Jeffrey Epstein was at the heart of the decision to fight Iran and also at the heart of the decision to stop fighting Iran?

“AOC says Trump is willing to ‘risk world war’ by using Iran attack as Epstein files distraction” (Independent, March 5, 2026):

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has slammed President Donald Trump over the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, accusing him of “risking world war” to distract from the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

“And every time he’s [used the U.S. military], it has been consistent with a spike or a revelation in what is happening with the Epstein files. I don’t think that that coincidence is something to dismiss off the cuff. I think that he feels existentially tied to it.”

Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who spearheaded the passage of the Act last year, posted on X Sunday afternoon: “PSA: Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”

A Democrat from Oregon:

If bombing Iran distracted people from digging into the Epstein files, how does walking away and leaving the Islamic Republic of Iran with intact oil industry, electric power plants, and everything else it needs to rebuild its weapons factories and military help distract people from digging into the Emmanuel Goldstein-Trump connection?

Separately, I’ve lost track of how people explain that the Biden-Harris administration, with exclusive and complete access to all Epstein files for four years, wasn’t able to find anything regarding Donald Trump that was worth leaking to the press. Friends from and in Maskachusetts believe, as a matter of established and verified fact, that Donald Trump, as part of his association with Jeffrey Epstein, either (1) raped a 13-year-old girl, (2) killed a 12- or 13-year-old girl, or some combination of the two. Why wouldn’t the Democrat-run Biden administration have been motivated to release all of the evidence related to these kinds of crimes by a political opponent?

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Florida Legislature responds to the No Kings protest by renaming Palm Beach International Airport…

… to Donald J. Trump International Airport. I wonder if the code will change from PBI to DJT.

“DeSantis signs bill to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Donald J. Trump” (WPTV):

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a controversial bill to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Donald J. Trump. The newly approved legislation, House Bill 919, gives the state authority over naming major commercial service airports and officially designates the facility as “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

Palm Beach County, of course, has more registered Democrats than Republicans, so this isn’t going to be universally popular with our neighbors…

#Ironic: Via his regular weekends in Palm Beach, Donald J. Trump has done more to reduce the utility of PBI than anyone in the 90-year history of the airport. (Temporary Flight Restrictions imposed when DJT is in town make PBI cumbersome/burdensome to use.)

Whether one loves Donald J. Trump or not, I think everyone can agree that PBI offers an awesome traveler experience. Security is a breeze, even without PreCheck. The check-in counters are always fully staffed so there are minimal lines for checking bags. The gates aren’t as crowded as in FLL or MIA. I do wish the ceilings were higher in the gate areas.

Here’s the view of Mar-a-Lago while sitting on JetBlue climbing out of PBI (DJT?) in December 2025 (en route to Minneapolis):

A car in the airport garage back in June 2025 (rare to have any political bumper stickers in this part of Florida, but it is also possible to go big):

Permanent airport exhibit on David McCampbell, “the United States Navy’s all-time leading flying ace”, who spent his youth and retirement in Palm Beach County:

Battle of Leyte Gulf: “When he landed his Hellcat aboard the USS Langley (the flight deck of Essex was not clear), his six machine guns had just two rounds remaining, and his airplane had to be manually released from the arrestor wire due to complete fuel exhaustion.”

Speaking of naming… if we had an aircraft carrier named for FDR why not one for Donald J. Trump (assuming that he wins the current war against Iran!)?

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How was your No Kings rally yesterday?

There was no No Kings rally here in Jupiter, Florida yesterday so I’m forced to rely on the New York Times to understand what one might have been like. Here’s one of their photos (source), I think from Minneapolis:

Principal confusion: We’re informed that Minneapolis is a fully integrated society of white people, Somalis, the Latinx, and some legacy African Americans who are being phased out in favor of migrants. But the photo appears to show only white people, consistent with Minneapolis in December (my experience in December 2025 was that environments were 100% white or 100% Somali and that there was no mixing).

Maybe the protest is actually against democracy? Folks are upset that the candidate for whom they voted was beaten by a candidate for whom other Americans voted? This is an illegitimate result because Americans who aren’t Democrats are “morons”:

In Little Rock, Ark., where more than 2,000 people marched across the Arkansas River, one woman carried her own MAGA sign: “Morons Are Governing America.”

The technical definition of “moron” used to be an IQ of 75 or less, but Democrats must mean something else because they advocate for increased immigration from countries whose average measured IQ is less than 75. Gemini in response to “average IQ in Somali”, for example (quote, but not in quote style for readability):

Based on studies conducted by researchers such as Richard Lynn and David Becker, and various international rankings, the average IQ in Somalia has been estimated to be in the range of 67 to 68.

