Category: Commentary

Commentary: Combating the Censorship Industrial Complex

RealClearWire

It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files — the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship — was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.

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Commentary: America and the Future of Globalism

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

If globalization is the economic integration of nations in a world where technology has all but erased once formidable barriers to long-distance communication and transportation, globalism is its cultural and ideological counterpart. In theory, the same dynamics might apply. As economies merge, cultures merge as well. As we move deeper into the 21st century, a global melting pot blends everything and everyone together. A planetary civilization marches united into a future of peaceful coexistence, ecological restoration, human life extension, and galactic exploration.

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Commentary: Identity Studies in Academia Is the Birthplace of Woke

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In 1983, having spent four years earning a PhD in English, I instantly turned down the reasonably secure entry-level faculty position my alma mater offered me and chose instead to sign up for that most financially insecure of all professions: freelance literary journalist. Why? Partly because it had taken me that long to face the fact that I just wasn’t the academic type. And partly because I saw that the kind of jargon-heavy approaches that were taking over America’s English departments — from politics-driven “feminist criticism” to pretentious postmodern “deconstruction,” straight out of France by way of Yale University — had nothing whatsoever to do with my own reasons for wanting to spend my life reading and writing about books.

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Commentary: The Nonsensical ‘Holy Climate Panacea’ Triad of More Wind, Solar, and Electric Cars is Maddening

RealClearWire

This list could be closer to 50 but let’s just stick to a handful of them. I literally live in this business every day, and I’m just so confused.

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Commentary: As It Always Has Been, the Only True Cause of the Left Is Power

Admin

Why do so many liberal climate-activist grandees fly on private jets? Or why do those who profited from Black Lives Matter have a propensity for estate living? Or why do the community-activist Obamas prefer to live in not one, but three mansions?

The answer is that calls for radical equity, “power for the people,” and mandated equality are usually mostly sloganeering for those who enjoy power and the lucre it brings, and their wish is to augment both for themselves. The result is that the issue du jour of mandated equality often becomes secondary if not irrelevant. There is neither fear of inconstancy nor hypocrisy, given the central theme that governs a leftist party line is political utility — or the ends of power always more than justify the hypocritical means used to obtain it.

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Commentary: Ron DeSantis Has All the Right Enemies

Admin

A lot of people are upset with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, especially as he launches his presidential bid.

Start with America’s wokest corporate titans. While perched in a Los Angeles County rapidly losing population and companies to Florida, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s company alleged DeSantis is “weaponizing the power of government to punish private business.”

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Commentary: Protecting Our Forgotten Rights

RealClearWire

Robbing a bank is a crime everywhere. But in some places and times you could become a criminal just by growing vegetables, feeding the homeless, playing poker or working without a government-mandated license.

African immigrant Tedy Okech risked arrest when she started working as a hair braider. She learned the craft in her youth by practicing on her mother and sisters. When she settled in Idaho in 2005, she found neighbors willing to pay for her skills. Soon she had a thriving side gig, which supplemented her income as a part-time insurance agent.

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Commentary: The Forgotten History of Memorial Day

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In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country.

The holiday was Memorial Day, an annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead.

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Commentary: In Praise of Americans Who Have Given Their All

Admin

The war in Ukraine, brutally slogging along some 5,000 miles from the U.S., involves another people but it serves as a reminder to Americans of what it takes to keep one’s country safe, free, and prosperous. It also reminds us that there are dangers in this world that can only be stopped by people willing to put themselves in harm’s way to protect the rest of us.

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Commentary: What a Difference a Real District Attorney Makes

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Chesa Boudin, named after cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, and son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, was elected district attorney of San Francisco in November 2020. Criminals were happy with the outcome.

“Chesa Boudin threw a monkey wrench into the city’s criminal justice system,” recalls Richie Greenberg, San Francisco resident and business consultant. “Amid a series of high-profile cases, his promise to release repeat criminals and to allow quality of life crimes to go unpunished, San Francisco descended into a scofflaw paradise.”

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Newt Gingrich Commentary: Where Are Woodward and Bernstein When America Needs Them?

Admin

The conspiracy between a corrupt set of bureaucracies (including the Justice Department, the IRS, and the intelligence community) and an equally corrupt and enabling elite media is astonishing. The Durham Report is just one more confirmation of the devastating level of dishonesty and manipulation which have characterized the last few years.

Some analysts believe the open corruption can be traced back to Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, in which she clearly stonewalled conservative organizations from getting tax status. When she was found to be in contempt of Congress, the Obama Justice Department spent two years ignoring the congressional contempt charge and then decided not to prosecute her.

