November 14, 2024
Light blogging today and tomorrow. I've been very busy here of late and it will give you all time to catch up with older posts.
Thanks for your patience!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:24 AM
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Trump has chosen the firebrand Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General.
I hope Trump knows what he is doing.
First, while I love Gaetz a lot of folks hate him, and his path to confirmation will be very difficult. I get the temptation; the GOP RINO wing were talking about kicking him out of the party just a short time ago, This is, of course, a shot across the bow of Mike Johnson, whom Gaetz tried to remove as Speaker. It's Trump's way of marking a bulls-eye on the timid and feckless and duplicitous Squeeker Johnson. It also sayss to the Democrats there is a new sheriff in town.
BUt it's all for naught if the Senate doens't confirm him. I suspect they won't.
And while he's from Florida and his seat will probably be replaced by a Republican it's no sure thing, and with the razor-thin margin in the House I'm not sure how good an idea that may be. The seat has to be filled by special election; the governor cannot appoint anyone as with the Senate.
Democrats are GREAT at winning those special elections.
I also think it sets a bad precedent in that it is keeping just another guy from inside the beltway rather than looking outside of washington for new blood. There is plenty; I favor Andrew Bailey, my home-state Attorney General (Missouri) for the position. He has no ties to D.C. It's hard to spend a lot of time in D.C., making friends with people, then distance yourself from them in the execution of your duties, maybe prosecuting them (and plenty of them need prosecuting). The AG should be an outside and should always REMAIN an outsider. The Old Boys Club is a big part of our problem.
But Gaetz IS a fighter and should do a good job of it, although I would prefer someone with some prosecutorial experience; we don't need the DOJ losing a bunch of cases because Gaetz screws up.
Another point; Trump MAY be tossing up Gaetz as a throwaway, knowing his pick will be rejected no matter what. He can then move on to candidate two, his real first choice. But I doubt it; time is precious and I believe Trump knows that. He can ill-afford to not have his man at the helm.
At any rate let us hope Gaetz gets 'em!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:22 AM
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Vivek Ramaswami is [linbk=https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2024/11/13/elon-musk-trump-appointment-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-department-of-government-efficiency/76253281007/]going to head up D.O.G.E., the Department of Government Efficiency, along with Elon Musk. Ron paul may also join them, it is rumored.
The two (and hopefully three) billionaires will hopefully take a buzz saw to multiple government agencies, and could save us billions, perhaps trillions over time. This is well past due.
We should call these guys the Roto Rooter men; they are going to unclog the drains and let all the poop wash away!
Hat tip; Dana Mathewson
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
07:01 AM
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November 13, 2024
Elon Musk did not run an illegal lottery according to a PA. judge who allowed it to continue.
So yet another case of lawfare failing when confronted by actual jurists.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
03:17 PM
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While surfing Google results for news aggregates I found this little tidbit that appeared in The Atlantic back in April.
I didn't see this sort of thing anywhere before the election, but the author is crowing about how Conservative websites/blogs were seeing their traffic collapse.
Needless to say they blamed it on Trump, but what it actually tells us is that Google and the other gatekeepers had shadow-banned conservative sites.
I know this is true. Our own Aviary is pretty much disappeared from search results when it used to be easy to find, and as a result our traffic dropped down in a major way some years back. The Gateway Pundit was huge and now you struggle to find it and THAT was because Google decided to simply disappear it.
So what does that tell us? It tells us that the mandarins of information have purposely suppressed conservvative thought to tamper with the election, that's what it tells us.
The next Attorney General needs to file a number of anti-trust lawsuits - against Google,against Meta, against network news. They have colluded, and with the aid of our government, to strangle free speech.
That is why small blogs like the Aviary largely no longer exist; just a few die-hards keep at it. You cannot profit from it, certainly; advertisers aren't going to pay for a platform nobody can find.
I had a friend who worked in radio and his wife took a sales job with the tiny station he worked at in North Carolina. She quit after a couple of weeks, largely because you couldn't pick up the station outisid of a few miles from the transmission tower. Nobody advertises on a station they can't even tune in. And that is what happened to most conservative blogs.
I stay at it because it's good for my emotiional health; I like to get my thoughts out. It's like a diary to some. But it doesn't pay anything (I never monetized it and now never will) and it takes a lot of time and effort. Few are stalwart enough to hang in with this, especially since I know that Ihave no audience, just a few loyal readers (like Bill and MIke).
