Conservative Happenings

Sunday, June 7, 2015

[EDITORIAL] Behind Barack Obama’s delusions of global respect

At a town-hall meeting last week, President Obama proudly bragged that “today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth.”

That jaw-dropper makes sense to him — because the only opinion that counts for the president is the opinion of folks who share his ideology: above all, the belief that America should never use its power unless “world opinion” (i.e., pretty much those same folks) agrees.

So it doesn’t matter that Vladimir Putin laughs at Obama’s America — continuing his invasion of Ukraine with just enough “deniability” that Obama can pretend it’s something else.

Or that China knows it can continue its grab of key sea areas, even building vast artificial islands on which to plant its flag (and weapons), because Obama will never risk confrontation.

Or that both Moscow and Beijing continue to give their hackers free rein to attack US targets — confident that Obama will overlook anything as ethereal as cyberspace.

Or that Bashar al-Assad is back to using chemical weapons, because Obama has already proved he lacks the will to enforce his own “red line.”

(Bonus disrespect: The Syrian butcher is also helping ISIS slaughter rival anti-Assad
forces because he figures “world opinion” will support his own odious regime once ISIS is the only other choice.)

Do Poland or the Czech Republic respect Obama after he pulled US anti-missile bases out of their territory as part of his pathetic “reset button” bid to win Putin’s love? Or, eyes on Ukraine, do they worry how else Obama’s America will fail them?

Time and again, Obama told Israelis he has their back. He promised all options were on the table to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Now he says military action is off the table — and his planned nuclear deal, by his own account, leaves Tehran set to build nukes within a dozen years.

The Saudis and other Arab rulers feel just as abandoned: That’s why most of them declined to even show for Obama’s “Arab summit” last month.

As for Iran: It’s already breaking the “interim” nuclear deal by building enriched-uranium stockpiles far larger than it promised to hold as of June 30. The mullahs plainly figure he won’t call them on it — nor on any “deniable” violations of whatever accord he winds up with.

Via: New York Post

The Anti-Poverty Experiment

In the U.S. and abroad, a new generation of data-driven programs is testing ways to help the poor to save more, live better and find their own way to economic security

The U.S. and other wealthy nations have spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century trying to lift the world’s poorest people out of penury, with largely disappointing results. In 1966, shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty, 14.7% of Americans were poor, under the official definition of the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2013, 14.5% of Americans were poor.

World-wide, in 1981, 2.6 billion people subsisted on less than $2 a day; in 2011, 2.2 billion did. Most of that progress came in China, while poverty has barely budged in large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Is it time for a new approach? Many experts who study poverty think so. They see great promise in a new generation of experimental programs focusing not on large-scale social support and development but on helping the poor and indebted to save more, live better and scramble up in their own way.

Linda Hanson of Duluth, Minn., 64 years old, works as an administrative assistant at a local organization for the disabled; her husband, Glenn, 65, is a retired city bus driver. Today, the Hansons have achieved some financial stability, but by early 2014, they were in trouble: Linda had lost her previous job, their catering business had failed and they had racked up about $28,000 on their credit cards.

Overwhelmed by the debt, they struggled even to make the minimum monthly payments, said Mrs. Hanson—until they heard about Pay and Win, an experimental program offered by Lutheran Social Services in Duluth to encourage struggling borrowers to manage their debts. Those who steadily pay down their loans each month are eligible for raffle drawings.

“When you know you have a hope of winning,” says Mrs. Hanson, “what a motivation!” The Hansons soon got their finances in order and felt less overwhelmed. In January, the Hansons got a surprise windfall: They won the program’s grand prize of $5,000, which they committed to use to pay down the principal on their debt. “We’re going to be OK now,” says Mr. Hansen.

Via: Wall Street Journal

Legal Expert: Obama Is ‘Undermining The Rule Of Law’

John Yoo, the son of Korean immigrants, begins this exclusive 34-minute video interview with The Daily Caller exhibiting his characteristic sense of humor as he reacts to the “amusing circus” of radical progressives who show up regularly and want him fired from the University of California – Berkeley because his views are supposedly unacceptable.

