Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

There is one struggling party in US right now, and it’s not the Democrats.

Biden: Oh no. We’ve upset Big Pharma again.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

Be a traveling stable for those who can’t find room at the inn.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

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107Comments

  2. 2.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    Whoops. Glenn just admitted he’s not a liberal. We all knew that already, but will liberals who still think he has something to say renounce him now? Doubtful.

    And Glenn. They didn’t call your stupid shillsite racist because you hired some slave catchers. They’re calling your site racist because of the way it covers politicians of different races. Stop lying you fucker.

  8. 8.

    Fair Economist

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Putin crony and Balloon Juice hero of the past, says what?

    Greenwald, as with many others, seemed to be with us under W, opposed Obama, and went strongly evil with Trump. (BTW, is he still insisting there was no collusion with Russia, and nothing to investigate?) I think these people were *always* working for Putin, because those have been Putin’s positions all along (and, also, the genuine positions of nearly nobody else on earth).

  9. 9.

    Cheryl Rofer

    The Intercept did do one good thing recently. I hate to link to them, but it’s this article.

    About mid-week, the Iran deal haters were tweeting a poll from Harvard that said that something like 70% of voters wanted the Iran deal renegotiated and other nonsense that followed the haters’ line. My first question was what the questions were on the poll. Murtaza Hussain found out. Here’s one of the questions:

    Some people say that the Iran nuclear deal is not perfect and the Iranians are building up their nuclear capability secretly, but we should not rock the boat now and just let it all slide along. Others say if Iranians are not compliant we have to call them out on it and push to renegotiate the deal with real verification. What would be your preferred course of action?

    1) Push to renegotiate the deal now requesting improved verification mechanisms or

    2) Keep the current deal in place and leave the issue alone for now?

    This question could have been taken from Donald Trump’s tweets. It tells the respondent what they are supposed to answer. Hard to see how Harvard let this have their name on it. I hope that a reputable outlet takes it up.

  10. 10.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Fair Economist: Both G^2 and his hand delivered gift to Putin, aka Edward Snowden were hailed as heroes by none other than our blog father on these very pages.

    ETA: I yearn for the days when metadata and dronzes were our biggest concerns.

  16. 16.

    Amir Khalid

    Glenn Greenwald is silly. I realised this a while back so I stopped reading him. But thank you, mistermix, for highlighting this entertaining bit of silliness.

  17. 17.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Greenwald; Libertarism has you covered bro – racism, ethnic cleaning, apartheid, genocide, that’s merely the free market on action on race. If these other races don’t want to be murdered, and exploited, then they shouldn’t have chose to be born in places with poor natural resources, am I right Bro? It’s like with the women, if they didn’t want to be raped, then don’t be born a woman. It’s just asking for it. /snark

    Serious: posts like that show idiots like Greenwald don’t really believe their own nonsense.

  21. 21.

    JGabriel

    mistermix @ Top:

    Do you think that “too inconsequential to be sued” would be a good revolving tag?

    Yes.

  22. 22.

    Baud

    I’m proud to say I disliked GG before it was cool.

    And liberals really need to think about how they choose their heroes.

  25. 25.

    The Dangerman

    ….without the Civil War slavery would end on its own due to capitalism.

    Good grief. Capitalism was the cause of slavery. Same as it is today, except now it’s workers in China.

  26. 26.

    JGabriel

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):

    Zaid thinks there’s a viable space for the left wing in the Republican Party (cf. the New Deal) …

    Zaid thinks the party that has been trying to privatize Social Security, sabotage Medicare, and end Medicaid is supportive of the New Deal? (And yes, I know Medicare and Medicaid are part of Johnson’s Great Society programs, but they’re an outgrowth of / inspired by the New Deal.)

    … thought Trump would support gay rights as president …

    He thought the guy who railed against transgender people using public restrooms would support gay rights?

    … and said that without the Civil War slavery would end on its own due to capitalism.

    Okay, now you’re just putting us on. No one is that fucking stupid.

  28. 28.

    ThresherK

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    Some people say that the Iran nuclear deal is not perfect and the Iranians are building up their nuclear capability secretly, but we should not rock the boat now and just let it all slide along.

    And that’s the “liberal” side of the poll question. Whoever wrote that is polishing their resume for a job at NPR.

  31. 31.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @The Dangerman:
    Well, not exactly. Even the Atlantic Slave Trade predated modern capitalism. From what I remember in Early American History, American slavery itself helped first create capitalism. In the early 19th century lines of credit were first established to fund the acquisition of more slaves, land, and other materials.

