Friday 29th of March 2024

the deal of the century...

treasontreason

Kash Patel, the former chief of staff for the Defense Department, said Milley violated laws governing the chairman’s ability to exercise “any operational authority.”

“Congress put this in the statute because the U.S. military is to be led by a civilian, the commander-in-chief,” Patel told Fox News

“Furthermore, by law, the national command authority goes from the president to the secretary of Defense to include anything relating troop deployments, operations in theaters of war, and nuclear command.”

“Calling a foreign counterpart and discussing operational capabilities against that enemy is literally treasonous,” he added. “The White House, nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense authorized the chairman to conduct any calls with Chinese officials regarding operations.”

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was poressed on the matter at his own briefing and said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has confidence in Milley despite the chairman’s apparent end-run around his commander in chief, former President Trump. 

“The secretary has complete and utter trust and confidence in Gen. Milley in his role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he said. 

Kirby said he couldn’t comment on communications that occurred in the previous administration but characterized Milley’s talks with Li as a routine part of a chairman’s responsibilities.

“I would say is a part of the value of having these communications, particularly with countries like Russia and China, with which we are experiencing tensions, is to try to reduce the risks in this calculation and conflict, to try to take down tensions, to make clear what our national security interests are,” Kirby said.

“The communication channel between our chairman and a chief of defense is a really key vehicle for transmitting and communicating those kinds of messages,” he added.

Asked if the chairman has an obligation to carry out the orders of a sitting president, Kirby said all “lawful” orders from the commander-in-chief must be obeyed, adding that doesn’t hold for “unlawful orders,” without saying what they would entail

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/09/15/white-house-defends-milley-amid-trump-treason-accusation/

 

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Today in our series 9/11 at 20: A week of reflection, we hear from Andrew Bacevich, who suggests failure must have consequences, and there is no better time than now. 

 

Anniversaries offer opportunities for reflection. The 20th anniversary of  9/11 should elicit second thoughts galore. 

The rollercoaster of history finds Americans today more than a little confused. To put it mildly, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. The great crusade launched with considerable fanfare in September 2001 has stalled. That 20 years after 9/11, the Taliban have once more seized power in Kabul must surely rate as one of the preeminent ironies of the past century. 

Addressing the nation in January 2002, President George W. Bush had promised a different outcome. Americans, he declared, had “been called to a unique role in human events.” The nation was embarking upon “a decisive decade in the history of liberty.”

 

Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential. Our enemies send other people’s children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life.

 

The best one can say is that sometime early on this quest for freedom and dignity began to go awry. When? I nominate the moment when Saddam Hussein’s storied weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize*. Since then, it’s been mostly downhill. 

Allow me to suggest that senior U.S. military officers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for the disappointments, disasters, and frustrations that have marked the ensuing two decades of our national life. The point is not to let civilian officials, beginning with the commander-in-chief, but also including the Congress, off the hook. It is rather to suggest that the nation’s mood and outlook might be rosier if the wars of choice that we inaugurated after 9/11 had ended in victory. 

Our generals were expected to deliver those victories. As the abysmal outcome of the Afghanistan War reminds us, they came up short. 

Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge. Oblige all active duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military leadership at the top. 

After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the top U.S. commanders in Hawaii — Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short — were summarily relieved of their posts, reduced in rank, and retired. The action might not have been altogether fair, but it was necessary. Unless failure has consequences, further failures are all but guaranteed — a dictum as true in war as in business or sports or any other competitive enterprise. Firing Kimmel and Short laid down a marker: henceforth, failure was not to be tolerated.

Granted, purges tend to sweep up the nominally innocent along with the definitively guilty. But we need not shed tears for any senior officers given their walking papers. They will receive generous pensions, lifelong healthcare, and opportunities to monetize their active duty experience, whether within the military-industrial complex or elsewhere. They’ll do just fine.

As a practical matter, however, getting rid of the deadwood is likely to be the easy part. Identifying a new cohort willing to acknowledge the subpar U.S. military performance of the recent past and possessing the creative imagination needed to undertake substantive reform may prove challenging.  

I would suggest the following approach: The secretary of defense — not the current incumbent; as a former four-star he too should be purged — should personally interview one- and two-star officers deemed to possess particular promise. The interview need not be long. Indeed, it should consist of a single question: “On a scale of one-to-ten, where one is lousy, ten excellent, and five mediocre, how would you rate U.S. military performance over the past 20 years?”

Those replying with a number above five should be immediately excused and denied consideration for further promotion. Those replying with a number of five or below should be invited into an adjacent room and given two hours to write an essay that addresses the following topic: “What is the problem and how do we fix it?” 