But it wasn't always so. My blog posts were linked up by a lot of writers, and in fact it made it into a number of books written by different authors over the years. We hadn't made it big but we teetered on the edge. Now it's the equivalent of a Facebook page, only without even the readers that those attract. I wonder sometimes why I bother with this.
We had a good online ranking until Google suppressed us. Now I think we are rating at well under the two million mark. In other words we aren't even gnat-like.
We used to have some illustrious readers too. I am certain Rush Limbaugh was a fan, for instance. He lifted my phrase "the Max Headroom President" when speaking about Obama the day I said it here, and nobody said that as a web search showed. He also mentioned a number of articles in the exact same order I mentioned over global warming once, and some of these articles were quite obscure. I know Rush knew about me; he had me in his stack of stuff when I wrote for American Thinker on a couple of occasions.
But now I doubt anyone even remembers me or the old Birdblog, or the Aviary.
Sometimes I consider turning this into a satire site like the Babylon Bee, or making it a literary magazine featuring my own writing. I may wind up doing that yet.
So I may have an ax to grind, but I'd like to grind it in the skull of that "don't be evil" corporation that has decided my website should be banished to oblivion. But the point is control of the means of disseminating information is the key to political power and the Left has always understood that and has largely controlled it - first with newspapers, then with radio and then television and now with their dominance of the internet. They don't so much defeat us as simply silence us so we can't compete. Like Barack Obama, they clear the field of any competition using dirty tactics. We have to fight fire with fire.
I hope Trump understands this. The only we we can make permanent changes is to break the power of their tongues. I am mindful of the Book of Revelation where the Woman and her newborn child are carried away by a flood from the mouth of the dragon; that SO fits the current situation where the dragon of liberalism is drowning us with a flood of lies. Well, how do you fight a dragon like an alligator? You first grab their mouths and hold them shut. The leftist media are nothing more than crocodiles and if we let them open their mouths they will clamp down on us and we will be dragged to their meat locker after a crazy death roll.
Another analogy; the King Cobra is lethal but the Mongoose usually kills it. We are the Mongeese (Mongooses?) We can kill the poisonous viper, but we have to be quick.
So whoever heads up the DOJ needs to go after the liars who are strangling us.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
03:01 PM
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It's the end of the world as we know it.
"BREAKING: senior IPCC scientists say exceeding the Paris 1.5°C limit is now inevitable, imminent, and may well have already occured as unsurvivable 2°C by 2034-2038 looms"
I find it fascinating that we get these predictions every time there is a U.N. Climate conference sullies our news cycle. And it's always ten years away. They've been saying this since the '80's.
This whole scam reminds me of the Salem Wtich panic. There were witches under every bed and behind every tree, but after killing a bunch of innocents sanity returned. Sadly sanity has not returned.
This is much like Orson Well's War of the Worlds scare, only it has lasted over forty years now.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
01:56 PM
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Bring it on!
Mexico Threatens Trade War with Trump
Exports to Mexico from the U.S. were $362.0 billion; imports were $493.1 billion. Who loses a trade war?
And there are lots of countries willing to take on the roll of Mexico as a cheap labor market for companies, those companies that don't move back to the U.S. under Trump. We can just as easily get goods from Guatemala or South America or whatnot.
FDI - Foreign Direct Assisstance - to Mexico in 2023 amounted to $38.3 billion . How is Mexico going to fare without that nice little chunk of change?
I dare the narco-state of Mexico to go to war with us over trade; they will get creamed. It is America that funds Mexico. The remissions from Mexican expatriates working here alone keeps the Mexican junta in power. That will change if we squeeze these remissions.
Good luck with that trade war!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
01:41 PM
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Senator John Thune
Looks like it's McConnell's mini-me to head up the Senate.
Republicans choose John Thune as next Senate majority leader
He is the worst possible choice for the senate leadership (well, worst of the candidates under consideration). This shows McConnell is going nowhere; he's planning on pulling the strings from behind the scenes rather than as the leader, and probably will continue to do so even after he leaves the Senate.
We can't be rid of McConnell soon enough, in my view.
Cornyne would have sucked but been better than Thune, and Scott would have been mediocre but better than Cornyne.
The Republicans should have picked up ten seats in this election; the Democrats were defending a bunch of them. But they barely took control of the Senate and in the next election it will be the GOP with a lot of seats to defend. Election after election the GOP has underperformed in the Senate, and that under the tutelage of Mitch McConnell, who preferred losing a seat to the Democrats to allowing a Conservative to sit in "his" Senate. His record of failure justified a drastic break from the status quo, yet here we are with the GOP majority choosing his flunky and thus continuing the McConnell doctrine, the path of the eternal loser.
