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Monday, April 18, 2011

TAX DAY

 

The True Finns won massively -- well, they went from 4% to 20%, and the other two parties hover at 20% . This gives a majority to Finns opposing international bailout, and Finland threatens to exercise her veto over bailing out Portugal and other banlrupt members of the European Union. There is fear that Greece will have to restructure its debts, but any talk of spending cuts sparks riots and public employee union strikes. "Restructure" is a polite term for default, which, given that Greece continues deficit spending while completely out of money, has everyone scared: not that anything will be done. Note the effect on the market. Meanwhile the US plays games with spending cuts -- they are far smaller than the insufficient $38 billion we were told of --  while assuring everyone we will raise the debt ceiling and borrow our way out for a while more. Unemployment continues. And the number of people who get money from government rather than pay taxes creeps upward.

And for irony:

The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is "one shock away from a full-blown crisis".

Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk "losing a generation".

He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Meanwhile, G20 finance chiefs, who also met in Washington, pledged financial support to help new governments in the Middle East and North Africa.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13108166

So we will help the new governments in the Middle East and North Africa, although what we will help them with is not entirely clear. Perhaps someone will loan us the money so we can loan it to Greece and Portugal who can loan it to Egypt, who can loan it back to us with the Suez Canal as security.

And I am off to the Post Office to send in my tax returns.

=================

Now for the good news: it is becoming apparent to everyone but the ivory tower intellectuals that things are bad, and the liberal dream is not working. It takes a while, but look at the last election. The machine still won in California, but it is strongest here. Of course California thinks it can continue to run enormous deficits which the harder working people in other states will have to bail us out of, while driving the last of the industries out of the state.

Studies show that the more you complain about pat downs at the airports, the more likely you are to get one. You think?

Last Thursday night at LASFS I had a few words about the return of the Ozone Hole: apparently it's not only back, but bigger and bigger than ever, and we'll have the Ozone Hole over Hyannisport again. The Ozone Hole panic caused us to phase out Freon and go to far more expensive fluids for our air conditioners. Oddly enough, Freon became a source of mortal danger just as the patents ran out on Freon and since it was pretty cheap, something else patentable became necessary for the chemical industry; accordingly Freon was pronounced the cause of the ozone holes and a threat to humanity.

It has been banned for some years now, but the Ozone Hole seems to be returning, bigger than ever. Perhaps I have misunderstood, but I thought we had solved that problem.  I wonder that the patent status of the new stuff we replaced Freon with is?

============

If you did not see Sunday's disquisition on temperatures it might be worth your while. There was also mail.

=========

Bill Rusher, RIP.

<http://www.nationalreview.com/
articles/264957/william-rusher-rip-editors>

-- Roland Dobbins

I knew him, not well, but we did meet several times, including once in New York City when I went to a Philadelphia Society meeting with Russell Kirk. He was a man of importance and dignity, and he had an effect on the world.

See also the Wall Street Journal editorial for today, "Right From the Start" http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB1000142405274870461350
4576269150668538440.html

Igor Birman, RIP

 The same WSJ editorial memorialized Igor Birman, the Soviet statistician and economist who after defecting to the United States held that the Soviet economy was much smaller and less robust than US experts including the CIA believed. Stefan Possony believed that also. It was important to understand that the USSR was not a second superpower, but a failing economy with missiles; and if the missiles were threatened, so was the power of the USSR to do evil in the world. As Larry Niven used to put it, don't we believe in capitalism? Reagan listened to this view, and it is one reason he stood up to the Soviets and would not back down on Strategic Defense. We live in a better world because of him.

===========

There seems to be some furor over one or another joke about Obama as a chimp, and how anyone who does that should be barred from politics forever. Googling "Bush as a chimp" produces a lot of items including http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blbushchimplookalikes.htm but I don't recall any furor over that. And I do recall that there were many who denounced Ape Lincoln in his day. If we had just evolved into a more polite society that has less tolerance for incivility I would probably be happier, but in fact that is not the case.  Any stick to beat an opponent...

