon down. Trump isn’t one of the common men. Not unless you pronounce the first “m” like an “n”. He didn’t get rid of the deficit—he quadrupled it. YOUR taxes didn’t go down, but he wants you to give up your Social Security and Medicare to make up for the cost of the taxes lost to billionaires and corporations. Oh, yes, and COVID-19 is a real thing, and actually has killed nearly a quarter million Americans. It wasn’t made up by scientists to make Trump look bad. He did that all on his own.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t dissuade followers. One was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “It’s [the pandemic] a ploy to take away from (Trump’s) success.”

These delusions are not only impervious, but tend to strengthen when opposing points of view appear.

The delusions, constantly reinforced by the right wing disinformation bubble and Trump himself, are red-flag markers of cultic thinking. Roughly 40% of Americans have joined a cult.

While most cults are reasonably harmless, some are predatory and malicious, and all, given enough power, become very dangerous, given that they are predicated on such tenets as separation from the greater society, most often in the form of a paranoid “us versus them” worldview, replete with conspiracy theories, and mistrust of established authority, be it governmental, scientific or educational. Most have some form of bigotry backing the sense of separation. It’s not uncommon to see cultists who fervently believe that a clandestine cabal of “those people” secretly control the world through wealth and hidden power, and simultaneously believe that those very same people are intellectually and morally inferior to themselves. Nearly all powerful sects believe the existing order must be torn down and replaced with, well, something.

That “something” is almost always utopian in theory, and horrific in practice. Cults aren’t emotionally or mentally equipped to deal with dissent, and people who refuse to submit to the utopian demands of the cult are rapidly targeted for punishment, either though ostracization or more severe measure, including imprisonment and death.

In the most dangerous types of cult, the cult of personality, the goal is a utopia run by the leader. The Leader, whether it be Hitler or Jim Jones or Donald Trump, is seen as wise, generous, benevolent, and caring for his followers. Usually none of those characteristics are accurate. Such leaders are authoritarian, narcissistic, and manipulative.

While cults of personality are usually the most dangerous, they are also the most vulnerable. The leaders tend to conflate their ideas with themselves, and the ideas often don’t hold up well in the absence of the leader. The leader doesn’t usually have a good second-in-command, an item seen as a vulnerability, a reminder that the leader won’t be there forever, and a possible threat from within. Number two in cults tend to be ruthless enforcers, devoted to carrying out the leader’s will and never having any particular will of their own.

Remove the leader in a cult of personality, and the cult usually collapses in relatively short order. There are exceptions, of course. Scientology and Mormonism survived the deaths of their founders. And Christianity is sort of an oddball situation, where the leader had already been dead for some 300 years before the cult really got going and they maintain their status by assuring everyone he’ll be back any old time now.

But in nearly all cases, a cult collapses when the central figure is removed. Sometimes the ideas survive, and resurrect themselves in different forms down the road. Hitler may be dead, but after three generations, Nazism is enjoying a bit of a revival. New iterations of the People’s Temple will horrify the world every decade or so. Mao is long gone, but the Chinese government survived by turning its back on everything Mao stood for and prevailing through sheer authoritarian muscle. Stalin died, and communism used authoritarianism to cling to power for nearly 50 years, and I’ve no doubt new communist movements will arise in the future.

Toxic ideas survive, but the leaders do not.

But removing the leader does suppress his followers. If Trump loses the election, he may fight it, but his followers for the most part will have the wind taken out of their sails. The ones that threaten to fight in the event of Biden winning will find themselves on television, fighting American troops, and they won’t have the support to continue. Their families will spend generations pretending they never existed.

Trump won’t accept the election, and in the event he declares he won’t leave the White House, the government must remove him, by force if necessary, and don’t even wait for the Inauguration. Remove Trump and jail him for trial, and let Pence try to hold the government together until January. Jail Barr, too—he’s Trump’s real second in command, a vicious thug who will cheerfully commit atrocities to keep Trump ascendant. He knows without Trump, he has no future.