  32. 32.

    NCSteve

    Donald Trump is what Narcissistic Personality Disorder looks like in a man who is stupid but born rich. Glenn Greenwald is what it looks like in a man who is very intelligent, but not born rich.

    The towering, yet brittle, self regard and the compulsive need to lash out at anyone who threatens their fragile egos because they experience every slight, every rebuff, every contradiction, no matter how trivial, as a psychic injury roughly equivalent to the way a normal person would feel if they walked in to their bedrooms and discovered their SO shagging their best friend are the same.

    The fact that both of them are Putin puppets may be a coincidence, though ego is one of the most important levers for an intelligence agency trying to recruit an asset.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @JGabriel:

    He thought the guy who railed against transgender people using public restrooms would support gay rights?

    To be fair, that delusion was more widespread than we’d like to admit.

  39. 39.

    Bobby Thomson

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:

    And Glenn. They didn’t call your stupid shillsite racist because you hired some slave catchers. They’re calling your site racist because of the way it covers politicians of different races. Stop lying you fucker.

    Also, too, because Greenwald is a god damn white supremacist.

  40. 40.

    Uncle Ebeneezer

    @Bobby Thomson: I will hazard a guess that Elon bailed at least in part because of the massive trolling that TWiB co-host, Imani Gandy (AngryBlackLady) received here when she was a regular front-pager. Around that time and shortly afterwards (iirc) the topic of Racism In Predominantly White Spaces, came up quite a bit on TWiB. I could very easily see Elon seeing posting at BJ as a waste of time or too much hassle to be worth continuing. He has very little tolerance for White Progressive TM Fuckery, which is one of the things I find admirable about him (and Imani too.)

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Fair Economist: Greenwald, as with many others, seemed to be with us under W, opposed Obama, and went strongly evil with Trump.

    The US gov’t and political establishment, AKA, The MAN, is the true source of all evil in the world.

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Incidentally (and unsurprisingly) he now employs the worst Balloon Juice alumnus of all time, Zaid Milani.

    I don’t remember his posts here, but I still vote for Bernard Finel for that prize. IIRC, I tended to agree with him substantively, but what an asshole. Never did figure out where Cole dug him up, but I was glad when he went back there

  47. 47.

    Patricia Kayden

    @schrodingers_cat: I used to like him when he wrote for Slate but that was a long long time ago. Funny to see how much he has become a Rightwing lackey and Putin apologist. The video of him yucking it up with the odious Bowtie Carlson jerk shows how far he has fallen since his progressive heyday.

    Greenwald’s “Obama could rape a nun” argument should settle things once and for all that he is a racist since he’s never voiced such a vile attack on any White presidents including the current bigot in the White House.

  48. 48.

    NCSteve

    @Baud: I confess that I read him most every day back in his Salon days when he spent all of his time savaging the Bush Administration. But even then, I was disturbed by the fragility of his ego he displayed in his three daily updates. And then once I saw how he would literally dive into the comments to savage ordinary commenting nobodies who dared take issue with him in the smallest way, it clicked. But, even at that, I kind of overlooked it because he managed to keep it out of his main story even as his basic nastiness asserted itself.

    It was only when Obama was elected that it completely consumed him and his writing dropped clarity and substituted the patented Greenwaldian pseudo-clarity, the taking of a position based upon evidence from which the position is only one of many possible inferences. Then having taken that position, he invites the reader to draw further inferences as established fact, which his fans do. And the trap is that if you dare call him out for the thing his faithful readers believe he told them, he will savagely attack and mock you by pointing out that he never said any such thing. Which, of course, is in a narrow sense, true.

    All of his “reporting” on the Snowden story was of this variety. Time and again, you followed his links and discovered, e.g. one slide from a whole powerpoint deck that might have been discussing real capabilities, might have been one slide from a vendor pitch for a project they were trying to get funded, might have been inserted as an explanation of why it was important to make sure you got a FISA warrant or sign off from your superiors before you looked at stuff, might have been some bureaucrat over selling a project that actually didn’t work. You didn’t know. And he didn’t tell you. The inference he wanted the reader to draw was clear, but the reader was left to draw it.

  50. 50.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: True. The fact that so many liberals were snookered by Assange who has shown to be a huge supporter of fascists says it all about our collective judgment. Ditto the fact that a few liberals were praising Flake and Corker to the high heavens for their weak criticisms of Trump which amounted to nothing since they vote his way over 90% of the time.