When Bush is depicted as a chimp it is a joke -- after all, he's stupid, isn't he? But if it is Obama, then it is racist, not that Obama is not as bright as he thinks he is? Now of course in the real world one does not become President of the United States by having the IQ of a chimp.  You have to be at least as smart as -- but no, no, I mustn't continue that thought...

There is mail up.

=================

I would have thought that if there were any validity left to the notion of anti-trust, allowing AT&T to absorb T-Mobile and (at least from their history) close off some towers and generally reduce connectivity would be the last thing you would allow. Why in the world reduce the number of providers?  I suppose because the notion is to increase the need for regulation and thus build up the power of government?

For heaven's sake.

=======

Obama's signing statement

Dr. Pournelle,

In your opinion, how important is it that the President has declared he will ignore the defunding of his "czars" in his signing statement? I had thought that the Power of the Purse was by original design the ultimate power of Congress, and that a Congressional budget was an all or nothing proposition for a President. Your thoughts?

Steve Chu

I need to think on this. The Constitution is clear. This is an act of defiance by the President. He is defying them to impeach him.

Perhaps the Congress can order the arrest of any official who pays salaries to the Czars?

Control of the purse is the fundamental curb on monarchy, and is the oldest of the rights of Englishmen. We all need to think on this. Constitutional Crises are to be avoided but sometimes there is no choice.

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Tuesday,  April 19, 2011  

The Fundamental Debate

The Wall Street Journal today ran the intellectual defense of Obama's deficit reduction plan in today's editorial pages. It is "Paul Ryan's Reverse Robin Hood Budget " (link) by Princeton economist Alan Binder,. Ostensibly about the Ryan budget plan, it says in abstract terms about what President Obama said in his speech: we don't have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem. It does not start by listing its assumptions: apparently it is assumed that you know what they are, to wit, that Medicare and Medicaid and all the other entitlements we have now are necessary and proper, the only permissible cuts in those programs will be small and devoted to "eliminating fraud and abuse, and the only real problems we have are funding those necessary entitlements while not going broke. Nothing else matters. Fortunately we can do that: stop giving money to the rich. Don't cut taxes.

Example:

Worst things first. The plan threatens to eviscerate Medicare by privatizing it—with vouchers that, absent some sort of cost-control miracle, would fall further and further behind the rising cost of health insurance. And to make that miracle even less likely, House Republicans want to repeal every cost-containment measure enacted in last year's health-reform legislation.

Then it summarizes:

It gets worse. The House Budget Committee's own rack-up of changes from the CBO baseline displays the much-ballyhooed $5.8 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. But it also displays $4.2 trillion less in tax revenue. How many Americans know that 72% of Mr. Ryan's claimed budget cuts would go to fund tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich?

Medicare would not die a sudden death under the Ryan plan—people over 55 are grandfathered. It would, instead, succumb slowly to a debilitating illness as the growing gap between the vouchers and the cost of private health insurance priced more and more seniors out of the market. This fate evokes conservative activist Grover Norquist's famous image: to keep on shrinking the government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub. And who would go down the drain with it? Not prosperous Americans, whose huge tax cuts would more than compensate for their higher health-insurance bills, but middle-class people who really need Medicare.

There's another summary that lets us infer the assumptions under this:

But follow the numbers out for decades, and the Ryan plan does turn into a lion. The CBO's scorekeeping shows federal spending under the House Republican budget falling to just 14¾% of GDP in 2050. (It's now 23¾%.) That sounds great—until you think about it.

For openers, the last time federal spending was that small a share of the economy was 1951—before Medicare and Medicaid, before the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Energy, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. You get the idea. Somewhere, Mr. Norquist is filling his bathtub.