But Trump is the center of his cult, and without him, there is little for his followers to cling to.

If he fights the election results, take him out. Do it now. It will save the country from a brief but very painful civil war. Remember, the cult is Trump, and Trump is the cult. Defeat Trump, and you defeat the cult.

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Horst Wessell II — Blake, Rittenhouse and the Kenosha PD

August 29th 2020

The shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha cop was disgraceful enough. He was shot seven times in the back while trying to comply with police orders to leave the home of his ex-wife. She had a restraining order against him for threatened violence, and the police seemingly were doing their job.

Blake walked around the front of his car, and two cops behind him pulled their guns. He opened the drivers’ side door, and one of the cops, Rusten Sheskey, grabbed him by the shirt and unloaded seven rounds into his back. Blake’s three young children were in the back seat of the car.

Later, the Justice Department—Bill Barr’s Justice Department—said Blake had a knife on the floor of his car. It’s not clear how a knife in such a location could be a threat to several armed cops. No knife has been produced yet, and it’s a mystery why they didn’t just say that Blake was reaching for his waistcoat, a form of apparel favored by African-Americans who wish to be gunned down by police.

Paralyzed from a shattered spine, Blake was transported to a local hospital where Kenosha police shackled his motionless legs to the hospital bed because he had an outstanding misdemeanor warrant. It took a week and a large public outcry before the Kenosha police worked up their courage and removed the shackles. Perhaps they thought leaving him unshackled would remind people that slavery was no longer legal and African-Americans weren’t supposed to be shackled.

There’s a certain element amongst the police who seem to believe that the way to handle public outrage over the arbitrary slaughter of black suspects is to continue to gun down unarmed men who, usually, are accused of either minor crimes or of being in the area where a crime might have occurred and aren’t threatening anyone. They aren’t doing a very good job of reading the room. People are outraged, and protests ensued.

It went from bad to worse, which, given how it began, meant that it got about as bad as it could be.

Self-styled “patriotic militia groups”, aka Brownshirts, aka Street Nazis, quickly started calling on armed thugs to converge on Kenosha to protect those poor, quivering, weeping little police fellows from the housewives and students and kids who thought arbitrarily shooting people was a bad thing. How dare they defy the Second Amendment like that?

Facebook missed a spot, and while they were censoring a friend who jokingly called his life partner/husband of 50 years a “fag” overlooked the call to protect the police of Kenosha from thugs and commies. Communism used to be defined by economics. Now it’s defined by race. Black is the new Red. Anyway, the call went out. “Street Nazis, Assemble!” And every buffoon with an AR-15 and an itch to bag liberals and darkies showed up. One of them was a kid named Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, who lived about 20 miles away in Illinois.

Now, I was a protester back in the 60s and 70s, and I remember that cops hated outside agitators. People who came from other places to instigate trouble. Cops hated those. Hate, hate, hate. But the very worst ones were the ones who crossed state lines to agitate. It’s not clear why being from out of state made them so much worse, but they were. Now, I live in California, and while Oregon has its share of assholes, they don’t seem any worse than our home-grown ones.

None-the-less, “crossing state lines” to agitate is the worst offense possible in the eyes of the protect-and-defend crowd, and when they see an outside agitator, they pull out the PR-24s and get to whaling.

So when Rittenhouse showed up from Illinois (Note: not the same state as Wisconsin, which is where Kenosha is) they pulled out the clubs and bean-bag guns and tear gas and set out to flatten Rittenhouse’s commie ass, right?

Well, not so you’d notice. Instead, they drove by the collection of heavily armed right wing misfits, and told them over a loudspeaker mounted on their weapon-of-war vehicle that they really appreciated the help the guys were providing, and tossed them bottles of water so they would be refreshed and well-hydrated when they started shooting down unarmed Americans in the streets.