We may well lose the Senate in the next election and that will be because we didn't win as we should have in the Senate. (I would add we underperformed in the House too and I place blame for that on Mike Johnson and his predecessors, who never stood up to the bullies in the Democratic Party and in the media.)
Insanity, in the words of Albert Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The American People did their part,electing Trump. But congress has failed us and did not succeed not because the American People didn't support them properly but because they didn't support US properly, preferring to dance with the Devil for the good life in D.C. It's hard to have enthusiasm for a party that takes you for granted and whose nose is as brown as one of those discontinued M and M's that often led to the trashing of hotel rooms by rock stars upon their discovery in the candy mix. They were obviously more interested in their own fortunes and corporate desires than in the public interest and so they have struggled. Most of us know we need Congress, but many of us are unmotivated to get out the vote for a bunch of weenies and losers.
So John Thunne is just another in a long line of men with hollow chests (and double chins) to lead the Republicans into the glorious land of surrender. We deserve better.
Trump showed the way. He showed that if you fight and remain firm and do not cower you will win. This is at odds with the GOP consultant class, which argues you should be everything to everybody and hold no principles. Trump blew that notion away.
Political opinions in the nation are not set in stone, and they change all the time. You have to LEAD and the public will follow. The GOP has spent decades leading from behind, then wonder why they cannot beat the damned Bolshevik Democrats. It's not that they can't; it's that they refuse to try. McConnell and his ilk were quite happy with a Senate that was neck-and-neck so that the voters dared not turn out the RINO wing out of fear of losing the seat (just look at Kari Lake in Arizona, who could have won had McConnell lifted a finger to win that seat). McConnell's fundamental strategy is predicated on a balance of power between the two parties, and he is happy to lose a few elections to maintain his grip on the GOP. That is a loser's strategy; it benefits no-one except the Party insiders. America has been in serious decline since McConnell assumed power in the Senate and it will continue under Thune unless Thune is so afraid of Trump he obeys Trump's orders. But even then he'll probably work behind the scenes to sabotage Trump.
BTW we need the vote for Majority Leader to be public and not secret. Why make it secret? Are Senators so cowardly as to be unwilling to put themselves out there? It's not the PARTY'S decision or the Senate's; it belongs to the voters who put these people in power. They REPRESENT us; they do not rule over us. They owe us the vote tally so we know who to punish and who to reward.
Thune had nothing but bad things to say about Trump until he saw which way the wind was blowing, I might add.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
01:21 PM
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Rumor has it Lara Trump may replace Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate.
That would be awesome, although I hate losing Lara from the Republican National Committee where she did so steallar a job in this last election.
Sorry, no link except a tweet on X.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:46 PM
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Steve Bannon, freshly released after four months in prison for refusing to honor a Congressional subpeona (much like multiple Demcorats have done, folks such as Eric Holder or Alejandro Mayorkas or James Comey who defied Congressional subpoena's and suffered nary a consequence while Bannon went to prison for Walking While MAGA) is now facing charges from Alvin Bragg and Letitia James in New York over his foundation that was taking donations for a border wall. Apparently a hundred grand was spent on expenses and Bragg is claiming this is fraud because Bannon said all money would go to the construction of the wall.
Steve Bannon blasts 'lawfare' as he faces New York trial after federal prison stint
According to the article:
There was an attempt to charge Bannon with this very same "crime" by Federal prosecutors who dropped the case (much like happened with Donald Trump, whose "hush money" case was dropped as not a crime by Feds.)
Bannon's attorneys asked for a postponement of the trial to allow time for his team to line up experts to rebut the Proseccution's claims of wrongdoing. The judge is considering the motion.
This is nothing but the most onerous forms of lawfare, an attempt to destroy and imprison a political rival. We need to start digging into Ms. James and Mr. Bragg's own dealings; no doubt there are skeletons that can be de-closeted and it's high time we start taking such action. As ye sow so shall ye reap...
Well, we now hold the winning hand and we'll lay our cards down with "read 'em and weep, creep!" Reap this!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:37 PM
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The Taliban (tally me banana) is trying to push it's snout into the international relief for "climate change". They sent their little piglet to Azerbaijan to attend the U.N. Climate talks in Baku. And of course he asked for money.
So there you have it; it's always about the Benjamins. Do note it's not about the worthless Afghani, the offical monopoly money of the Taliban.