That, I think, states the assumptions under which Blinder and the White House operate: All that growth in the Federal government since 1951 was necessary and proper, and we are much the better off for it. Of course it was the fear of that growth that caused Bill Buckley to found National Review in 1955, and state that its mission was to stand in the way of history shouting "Stop!" This has been the fundamental debate between conservatives and progressives ever since. It is made complex by another debate: there are those who believe that government has a positive role in doing good through "progressive" means, but that these are not the job of the federal government: they are the province of the states. And that was greatly complicated by the problems of civil rights: did states rights mean the right of the states to continue segregation? Were federal civil rights laws required in order to make the law color blind? Did not the cause of civil rights demand the enormous expansion of the power of the federal government and the creation of new bureaucracies? Because once the new bureaucracies were created, they would grow. Parkinson's Law and Pournelle's Iron Law would see to that.

But are all those bureaucracies needed? Do they do good or harm? Would education in the United States be better for a continued growth in the Department of Education, or would it be bettered by abolishing that Department entirely? Do we need Energy and Transportation as separate Departments or could their necessary functions be performed by Interior and Commerce? Are we really better off for their existence? It is surely worth debating, but Professor Blinder does not see that. To him it is self evident.

It is not self evident to me.  The necessity of maintaining federal spending at 20% GDP and above seems to me the essence of what we ought to be discussing.

==========

Regarding civil rights: when I was a young man in high school in the legally segregated South, I thought the law ought to be colorblind. I was thought a hopeless radical for thinking so. When the civil rights debates and freedom rides took place, I did not support them: I remain an advocate of states rights. The one federal law we needed was enforcement of the right to vote. That was clearly constitutional, and Congress clearly had the plain black letter law power to enforce it by appropriate legislation. In my judgment that was the proper course of events, and all the other federal interferences in state affairs like the various school takeovers were not merely needless but did great harm. I see no reason for changing that view now. But that is an aside and not a part of the current debate, which ought to be:

To how much of someone else's income and property is someone entitled by reason of existence? If you cannot see well, are you entitled to spectacles paid for by someone else? If you have no teeth, are you entitled to free dental work? If you have no kidneys, are you entitled to one from someone who has two and needs only one? If you are anemic, are you entitled to someone else's blood? If you are hungry, are you entitled to have someone buy you lunch? If you are poor and disabled, are you entitled to have someone pay you enough so that you enjoy a dignified and satisfying life? If you are poor and lazy (have ADHD) are you entitled to have someone pay you, and how much?

By entitled I mean a legal entitlement: you are owed money, and armed agents of the government will be sent to collect it for you. I do not mean some ethical or moral obligation based on religion laid against those who will pay: I mean that the public hangman threatens those who owe you if they resist paying.

Clearly these entitlements do not fall equally: some get them, and some do not. Equally clearly the obligations to pay them do not fall equally. Some have to pay, and many others do not. I am told that more than 40% of Americans do not pay any income taxes at all, and of that 40% a substantial number get "earned income credits" which is to say negative income tax: they get "refunds" from withholding taxes that were in fact not withheld. The question, then, is who takes and who pays?

This is the fundamental debate. The progressives say that the remedy to the deficit is to take more from the rich and give more to the poor. Share the wealth, and all will be well.  The problem with this, as Lady Thatcher observed, is that after a while you run out of other people's money. Taking the investment wealth and distributing it results in less investment. The remedy to that is to take even more and invest some of it. See Clinton's campaign speeches for more detail. But that has been tried many times, and Central Planning does not seem to work well as a means of investment. The Five Year Plans never worked, and over time the USSR, empire and all, spiraled into insolvency even as West Germany became a great economic power.

Obama and his intellectuals have made it clear even as they try to obscure what the debate is about.

The Ryan plan has received vastly too much praise from people who should know better. For a while, it was even celebrated as "the only game in town," which it never was. It was preceded by both the Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin plans, which are vastly superior in every respect. Within days of Mr. Ryan's announcement, President Obama chimed in with his own ideas on deficit reduction—another huge improvement over the Ryan plan. Now we await the Senate Gang of Six's entry.

No, the House Republican plan is not the only game in town. It's only the worst.

Which, on analysis, parses out to: the entitlements are necessary and proper, and cannot be cut. Since we can't cut the entitlements we must raise taxes.