Rittenhouse fired into a group of protesters standing in front of a gas station. One theory is that he wanted to protect the gas station from the mob, but there’s nothing to suggest the mob had any interest in that particular gas station. But you know, thugs and commies can be so irrational, so Rittenhouse did what any good, loyal, patriotic citizen would do, and opened fire on the crowd, killing one.

The crowd gave chase, which must have scared the piss out of Rittenhouse, since he had a big gun and the people chasing him did not. He tripped over his own feet and, from flat on his back, fired at the people surrounding him, killing another and injuring a third. He got up and trotted toward the group of police vehicles, a half dozen of which had a clear view of the shooting. He had his hands up, presumably hoping the police would take him into custody and protect him from the people who were unaccountably annoyed with him. Kenosha PD were his friends. They wouldn’t shackle him to any hospital bed.

The police let him walk past them, AR-15 slung over his shoulder, and ignored cries from the crowd that he had killed someone. All the police knew was the crowd, for some reason, was riled up, and it looked to them like the work of outside agitators from out of state. They didn’t have time to give a nice little white boy with a gun a lift to his car. Poor Rittenhouse had to walk to his car, and only then could he start it up and drive home.

The next day, apparently concerned that he may have violated a zoning law or something, he turned himself in—to Illinois police. In Illinois, he’s a minor. In Wisconsin, he isn’t. That may have had something to do with it. If nothing else, Illinois would get an assurance that Wisconsin wouldn’t seek the death penalty before turning him over. His lawyer is reportedly a member of Qanon, which basically is the Republican Party these days.

I have a friend who thinks we should start referring to that crowd as “The Shallow State.” That works for me.

The next day, the Chief of the Kenosha police, one Daniel Miskinis gave a press conference, and uttered a statement that showed, beyond any possible doubt, the courage, integrity and steadfastness of the Kenosha Police. He said (and I’m not making this up) “Persons who were out after the curfew became engaged in some type of disturbance, and persons were shot. Everybody involved was out after the curfew. I’m not going to make a great deal of that, but the point is the curfew is in place to protect…Had persons not been out involved in violation of that, perhaps the situation that unfolded would not have happened…It is the persons who were involved after the legal time, involved in illegal activity, that brought violence to this community.”

Yes, those people violently stopped .223 rounds from an AR-15. And of course, there’s the matter of Rittenhouse and his gang of street Nazis, who were ALSO out after curfew. If the Kenosha Police Department, at any point, showed any sign of intelligence, courage, and desire to uphold the law, it was when they politely refused a request from the street nazis to deputize them. Somewhere in the aching caverns of their police sensibilities, they may have sensed that violent, heavily-armed and undisciplined right wing thugs, filled with rage at uppity Negroes, might not be the best candidates to bestow badges on. Or maybe they were afraid the street Nazis would show them up. In any event, it was the one thing they got right.

I would say that it couldn’t get much worse than this, but this is exactly what the Fuhrer-in-waiting, Donald Trump, wants. He wants racial strife, and rage verging on civil war. So expect him to weigh in on the side of Rittenhouse, and have the Justice Department press to have charges dismissed. He may even talk of pardoning Rittenhouse.

It’s how he rolls. This is a golden opportunity for him. In Rittenhouse, he has his Horst Wessel.

It’s a good time to remember that you are better than the Kenosha Police and their pitiful chief. You are better than Rittenhouse and his coterie of street Nazis. And most of all, you are better than Donald Trump, the ultimate outside agitator.

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Tin Soljas — Mercenaries against America

July 26th 2020

For some time, rumors had been swirling around that the costumed clowns would-be Dictator Trump was sending into American cities, beginning with Portland were in fact, mercenaries, scummy for-hire bravos, cast-offs and retirees from the military, or just gun-nut yahoos looking to bag a few people they disapprove of. Medium has a major story this week detailing the presence of gunsels from Triple Canopy and Academi, two disguised dependent corporations of the infamous Blackwater. The article states, in part that the so-called Federal Protective Service “..In fact, FPS spends more than $1 billion a year on these contract security guards who are authorized to conduct crowd control at federal properties, such as those in Portland.”