  • Contextual Data: A 2025 compilation of countries by average IQ, often citing data from the Ulster Institute, lists Somalia with a score of 67.67.
  • Study Data: Another study focusing on Somali refugees in Kenya, using the Standard Progressive Matrices Plus, identified a British-scaled average IQ of 68.
  • Controversy and Factors: It is widely noted that IQ scores are heavily associated with environmental factors, such as nutrition, parental socioeconomic status, morbidity, and educational quality. These low scores are frequently attributed to poor socioeconomics, conflicts, and developmental challenges rather than innate intelligence.
  • Methodology Debate: Critics argue that these studies often rely on outdated data, small sample sizes, or Western-centric tests that do not account for cultural or educational differences. 

These figures place the estimate among the lowest in international IQ studies, often noted in the context of the lowest-ranked nations for national intelligence estimates. 


(I personally think that Somalis who collect checks from government welfare programs are smarter than white Minnesotans who write the checks and work 60 hours/week to pay taxes to fund the checks! So we can say for sure that IQ tests don’t measure practical intelligence.)

What did you all see in your neighborhoods for No Kings day? Your answer can’t be “nothing” because the NYT says “The No Kings organizers said that eight million people took part” and we know that it is Trump who lies and not those who are opposed to Trump.

Pictures from friends on Facebook who attended… note the lack of non-whites.

Boston:

Silicon Valley:

Portland, Oregon:

Black-free Atlanta:

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Trump tried to fill our Strategic Reserve at $20-25/barrel, but wise Senators blocked him

Oil collapsed to $20-25/barrel during coronapanic and Donald Trump tried to seize the opportunity to buy enough to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Exactly six years ago, from rollcall:

The last point:

Senate Democrats took credit for stripping out that money from the Senate bill, unveiled Wednesday, calling it a “bailout” for the oil industry.

What happened after Trump was replaced by Team Smart (Biden-Harris)? The SPR was drained to its lowest level since 1985:

AEA… “Biden Drains Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ahead of Midterms”:

As the mid-term election approaches, the Biden administration is reportedly preparing to sell the 14 million barrels of Strategic Petroleum Reserve oil leftover from its 180-million-barrel SPR release program that began in May. It may also release an additional 26 million barrels of SPR oil in fiscal 2023 that began this month, which is required by Congress to raise money to pay for some of its earlier spending. The administration has a few weeks before the midterms to try to lower gasoline prices, or demonstrate that it is trying to do so.

Loosely related, the examples of Why are climate change alarmists also coronavirus alarmists? continue to mount. Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly, pre-war, advocating “action to protect our planet”:

The same Democrat, March 24, 2026, demands low gasoline prices so that Americans will be encouraged to buy 12 mpg SUVs and drive in circles. The most obvious way to reduce carbon emissions is a carbon tax, but Sen. Mark Kelly here advocates removing a carbon tax (that also pays to maintain the roads, thus shifting the tax burden for road maintenance from car owners to people who virtuously live in walkable neighborhoods and don’t use cars):

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Donald Trump’s lies regarding the range of Iranian missiles

Yesterday, the peaceful Islamic Republic lobbed a warhead 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from Iran to Diego Garcia (WSJ).

Let’s compare to “In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims” (New York Times, last month; note that a “False Claim” might be construed by some people as “Lie”):

American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House has presented in recent days.

… in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made a new claim, saying Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

The following day, Mr. Rubio repeated the president’s assertion about Iran’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, although he used different language about how quickly Iran could be capable of hitting the United States. While Mr. Trump said it would be “soon,” Mr. Rubio said it would be “one day.”

A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency last year concluded that Iran did not have ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States, and that it might take as long as a decade for it to have up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

… 16 years later, there is still no evidence that Iran has made its long-range missile program a top priority.

Instead, Iran has put far greater focus on building up its arsenal of short- and medium-range missiles, believing it could be the most effective deterrent against Israeli or American efforts to overthrow the government in Tehran.

“Trump Iranian missile claim unsupported by U.S. intelligence, say sources” (Reuters, last month):

The New York Times first reported that U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

Without providing evidence, Trump said that Tehran was beginning to rebuild the nuclear program that he claimed had been “obliterated” by U.S. airstrikes last June on three major sites involved with uranium enrichment.

In an interview with India Today TV released on Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied that Iran was expanding its missile capabilities. “We are not developing long range missiles. We have limited range to below 2000 kilometers intentionally,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a global threat. We only have (them) to defend ourselves. Our missiles build deterrence.”