BTW What does Afghanistan have to offer to reduce carbon dioxide output? They are essentially in the Middle Ages and don't produce greenhouse gases in any meaningful way. I suppose they reduce emissions by making women cower under Burkha's and thus not breath their "unclean" air on everyone, and of course they just kill off the surplus population so as to reduce human emissions.
If this were run on business principles nations like Afghanistan would not have a seat at the table as they are not part of the "problem", a problem that is in fact all hot air. But if they don't produce emissions what right have they to decide on policies that impact other countries that rely on industry that produce emissions? This is rather like letting Afghanistan set educational policies for the rest of the world; they can't teach their own young but can tell us how to teach outs?
We live in an Alice-in-Wonderland world.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:57 AM
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This is good news but I want to know who he was working with and if others were involved in this. I strongly suspect this guy was not acting alone.
Man Charged in Leak of Classified Documents About Israeli Military Plans
You know full well this guy was acting in concert with people in the Administration. What we need to find out is who.
FTA:
"A C.I.A. official has been charged with disclosing classified documents that appeared to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this year, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.
The official, Asif W. Rahman, was indicted last week in federal court in Virginia with two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He was arrested by the F.B.I. on Tuesday in Cambodia and brought to federal court in Guam to face charges.
The documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and information collected by U.S. spy satellites. It conducts work in support of clandestine and military operations.
Mr. Rahman, who worked abroad for the C.I.A., was set to appear in Guam on Thursday.
The information in the documents is highly classified and details interpretations of satellite imagery that shed light on a possible strike by Israel on Iran. They began circulating last month on the Telegram app. U.S. officials have previously said that they did not know from where the documents had been taken, and that they were looking for the original source of the leak."
End
So how did this guy get a top secret clearance in the first place?
When I graduated from college I and my fellow Russian classmates (I studied Russian and history in college and had a certificate in Russian Scientific translation, although I fell one class short of getting the Russian degree and the Eastern Area Studies certificate because the professor who taught the philosophy of Mrxism/Leninism was on sabbatical) tried and failed to get jobs with the CIA and NSA. One girl, who had been an Army brat, was denied an NSA job solely because she had a distant cousin in East Germany and her father had been stationed in West Germany. They feared she could be a security risk. (I would add she was a BABE; I should have asked her out!) At any rate most of my classmates were denied such jobs because of niggling reasons that might suggest a security risk. Yet here we have a guy named Asif Rahman, who undoubtedly could be connected to Middle Eastern interests, getting so sensitive a security clearance. And this is nothing new; John Brennan actually voted for the Commmunist Party USA in an electiona nd disclosed that on his security clearance application and wound up becoming head of the CIA!
Times have really changed in our national intelligence.
And now we are going to probably see this guy quickly charged and convicted and disappear into the bowels of the penal system - and perhaps hang himself in his jail cell, or be struck by a bolt of lightning. But I suspect this will be the last we hear of him.
At a minimum he had to have contacts to deal with. You don't just one day decide to committ treason and pick up the phone and call Tehran with an offer. You have to know how to do it, who to call, and how to avoid detection. There are co-conspirators - Iranians at a minimum but I suspect people in the current Administration who wanted to hamstring Israel and thwart a possible attack on Iran by Israel.
My prediction is this story will vanish and so will that noodle Mr. Rahman. We'll probably hear he hanged himself, or was shanked by prisoners. But I imagine that will be covered up. Yes, the incoming Administration may well try to get this out, but I suspect the current crop of conniving convicts we call national security people will act switftly. They can't have this guy spilling his story to Newsmax or The Gateway Pundit.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:41 AM
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Rick Scottis out for Majority Leader.
He wasn't good but he beat the heck out of the two other losers contenders.
So we'll wind up with a McConnell clone and the Senate will continue to act as an anchor weighing down the GOP.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:18 AM
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Oh rats rear ends!
Vivek Ramaswamy: I won't seek appointment to Vance seat - Yahoo
"Ohio's Vivek Ramaswamy said late Tuesday he would not seek to fill Sen, JD Vance's soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat.
Ramaswamy's post on X came after President-elect Donald Trump tapped the Evendale native, as well as Elon Musk, to lead a group that will recommend cuts to the federal budget.
"And yes, this means I’m withdrawing myself from consideration for the pending Senate appointment in Ohio,” Ramaswamy posted on X Tuesday. "Whoever Gov. DeWine appoints to JD's seat has some big shoes to fill. I will help them however I can.”
