Tag: history

5GW: The Extension of the Battlefield

As I previously wrote in The Fifth Generation of Modern War: Drones, Attrition, and the Collapse of the Logistics Sanctuary, the advent of drone warfare, combined with the digital elements that make it uniquely lethal, genuinely represents a new generation of modern war. It is clear that the Russians understand this much more clearly, and are able to describe it and articulate the issues much better than Western military historians and strategists, because they are actively engaged in it.

Simplicius quotes the retired General Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia’s Chief of General Staff from 2004-2008, from his recent article on the current revolution in military affairs, as well as a Russian source working in logistics on the Pokrovsk front, that explain and underline how this really is a new generation of war, the chief aspect of which is the massive extension of the battlespace well beyond the traditional battlefield.

The piece urges for Russia to adapt to this ‘new reality’ as soon as possible. The urgency stems from the stated thesis that drone tech capabilities will increase faster than the effective means of countering them:

It is unlikely that there will be an expert who denies the revolutionary changes in military affairs – the “unmanned revolution” or the “drone war revolution.” Perhaps, in a broader sense, it could be called the “digital war.” There is every reason to believe that this process will continue to expand and deepen, as the potential for increasing the “drone war” exceeds the ability to effectively counter this type of weapon.

The authors go on to elaborate that drones are getting progressively cheaper and smaller while increasing their range. In the near future, they note, the tactical rear will become a total “zone of extermination”—which it has essentially already become according to many frontline reports.

The tactical battlefield and the rear, tens of kilometers away from the line of contact, will essentially become a “zone of extermination.” Naturally, countering these threats will be a top priority. As a result, the armed struggle will primarily focus on gaining “drone supremacy” in the air. Consequently, the organization of military forces must align with the goals and objectives of achieving such supremacy in the air and space.

In light of the above, here is an interesting breakdown from a Russian channel on the Pokrovsk direction, describing just how the situation has evolved in terms of logistics and putting units in positions.

We continue our difficult work to supply our assault units in the Pokrovsk direction. This month, the main focus was on the assault units and their communication and survival on the battlefield.

First, we need to explain what the line of contact looks like in this direction, and in general, in general, now-on the entire front. First, military personnel assembled and ready to perform their combat tasks are brought to the assembly point 20-25 km from the front line. Then they wait for the command. They are loaded at the beginning of the next segment and dropped off at a point approximately 10-13 km from the LBS (line of contact), where they can stay for some time – from several hours to several days. This is a nearby evacuation point from which you can almost guarantee to escape and survive.

Then there is the next drop-off at a point 5-7 km from the LBS – it is not possible to drive any further. All drops-offs and movements across the terrain among minefields and open areas are carried out by guides.
Then, on foot, they reach the point from which the assault may begin. From there, they approach the positions. As a rule, only half of them reach the positions, while the rest are injured or killed by drone strikes.

A pair of stormtroopers who have reached the ruins of a house usually travel in pairs, hiding in the ruins and basements. They do not venture outside unnecessarily. From there, they must maintain communication with their commander to stay informed about what is happening outside, coordinate their actions with their neighbors, provide assistance, and engage in assaults. They may spend a week, a month, or two in the ruins.

If the weather is bad: fog, rain, snowfall, then losses are sharply reduced. FPV drones almost do not fly in the rain – droplets stick to the camera. The water curtain strongly jams the signal at 5.8 Ghz. However, the enemy artillery begins to work more actively.

The wiring of any armored group is usually noticed by the enemy 10-15 km before the LBS. By the time it reaches the initial positions for the attack, there are already dozens of enemy FPV drones in the sky and dozens more ready to launch. All of this then falls on the armored group and the paratroopers. Yes, it’s difficult for our troops, and there are casualties, but we are still able to drop paratroopers and advance. Our main losses are in the form of wounded soldiers.

As per the description above, the 25km-from-LoC zone has already become extremely dicey, where dispersion is necessary for survival. Then from 5-7km onward, it essentially becomes the ‘death zone’, to borrow mountaineering terminology.

Baluyevsky and his co-author state that the chief development of the modern battlefield is the total doing-away with the ‘fog of war’, initiating an era of complete battlefield transparency.

War has fundamentally changed and these changes don’t just change and expand the tactical battlefield, it indicates tremendous changes to the logistical art, the operational art, the strategic art, and even the geostrategic balance of power.