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Commentary: A Rent Control Renaissance Is Underway in the U.S. and It’s Sure to Make the Housing Shortage Worse

Admin

If one needed any more proof that rent control laws suppress investment in new housing, then it is not necessary to look any further than this recent survey from the National Apartment Association. They found that “Over 70% of housing providers say rent control impacts their investment and development plans; actions include reducing investments, shifting plans to other markets, and canceling plans altogether.”

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Commentary: Catholic Campus Ministry Produces Priests at Liberal CU-Boulder

Admin

One Catholic campus ministry center is doing what it can to ensure future generations have priests – and it is accomplishing this work at a liberal school in a liberal town.

The St. Thomas Aquinas Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder continues to help young men realize their call to the priesthood.

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Commentary: The Clear and Present AI Danger

RealClearWire

Does artificial intelligence threaten to conquer humanity? In recent months, the question has leaped from the pages of science fiction novels to the forefront of media and government attention. It’s unclear, however, how many of the discussants understand the implication of that leap.

In the public mind, the threat either focuses narrowly on the inherent confusion of ever-better deep fakes and its consequences for the job market, or points in directions that would make a great movie: What if AI systems decide that they’re superior to humans, seize control, and put genocidal plans into practice? That latter focus is obviously the more compelling of the two.

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Commentary: The Mind Virus of the Affluent Woke Left

Admin

Those who belong to the woke Left are held together by overlapping interests and shared passions. Not all wokesters support the same causes and certainly not with equal intensity. Thus, warriors against climate change like Karl Schwab and Bill Gates don’t often speak up for the sexual transitioning of children or call for allowing biological males claiming to be women to compete in female sports events. One can likewise read the racialist diatribes of Corey Bush, Ibram X. Kendi, or Al Sharpton without likely running into attacks on fossil fuels or gas stoves. The point is not that these allies never agree on anything. It is that their alliance is looser than some might imagine.

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Commentary: I Love Homeschooling Our Eight Kids

Admin

This year I will graduate my first homeschooler. It seems like only yesterday I was teaching our oldest child to read, and now she’s an adult taking college courses. For the last 14 years I’ve been knee-deep in educating our eight children, recently as many as five grade levels at a time, in a one-room schoolhouse style approach.

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Commentary: Send Them Back

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Only a country that has lost the will to survive would tolerate the invasion underway all across America. There is no longer a southern border to speak of. From Arizona to Maine, towns are under siege by a relentless, surging mass of humanity. The lowly citizen has been trampled underfoot to make lebensraum for the hallowed “asylum seeker,” whose conquering steps are greeted with suppliant knee. 

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Commentary: The Corruption of Climate Science

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

“We need to criticize the people who got us here,” says Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of Fossil Future. “We can’t keep treating these designated experts as real experts. They are not real experts, they are destroyers. They are anti-energy, non-experts. And that needs to be made clear.”

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Commentary: Mask Mandates Unmasked

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no reason for you to be walking around with a mask.” But the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) soon changed his stance. Although not 100 percent effective, Fauci said, wearing masks is “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”

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Commentary: America’s Radical Criminal Justice Reform Disaster

RealClearWire

Over the past decade or so, America has undertaken a radical experiment with criminal justice reform. The consequences have been devastating.

The number of people arrested in America each year has fallen sharply over the past two decades. Public prosecutors now prosecute significantly fewer cases. Those that are convicted can generally expect shorter sentences. The combined effect of all this is that America’s prison population is now 25 percent lower than it was in 2011.

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Commentary: Everyone Is Protecting Ray Epps

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Over the past month, speculation has swirled around why Fox News honchos ousted the nation’s most popular cable news host just hours before he was set to begin his nightly monologue. Tucker Carlson reportedly was stunned by the news, which was announced in a terse statement released by the network on April 24: “FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.”

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Commentary: Any Debt ‘Default’ Will Be Biden’s Choice

Admin

There’s enough revenue to pay interest on the debt even if the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling is reached.

Meaning, if the U.S. defaults on the debt on June 1, it will be because President Joe Biden chose not to make principal and interest payments on U.S. Treasuries out of existing revenue, for which there is more than ample revenues to service and refinance up to the current debt ceiling limit, $31.4 trillion.

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Commentary: Abandon the Swamp and Let it Rot

Admin

Suppose a document drops in the wilderness and no one is around to hear it. Does it make a sound? I submit that John Durham just tested this Bishop Berkeleyesque query. The special counsel spent four years beavering away in the forests of the deep state and what did he produce? Three hundred pages telling us what, for the most part, we already knew and with the result that exactly nothing, apart from a little hand wringing, will happen. 