As for the man with a huge paper mache head in the likeness of Yoo’s head, Yoo wonders, “How much rent does he pay to store my head?”

Working in a very left-wing area, Yoo explains why he doesn’t want liberals to be in charge of running anything.

Apart from being an irritant to the left, John Yoo is Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law School of Law at Cal Berkeley. He is also a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. Graduating from Harvard, he attended law school at Yale, clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Supreme Court. He was general counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and has authored seven books and over 90 articles for scholarly journals.

Yoo is an erudite scholar, a popular speaker and an avid columnist. He was a senior legal adviser at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush Administration and became well known for his opinion about presidential powers.

According to Yoo, President Obama is, without precedent, “undermining the rule of law” by picking winners and losers in the enforcement of laws, as opposed to how they were dictated by Congress.

John Yoo invokes Superman’s “Bizarro World,” where things are the opposite of what they are supposed to be, in assessing Obama’s presidency. To Yoo, Obama’s view of the presidency — exhibiting weakness abroad and yet dominance in domestic politics — this is “the reverse of what the framers’ presidency” prescribed.

Via: The Daily Caller

[COMMENTARY] Bowing to the Big Lie of Bruce Jenner by L. Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham

The story of Bruce Jenner declaring against human reality that he's a woman was already a tired old story, exhausted last month in a one-hour prime-time ABC "news" special. But that's not how the grand pooh-bahs of our news and entertainment media see it.

They can't get enough. Deconstruction is a tonic. And so the Kardashian-Jenner Inc. rollout continues, a perfect combination of shameless TV hucksterism and a leftist revolt against the old-fashioned notion of natural humanity. How yesterday.

We know — everyone knows — Vanity Fair rolled out a new cover of Bruce Jenner gaudily underdressed as a woman with the headline "Call Me Caitlyn." Not a cover story, mind you, just a cover image. The media went bananas. ABC, CBS and NBC offered more than 48 minutes of coverage in two days, as if Jenner was now the Queen of America.

ISIS. The 2016 campaign. Hillary's scandals. The crashing economy. Who the hell cares about that?

It would be shocking if anywhere in that 48-plus minutes of enthusiasm there was one discouraging word of dissent. Fawning is mandatory, dissent forbidden. Babbling morning hosts cooed over the Internet "buzz" (which they were fueling). Somehow they forgot to mention that a hefty portion of it expressed sadness, disgust and outrage at all the pandering.

So the Big Lie is a big hit. The emperor wears women's clothes, and everyone must bow and praise the beautiful rollout. GLAAD will destroy anyone who fails to be re-educated.

Via: CNS News

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NY Teacher Exam Thrown Out For Being Discriminatory

A federal judge in New York has struck down a test used by New York City to vet potential teachers, finding the test of knowledge illegally discriminated against racial minorities due to their lower scores.

At first glance, the city’s second Liberal Arts and Science Test (LAST-2) seems fairly innocuous. Unlike the unfair literacy tests of Jim Crow, LAST-2 was given to every teaching candidate in New York, and it was simply a test to make sure that teachers had a basic high school-level understanding of both the liberal arts and the sciences.

One sample question from the test asked prospective educators to identify the mathematical principle of a linear relationship when given four examples; another asked them to read four passages from the Constitution and identify which illustrated checks and balances. Besides factual knowledge, the test also checks basic academic skills, such as reading comprehension and the ability to read basic charts and graphs.

Nevertheless, this apparently neutral subject matter contained an insidious kernel of racism, because Hispanic and black applicants had a passage rate only 54 to 75 percent of the passage rate for whites.

Once their higher failure rate was established, the burden shifted to New York to prove that LAST-2 measured skills that were essential for teachers and therefore was justified in having a racially unequal outcome. While it might seem obvious that possessing basic subject knowledge is a key skill for a teacher, District Judge Kimba Wood said the state hadn’t met that burden.