That’s a lot of money to be spending on hired pork meant only to terrorize peaceful demonstrators. In fact, according to Medium, “There are some 13,000 security guards nationwide employed by FPS via contracts with private security firms, a figure that can be expanded through existing and future contracts.”

These are not federal troops. They are not part of any legitimate policing agency. They aren’t even special agents such as exist in the Secret Service or DHS. They are mercenaries. They are for-hire thugs, glorified security guards with weapons of war. They aren’t in American cities to keep the peace: they are there to shatter it. They want riots, confusion and chaos because that is what Donald Trump needs as an excuse to cling to power.

Americans are better than Donald Trump and his rent-a-pigs, and they have been proving it in Portland, with a March of Moms, a line of real American veterans (as opposed to the “Let’s pretend we’re still soljas” in Blackwater) and in a truly magnificent stand, a naked woman performing yoga poses in front of the mercenaries. (They retreated in considerable confusion!). One guy showed up with a hockey stick to (successfully) bat tear gas grenades back at the portapigs. One heroic vet, Christopher David, 53, joined the protest because he was disturbed by reports of federal officers in unmarked cars arresting people without explanation. They beat the hell out of him with batons, breaking his right arm, and tear gassed him at point-blank range. Showing balls of steel, he strode away from the puzzled and defeated assailants.

While I’m deeply contemptuous of these thugs and the morally diseased people who deploy them, I don’t underestimate the danger they pose. Take Iraq, for example.

There were many different reasons why the American invasion and occupation of Iraq failed, but it was Blackwater that made such a complete calamity for America inevitable, even if the Americans had done everything else right.

First there was the 2004 Fallujah ambush. Four Blackwater mercenaries were ambushed, killed, set afire, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and hanged from the struts of a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. The four individuals weren’t believed to be doing anything more sinister than making a food delivery, but they were seen by the locals as symbols of greater problems. America got off to the wrong foot in that city, riding tanks and humvees into town with huge American flags flying, in direct defiance of orders not to fly flags lest they be seen, not as liberators, but invaders. It was a grotesquely stupid display of ooh-rah patriotism.

Americans, both soldiers and mercenaries, did door-to-door searches, and it’s believed that the mercenaries hit on the bright idea of bringing bomb-and-drug sniffing dogs into the households of the residents. Iraq, like many Islamic nations, has a deep taboo against allowing dogs in the home. Scattered reports of viciousness, molestation and even rape of women, and contempt for Allah circulated. The ambush of the mercenaries resulted in great joy in Iraq and a tepid response in America, where people were unenthusiastic about the use of mercenaries. It’s true that America couldn’t have won independence from England without the presence of mercenaries, but those were German mercenaries, hired by the Crown, and hated by the colonists. Mercenaries don’t have a good odor in America, and nor should they.

In the wake of the hanging of the four mercenaries, a popular uprising drove the Americans out, temporarily. But Blackwater influence in Iraq wasn’t done.

In September 2007, Blackwater gunsels, apparently without provocation, opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 and injuring 20. Even though America promptly pulled the mercenaries out of the region, it solidified the opposition in Iraq that eventually lead to the Americans being driven out in disgrace.

Why use mercenaries in the first place? American politicians knew the public wouldn’t count them as part of the deployment, and wouldn’t care as much about casualties amongst private contractors. And the Republicans suffered, then as now, from the mad delusion that things such as military operations should be privatized, even if they cost more (some mercenaries in janitorial positions made more than the officers they cleaned for) and were less easy to control. Eric Prince, owner of Blackwater/Academi/Triple Canopy is, along with his vile sister Betsy DeVos, well-positioned in Republican circles. And both are tight with Trump and his mafioso clan.