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They DID Steal the Land

I fail to see any reason for outrage here. I mean, there absolutely isn’t any doubt that a considerable amount of the land in Canada and the United States was stolen, illegally and by force, from the Indian tribes that were recognized as the legal residents there.

Homeowners in a Canadian city have received letters warning that their properties will be seized and returned to the “First Nations People of Canada.”

The letters, signed by the city’s mayor, claim the property titles may be “defective and invalid.”

This follows a British Columbia Supreme Court ruling granting the Cowichan Tribes Aboriginal title to about 800 acres of land within the city.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the original pre-European-arrival state of the land. I’m talking about the post-arrival period when a land title system had already been established and the various tribal claims to specific areas of land were legally established according to treaties between various parties, including the federal government in the United States, and the relevant Indian tribes.

One thing that is profoundly dishonest about the popular pro-settler position is that it customarily requires a bait-and-switch between the two very different legal scenarios. And eminent domain clearly can’t be applied to sovereign Indian tribes.

Don’t think this matters because it’s all in the past? Perhaps you should take a look at the Middle East and revisit your assumptions.

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A Boomer Looks Back

Speaking as a member of the generation that followed the grasshopper generation, it feels as if there were a few important things that were left off this list:

WE ARE A GENERATION THAT WILL NEVER COME BACK.

A generation that walked to school and then walked back.

A generation that did their homework alone to get out asap to play in the street.

A generation that spent all their free time in the streets with their Friends.

A generation that played hide and seek when dark.

A generation that made mud cakes.

A generation that collected sports cards.

A generation that found, collected and washed & Returned empty coke bottles to the local grocery store for 5 cents each , then bought a Mountain Dew and candy bar with the money.

A generation that made paper toys with their bare hands.

A generation who bought vinyl albums to play on record players.

A generation that collected photos and albums of clippings of their life experiences as a Kid.

A generation that played board games and cards on rainy days.

A generation whose TV went off at midnight after playing the National Anthem.

A generation that had parents who were there.

A generation that laughed under the covers in bed so parents didn’t know we were still awake.

A generation that is passing and unfortunately it will never return no matter how hard we try.

I loved Growing up when I did. it was the best of times.

I have no doubt that many Boomers loved growing up when and how they did. They were truly blessed with opportunity that was unmatched in the entire history of Man. What a pity, what a tragedy, that they denied similar experiences and opportunities to the generations who followed them.

A generation that had parents who were there.

Yeah, so, about that…

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Too Good to be True

The Moon Landing psyop is falling apart since the old technology utilized can’t stand up to analysis anymore and only the Boomers can “remember” it being staged live. We’re already entering the Revelation of the Method phase that reliably precedes the Old News Admission phase.

Jason Farago just published a New York Times interactive photo-video piece headlined “How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth.” Farago celebrates the alleged artistic genius of the Apollo moon photos, viewing them as the climax of the overlapping artistic and scientific histories of moon explorations and representations.

Moon landing skeptic and professional photographer Massimo Mazzucco says that’s bullshit. Farago’s extravagant praise of the Apollo astronauts’ brilliant use of deep depth of field just means they knew how to crank the f-stop up to f16 or f32 (which I figured out about five seconds after buying the cheapest available Pentax when I was a journalism student back in 1976). His orgasmic effusions about the beautifully-rendered lunar surface texture sound like something an LSD tripper might say while staring hypnotically at the ground in some godforsaken stretch of barren desert. And his ranting about how many of the moon landing photos are so perfectly composed and executed that they look totally fake really takes the cake:

“The photographs were in fact so good—and the 70mm stock so detailed—that doubts set in on the blue sphere below. With their rich chiaroscuro and starless skies, Bean and Conrad’s photos looked uncannily like a Hollywood stage set.”

Because they were taken on a Hollywood stage set. This is obvious to any professional photographer who bothers to actually analyze the images.

I have been a photographer for the first part of my life, let’s say between age 20 and 40.. And I was a professional, at the top level. I was working for magazines all over the world. I was using actually the same cameras and film and lighting that supposedly were used in the Apollo missions.

I’ll give you one quick anecdote so you understand the point of view of a professional. I learned my trade from a famous photographer, now deceased. He just passed away a few months ago. His name was Oliviero Toscani. He’s actually the guy who made the Benton campaign all over the world. He was very, very famous. I would put him in the top 10 in the world history of fashion photography. I was his assistant for about three years. Then we parted ways. I went on to have my own career.