Now that the Iranians actually do have missiles capable of reaching Paris and London, how long before (1) the French surrender, and (2) the Islamic Republic of the UK merges with the Islamic Republic of Iran to form the United Islamic Republic of Britain and Iran?

The map from a few days ago:

The map from today (Daily Mail):

I still can’t figure out why the U.S. hasn’t targeted Iran’s oil production and electric power plants. So long as Iran is exporting oil it can build new missile factories whenever it wants to and so long as Iran has electric power it can plug those new missile factories into the grid for 24×7 operation. If there isn’t a realistic possibility of a friendly government in Iran how can it make sense to leave the current government in control of a functional export economy?

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How did our Trump-hating Olympians do at the Olympics?

The Olympics are over. How did the American athletes who made the news for hating Donald Trump do in terms of medals? If we assume a just God who hates a malevolent dictator, the virtuous #Resistance should have dominated the games. Did the Trump-haters in fact do better than expected?

“Lindsey Vonn Is Clear As Ice About Her Thoughts On Donald Trump”:

Vonn, who was preparing to qualify for the 2018 Games in PyeongChang at the time, was approached by CNN to see if she would go if asked. Her response was as icy as the snowy mountains she conquers. “Absolutely not,” Vonn said. “I hope to represent the people of the United States, not the president. …I want to represent our country well. I don’t think that there are a lot of people currently in our government that do that.”

Fox News recently approached Vonn about the possibility she might get a second invite to the Trump White House. “First of all, I just want to say that every Olympic athlete from Team USA is normally invited… it has nothing to do with if you win a medal or not,” she began. “I’m not going to answer that question because — I’m just not going to answer it. I want to keep my passport.” It was a more diplomatic answer than the one she gave eight years earlier, but her meaning was clear. Donald Trump has a history of meltdowns when faced with dissent, and he tends to lash out at those who dare to oppose him. He disinvited the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit in 2018 because they wouldn’t promise all players would salute the flag. Who’s to say the president wouldn’t find a way to keep a star skier from getting to a major competition if she said something that wounded his pride?

As with my friend Mike Hawley, Trump turned out not to be Lindsey Vonn’s biggest enemy (Journal of Popular Studies regarding Vonn’s broken leg).

Amber Glenn was apparently a trailblazer in combining unusual sexual desires (behaviors?) with ice skating (unlike 100 percent conventional NBC host Johnny Weir):

Glenn, who is the first openly queer woman to represent the U.S. in Olympic figure skating, was asked directly about President Trump, his treatment of the LGBTQ community and how it affects her at a press conference on Feb. 4 for the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. The athlete, 26, told reporters that while it’s been “a hard time” for the community, she hoped to use her platform and her voice “to try and encourage people to stay strong.”

This sculpture in Austin’s UMLAUF Sculpture Garden reminds me that Taylor Swift was at the Games and sagely pointed out that “skaters gonna skate”:

(My personal favorite skaters this year: Isabeau Levito, France’s Adam Siao Him Fa, and, of course, Alysa Liu.)

Then there’s Mikaela Shiffrin. “Alpine skiing-U.S. gold medal hope Shiffrin speaks up for diversity and inclusion” (Reuters):

“It’s always an honour and a privilege to represent Team USA and to represent your country,” she told a news conference when asked by a reporter how it felt to be representing the United States “given what’s happening there”.

The query chimed with more pointed questions faced by other U.S. athletes at the Games over President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration. Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, drew a smattering of boos at Friday’s opening ceremony in Milan. The host city has also seen protests against Trump’s policies.

Shiffrin said that for her “as this relates to the Olympics, I’m really hoping to show up and represent my values. Values of inclusivity, values of diversity and kindness and sharing.”

I don’t think we have to look too far to find a hater who does not value inclusivity and diversity! Where does the diversity-loving Shiffrin live? In a mansion in Edwards, Colorado, right near the Beaver Creek ski resort and not far from Vail. Her address is supposedly 43 Hollis Lane Edwards, CO 81632. Zillow says it is worth $5.2 million. Here’s a nearby 2BR apartment that a diverse person could purchase for $2.8 million:

Then there’s Hunter Hess, the freestyle skier who says that he wants to #resist ICE, but somehow ended up in Italy rather than in Minneapolis. NBC:

“It brings up mixed emotions to represent the U.S. right now, I think. It’s a little hard,” he said. “There’s obviously a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of and I think a lot of people aren’t.”

He continued: “I think for me, it’s more I’m representing my, like, friends and family back home, the people that represented it before me, all the things that I believe are good about the U.S. I just think if it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I’m representing it.”

“Just because I’m wearing the flag doesn’t mean I represent everything that’s going on in the U.S.,” he said.