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Commentary: In Mao’s China, They Even Monitored Talking in Your Sleep

RealClearWire

When the recently deceased Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot sang, “I heard you talking in your sleep… from your lips there came that secret I was not supposed to know,” he was talking about marital infidelity.

Not long after Chairman Mao came to power in China, idealistic college students learned that political fidelity to Mao and the Communist Party was the most important virtue they needed to demonstrate. Party or Youth League members were present at every meal and in every dorm room. Historian Frank Dikötter described in his book The Tragedy of Liberation, “These Communists took notes on the day and night behaviour of every student. Even the words of a student talking in his sleep were recorded and considered for political significance.”

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Commentary: Look Ahead, Not Backwards, to Hold the Justice Department Accountable

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on law enforcement and intelligence misconduct related to the 2016 presidential election has been met with outrage, recriminations, and a justified amount of vindication for those, including President Donald Trump, who helped expose the brazen operation from the start. 

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Commentary: Segregation Is Coming to a Medical School near You

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in April published an article openly championing segregation as a way for medical students to learn more effectively. Unsurprisingly, the article is steeped in incredible amounts of racism.

Seven academics from the University of California at Berkeley and UC San Francisco begin with the premise that traditional medical education is “systemically racist.” They propose to split up medical students into what they call “racial affinity group caucuses,” where would-be doctors can discuss what they have been learning in their antiracism classes with other people who share their skin color. The euphemism may be “racial affinity group caucusing,” but the authors, in fact, are really advocating segregation. 

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Commentary: Immigration Court Backlog Is Growing Worse

RealClearWire

New migrants pouring into the U.S. after the Biden administration let a COVID-19 restriction called Title 42 expire last week will not break the nation’s stretched court system. The system is already shattered, according to several former judges, immigration experts, and Department of Homeland Security data.  

The average wait time for a “Notice to Appear” before a judge at one of the nation’s 66 immigration courts is now four and a half years. In some cities it is much longer. In New York City, new migrants do not have to appear in court until 2032. This growing backlog creates an incentive for more people to cross the border and request asylum as each new case pushes assigned court dates further into the future. In the meantime, many migrants are permitted to live and work in the United States.  

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Commentary: The Hate Industry

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.

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Badger Institute Commentary: Legislature Protects Milwaukeeans from $15-Per-Rider Fare-Free Trolley Folly

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In need of quiet solitude not long ago, I did the obvious: I got on Milwaukee’s streetcar, The Hop.

It did not disappoint: In all, five people Hopped on, then off, as we trundled 2.1 miles across downtown.

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Commentary: Biden-Era Funding Is Skewing Scientific Research More Woke

RealClearWire
Man on sight with microscope

While pushing record spending for research and development, the Biden administration is working not just to advance science but also progressive ideology. In line with the administration’s “whole of government” commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, recent grants and requests for proposals from the National Science Foundation encompass research that: 

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Commentary: Congress and President Must Oversee the FISA Court and All FISA Warrants After Durham Report Revelations

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

Special Counsel John Durham has finished his voluminous report outlining the Justice Department, State Department, intelligence agencies and FBI’s “confirmation bias” that led to a years-long investigation of former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, transition and then administration falsely alleging that Trump and his campaign were Russian agents who had helped Moscow hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and put their emails onto Wikileaks despite the fact that the FBI could not “corroborate a single substantive allegation in the [Christopher] Steele dossier reporting,” which was sourced to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.

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Commentary: Can Texas Restore Nondiscrimination and Equal Opportunity to Higher Education?

Admin

Americans once said, “As California goes, so goes the nation.” Hopefully after this legislative session, Americans will say, “As Texas goes, so goes the nation.”

The Lone Star State’s leaders are fighting fiercely right now to restore non-discrimination and equal rights under the law. These are American values embedded in U.S. civil rights laws and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, but they’re no longer practiced—or enforced.

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Commentary: The Lead Attorney Behind the January 6 Prosecutions

Admin

During the 2020 presidential election cycle, Matthew M. Graves donated $2,000 to the Biden-Harris campaign. The modest contribution was a no-brainer for Graves. Not only was he a domestic policy advisor for the campaign, he worked at the time for the same white-shoe law firm as Douglas Emhoff, Kamala Harris’ husband.

Graves’ kowtowing paid off. In November 2021, Graves took the helm of one of the most politically-charged U.S. attorneys office’s in the country: the District of Columbia. 

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Commentary: Take GOP Debates Away from the Mainstream Media

Admin

Tucker Carlson reportedly wants to host his own GOP presidential debate. The idea struck a chord with many people. It would be must-see TV for the most popular commentator on the Right to grill presidential hopefuls before a national audience. Republican voters would also prefer if those asking the candidates questions were not liberal reporters.