Mercenaries aren’t soldiers, or even police. Many have little or no training, and discipline is notoriously shoddy. They have little or no training in keeping the peace, but are very adept at disrupting it. They are pure poison to the discipline and morale of both real soldiers and police. And they are a reckless, direct and immediate danger to the people they are putatively there to contain.

There aren’t there to protect the cities of America. They are there to drive them into chaos, so Trump can end the United States once and for all.

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Whine and Poses: The unbearable lightness of being a right winger

July 23, 2020

Every so often, a right wing list of grievances makes the rounds on the web, and every several years or so I grab one that addresses enough different issues to make it worth my while. This one showed up, and I thought it was time to do one of those.

1. Joe Biden isn’t winning just like Hillary wasn’t winning.

Hillary did win by 3% of the vote. Biden has between and 8 and 15 point lead in the polls, big enough that the Electoral College can’t overturn it.

2. Bubba Wallace wasn’t a victim.

Nope, and he never claimed to be. Indeed, he was deeply appreciative of the support he received from NASCAR and was happy and relieved to learn that the noose in question was not directed at him or any other African-American.

3. Black lives do matter, along with everyone else.

Until black people have all the rights and privileges of white people, then yes, we have to remember black lives matter.

4. What happened to Floyd should never happen again. But he was still a criminal not an innocent individual.

Floyd was suspected of passing a fake twenty. And that’s all. (The fake twenty never turned up, it seems). By the way, the pig who killed him had a far worse criminal past, protected by his badge and the color of his skin. Multiple incidents of what in regular people would be felonious assault, nine felony charges of tax evasion, and now murder.

5. All cops definitely aren’t bad, nor are they all racist.

No, but we must drive out the ones that are. They ruin the reputation of all cops. And endanger everyone.

6. Trump is the President and doing a great job! Just should keep his mouth shut at times.

I would love to see just one example where Trump is doing a great job. That someone felt he needed to be administered the Montréal Cognitive Assessment Test is not a sign he’s exhibiting top executive reasoning.

7. Rioters and looters have nothing to do with George Floyd. (And should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law).

Rioters and looters are less than 1% of the people who turned up at the protests of Floyd’s death, and mostly had nothing at all to do with the demonstrations. They just saw an opportunity, just as Trump saw an opportunity to send in his Nazi thugs.

8. Police lives matter.

Not at the expense of every one else’s lives.

9. Unborn lives matter.

So do the lives of women and families. So do the lives of the children you force into the world and then brutally ignore.

10. Colin Kaepernick isn’t a hero, and never will be.

Yes, he is, and I’ll demonstrate how he is at point 24. In the meantime, he risked everything for his principles. If right wingers ever get principles, then they might consider taking risks rather than just bullying people.

11. CNN isn’t news (nor is MSNBC)

Please don’t try to tell us that Fox, Sinclair or OAN are news. America desperately needs a not-for-profit news corporation like the BBC or CBC. CBC is one of the main reasons Canada isn’t the mess that the US is in today.

12. Elizabeth Warren isn’t Indian just a fake person.

Did you know that for years, Trump claimed to be Swedish because he felt having a German background might hurt him financially? How do you feel about that?

13. Facebook only censors conservatives.

If by “conservative” you mean bigots, hatemongers, conspiracy crackpots and liars, then yeah, I guess they only censor conservatives.

14. All lives do matter (red, yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight).

Until all lives are equal, that’s just vacuous nonsense.

15. COVID 19 is being used to gauge just how much of our freedom they can take away.

…and it’s howling nut time…

16. All fear is fueled by the media, this is a fact.

…says the guy who just said that the pandemic was just a government conspiracy…

17. God is still in control and always will be.

And a bang-up job it’s done of running the universe, let me tell you!

18. Epstein did not kill himself. Nascar did kill themselves.

Nascar will probably broaden its appeal outside the realm of treasonous racists.