Back in 2000, when I saw the lunar pictures for the first time—all of them, not just the few that were published before, but all of them that were put out by NASA on the internet—I looked at them and I could see all the defects that I would find myself when I tried to replicate sunlight in the studio. So I got very suspicious. I called Toscani and I said, “Oliviero, what did you think the first time you saw the Apollo moon pictures?” And his answer was, and I quote him:

“I always thought that had they given me the job, I would have done a much better job.”

I’m not saying that Man never landed on the Moon, that there aren’t secret Nazi military bases there, or even that it’s impossible for Man’s alien progenitors to have left clues about their original landing on Earth there. (That’s a James Hogan reference, if you’re wondering about that last one. Very good and genuine science fiction, that trilogy.) I am saying that the Apollo missions staged by NASA from 1961–1972 never landed anyone on the Moon, probably never got anywhere near the Moon, and were definitely faked.

The amount of evidence proving that the Apollo missions were fake is simply overwhelming now, and the more technology improves, the more obvious it is. Which, of course, is why we’re rapidly approaching the point that the US government is going to admit it and the media will promptly claim that everyone always knew this all along and cite the very sources that we skeptics have been pointing to for decades.

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He Wasn’t Wrong

Twenty-five years ago, the Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker wrote an impassioned observation about the decline of New York.

“Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing. The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?”

He was roundly condemned for this by the national media, by Major League Baseball, and was even forced to undergo professional counseling for the thought crime of noticing the consequences of the foreign invasion the city was undergoing. And now, with what appears to be the imminent election of a socialist Muslim born in Uganda to the highest elective office in New York City, he’s taking a well-earned victory lap.

25 years ago I criticized New York for its rapid decline into a third world country. I was forced to undergo Psychological Counseling, as if I were the crazy one. 25 years later, the city is voting in a muslim socialist for mayor.

This is an object lesson for all of the puritanical goodthinkers and immigration fetishists who drank the equalitarian Kool-Aid. Those Cassandras you condemned for being “crazy” and “racist” and “bigoted” were right all along. All of history, recent and ancient, clearly testifies to the obvious fact that if you permit a sufficient number of foreigners to enter your country, they will change it to suit their preferences with absolutely no respect for what was there before them.

The equalitarian ideology has failed. The Enlightenment has failed. Multiculturalism and anti-racism have failed. Immigration is a clear, present, and existential danger to most of the nations of the West.

If you are still having trouble understanding the concept, ask an American Indian to explain it to you.

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Immigration and Military Power

As we know, Martin van Creveld has demonstrated that immigration is simply another form of war, and an invasion is an invasion regardless of whether it is a peaceful, unarmed, and disorganized one that is welcomed by a governing elite or an armed and organized one that is resisted by the governing elite.

But one of the lessons demonstrated by Sir Charles Oman in his The Art of War in the Middle Ages is the way in which immigration and the reliance upon foreign troops is intrinsically deleterious to the nation’s military organization and will inevitably weaken even the most dominant military power. And this weakness is distinct from the separate problem of foreign military commanders whose loyalties tend to be outweighed by either their ethnic interests or their self-interests.

As he demonstrates in the first chapter of his excellent essay, now being serialized at Castalia Library, the Roman Empire suffered both of these negative effects.

The morale of the Roman army was no longer what it had once been: the corps were no longer homogeneous, and the insufficient supply of recruits was eked out by enlisting slaves and barbarians in the legions themselves, and not only among the auxiliary cohorts. Though seldom wanting in courage, the troops of the fourth century had lost the self-reliance and cohesion of the old Roman infantry, and required far more careful handling on the part of the general. Few facts show this more forcibly than the proposal of the tactician Urbicius to furnish the legionaries with a large supply of portable beams and stakes, to be carried by pack-mules attached to each cohort. These were to be planted on the flanks and in the front of the legion, when there was a probability of its being attacked by hostile cavalry: behind them the Romans were to await the enemy’s onset, without any attempt to assume the offensive.

This proposition marks a great decay in the efficiency of the imperial foot-soldier: the troops of a previous generation would have scorned such a device, accustomed as they were to drive back with ease the assaults of the Parthian and Sarmatian cataphracti.

It should not be a surprise that the US military is in observable decline, having lost its global superpower status and has been surpassed in several areas by the Russian and Chinese militaries, given the fact that the percentage of foreign-born U.S. veterans rose from 2 percent in 1990 to 4.5 percent in 2022. And, of course, this doesn’t even count the much larger number of foreigners who were second- or third-generation immigrants whose interests do not necessarily align with those of the native population.