Those essays should provide the basis for selecting and assigning the next generation of senior leaders. Oh, and if none of the one- and two-stars find fault with U.S. military performance since 9/11, then it will become necessary to expand the search into more junior ranks. It has long been my impression that officers wearing bars or oak leaves are more open to critical thinking and original ideas than those who wear stars.

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might improve their condition by selling their children to be “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” and served on the tables of well-to-do English gentry. My own modest proposal envisions nothing quite so drastic. 

But whereas Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was intended as a satire, mine is not. Absent serious efforts to reform the senior officer corps, we can expect more Afghanistans to come. Listen to General Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, who expected Afghan forces to hang on “from weeks to months and even years following our departure” and tell me I’m wrong.

 

Read more: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/11/a-modest-proposal-fire-the-generals/

 

*Note: There was NEVER any WMDs. The story had been concocted by the Administration via the CIA. See https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/11276

 

 

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welcome to america...

 

BY Gordon Duff

 

Something strange has happened to America. Millions of Americans are demonstrating symptoms of what are generally referred to as pathological disorders, generally personality disorders, of the kind normally attributed to abandonment by parents or sexual abuse as children.

You see it every day, not just in violence against nurses or school officials but in the overall tone of America, anger infused with stupidity and bad manners.

The symptoms are unmistakable as millions of Americans are drawn to “cult level” beliefs, including political and religious extremism that would put the Taliban (banned in Russia) to shame.

Let us also be clear. America never had a real love affair with truth when it came to what the American public was taught in schools or indoctrinated through media. What used to be controlled only by select elites like the Rockefeller or Ford Foundations has now fallen into the hands of the likes of Alex Jones or Joe Rogan.

The old lies, certainly poisonous and insidious, have been replaced with buffoonery and vitriolic, but along with the change in tone, there is also a change in quality. Painful rhetoric is now not just incomprehensible, but it reeks of illiteracy and basic ignorance, simple ignorance, not knowing right from wrong.

Then again, are things really worse? When America “bought” the wars of lies such as Vietnam or the even more reprehensible national tantrum in response to 9/11, millions died because of war profiteering fully supported by the news media and a corrupt government.

Thus, when millions of America’s least educated or most intellectually “vulnerable” lap up vaccine or election hoaxes they may be “totally wrong” but are they?

Are American elections rigged by the CIA? It doesn’t take a genius to see the “unseen hand” even in the process of selecting candidates, much less with the elections themselves.

The most glaring examples are Bush in 2000 or Trump in 2016 where normally accurate exit polls were off by “double digits,” something statisticians would report, if allowed, is impossible.

Similarly, if Americans don’t believe Dr. Fauci, could it be that America’s medical community has always treated the public as guinea pigs? America has the worst availability of healthcare of any advanced nation with profiteering my “big Pharma” and the medical corporations working hand in hand with corrupt politicians to create a scandalously failed medial system that has long preyed on the American people.

Then one day we get a pandemic, and nobody wants to play along. Who is responsible? Is it the lunatic fringe reporting by Fox News or was it all prestaged by engineering a society of gullible and complacent healthcare consumers?

There is evidence that the United States may well have, as a nation, degenerated into not just something ungovernable but something even worse, not just a breakdown of political and social cohesion.

Any reports from the United States, be it political leaders or the continual voices of angry Trump supporters have one thing in common. They show American adults acting like spoiled children, often raving like lunatics, often violent, generally irrational and, above all sharing one common trait and that is a lack of quality education.

The breakdown reflects many things, certainly a failure of American families, of schools, a failure of religious leaders and, clearest of all, a lack of positive role models among “social elites.”

Let us be clear, celebrities have always been a mixed lot, spoiled, privileged or “preachy.” The few that mean or meant well like Ed Asner are a distinct minority.

Others, like George Clooney, are coopted into supporting organizations like the White Helmets in Syria, no longer seen as “clean hands” first responders after armies of witnesses have accused them of full complicity in terror acts.

But the truth is ugly. America has had a full “meltdown” where schools run by powerful teacher’s unions and supported by politicians have overridden parental authority and act as “re-education camps” on behalf of ignorance and mediocrity.

But even decent schools would be unable to override a society that is “dumbed down” not just by the mindless game apps, bad schools, drugs everywhere, cheap and available or the tabloidization of the news media.

The well-financed and carefully orchestrated hatred of educated elites, denialism of science and the newfound wild acceptance of anything conspiratorial reeks of something quite purposeful.

Why would someone, some group, some cult or secret organization want the most militarily powerful nation in history to be controlled by those now elevated to high authority who are more than unstable. Listen to American media personalities like Tucker Carlson.

This week disgraced former President Donald Trump was interviewed by disgraced former White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Newsmax, a fringe network supporting supremacist hoaxes.

The former president stated that he believed the United States would be completely destroyed from within before the next presidential election. Spicer tried to shut him up, but nobody shuts up Donald Trump. Worse still, Trump may well have been correct.