“Instead of beginning with ascertaining the job tasks of New York teachers, the two LAST examinations began with the premise that all New York teachers should be required to demonstrate an understanding of the liberal arts,” Wood wrote in her opinion, according to The New York Times.

Via: The Daily Caller

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Gopher Gate Exposes VA Fraud and Corruption

Fellow Veterans and Friends of Veterans

As we know, the Secretary of the VA’s top assistants and Congressman Ted Lieu’s senior deputies seem to have intentionally lied to Veterans. and the general public about a “gate opening” ceremony being canceled because of gopher holes.

To the contrary, a “private ceremony” was held for these same entrusted public servants along with selected wealthy and powerful attendees, while everyday Veterans and local residents were intentionally deceived to and denied equal attendance.

Thus, nothing has changed as it’s “business as usual” and reminiscent of the days when Sue Young, former executive director of Veterans Park Conservancy (VPC), held her “private parties” for her wealthy cronies.

Now it’s Carolina Winston Barrie, a former member of VPC’s board of directors, who is continuing with this private and privileged tradition as the Gopher Gate “private ceremony” scam was her idea.

In fact, Carolina Barrie was able to accomplish what Sue Young was unable to achieve for nearly a quarter century, and that is to open the front gates and turn this sacred land into a public park—and she did it without an illegal “sharing agreement” but with the blessings of the Secretary of the VA. She’s even having her own special plaques made to hang on the front, which we will address at another time.

Via: Canada Free Press

In 2008, Clinton couldn’t buy Iowans’ love. So she bought them snow shovels.

AMES, Iowa — In Phyllis Peters’s garage, there is a snow shovel. A nice one: green, shiny, with an ergonomic steel handle. It came from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And it plays a part in a modern-day political legend, about some of the strangest money a candidate has ever spent.

Eight years ago, Peters was a volunteer for Clinton’s first presidential run. She had been an admirer of Clinton since her time as first lady. But just before Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses, her staffers did something odd: They bought shovels for Peters and the hundreds of other volunteers.

“If you’re in Iowa, you have a snow shovel” already, Peters said. But she accepted. To be nice. This is Iowa. “We’re not rude people,” Peters said.

Today, the story of Clinton’s snow shovels is being told again in Iowa, as supporters worry that her second campaign could repeat the mistakes of the first. For both those who gave out the shovels and those who received them, they came to symbolize a candidate who never quite got their home state.

Clinton doesn’t face near the same challenge in Iowa in 2016. But the state still matters as a test of basic politics, a gauge of whether she has gotten any better at connecting with the people she wants to vote for her.

Last time around, Clinton tried to win over Iowans with bloodless logic, touting her résumé and her grinding work ethic. When that fell short, Clinton’s well-funded campaign — unable to buy her love — started buying everything else.

Via: Washington Post

Feds Spend $150K to 'Embed' Russian Journalists in U.S. Newsrooms

Even as diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia remain decidedly chilly over the Ukrainian conflict, the State Department is reaching out to "up-and-coming" Russian journalists. A recent $150,000 grant offering from the U.S. embassy in Moscow seeks to establish a program to give Russian journalists an "intensive professional exchange experience in American newsrooms," plus "cultural experiences that allow them to learn more about the United States in general."

Although the program is tentatively named the "Russian Journalist Exchange Program," it involves only the placement of Russian journalists in American newsrooms and not vice versa. Although the State Department wishes to focus on relatively new journalists who are "showing promise" in their careers, grant recipients are reminded that "[e]very effort should be made to attract a large and diverse participant pool, including persons with disabilities, minorities, a balanced mix of male and female participants, etc." Grant recipients will carry out recruitment, but the U.S. embassy in Moscow reserves the right of final approval of all participants, as well as approval of the U.S. newsrooms where the visiting journalists will be working.

In addition to being "embedded" for a minimum a two-weeks in "reputable American newsrooms," participants are to be housed with American families to enhance their cultural experiences. While the Russians are expected to "work alongside American reporters" and interact with host families to get "a first-hand view of American family life with all its diversity," the State Department doesn't want the visitors to get too comfortable. Grant recipients are reminded they are not only responsible for arranging an American work, cultural, and family-life experience for the journalists, but also for "ensuring their return to Russia." All participating journalists must "[c]ommit to returning to Russian Federation after completion of the program."