  52. 52.

    Jay S

    @JGabriel:

    … and said that without the Civil War slavery would end on its own due to capitalism.

    Okay, now you’re just putting us on. No one is that fucking stupid.

    I am pretty sure this was a standard College level textbook position after the great civil war whitewash. It prevailed until the 60’s, I believe. Including minimization of slavery as a cause of war and substituting tariff nonsense.

  55. 55.

    cain

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):

    @cain: A very short stint in July 2014, so short that when another commenter brought it up on LGM I thought he was referring to Freddie. FWIW the reception was mostly positive at the time.

    Oh wow.. I must have totally passed it over. My commenting sprees tend to come in spurts. Oh well, looks like nothing was lost. I actually didn’t mind Freddie all that much.

  56. 56.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Wild sophistry, with a particular focus on ludicrous and insulting straw men, has always been Greenwald’s style. I will always go back to when he was criticized for speaking glowingly of Ron Paul, Publisher of White Power Manifestos. Greenwald’s single paragraph counter argument in his next Paul-fellating article was that Democrats like to kill babies, but understandably do not want to admit that to themselves, so of course they say they object on the grounds of racism. I am quoting him as closely to his phrasing as I can remember.

    @Baud:
    I, too, was an early Greenwald’s objector. I believe I first spotted what a dishonest ass he is when he was raging about Al-Alwaki being assassinated without due process. He quoted a federal judge’s statement of concern about the issue, but left out that the same judge declared the targeting legal and constitutional, upholding a previous judge’s ruling that Al-Alwaki voluntarily waived his right to trial. There is no excuse for a supposed constitutional lawyer not addressing those facts, and it angered me how many people he deceived by misleading them about what due process is.

  58. 58.

    Turgidson

    @Fair Economist:

    Glennie pooh immediately declared for all time that Obama was worse than bush and pure evil when Obama didn’t summarily fire and disband the entire NSA and CIA, and anyone who disagreed with him was a bootlicking OBot who would defend anything Dear Leader did.

    Since then, Glennie pooh’s entire reason for being is to make claims that Democrats are hypocrites and sell outs, which makes them worst of all. Which means now he’s just as committed as Hair Furor to the “Russia story is a hoax” dipshittery. He’s been so far around the bend for so long now that he might as well just fucking go to Breitbarf and be done with it.

  60. 60.

    PIGL

    @Patricia Kayden: it says fuck all about “our collective judgement”. WikiLeaks was on its face a good idea so Assange received much merit as being its public face. This opinion, most of us have been capable of revising as the evidence changed.

    I really don’t know how you would like to proceed; that no cause or representative be taken seriously until proven to be a spotless Christian hero? how many decades of inquisition would be required do you think?

  62. 62.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Uncle Ebeneezer:
    I miss Angry Black Lady, and respect the Hell out of her. She really opened my eyes. I was stunned by the extremity and breadth of the racist reaction to Obama. Imani’s explanations were the ones that fit the facts and I accepted them.

    @Patricia Kayden:
    I was also an early doubter of Assange and an immediate doubted of Snowden. Every time I followed up their leaks, I found that they did not say what we were told they said. A prime example was an NSA audit finding 4000 errors in the use of a search engine (typo stuff, wrong fields, etc.) reported as 4000 times the NSA targeted Americans for spying.

  64. 64.

    Brachiator

    Note how God Emperor Donaldus of Orange declares that an attack on him is an attack on the country.

    The sad thing is that the GOP simply ignores this and his supporters eat it up. We may have an authoritarian democracy, with Trump channeling the mob.

  66. 66.

    Roger Moore

    @NCSteve:
    This summarizes my main problem with Greenwald: he’s a very partisan* advocate masquerading as an unbiased reporter. He is highly selective in the facts he reports, and he responds very badly whenever anyone points out anything that disagrees with his POV or points out how selective he’s being. It’s a very nasty combination.

    *In the sense of taking sides in an argument, not necessarily party politics.

  68. 68.

    Fair Economist

    @Jay S: To back up the fact that capitalism alone wouldn’t end slavery, look at the last major country to abolish slavery, Brazil. Brazil only ended slavery because of the strong anti-slavery beliefs of its emperor and princess imperial, who signed decrees restricting and eventually abolishing slavery against strong political opposition.

    The capitalists responded to their actions by mounting a coup and kicking them out of office. To her credit, Isabel, ex-Princess Regent, said later “I don’t regret it; I consider it worth losing the throne for.”