Trump’s behavior of late has become more irrational than usual after revelations that the military had removed command authority from Trump based on their estimation that he was likely to try to start a nuclear war after an unsuccessful coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually called his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuecheng two days after the coup attempt, assuring China that Trump would not be allowed to attack China with nuclear weapons. From PBS, an excerpt from a transcript of a news broadcast:

  • Yamiche Alcindor:

Well, General Milley was taking extraordinary steps and having extraordinary conversations with a number of people, chief among them, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

this, of course, at the time on January 8, when a call was made from Speaker Pelosi to General Milley saying: I want to know what you’re doing to make sure that former President Trump is not allowed to misuse the nuclear codes or not allowed to get into some sort of military action that is not wise.

During that call — we want to put it up for folks — during that call, Speaker Pelosi said this of President — of former President Trump: “He’s crazy. You know he’s crazy. He’s crazy. And what he did yesterday,” referring to the Capitol seize, the Capitol attack on January 6, “what he did yesterday is further evidence of his craziness.”

And, remarkably, General Milley replied: “I agree with you on everything.”

Now, those are sources on Capitol Hill confirming those exact words to me tonight.

And what this really shows you is that someone like General Milley, who is not seen as political, not seen as a Democrat or Republican, here he is on the phone with a Democrat who is a target of former President Trump’s anger, saying: “I agree with you.”

I also want to point out another conversation that General Milley had, and that was with Gina Haspel. She was the former director of the CIA. And here’s what Gina Haspel reportedly told General Milley: “We are on the way to a right-wing coup,” again, going back to this idea of January 6 really shaking people up.

It’s extraordinary conversations really underlying the idea that former President Trump was seen as someone who was a loose cannon in his own administration.

 

When looking at this most extreme situation, there are two ways to go, blaming Trump as an “elite” willing to sacrifice 100 million in a cruel attempt to retain power or something worse.

What if Trump is, as so many of his followers believe, simply one of them? Trump’s education is spotty, his college records classified as national security secrets and there is that one issue, that he is accused of paying someone to not only take his entrance exams but to have quite possibility attended college for him, taking tests, writing papers.

But we also hear the same things about former Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush as well, as both share key characteristics with Trump:

 

  1. An aversion to telling the truth
  2. Very low verbal communications skills
  3. Long histories of personal meltdowns and/or substance abuse
  4. No visible history of real employment

 

If we took those same four characteristics and applied them to many, Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan for instance, or Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or perhaps the majority of the members of America’s congress, we might well find some consistencies.

 

Conclusion

Some of it may well be the abandonment of “expertise” as a source of respect for Americans. It takes real talent and expertise to operate heavy equipment, to lay tile or carpeting correctly or do brain surgery.

Those who have real and specific expertise are now pushed aside in the eyes of the public where anyone with a device, internet access and a case of narcissistic personality disorders can now become a vaccine expert, a political commentator or an expert on space travel or military technology.

They can be on television or be elected to high public office.

The same applies with “facts” or “information.” The new definition of “freedom” and “beliefs” has been augmented to include demands that all “facts” or “information” be considered “equal.”

If you believe you are the king of Sweden, then that belief must be not only respected but defended by others, often with violence at over the objection and rights of others.

This is how today’s American “new think” works.

Vaccines can cause pregnancy, they can cause sterility, they can be used to track, to control or even to prevent disease. All is simply “information” or “facts” and even “alternative facts.”

Nothing is wrong anymore and those who say things continually are not liars or criminals, they are patriots.

Welcome to America.

 

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/09/16/trump-says-america-is-dying-is-he-right/

 

See also: 

of revolutions!!!!

 

 

assangezassangez

hello, happy lotus?...

The Chinese were happy with Milley's phone call... They did not have to worry about an impending nuclear strike... Milley would warn them well in advance, should Trump play nukular bugger... Of course the US should sack Milley, remove his stripes and demote him to second class trooper...

 

The reported phone calls by the US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to a Chinese military official highlight the need to "improve crisis management mechanisms" between the two nations' militaries, according to one expert.

General Mark Milley, appointed by former president Donald Trump and retained by the Biden administration, covertly called the official in China twice to reassure him that the US would not attack in the waning days of the Trump administration and pledged to relay advance notice should Trump order an attack.

The upcoming book Peril by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed details surrounding the controversy of the "secret" calls. Trump called Milley's actions treasonous, and some Republican lawmakers urged President Joe Biden to fire him.

Biden expressed "great confidence" in Milley. White House press secretary Jen Psaki rejected calls for his dismissal, saying the same critics "were silent" as Trump "fomented an insurrection" at the Capitol on Jan 6.