However, the State Department has plans for a continuing relationship with the Russian journalists who participate in the program. One of the elements required of grant recipients is to "plan for post-program participant engagement that includes an outline of any proposed follow-on activities or initiatives and an articulated plan for utilizing Department of State and other alumni tools and social media outlets to provide continued support to program alumni." [emphasis added] A post-program evaluation is also desired using a now-familiar State Department metric: "The more that outcomes are “SMART” (specific, measurable, attainable, results-oriented, and placed in a reasonable timeframe, the easier it will be to conduct the evaluation."

Development of the program, recruitment of participants (both Russian journalists and American news organizations), and selection of host families is expected to take until March 2016. The actual exchange experiences are then to take place from March through August 2016.

Via: The Weekly Standard

Obama Fails To Recognize D-Day, The Democrats Recognize Day By Quoting…Barack Obama

Barack Obama failed to recognize the day at all today, not even with his traditional picture of himself.

One might give him an excuse, as he was delivering the eulogy for Beau Biden today. However, he did manage to have time for tweets on what was really important to him, that he “intended to keep doing everything he could” for illegal aliens

But the Democrats did manage to recognize the day on their Twitter account, by tweeting a quote of…Barack Obama from last year. Remember when he went to the D-Day ceremony and was caught chewing gum?

The Democrats are inheriting his narcissism by extension…

Via: Weasel Zippers

I Still Blame the Communists

What explains the years of rage on campuses?

Maybe American higher education was never all that serious about, you know, the education portion of its name. After more than a decade of teaching in the Ivy League, the philosopher George Santayana dubbed Harvard and Yale the nation’s toy Athens and toy Sparta. He actually meant it as a compliment—as much a compliment, anyway, as he could muster. Santayana resigned his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moved to Europe.

TWS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

But something especially odd does seem to be happening on American campuses these days. I confess to a little schadenfreude about the widely reported situation of Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor whose feminist essay in praise of faculty-student dating prompted her school to investigate her for violations of the antidiscrimination provisions of Title IX. Kipnis is a widely published controversialist, and over the years she fanned the feminist flames that have now tried to burn her. The revolution, as the old story goes, devours its children.

Still, from symbolic mattresses and op-eds against Ovid at Columbia, to students interrogated about their Jewishness at UCLA and Stanford, to the stories of lawsuits filed by the undergraduates accused by their colleges of rape, to the reports of the Boston University teacher who used her Twitter account for anti-white-male messages, to the creation of “safe spaces” lest a public lecture trigger a bad memory in someone, to . . . On and on it seems to go, each fresh day bringing some fresh account of militant outrage at American colleges. “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” Santayana once warned us. Certainly only the dead have seen the end of campus upset.

It wasn’t always thus. I’m not thinking of some supposedly idyllic moment in the 1840s, or the 1910s, or the 1950s. I mean that 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, at least a small sense of relief was felt by a number of people. Back in 1987, Allan Bloom had out-Santayana’d Santayana with his bestselling lament, The Closing of the American Mind. In the early 1990s Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza added widely read books on the radicalism of college faculty—even as the collapse of Soviet communism from 1989 to 1991 deflated the hopes of the Marxist professors they wrote about.

It all seemed to add up to a slow but real generational retreat from an academic world still dominated by its proud memories of 1960s student protests. I remember the Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon explaining, around 1996, that she suspected the peak of political correctness had passed—since schools like Harvard and Princeton would feel embarrassed if they didn’t have one person on the faculty they could point to as a conservative. Not more than one, perhaps, but nonetheless, it seemed to mark a change that she imagined would soon filter from the Ivy League out into the rest of America’s schools. The poet Dana Gioia proposed something similar around that time, after he’d been approached by a major foundation for names of conservative authors it might support in order to blunt the charge of its being merely a subsidiary of liberalism.