History is an absolute necessity if one wishes to understand the probable consequences of current events. Even if you have relatively little interest in leatherbound books, or in the aesthetic aspects of the most beautiful books in the world, it will behoove you to consider signing up for a free subscription to the Castalia Library substack for the benefit of the daily serial alone. On a related note, I’m pleased to be able to announce that yesterday, Castalia Library reached 3,000 daily subscribers.

In other Castalia-related news, we have completed the interior layout for THE JUNIOR CLASSICS Volume Nine, Sport & Adventure. We anticipate shipping both volumes Nine and Ten to the backers in November, although demi-royal backers will probably need to wait until December to receive theirs. And for those who were not original backers, we anticipate making the regular editions available as part of the annual Thanksgiving sale.

And yes, we will be announcing a 2nd Edition of The Castalia Junior Classics in leather and making them available once the complete set of the Original Backer’s Leather Editions is in production at the US bindery. The difference will be that the 2nd Edition will be bound in pigskin at the Castalia Bindery.

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The Mediocrity was Inevitable

The modern sacralization of democracy is one of the intellectual abominations of Clown World. And the reasons why the great writers of the past disdained democracy and had such low expectations for it have been more than demonstrated by the rise and fall of the Western democracies. Such as, for example, Zeno of Elea:

The genius of a nation strikes but once in its history. It is its glory and its immortality in the annals of men. It is aristocratic, discriminating, radiant and selective, and abjures all that is mediocre, plebeian and mundane. It is regnant. It is spiritual. It is the flame emanating from the core of the Universe, which is the generation of life. It is the lightning which sets fire to the small spirits of men, and raises them above the field and the plow, the house and the hayfield, in a sudden revelation of grandeur. It is, above all, masculine, for the aristocracy of the soul is purely masculine and never feminine, which is concerned only with petty matters and insistent trivialities. It transcends the humbleness of daily living and stands even the least important of men upon Olympus for a brief hour. It is never democratic, for democracy is a destructive thing, conspired in the inferior minds of envious men.

If that nation which would survive in glory would cultivate only the masculine principle its name in history will be written in gold and blaze through the centuries.

Even real democracy is destructive, so imagine how much worse is the USA’s pseudo-democratic model of “representative democracy” where a fraction of the people participate in rigged elections that pretend to let them choose between one AIPAC-funded candidate and another AIPAC-funded candidate who will then represent the interests of a foreign people and other foreign invaders at the expense of the nation.

It’s no surprise that the so-called “authoritarian” models of Russia, China, and even Iran are proving objectively superior over time as the pseudo-democratic model has not only become sclerotic, but rapidly approaches complete collapse everywhere from France and Germany to the UK and the USA.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Post-WWII Moral Order

Since 1945, World War II has been the basis of Clown World’s civic religion, but with the observable decline of the West, neither the native masses nor the foreign invaders believe in it anymore:

Every civilization rests upon a sacred order, something that transcends the merely mortal and provides the framework through which value is arranged and meaning conferred. It is not a fiction but a sacred order that defines good and evil, memory and destiny, and determines what may be preserved and what must be condemned.

For the modern West, that faith is the Second World War.

It is remembered not as a conflict among nations but as the moment in which a new moral order was born. The war is treated as revelation, the event from which the moral legitimacy of the Western Regime descends. From it emerged a political theology that shaped institutions and public life, binding the Western world to a moral interpretation of its own survival.

Within this framework, Hitler ceased to be a historical figure and became a moral archetype, a new antichrist whose memory must be condemned. He stands as the emblem through which modern virtue is defined and the warning through which conformity is maintained. His image serves as the foundation of the postwar faith, a reference point invoked to justify authority and to police the boundaries of thought.

Through this transformation, a human tragedy was elevated into doctrine. The victors fashioned from their triumph a permanent narrative of righteousness that turned history into morality and memory into commandment. The faith endures because it explains the modern West to itself, granting coherence to its institutions and meaning to its exhaustion. It teaches that virtue lies in suppressing national will, that peace depends upon the renunciation of power, and that remembering the past too fully risks exposing the myths on which the present order rests.

The cult of the war did not remain confined to remembrance. It grew into a civic religion, woven into the structures of power and instruction. Its language pervades public life, where law and policy alike are judged against its moral vision. The past is recalled less to understand than to admonish, and history itself has been moralized into a sermon.