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Hopefully Trump will have a good cabinet post for Vivek. He has a bright political future if he should care to pursue it. But we sure could have used him in the Senate.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
11:08 AM
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The Department of Health and Human Services spent $38.million per year on DEI. Just wasted that to promote discrimination against white males.
FTA:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spends tens of millions of dollars annually on diversity-related expenses, according to a new report from the watchdog group Open The Books.
American taxpayers foot a bill of roughly $38.7 million every year to employ 297 staffers conducting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work at HHS, with 247 of those federal employees making over $100,000 a year, according to government records analyzed by Open The Books. On top of that, HHS spends $29.4 million per year to keep 209 workers on payroll for its Office of Minority Health, which exists to "improve the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities.”
end
But it doesn't stop with medical care for sick folks, no sir!
"One of the programs funded by the Office of Minority Health included a "vaccine equity” program in Atlanta aimed at getting monkeypox vaccine doses to gay black men to help "celebrate diversity and the impact of distinctly Black gay and queer culture on the community,”'
Might I suggest gay black men stop the unhealthy sexual practices that lead to the spread of diseases in the first place. Much of the health problems in the gay community in general stems from contact with fecal matter as the primary pracice of gay men is to utilize the body's primary waste disposal opening as a sexual object. And given a propensity for multiple sex partners and orgies one must suggest that no amount of government lecturing is going to alter the fact that homosexual activity is tremendously unhealthy and just plain gross.
We tell alcoholics to quit drinking. We tell teenagers to not drive extremely fast and not get into drag races. We had banned bare-knuckle boxing (until just recently - it's come back and we will see deaths and brain damage as a result). We tell diabetics not to eat sugar. We tell people not to do dangerous and unhealthy stuff all the time. Yet with homosexuality we are supposed to CELEBRATE it! So a guy shoving his johnson up the rectum of another dude, right into the impacted fecal matter, is somehow grounds for celebration! Or worse his TONGUE.
But political correctness trumps all common sense or wisdom in our modern insane society. And the Left uses our tax dollars to fund this sort of stupidity.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:35 AM
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Carlos Santana says it best!
Winning!
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:34 AM
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Drain that swamp!
RFK Jr. Promises Firings of 600 NIH Employees
If Kennedy winds up running HHS (and I suspect he will) he is going to do what every department head should - cut the bloat and rid us of these meddlesome priests.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:47 AM
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Breaks my heart...
Pelosi Asked How She's Doing Post-Election: "Terrible"
The San Francisco Bleat doesn't know how terrible she's going to feel when she has to make an account of her actions and behavior to the great Judge.
Remember, Pelosi is the one who set up the frame job on Trump over J6. And Pelosi was behind almost every really ugly attack on Trump and on US. People are doing years in jail for sight-seeing in the Capitol and that because of Pelosi.
In a way I do shed a tear; she has wasted all the great gifts given her in life and will reap the punishment reserved for El Diablo and his pals.
She thinks she feels terrible NOW...
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:40 AM
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November 12, 2024
Candidates for the GOP Senate Majority top job have agreed to a Trump demand that they allow him to make recess appointments.
When McConnell was running the show he refused to let Trump do that, keeping the Senate technically in session (even on Christmas) to deny Trump his choices, choices the Democrats were blocking.
So now the top candidates all have pledged to allow recess appointments, thus making it possible for Trump to fill these positions without filibusters and other nasty media circus events.
As Trump notes in the article, it took as long as two years for the Senate to confirm some of the positions needing filling and there just isn't time to waste waiting for the political posturing to come to an end.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
09:13 AM
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The rats are now fleeing the good ship Corn Pop as the Deep-staters exodus Washington in droves.
For example, Christopher Wray, the man Trump appointed to head up the FBI and who subsequently led the charge to take his benefactor out, is probably quitting as FBI director and plans to leave town, hoping Trump forgets what he did.
It would be wise; Trump called for Wray to resign back in July for telling Congress he noticed no cognitive decline in Joe Biden, for instance. Trump is likely not to keep him, and may well prosecute him. I hope whoever Trump chooses for Attorney General goes after Wray as well as Merrick Garland.
Trump needs to understand that forgiveness is from God but discipline is from the King and he's got to punish the people who tried to destroy him.
Julius Caesar had a very forgiving policy towards his enemies - and they killed him for it. In hyper-partisan times like then and now you cannot leave an enemy at your back. And many of them like Wray or Garland have been tyrants who framed our side for political power. There must be justice done.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
08:09 AM
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