I hope that we can all agree on whose moral values are deficient/bankrupt and also that “a lot going on that I’m not the biggest fan of” means ICE detaining migrants and not Minnesota paper day care centers siphoning out all U.S. taxpayer cash.

They won Gold for virtue and Trump-hatred, but how did the above athletes actually do in competition?

He/she/ze/they is not exactly an athlete, but Justin Trudeau did taunt Donald Trump with a “you can’t take our game” message before the Canada v. USA hockey match.

Loosely related…

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Why haven’t a lot more people been shot in Minneapolis?

Look at this scene of total chaos in Minneapolis from a few days ago:

People are even more upset this weekend because Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents, just as his parents predicted. What confuses me is why there weren’t daily shootings. Pretti, for example, was armed with a gun and perhaps 51 rounds of ammo (3 magazines times 17 bullets; was he planning to shoot 51 people, to have really bad aim, or to be involved in a multi-hour gun battle?). If people on both sides of this unrest are heavily armed and passionate (the “protesters” say that they’re resisting fascism/Hitler 2.0/Gestapo 2.0) shouldn’t we expect multiple deaths from a scene like the one in the above video (at which nobody was killed, as far as I know).

Separately, here’s my idea for de-escalation: Trump renames ICE to “National Immigration and Customs Enforcement”. They’d be known as “NICE” for short. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would become “Security & Welcome for Entry, Exit & Trade” or “SWEET”. Media headlines would then read “NICE and SWEET visit Minneapolis”. Who could get angry about that?

Related:

  • “The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left Is Back” (New York Times 2026) might explain Mr. Pretti’s epic supply of ammo. The article describes the shooting of four retired investors living on their respective pensions: “The white man who shot four Black teenagers on a downtown subway in December of 1984 … He was convicted of criminal possession of a gun and served eight months in prison … His only regret, he says, was running out of ammunition.” (Compare to NYT January 1985: “Mr. Cabey was arrested in the Bronx on Oct. 13 on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun and stole an undetermined amount of cash and jewelry. … Mr. Canty, 19, of 1372 Washington Avenue, has been arrested four times since he was 16 years old. … Mr. Allen, who is 19 and also lives in a building at 1372 Washington Avenue, is facing a jail sentence for violating probation. … He was first arrested in 1982 at the age of 16 in the Bronx for attempted assault after being accused of shooting another youth in the hand with a BB gun.”)
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Does the Greenland controversy prove that Donald Trump is a genius?

Here’s the front page of the Guardian:

All of the folks previously focused on helping Hamas and harming Israel (“Queers for Palestine”) have now turned their attention to an issue that hardly anyone prior to 2017 had ever considered, i.e., whether Denmark should continue to rule Greenland, whether Greenland should be independent, or whether Greenland should become a U.S. territory.

Could it be that Donald Trump is actually a genius?

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Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol II)

After seeing the lowrider special exhibit (see Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol I)), we continued around some other parts of the de-woked and attacked-by-Trump Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

In the Entertainment Nation section, Carl Nassib was highlighted as the most notable football player in U.S. history (“openly gay”):

Hamilton was featured as the most notable Broadway show in U.S. history due to its “performers of color”:

The Phoenix Suns are are most notable basketball team because at one point the multi-millionaire players advocated for open borders (according to Harvard, low-skill immigration makes multi-millionaires richer while impoverishing the native-born working class).

One American fencer is highlighted as important. Her achievement was fencing while wearing hijab as a positive example to counter the horribleness of Donald Trump:

Trump apparently wrongly questioned the value of importing millions of Muslims as U.S. residents/citizens shortly before Omar Mateen, child of immigrants from Afghanistan, killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub (June 2016). (Note that children of Muslim immigrants are statistically more likely to be interested in waging jihad than their parents were (Harvard report on Danish study).)

A TV actor is highlighted for identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+:

Anthony Fauci is featured as the most notable physician in our nation’s history (note the modeling of a cloth mask rather than an ineffective N95 mask):

(I am desperate to see a Fauciland theme park on the campus of NIH Bethesda!)

Speaking of coronapanic, a separate part of the museum reminds us to “fight the virus, not the people”:

Science fiction has been important to the extent that it has been about women:

Clips of some of America’s greatest television moments are available. There is a Sesame Street show in which kids are exhorted to wear masks and also one in which kids are told that immigrants, especially Muslims in hijab, always make America a better place for everyone:

In a separate section of the museum, visitors are reminded that today’s immigrants have “much in common with those who came before” (i.e., a no-skill Islamic asylum-seeker immigrant from Somalia has a ton in common with Heinrich Engelhard Steinway, who built pianos in Germany prior to building pianos in New York):

The entertainment section has a “micro-gallery” about racism and comedians of color:

Those who appreciate engineering will be pleased to learn that the museum displays a portrait of Elon Musk:

The World War II exhibit reminds visitors that the U.S. and U.K. defeated Germany without significant assistance from the Soviet Union.