From this grew an orthodoxy that defines the limits of permissible thought. Nations may exist only as administrative zones and marketplaces, peoples as abstractions, and tradition as surface decoration. The religion grants the ruling order its moral immunity, for to question it is to profane what has been declared sacred.

As I pointed out to Louise Mensch, no one cares about World War II, the Nazis, or the Holocaust anymore than people cared about the Boxer Rebellion in 1939. Events that took place more than 80 years ago are simply not relevant to their lives or to their experience in any way, shape, or form.

This wasn’t true 30 years ago. When Spacebunny and I bought our first house, the man from whom we bought it was nearly brought to tears when meeting my grandfather, a Marine who fought in WWII, because he’d lost his brother in Normandy on D-Day. And an elderly British man of our acquaintance could barely hear the word “Israel” without his lip curling in disdain; he’d lost a brother in the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946.

But nearly everyone with personal experience of WWII is now gone and the false moral order that was imposed in its aftermath is not only fading, but obviously bankrupt. We don’t know exactly what will take its place, but we do know that the post-post WII period is going to be very different than what preceded it. And we can be certain that the nations will rise again.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Importance of GamerGate

The Billionaire Psycho reminds us of “the most important event you are not allowed to discuss”:

GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.

GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.

This event was important for several reasons.

GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.

GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.

It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.

It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates… and suffers damage.

It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.

But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.

Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.

This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.

First of all, as an Original GamerGater, I can testify that Lomez’s history, while welcome, is almost certainly going to be incomplete and missing some very important details. I’m 99 percent confident that he doesn’t even know who GamerGater #1 is, because there are only a small handful of people who do and Lomez isn’t speaking to them and he hasn’t spoken with me either.

This doesn’t mean his chronicle of the public history and his analysis of the public events and the observable consequences won’t be accurate, but he isn’t going to be able to understand the hows and whys of what happened because he isn’t talking to anyone who was actually there in the early days of what was then called the Quinnspiracy.

And the Billionaire Psycho is correct to point out that what is now obvious today, namely, the total disinterest of the international corpocracy in things like customers, revenue, and profit, were first exposed to the public by GamerGate. Now, the corporations even admit it openly, as the former CEO of Ford admitted that his company invested excessively in electric vehicles even though car buyers clearly indicated that they didn’t want them.

Former Ford CEO Mark Fields openly acknowledged that the industry charged ahead with massive EV investments, overlooking what consumers actually wanted. Fields, who led Ford from 2014 to 2017, pointed out the misstep during a discussion on the rapid buildup of EV production. “Over the last couple of years, the automakers really went full bore in putting in capacity for EVs,” he said. This aggressive push came without enough thought to buyer preferences, leaving companies like Ford and GM facing unexpected market realities.

Now the corporate games industry is dying, although the indy game development community hasn’t been this healthy or this profitable since id Software was putting out shareware and Fenris Wolf was developing technology showcases for Artist, Creative, and Intel. And while GamerGate didn’t fix the problem, it did accomplish the very important task of diagnosing it and making it known to a large section of the public.

For those of you who weren’t there, here is the timeline of the start of #GamerGate from my perspective.

  • 11 August 2014: Depression Quest released on Steam.
  • 16 August 2014: The Zoe post. Mundane Matt puts out a video discussing it.
  • 21 August 2014: My first post about Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy
  • 27 August 2014: Adam Baldwin coins the hashtag #GamerGate
  • 28 August 2014: 17 game journalists run very similar articles asserting the irrelevancy of gamers.
  • 17 September 2014: Milo breaks the news of a secret GameJournoPros mailing list.
  • 21 September 2014: Milo exposes the entire GameJournoPros list.
  • 15 July 2015: Mike Cernovich, Milo and I host #GGinParis. Le Monde covers it.

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It Actually is Their Land

Ron Unz realizes that the Zionists really held the original claim to the land all along:

America’s tens of millions of Christian Zionists regard themselves as the champions of the Israelis whom they identify with the Israelites of the Bible, and I suspect that many of them may vaguely consider the Palestinians to be the descendants of the accursed Canaanites. But the actual facts seem to be the other way round, with the Israeli Jews having heavy Canaanite ancestry and today’s suffering Palestinians probably being the closest direct descendants of the ancient Israelites.

It would appear Miles Mathis knew what he was doing when he described the primary moving force behind Clown World as “the Phoenician Navy”. And no doubt the shape of the next temple in Jerusalem, will surprise everyone when it is eventually built.

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