Via: The Weekly Standard

[VIDEO] IRS Mocks Lawmakers – Blows Off Congressional Request for Clinton Foundation Investigation

The IRS continued this week to prove it has become an armed extension of the Democratic Party.

The IRS sent an unsigned form letter to Congress in response to its request.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said the disrespectful response was unacceptable.

Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) today called into question the ability of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to appropriately respond to concerns being raised by the American people in regards to allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation’s tax status.

Last month Blackburn was joined by 51 of her House colleagues in sending a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen requesting a review of the Clinton Foundation’s tax-exempt status. Late Wednesday afternoon, Blackburn received an unsigned form letter addressed to “Sir or Madam” from the IRS in response to this request.

“The IRS response is not acceptable and lacking in the requisite tact that should accompany a Congressional inquiry. It is unbelievably disrespectful that Margaret Von Lienen couldn’t even take the few extra seconds needed to sign the letter. It begs the question – do they even take our request seriously? This is exactly why people don’t trust the IRS,”Blackburn said. “Members of Congress have an obligation to be responsive to the questions being raised by our constituents regarding these widely reported improprieties. 51 of my colleagues took the time to review this issue and joined me in sending the letter. We’d expect officials at the IRS, who also work for and are paid by the U.S. taxpayer, to take the same care and effort in crafting a response to our inquiry. The allegations swirling around the Clinton Foundation are very serious and raise issues of great public importance. They should be thoroughly vetted and we intend to continue our examination of the Foundation.”

Via Special Report:

Via: Gateway Pundit

Making Amtrak Compete Would Benefit All

The recent Amtrak derailment outside of Philadelphia, which killed eight people and injured over 200, is a somber reminder that quick action by Congress is necessary to prevent another passenger rail catastrophe. Amtrak is the sole operator of trains on the Northeast corridor between Washington, D.C., and Boston, and thus bears responsibility for providing safe passenger train travel. Yet, despite a posted 50-mph speed limit on that section of track, the train was traveling at 106 mph around a very tight turn. Amtrak’s contract to operate trains on the Northeast corridor should be terminated immediately.

But wait. No such contract exists. Amtrak has an uncontested, indefinite monopoly on intercity train operations in the United States. The problem lies therein: Amtrak is unconstrained by the fear of losing its operational rights, and thus its revenue, regardless of safety or on-time performance.

The corridor includes stops in such major population centers as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, N.J., and New York. It is highly profitable, with the tight population densities, moderate distances, and concentrated central business districts that are critical for successful passenger rail. The NEC should be a showcase for how the United States can deliver a self-sustaining, reliable, safe, and affordable high-speed passenger rail. The barrier is not geography or insufficient taxpayer spending but appalling, outdated federal rail policy.

We can do better. One appealing solution is a public-private operating partnership, or PPOP. Under this approach, the NEC would be separated from the rest of Amtrak’s routes. The NEC already differs fundamentally from the rest of the passenger rail system. Amtrak owns most of the tracks and rights of way on the NEC, but utilizes freight train tracks in the rest of the country.

A 2013 report from the Brookings Institution notes that the NEC routes, which carry some 11.4 million people each year, earn an operating profit of about $205 million annually. The rest of Amtrak’s nationwide network, however, hemorrhages cash.

Under a PPOP, the right to maintain and operate NEC trains would be bid out at regular intervals of, say, 10 to 15 years. A PPOP concession contract would specify key aspects of service, such as rates, service frequency, and safety standards. Bidding would occur on the basis of the largest upfront concession payment an operator is willing to make for an exclusive operational right subject to the pre-set terms of service.

Via: Real Clear Politics

White House Staff Tells All: Inside The Private Lives Of First Families

A new book released this week gives readers an unprecedented look at life inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, from the perspective of the traditionally reticent White House staff. In her book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, Kate Andersen Brower brings together their stories from the administration of JFK to the current day.

Brower’s research was extensive, including interviewing over 100 former White House staff. She spoke to retired butlers, ushers, bakers, florists, maids, and doormen among others. Some staff members werereluctant to participate in Brower’s project at first, due to an unwritten tradition of silence about their work; but the writer was persistent and persuaded some to share their stories, and the momentum built from there.