With Carlson now visible primarily on Twitter, it looks like he will have the opportunity to host the debate on the social media giant. According to the Washington Post, “Carlson wants to moderate his own GOP candidate forum, outside of the usual strictures of the Republican National Committee debate system.”

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Commentary: Elites Have Come Up with Their Greatest Excuse Yet to Suppress the Rest of Us

Admin

The recent torrent of regulations unleashed by the Biden administration — targeting everything from power plant and automobile tailpipe emissions to gas stoves and other household appliances — confirms that the White House was deadly serious when — in office for less than a week — it pledged a “whole of government” approach to combatting what it told the public was a “climate crisis.”

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Commentary: Time Is the Best Mother’s Day Gift

RealClearWire

What do you want for Mother’s Day? Perhaps you’ve asked your mother, spouse, or co-parent this question within the past couple of weeks. You might expect her to say flowers, shoes, a purse, or jewelry — tangible gifts you can order with a few clicks and have delivered to her doorstep in two business days. Yet, the gift that most mothers want is both free and expensive. It’s time, time to herself. The question is how can we give mothers more of their time?

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Commentary: Transgenderism and the Contemporary Church

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

“The church’s response to those who identify as transgender,” Andrew T. Walker writes, “must be, immediately and with integrity, ‘You are welcome here. You are loved here.’”

This position reflects the broad inclinations of contemporary evangelicals, who generally seek to intentionally love and welcome those in the transgender movement. Though scripturally grounded churches may disagree with much of transgender ideology, they still strive to love those within the movement.

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Commentary: Confronting China’s War on Religion Part Four

RealClearWire

On Thanksgiving Day, 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, a Hong Kong priest, was convicted, along with five others, of failing to register a defunct charitable organization that tried to help pro-democracy demonstrators targeted by the regime.

Ostensibly, the charges stemmed from the group’s failure to submit paperwork to authorities. But Chinese people of faith and governments around the world understood the real message Beijing was sending when it arrested Fr. Zen, known as “the conscience of Hong Kong,” last May. The purpose of the prosecution, said U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, was to show that China’s government “will pursue all means necessary to stifle dissent and undercut protective rights and freedoms.”

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Commentary: The Voter Registration Machine Flipping the States Blue

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In modern elections, the candidate who can turn out the bigger base is usually the winner. Put differently, the campaign with better voter data holds the trump card.

For more than a decade now, Democrats unquestionably have owned that trump card and used it to carve deep inroads into once solidly red states such as Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, while Republicans have looked on in bafflement. It’s no secret why the Left is winning elections despite shrinking in the polls: They register new voters in droves, and conservatives do not.

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Commentary: Importing Problems

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

In Texas, two terrible mass killings recently took place. Both involved perpetrators who were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In many cases, so were their victims. With the latest surge of humanity on the border, it’s worth considering the connection between these high-profile crimes and an uncontrolled border.

In the Houston suburb of Cleveland, a drunk man shooting guns in his backyard massacred his neighbors when they dared to ask him to keep it down. The victims were all illegal alien immigrants from Honduras, save for the youngest who was born here in the United States. Governor Greg Abbott got into some hot water when he described the victims as illegal. While this was a fact, even I think it was a bit insensitive to highlight that when announcing they were victimized by a violent maniac.

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Commentary: It’s Time to Treat Communist Symbols Like the Swastika

Wisconsin Daily Star Staff

If someone were to ask you to think of either extreme of the political spectrum, odds are you would immediately picture a swastika at one end, and a hammer and sickle at the other. Regardless of your views of the left-right paradigm, or whether you subscribe to horseshoe theory or not, we (rightfully) tend to perceive fascism and communism as the standard ideologies of the extreme.

As such, many of us would also feel rather uneasy seeing those two symbols. Upon seeing a swastika, we are immediately reminded of the evils of the Nazi regime, and are accordingly repulsed. To publicly display the logo is even a crime in many European countries. We understand how abhorrent the ideology is, and treat it accordingly with disrespect and disgust.

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Commentary: The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion Part Three

RealClearWire

It’s morning in Istanbul, but Joseph is reliving his morning routine in the camp, before the 16-hour shift starts. After the prisoners had sung Communist songs for their breakfast, the Chinese guards played a video for them shot in cinema verité style. It began with Chinese plainclothes agents tackling Uyghurs, cramming them into unmarked cars, and pulling bags over their heads.

Then, the camera would pan away, revealing, not China, but a foreign street with signs in German, Arabic, or English. Joseph says the film was a tease: Run away. Please try it. We’re everywhere. Even Washington, D.C. 

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