19. Most people are not racist.

…says the guy who just said Nascar will fail because it rejected the Confederacy…

20. There is NO White Privilege

But didn’t Jesus have to turn white before guys like you would take him seriously?

21. LIFE is What YOU Make of it.

Provided you’re white, wealthy, powerful, and not an utter fuck-up like Trump. And if you’re rich enough, then even an utter fuck-up like Trump can make the most of it at our expense.

22. No one OWES You ANYTHING !

No one owes you your rights. Those are yours by birth. Nobody can tell you what they are, or take them away.

23. I stand for the Flag and National Anthem.

You’re free to do so. Just respect the right of others not to.

24. I kneel only for Jesus.

Again, fine. Just respect the rights of others to kneel—or not kneel—as they please. Your Jesus would have “taken a knee” for the rights of the oppressed. He would have knelt alongside Colin Kaepernick. Follow that example.

And there ya’ have it!

Toxic conservatism in a nutshell!

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Down the Rabbit Hole — Alas in Blunderland

July 20th 2020

Not much doubt we’ve stumbled into a meth-driven Hunter S. Thompson fugue state these days. I’ve sometimes wondered what old Hunter would have made of Trumpenstate 2020. He would have been either rolling on the floor, convulsed with laughter and scribbling furiously, or he would have blown his brains out. Can’t really imagine him scratching a cheek and languidly asking, “Wow. How ‘BOUT that?”

But then, it’s not a languid era. You can cry, you can laugh, or you can get your rifle. None of them are particularly good signs of mental health, but our psyches aren’t really equipped to deal with the madness that pervades our lives today.

You have clowns in camo snatching up peaceful protesters and hauling them away in unmarked vans. The Supreme Court has just ruled that those rounded up by the gestapo can be held indefinitely, a system that the Soviet Russians used to refer to as “the Gulag Archipelago.” We have a demented president and a mafioso-corrupt attorney-general praising the gestapo’s actions in Portland, Seattle and now Chicago, and promising to attack other peaceful protesters, presumably in hopes of sparking full-spread rebellion, a Reichstag fire of protest than can justify a Nazi coup against America.

And once they’ve rounded up protesters and thrown them into camps, what next? Well, the administration has been consulting with vicious dirtbag and justifier of torture, John Yoo, on how best to torture their prisoners, and while they’re at it, flout executive law through executive order. Trump wants to issue decrees on healthcare, immigration and “various other plans” over the coming month. He finally had to back way from his preposterously cruel plan to deport all foreign students from the nation’s colleges. A pity. That worked so well for Hitler, ending the war years earlier than if he had maintained a brain trust.

Trump is pushing to open the schools. He’s pretending it’s for the children, but really, he wants to make it possible for parents to return to jobs that may or may not exist. To that end he’s stonewalling on extending unemployment benefits, further cruel coercion meant to prop up an economy that more and more is a vicious joke meant only to serve the very rich. He’ll consider an extension of a month or so if Congress agrees to utterly gut Social Security and Medicare. How fucking kind of him.

Betty DeVos wants to return the kiddies to class, even if it means ten thousand or more of them will die. DeVos, who has never sat in a public classroom and has no educational training of any sort, wants churches and corporations to take over training the brats, and get them past the awkward stage where they’re too little to be of any use in the work camps.

Speaking of demented presidents, we have one that just boasted of “acing” a cognition test. The only time people are administered such tests is when medical personnel are concerned that a person is so far gone mentally that he is a hazard to himself and others. It’s scary enough that they would feel a need to administer such a test to a man in charge of the American military and nuclear weapons, but it’s even scarier that he boasts of “acing” it, even though the final five questions were “very hard.” The sections he found challenging included memory (given five simple words, asked to repeat them back, then and five minutes later) attention (Trump was always notoriously bad at this, and it’s hard to imagine him being able to count down from 100 in increments of 7, ie, 93, 86, 79, 72…), language (accurately repeat simple declarative sentences), abstraction (what pairs of words such as apple and banana have in common) and orientation (present date, month and year, and the name of the place they are in as well as the city). Test providers then praise the subject, no matter how they did on the test as positive reinforcement for future sessions using such tests. The test is 30 points, 26 is considered borderline cognitive decline, and 20 a sign of significant cognitive decline, so Donald could have scored 15, and been praised for how he did on the test. That Trump was even given the test is disturbing; that he boasted about how well he did is horrifying.