The President has said we cannot continue to spend more than we take in. No one questions that. How that will be accomplished is the real debate for the 2012 election. That election is crucial: it will determine whether, finally, those who have stood in the path of history shouting Stop! since the 1950's will finally get the attention they deserve without the horrible distractions of the Cold War. It will determine the future of this republic.

============

Subject: Alan Blinder's little lie

Jerry, in today's View you quote Alan Blinder as writing, in part, "For openers, the last time federal spending was that small a share of the economy was 1951—before Medicare and Medicaid, before the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Energy, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security."

What Professor Blinder very carefully fails to mention is that, although there wasn't a federal Department of Veteran's Affairs, there was the Veteran's Administration, predecessor to the Department and doing exactly the same things. Clearly, he wants us to think that the current Department is something new that didn't exist in any way, shape or form back in 1951 to help explain why the Federal Government needs to spend such a high percentage of our GDP today. I think it's safe to say that his argument would have worked just as well if he'd left this false example out. This suggests to me that he's not as sure of his conclusions as he wants us to think he is, and felt the need to bolster it by slipping in this "little white lie." Of course, it could also be that he simply doesn't know his history as well as he wants us to think he does, but in either case, it casts his entire argument into question, or at least, it should.

Joe Zeff

Indeed. I went to University on the Korean GI Bill, and of course much of the great expansion of the US University system came from the GI Bill of Rights of 1945 and after. I do not know the extent of Professor Blinder's knowledge of the times, but he certainly has much of that wrong.  His point seems to be that the entitlements are indispensable, and we do not have a spending problem, we have a revenue problem which must be solved by taxing the rich. That is the official line of the current administration. No cuts. More spending. And balance the budget, not by cutting back but by taxing more.

============

Trumpets!  If you have not heard this, go listen. You'll be glad of it!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
world-middle-east-13092827

===============

 

 

 

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Wednesday,  April 20, 2011

It's all right to do cartoons of presidents as chimps, unless that president is Obama, in which case you must commit ritual suicide if you find such a cartoon funny and forward it to anyone. The cartoon itself has vanished (although I saw a copy of it yesterday), although cartoons of Bush as a chimpanzee have not. The radio talk shows are boiling with comment on the horrid racism of it all. I find all that interesting: it is not racist to imply that Bush or Reagan are chimpanzees in disguise, but it is racist to imply that about Obama. Of course it is not clear what "racist' means in the first place.

What is pretty clear is that no one has been harmed by an email forwarding of a cartoon, and all the furor over this non-incident is absurd. At least we haven't -- at least not yet -- burned buildings and killed people over cartoons, although I wonder sometimes if that is where we are heading. Maybe we need some rules. Is it all right to photoshop a picture making a President a rat? A tarantula? Perhaps a rattlesnake? A cuddly panda? Is it permitted to put a President in a wheel chair? Perhaps any President but Roosevelt?

We seem to be a nation of people who not only take umbrage, but go about cultivating umbrage, or mining umbrage, or pretending umbrage. Would self immolation be sufficient atonement?

And the unction of the radio commentators would be amusing if it were not so pretentious.

Niven is here and we are about to go up the hill. Sable took the opportunity to remind Larry of how much he likes her. Sable grew up not allowed to get on the furniture, but when she had her knee rebuilt we let her get up on the couch with us while she was recovering. Now that she's completely recovered she continues to claim the privilege. I couldn't resist getting the picture.

We had a good hike and lunch.

=================

 

 

 

 

 

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Thursday,  April 21, 2011

 

==========

From time to time I try to analyze my critical mail. I find it fascinating:

Umbrage.

You are being ingenuous.

Comparing black people to chimps, just as comparing Jews to rats, Japanese as bucktoothed, or Mexicans as greasy, is offensive because the comparisons play into ethnic stereotypes which have historically been used to oppress these groups.