Likely unrelated to Trump and his war on wokeness, the museum falsely states that German-Jewish immigrant Ralph H. Baer invented “the first video game” circa 1966. Baer was perhaps the first to try to make a consumer-priced device that could attach to a TV, but Wokipedia correctedly credits earlier efforts on mainframe computers.

The currency exhibit reminds us that most of the world’s important societies for most of human history have been governed by females:

A $100,000 bill is displayed as well. Although intended for transferring funds from one Federal Reserve Bank to another in 1934, if Congress continues its deficit spending program this could be useful to feed into Coke machines:

The 10-year-old and I found ourselves in the “American Enterprise” exhibit in front of a wall of business pioneers all of whom just happened to be female. I said to the kid “standing here and looking at this wall you can learn that the success of American business was entirely due to women.” This generated some righteous indignation among a couple of 40ish people nearby (presumably furloughed government workers). They proceeded to lecture us to “open your eyes” and look at other walls within the same exhibit. We actually did as they suggested and found Eli Whitney displayed as having equal importance to American enterprise as “Jemmy”, an “enslaved entrepreneur” who made baskets (this pairing makes a certain amount of sense because Whitney’s cotton gin kept slavery going longer than it otherwise might have).

The de-woked attacked-by-Trump gift shop offers this classic American candy, invented by Johannes “Hans” Riegel Sr.:

Some of the apparel in the gift shop celebrates 2SLGBTQQIA+, but most of it celebrates those who identify as “women”. Women are voting, doing science, building WWII weapons, being legends rather than ladies:

Maybe the books would feature some victimhood category other than “female”? Well, a few did:

But mostly the books ignored Blacks and the Latinx in favor of victims whose victimhood was a consequence of female gender ID, just as most of the jobs and government contracts set aside for descendants of American slavery have been scooped up by white women:

Ironically, for a museum that features certain Americans because of their gender or race ID, the gift shop sells a book celebrating the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection:

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Report from the trenches: The post-Trump de-woked Smithsonian (Vol I)

We are informed that Donald Trump has attacked America’s museums in general and the Smithsonian in particular. “Will Museums Fight Back Against Trump?” (New York Times, August 22, 2025):

The president’s attacks on the Smithsonian Institution and other museums have become an effort to redefine why such places exist.

President Trump has sought to govern with an iron grip the federal bureaucracy, the economy and even the finer details of White House architecture.

He wants to put his stamp on the culture of the nation, too.

The president, once a fixture of tabloids and reality television, is waging a war on the rarefied cultural spaces he says have become too “woke.”

We took our boys (10 and 12) to the de-woked Smithsonian National Museum of American History on October 4, 2025. Just inside the front door, the boys learned that they “belong” in girls’ sports just as soon as they raise their hands and say “we identify as girls”. It’s not a matter up for debate, but simply “fair play” when “transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender female athletes demand equality”. The Smithsonian certainly doesn’t mention that there are any dissenters (“haters”) from this dogma, though, as we would find throughout the museum every sign is translated into Spanish (but not Arabic, Chinese, Somali, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, or any of the other languages of migrants who make America great).

There’s a lot of explanation for the womanly skateboarder at right:

Our primary objective was to see the lowrider show (see also Lowriders in Fort Worth for these machines in their native increasingly-Islamic element). Spanish 101: the word for “lowriding” is “El lowriding”.

The de-woked curators remind us that American Hispanics claim victimhood going back at least 75 years:

(The discrimination was so bad that an additional 50 million Latinx migrated to the U.S. during the ensuing years? See also “Inhuman treatment” of immigrants in the U.S.)

If I can get our Honda Odyssey’s batteries to stop failing (the most recent 4-year AGM battery survived for about 1.5 years) it would be awesome to find the paint shop that did this one:

The depth of color isn’t achievable with a wrap, I don’t think.

Father of the Year Daniel Tovar made a lowrider for his daughter:

One hundred percent of the people described and depicted in the exhibit as actually building lowriders of significance had traditional male names and appeared to identify as men (moustaches, male attire, etc.):

(the dapper gentlemen is Sonny Madrid, who founded Lowrider magazine in 1977)

The gift shop, on the other hand, explains that it is actually Latinas who are responsible for lowriders:

To be continued…

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