  69. 69.

    Fair Economist

    @Turgidson: I don’t think Greenwald is “around the bend”. His intellectually nonsensical beliefs are just too good a fit to Putin’s aims. He’s a paid agent and propagandist. Look at the discussion in this thread about the elaborate and clever ways he pushes obvious nonsense. Those aren’t the actions of a crazy person, they are the actions of a very skilled liar.

  70. 70.

    Brachiator

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:

    From what I remember in Early American History, American slavery itself helped first create capitalism. In the early 19th century lines of credit were first established to fund the acquisition of more slaves, land, and other materials.

    This is factually incorrect.

  73. 73.

    Fair Economist

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):

    Glenn and Young Conor turning “DROOOOONEZ” into a memetic metonym for farcically-narrow, glibertarian foreign policy types is one of their more unfortunate own goals.

    Not an own goal. When Trump tripled the rate of drone strikes, they fell silent. They don’t give a flying f*** about drone strikes; they were just writing about it to increase opposition to Obama because they thought they could use it to wedge off the peace faction.

  74. 74.

    No Drought No More

    “Too inconsequential to sue”… or otherwise destroy for practicing free speech and fuck you, too, bucko.. What happens to those Americans that seek to destroy our Republic from within? What the hell is wrong with those people?

  76. 76.

    ? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?

    @Brachiator:
    It’s been like a year since I took it. I still have the book we had to read, “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward E. Baptist, a historian.

    A sweeping, authoritative history of the expansion of slavery in America, showing how forced migrations radically altered the nation’s economic, political, and cultural landscape.

    Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution–the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

    In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

    Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

    I do remember the overarching point being that capitalist market economics and slavery worked hand in hand and contrary to what contemporary abolitionists claimed about the superiority of free-labor, chattel slavery proved itself superior in terms of production of cotton, including after the civil war when slavery was outlawed; slavery was never going to end because of economics or new machinery (the cotton gin, if IIRC helped save slavery). If plantation slavery ever became obsolete, then slavery could be adapted to the assembly line.

  77. 77.

    Hobbes83

    The funny part is that he says that LGM is “too inconsequential to sue,” and yet dedicated a tweet threat to them based on the article they posted. One of these things is not like the other, not like the other, not like the other…

  78. 78.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    @Fair Economist: Actually, Glenn has written a few posts to the effect that civilian deaths under Trump so far have exceeded the whole of those under Obama…but has proved intent on learning nothing from said information.

    And by “own goal” I didn’t mean “get Trump elected,” but rather that their drones/electoral wankery helped in making drones a “libertarian white guy’s pet issue.”

    FWIW, I consider drones to be significantly worse than Libya and less awful than Yemen. Libya was a reasonable call in a civil war and an international coalition, but would have required more intensive, long-term groundwork to be effective; Yemen is terrible on the merits and US involvement seems to be based in informal Saudi appeasement (i.e. not officially codified in policy).

  81. 81.

    Ruckus

    @JGabriel:

    Okay, now you’re just putting us on. No one is that fucking stupid.

    That’s a funny!
    You are right though, they aren’t that fucking stupid. To be that fucking stupid they would have to move up the scale about 200 positions – they really, really are much more fucking stupid than you are giving them credit for.

  88. 88.

    Citizen Alan

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):

    without the Civil War slavery would end on its own due to capitalism.

    People who say this fill me with an almost superhuman rage. Their unspoken assumption is that once capitalism made slavery uneconomical, the slave owners would have simply free their slaves and welcomed them into the Brotherhood of Man or some shit like that. When in fact, the more likely outcome is that once slavery became non-profitable, the slave states would have simply killed all their surplus slaves! It was in 1912, when Mississippi governor JK Vardaman said publicly in a widely praised speech but if it were the only way to preserve white supremacy, he supported the mass lynching of every black man, woman, and child in the state of Mississippi. That pretty much summed up the views of the slave state governments towards their slave state populations.

  89. 89.

    Ruckus

    @Roger Moore:
    He knows what he knows and no one is going to contradict him because no one is as smart as he is. Just ask him. Delusional is not a band.

  90. 90.

    Brachiator

    @? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: One tidbit.

    the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

    The North became more industrialized and modern than the South. Except for technology related to agriculture, the South quickly fell behind and its economy was exceptionally fragile by the time of the civil war.

    Market economies of varying sophistication have existed since the rise of civilization.