He wants to cut billions of dollars for COVID-19 testing and tracking even as the number of cases in the US alone approaches 4 million, because having a raging pandemic is hurting his reelection chances. Back in 1945, the Nazis shot German citizens who made the mistake of wondering aloud how well the war is going. This is the same mindset.

He still refuses to mandate masks, encouraging a destructive, dangerous and foolhardy anti-mask cult who have been attacking people for wearing masks, or for requiring them before allowing people into their homes or places of business. The anti-maskers are becoming more and more belligerent, and they’re playing with fire: public rage against them is mounting. I expect to hear about some anti-masker getting shot, either by a security guard or an armed customer. Only a matter of time.

Speaking of shooting, has anyone noticed how fast the clowns in the NRA all vanished when government thugs started rounding up civilians and carting them off to camps. This is exactly the situation the NRA said it existed to avoid. Well, I always thought they were nothing but thugs, bullies and cowards. Guess I was right. Fuck the NRA, and fuck anyone who’s a member.

Meanwhile the Roberts Court, tossing a few bones to progressives, has quietly destroyed laws designed to protect people against predatory loan sharks, removed more of the limitations on Wall Street instrument manipulations like the ones that caused the 2007 crash, and removed transparency from hedge fund trading. Just another service provided for the greater fascistic control of American.

Remember: this election is our last best chance to avoid a Fourth Reich. If we don’t take the country back in November, our future is very violent and dark.

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Oklahoma Crude — Repulsa in Tulsa a Fiasco

sadclownTrump

Oklahoma Crude

Repulsa in Tulsa a Fiasco

June 21st 2020

South of the equator, yesterday was the day of the Winter Solstice. So cheer up, fellas! You’re over the hump. Don’t lose hope. (Note to self: don’t mention that for the rest of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s all downhill from here.)

I was keeping a wary eye on the news yesterday, since the Trump campaign kick-off rally took place in Tulsa, OK. There was a confluence of so many factors that I was concerned that it could prove a flash point leading to a very large social explosion.

It may well have been on the minds of all those gathered: the Trump supporters, the protesters and counter protesters, and the police. Aside from a few minor incidents, the event concluded peacefully, which was a credit to all sides. Even the ones who might have been looking for trouble seemed to have second thoughts.

Trump was determined to stir the shit, and brought his full arsenal of race-baiting, xenophobia, and defamation of any who oppose him to the show. But he gazed around the half-empty stadium, doubtlessly thinking of his campaign’s boasts that a million people had expressed an interest in attending (only 6,275 did, according to the stadium gatekeepers), and gave his two-hour speech in a listless monotone, and just fifteen minutes in, his enthusiastic audience of true believers were beginning to look openly bored. Outside, the stage for the planned-for overflow rally was being dismantled (the campaign seriously expected between 100 and 300 thousand people to flood into Tulsa for this event) and millions of viewers were gifted with the eerie sight of a twenty-four foot screen in the parking lot showing Trump addressing the audience inside, with an audience of exactly nobody. You would think that there might be some old guy, taking his dog out for an evening stroll, who stopped to see what the asshole was saying while his dog relieved itself, but no. Just one lonely, bored tech whose job it was to make sure nobody stole the screen or the equipment running it. And he wasn’t even watching it.