You can make a case that this is okay, that it is allowable to use this context in political advocacy, and that this is the same as portraying Bush negatively as a spoiled and privileged wasp (another ethnic stereotype). You cannot make the case though, that portraying a white man as a monkey is the same as portraying a black man as a monkey. It isn't. History and context matters.

You know this.

Brian Gulino

Actually, I know better in more ways than you think. If there are no racial differences then there can be no unique racial insults. There is no more truth to the assertion that Obama is closely related to chimpanzees than there is to the same assertion about Bush. I would have thought that fairly obvious to anyone who considered the matter. Are you asserting otherwise?

As to offensiveness, what has that to do with anything? Political rhetoric is intended to be offensive. There is no lack of offensive rhetoric. Most of it is openly said, not merely forwarded in an email to people supposed to be friends.  If  we are looking for political statements that offended their targets, we will have no problem finding them. Being the target of offensive rhetoric -- and cartoons -- is one of the burdens of seeking and holding public office.

As to making cases, you have made mine for me. The next step in this affair is to excuse rioting and violence because someone drew a cartoon. I doubt that will be long coming.

I am more interested in the term "allowable". What do we mean by that? Who determines what political advocacy is allowable?  What is the penalty for saying that which is not allowed? Is it to be enforced by federal authorities? Shall we add that task to the duties of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, Firearms, and Explosives?

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens. .  .  .

—Senator Edward Kennedy, July 1, 1987

One presumes that is allowable since it was certainly allowed. Presumably it would not have been allowable had Senator Kennedy privately shown a copy of a letter he received from a correspondent who called Judge Bork a rat?

Ah well. Taking umbrage is allowable. A free society will give anyone ample access to vast quantities of umbrage. There's even some here for the rest of us. The incident makes me angry -- not with the elderly party volunteer official who forwarded an email to a few people on a private list because she thought it was funny and it was easy to do with a few clicks -- but at the supposed friend who decided he had to let the press know about this offensive cartoon, and how he got it, and from whom, and how he thought it offensive, and how virtuous he is for doing all this. That's the guy I want to avoid.

===========

There is a serious discussion in all this.

Many statements are offensive, some peculiarly to certain people. I hadn't thought about buck-tooth jokes about the Japanese in a long time, although every now and then I'll run across a Hollywood cartoon from the World War II era, in which buck-toothed Japanese are depicted in comic ineptness. I am of the "sticks and stones" view on most such matters in any event, and I find many of the "that was hurtful" operations to be cynical shakedowns to the benefit of professional umbrage takers. Perhaps I grew up in more tolerant times, but I heard most of my stock of Jewish jokes from the late Elmar Lanczos who delighted in collecting Jewish and Hungarian ethnic jokes, most of them in the poorest possible taste, which he only told to his friends, most of whom were gentiles. He would have considered it bad taste to tell such stories to friends he thought would be offended.

 Bad taste is timeless, and most of us are guilty of lapses once in a while. If repeating a joke which is likely to be offensive to someone, somewhere, is immediate disqualification for public life, then we are doomed.

The serious point is this: what about hurtful statements that are true? As an example: it is simply true that there are retarded children in this world. It is simply true that mainstreaming them -- placing them in classrooms with children of normal intelligence -- can make education for the normal and bright kids much more difficult. It may be true that these difficulties can be overcome by proper teacher training. What is certainly true is that it's impossible to discuss the subject without making statements that will be considered offensive and hurtful, if not by the retarded, then by their parents or guardians, and said to be offensive by advocates whose motives may not be entirely altruistic. Discussion of entitlements to education cannot avoid this dilemma: are the normal and bright kids in a classroom entitled to the teacher's attention? Are they entitled to classrooms without distractions and disruptions? But again, the very mention of such things is hurtful.

But serious discussions of serious problems must take a back seat to the pretended horror of a forwarded email containing a cartoon of the President as a baby chimpanzee. We even have new photographs of the President, stony-faced, viewing the cartoon. I can think of more pressing matters for his attention. And I can think of more pressing matters for ours.