  93. 93.

    gorram

    @Citizen Alan: Liberia. Never forget that far too many abolitionists were abolitionists because they wanted an all-White country… and that meant ethnically cleansing the country of any previous slaves.

  94. 94.

    Roger Moore

    @Citizen Alan:

    Their unspoken assumption is that once capitalism made slavery uneconomical, the slave owners would have simply free their slaves and welcomed them into the Brotherhood of Man or some shit like that. When in fact, the more likely outcome is that once slavery became non-profitable, the slave states would have simply killed all their surplus slaves!

    In practice, they’d probably just work them harder and treat them worse to try to squeeze out as much money as they could while they could. That’s been by far the most common outcome for slaves throughout history. The US was an anomaly in having a slave population that had children fast enough to have a growing population, and it wouldn’t last long if/when capitalism started to make slave labor economically uncompetitive.

  95. 95.

    Terry chay

    @Jay S: You are correct to a degree. It actually persisted longer in high schools (my US History teacher in the 1980’s repeated this lie). The argument was that the price of slaves were going up after the end of the slave trade and so slaves would become too expensive and get priced out.

    This is ironic because simple supply and demand says that if prices go up the demand must be higher, not lower for a good. It took a economic history grad student from the odious U Chicago to notice this and write a paper in the 60’s or 70’s. She concluded that mechanism wouldn’t have been cheaper than slavery (in farm labor) until the 1960’s. And even then, common sense would have dictated that slavery would have found another avenue (eg manufacturing) just like it did when it moved from the old south to the new (which increased demand and made slaves more expensive in the years before the civil was).

  96. 96.

    burnspbesq

    Even in 2005-07, before he lost his mind, Greenie was second-rate. Marty Lederman consistently got there first with better analysis.

  97. 97.

    Ransom

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    LOL maybe Alan Dershowitz commissioned this and that makes it a “Harvard” poll?
    Ya know, I haven’t really seen discussed in depth the extent to which maybe GG’s antipathy to Trump/Russia “collusion” hinges on some fear of the entire enterprise of his (and Assange’s) leakocracy coming under existential threat if its proved that the leakosystem was a useful idiot in Putin’s active measures campaign. And the shrillness of the denials makes you think that where’s there’s smoke….

    GG overtly accepts a role as a politically “committed” journalist, and that’s fine, but if its proved that he or other’s like him have been acting as a knowing instrument of a hostile country, its going to be much easier for politicians and intelligence agencies to make the case that they are essentially hostile nonstate cyber-combatant and take measures against them.

  98. 98.

    pluky

    @The Dangerman: Yes! And frankly de facto slavery (maintained by share-cropper debt, the chain-gang, and the Klan) in the South didn’t really end until the dismantling of Jim Crow.

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @Ransom:

    the leakosystem was a useful idiot in Putin’s active measures campaign.

    It was not a useful idiot; it was a knowing participant.

  100. 100.

    patroclus

    @burnspbesq: Like baud and many others, I too have despised Dear Leader Greenwald for quite a long time; even before 2007. In 2005, I was intrigued by him and his attacks on Bush and torture and extraordinary rendition, but he never really moved beyond that initial burst. And then he went berserk in 2009 when Obama became President and he’s never recovered.

  101. 101.

    Ransom

    @Roger Moore:
    I think in fact GG is not pretending to be unbiased. I’ve heard him present himself as politically committed, which in fact is something we need more of in the mainstream journalistic profession. But, and this is a YUGE but; he’s not honest. He’s actively twisting facts in the FOX model. And if you disagree with him or point this out, you are the enemy, and an even bigger one than the external enemy of the right, because you are a traitor.

  103. 103.

    Ransom

    I think we need to differentiate between the importance and maybe inevitability of undertakings like wikileaks and the Intercept, and those who would lead those enterprises. These are revolutionary journalistic innovations, and need them and must work with them. But you know what revolutions attract? Lenins.

    We can and should condemn Leninists like Assange who seek to turn a movement into a cult of personality, and will do deals with the devil to advance their cult.

  104. 104.

    eemom

    @patroclus:

    The fuckwad went berserk BEFORE Obama was president, and in particular during the 2008 campaign, just like his gal pal Hamsher…..who seems to have mercifully vanished.

    Glad for this post, though. I needed a laugh today.

  106. 106.

    David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch

    BBWHWHWHWHAHHAHAHAHWHAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHAHA

    Griftwald complaining about perceived charge of racism

    AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHA

    He used to be a Klan lawyer (Matthew F. Hale)

    HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHHAHHHAHH

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