Trump, apparently determined to keep the public attention focused on his mental and physical health, ranted for 15 minutes about the news noting his difficulties maneuvering down the ramp at the West Point ceremony (It didn’t help that someone found an old video of Obama ascending the same ramp with the carefree grace of a teenager). Trump then essayed to show his audience that yes, he could indeed drink a glass of water using one hand. The audience cheered—one of the few things they really had to cheer about on this sad night—but everyone watching on television could see it was a tiny 6 ounce glass, half-full, and even then his movements were slow and considered. If it was a sobriety test, he would have failed. He went on to rant about poor old lazy and demented Joe, apparently unaware that the Biden campaign had just put out an ad showing Biden jogging, where he pauses to tell the camera, “I would like to see Trump do this.”

Trump also made the extraordinarily stupid boast that he asked for testing for the coronavirus to be slowed down, leaving people to wonder if he really thought less tests meant less cases. That’s a bit like eating 4,000 calories a day, convinced that so long as you don’t step on the scales, you aren’t putting on weight. It’s magical thinking, and about the lowest and most self-destructive form of magical thinking there is. This should be in every Democratic ad between now and November, if they have any sense at all.

Speaking of which, one online correspondent told me that the sparse turnout may have saved thousands of lives. Given the exponential nature of contagion, I’ve little doubt that he’s right. Horowitz, of course, had the mot juste: “Coronavirus disappointed by small turnout.” Trump’s campaign slogan ought to be “Donald: Because he’s killed a lot less people than he might have.”

Finally, there were the images of the Donald alighting from the Marine helicopter on the grounds of the White House in the predawn hours. Exhausted, haggard, obviously depressed, he had his tie undone and hanging from around his neck like a suicidal rattlesnake, and his pose could only be described as ‘abject.’

Fingerpointing for this undeniable fiasco began at once. Brad Parscale, man most likely to be unemployed by Monday night, opined that the campaign based its inflated projections of attendance on thousands of K-Pop fans on TikTok who reserved most of the tickets and flooded the “interested in attending” page. Someone finally noticed the hideous optics of a professional campaign getting scammed like that by a bunch of teenagers in Korea (you don’t put a $25 deposit on reserving a ticket, for crissakes?) and decided that some 300,000 committed Republicans were going to show, but were scared off by AntiFa(scists) and BLM protesters. There were about 300 anti-Trump protesters there, consisting of the usual suspects—school teachers, college students, and (shiver violently as I say the words) people who hate fascists. If they really scared off 300,000 Republicans, then they made the Battle of Thermopylae look weak by comparison. The Trump campaign just blamed the poor attendance on widespread cowardice within the party. That should play well with his supporters.

Trump looked like a cornered rat, and you know what they say about cornered rats. He, and his party and followers, are going to be more dangerous and extreme going forward, now unable to entertain the belief they are an unstoppable popular front.

One indication of this came in the form of an unbelievable full page ad in the Nashville Tennessean. In fairness, the paper did immediately repudiate and pull the ad once the blow-back began, saying, “The ad is horrific and is utterly indefensible in all circumstances. It is wrong, period, and should have never been published. It has hurt members of our community and our own employees and that saddens me beyond belief. It is inconsistent with everything The Tennessean as an institution stands and has stood for and with the journalism we have produced.”

Fair enough. But the ad was beyond belief, written by some end-times crackpot who claimed that “Islam” was going to explode a nuclear weapon in Nashville sometime during the month of July. Quite aside from the hateful nature of the speech, there’s the fact that not everyone in Nashville is that tightly wound, and an ad like that could cause a panic.

There’s never a shortage of end-times crackpots around. I know several personally. Generally, they’re harmless. But some have both money and malice. And it’s not unusual for papers to have various nuts show up, money in hand, demanding that the local paper vouchsafe whatever demented and paranoid fantasies they have to the populace. Generally, papers have enough sense to tell them to bugger off.

Someone in a position of responsibility at the Tennessean thought publishing this was a good idea. Maybe it would get a few Moslems lynched. Maybe it would help Trump. Someone thought something this extreme and foolish would help the cause.

The right is crowded with people like that, and they are starting to panic.

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