=============

See "Cheapest E-Books Upend the Charts" (link) in today's Wall Street Journal marketing section.

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Friday,  April 22, 2011

Good Friday

Earth Day

I do not observe Earth Day, but I note it because this is the day of publication of the 2011 Edition of A Step Farther Out, a book on saving civilization I first published in the 1970's. It was largely drawn from the columns I wrote as Science Columnist at Galaxy Science Fiction. While some of it is dated, much of the book is still relevant.

I don't know how long it will take for Amazon to get this up for sale, but it should not be long. This edition is much better than

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday,  April 23, 2011

It is Easter weekend, and I've been busy.

I do recommend Peggy Noonan's Saturday WSJ column "What the World Sees in America" (link).

I want to talk a little more this holiday week about what I suppose is a growing theme in this column, and that is an increased skepticism toward U.S. military intervention, including nation building. Our republic is not now in a historical adventure period—that is not what is needed. We are or should be in a self-strengthening one. Our focus should not be on outward involvement but inner repair. Bad people are gunning for us, it is true. We should find them, dispatch them, and harden the target. (That would be, still and first, New York, though Washington too.) We should not occupy their lands, run their governments, or try to bribe them into bonhomie. We think in Afghanistan we're buying their love, but I have been there. We're not even renting it.

Our long wars have cost much in blood and treasure, and our military is overstretched. We're asking soldiers to be social workers, as Bing West notes in his book on Afghanistan, "The Wrong War."

Her conclusion is the position I started from before we went into Iraq. I had no problem supporting the punitive expedition into Afghanistan with the goal of teaching the Afghanis not to harbor our enemies, but I was horrified when we set up camp and tried to build a new government there. Mesopotamia is known as a graveyard of empires, but Afghanistan even more so; and as Miss Noonan observes, we're not even renting the love of the Afghani. For every one there who wants us to stay forever, there is at least one who can't wait for us to get out.

Perhaps, with more resources to pour into desert sand and scatter to Afghan winds we could do more, but we don't have more resources. We're broke and bleeding, and we are building neither an empire nor an ally, not in Afghanistan and not in Iraq. We need to come home and rebuild America.

The rest of her column is thought provoking.

==============

I also recommend "Why I Still Support Nuclear Power, Even After Fukushima" by William Tucker (link).

It's not easy being a supporter of nuclear energy these days. The events in Japan have confirmed many of the critics' worst predictions. We are way past Three Mile Island. It is not quite Chernobyl, but the possibilities of widespread radioactive contamination remain real.

Still, other energy technologies are not without risk. In 1944 a natural gas explosion in Cleveland leveled an entire neighborhood and killed 130 people. Yet we still pipe gas right into our homes. Coal mining killed 100,000 workers in the 20th century, and still kills an average of six a day in China, but we haven't given up coal. A hydroelectric dam collapsed in Japan during the earthquake, wiping away 1,800 homes and killing an undetermined number of people, yet nobody has paid much attention.

I do not agree that this is "not quite Chernobyl". We're a long way from Chernobyl, and I can't think of a scenario that gets us to where a major portion of Fukushima's fuel inventory goes into the atmosphere and contaminates surrounding territories. The amount of actual damage to anyone off site from Fukushima is minimal, and while there remains some danger -- say even the inevitability -- of further radioactive contamination, it will be neither widespread nor persistent compared to Chernobyl. The amount of contaminated territory will certainly be small compared to, say, the annual tailings piles from producing and burning enough coal to produce a similar amount of electric power.

We cannot build a great world civilization without energy, and we can't get to that civilization without a period of dependence on nuclear fission power. I said all this in A Step Farther Out some forty years ago, and it remains true today.

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Sunday,  April 24, 2011

You can now buy A STEP FARTHER OUT for your Kindle. It's $2.99. It's not a lot different from the older editions; this isn't a big revision. The book is very much relevant to the 21st Century. I got a few things wrong, but I got a lot right as well. I recommend this book for anyone concerned about the future -- but then I wrote it for people concerned about the future. Go find it on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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