Not surprisingly, one of Brower’s discoveries was that life inside the White House became tense between the Clintons following the revelation of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bill was relegated to the proverbial couch in the residence for months. Staff also recalled profanity-laced shouting matchesbetween the couple that only intensified following the affair. Staff suspected that Hillary threw one of her bedside books at him, hitting his face and leaving blood-stained sheets for the staff to replace.

Bill and Hillary were the most private occupants of the White House in recent decades, according to Brower. “I’ve had staffers say that the Clintons were definitely the most paranoid first family that they ever had to work with,” she said.

Only Democrats Are to Blame for ObamaCare Chaos

If the Supreme Court were to decide not to allow retroactive legislating and uphold Obamacare as written, terrible things would happen to America. We might, for instance, find out what health insurance in fabricated, state-run “marketplaces” actually costs.

The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the 37 states that have declined to set up exchanges would see an average spike of 287 percent should the King v. Burwell decision not go the Obama administration’s way. It would be 650 percent in Mississippi — an amount that only proves that exchanges have not made insurance markets more competitive or more affordable as promised. Actually, the cost of insurance in federally run exchanges is already 287 percent higher. The difference is picked up by taxpayers.

And you know who’s to blame for that, right?

Here is Vox: “What a Supreme Court ruling against Obamacare would look like, in 3 maps.”

Here is The Washington Post: “Map: Health-care premiums could spike as much as 650 percent if this Obamacare challenge succeeds.”

Now, technically, King v. Burwell isn’t a “challenge” to Obamacare. It’s a challenge to uphold Obamacare rather than allow the administration to implement the law in any manner it sees fit. There are compelling arguments on both sides, but the case is well within the purview of the U.S. Supreme Court. The coverage of the debate, though, has already been irrevocably distorted.

In the past few years, any SCOTUS decision that potentially disrupts liberal policy aims has been depicted as an unprecedented and extraordinary partisan overreach that threatens civic order and the norms of democracy. If the president is willing to berate SCOTUS for protecting the First Amendment, you can imagine what we’re in for should something unpleasant happen to the signature achievement of the new progressive era.

So SCOTUS can issue pro-same-sex marriage opinions that “challenge” over 200 years of American law and upend a traditional institution, but ending a concocted subsidy that’s only been around for a few years would, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest, create bedlam:

“We continue to be very confident in the legal case we have to make. What’s also true is that if the Supreme Court were to throw the health care system in this country into utter chaos, there would be no easy solution for solving that problem, because it would likely require an act of Congress in order to address that situation.”

Via: The Patriot Post

[CARTOON]: Fracking Fool

Via: California Political Review

DEA Releases Photos Of Baltimore Pharmacy Looters…

“You’re Honor at the time of the looting my client was returning from singing in the church choir, after he taught the homeless illiterate how to read and in his spare time builds houses for the poor.”

The Drug Enforcement Agency released photographs Thursday of nine people officials say are connected with looting prescription drugs from Baltimore pharmacies during the April unrest related to the death of Freddie Gray.

The move came a day after Baltimore police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts revised the estimate of how many drugs were stolen to more than 175,000 units, or doses.

“That amount of drugs has thrown off the balance on the streets of Baltimore,” Batts said.

DEA Special Agent Gary Tuggle said even more drugs were stolen than initially reported. About 40 percent of the looted pharmacies have not finished counting losses, he said.

Twenty-seven pharmacies and two methadone clinics were looted when rioting erupted April 27, the day of Gray’s funeral.[…]

harmacy and law enforcement officials said they have seen no evidence that personal information found on stolen prescriptions has been used for fraud. Nevertheless, Rite Aid hired Kroll, a risk management firm, “to alert impacted customers via a letter of notification and share with them the proactive measures it has taken to guard against identity theft.”

Via: Baltimore Sun

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Sunday, June 7, 2015

What explains the years of rage on campuses?

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