In a bristling statement criticizing Milley on Tuesday, Trump said: "For the record, I never even thought of attacking China — and China knows that. The people that fabricated the story are sick and demented, and the people who print it are just as bad."

Douglas Paal, a scholar in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that Woodward sensationalized and distorted reports of Milley's calls and that he agrees with Biden about the propriety of the calls.

"Biden is right, and Trump is wrong. Milley proceeded through proper interagency channels and conveyed appropriate messages," Paal told China Daily, adding that the secret calls "[were] contained in the spirit of the communication".

But in Paal's view, the fundamental issue between the US and China is not miscommunication; yet, poor communications do not help if the most important bilateral relationship is to be repaired.

Paal believes that dialogue was insufficient between the US and China under Trump's presidency.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration has accomplished significantly less than it should have, and in some areas, less than the previous administration, Paal said.

"Things were bad under Trump, but the defense segment did a more appropriate job than the rest of the Trump administration. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has not made headway to improving military-to-military communication, for reasons of protocol that are hard to understand and normally, regularly resolved," Paal said.

Paal expressed hope that the White House would reach the same level of communication as the Trump administration's Department of Defense. "So far, as much as I can tell, it has not," he said.

"There seems to be a desire in China to improve crisis management mechanisms.  I hope the Biden people seize this apparent opportunity and improve direct communication," Paal said.

According to Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "Milley had no choice but to do what he did" in a Washington Post article. "Milley should be commended for acting to limit an unhinged commander in chief's ability to overthrow the government or start a war."

Milley's spokesman stated on Wednesday that Milley acted within his authority as the president's and secretary of defense's most senior uniformed adviser, arguing that the contacts were made to avoid conflicts.

"The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs regularly communicates with Chiefs of Defense across the world, including with China and Russia. These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of US national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict.

"His calls with the Chinese and others in October and January were in keeping with these duties and responsibilities conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability. All calls from the chairman to his counterparts, including those reported, are staffed, coordinated and communicated with the Department of Defense and the interagency," the statement said

 

Read more:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/17/WS6143fc62a310e0e3a6822418.html

 

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assangezassangez

not getting into wars...

 

Trump Claims He Never Planned to Start War With China, Says Milley Should Be Tried for 'Treason'

 

 

Trump's remarks come after the September release of journalist Bob Woodward and Robert Costa's book "Peril," which claimed that in Trump's final months in office, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued backchannel assurances to China, which he defended as "perfectly within his duties" before Congress. 

 

Former President Donald Trump stated on Friday that he "never" considered attacking China, adding that General Mark Milley "should be tried for treason" if he did call the Chinese military to pledge an early warning in case of an attack.

 

Trump, rather unexpectedly, issued a statement via e-mail to reporters and his Telegram channel, commenting on the September scandal over the fact of Costa and Woodward's book release and that Milley, the top US general, admitted to giving such assurances to the People's Liberation Army's General Li Zuocheng during a House committee hearing in September.

 

"Does anybody really believe that longtime Con Man Bob Woodward, and his lightweight lapdog assistant Robert Costa, are implying in their book of fiction that I was planning to go to war with China, but that one of the dumber generals in the military called the Chinese to tell them that he will inform them if this action proceeds further," Trump said.

 

 

According to the former president, "Milley may have called, but if so, he should be tried for treason."

 

"I never had even a thought of going to war with China, other than the war I was winning, which was on TRADE," Trump stressed. "To make up stories like this and to sell it to the public is disgraceful. I watched that craggy smug face of Woodward as he ‘bullshits’ the public and said to myself, ‘I wonder if history will really believe this stuff?’ How do you get your reputation back? I was the only President in decades to not get us into a war — I got us out of wars!"

 

In what might be perceived as his typical teasing of a potential presidential election rematch in 2024, Trump added that the US "has been taken over by Scammers and Hoaxsters," and it has to be taken back.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/20211126/trump-claims-he-never-planned-to-start-war-with-china-says-milley-should-be-tried-for-treason-1091053114.html

 

 

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley stressed the idea that the military must be apolitical during a speech at Princeton University and in a subsequent interview with Fox News on Friday, glossing over criticism that he has been anything but during his tenure in the cabinets of President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.

“You’re not taking an oath to a dictator or wannabe dictator, or tyrant… you’re taking an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America,” Milley said at Princeton University’s ROTC Class of 2022 ceremony.

Repeatedly stressing that American servicemembers take an oath to “an idea” and “a document,”Milley assured the newly-minted cadets at his alma mater that their duty was only to the principles on which the US was founded.

While he acknowledged in his interview with Fox News' Brett Baier that he had considered resignation during his tenure under the former president, with whom his relationship was “rocky,” he doubled down on his previous insistence that his loyalty was to the Constitution – his “north star,”the “basic core essence of who [he is] as a soldier.”

“We have to be apolitical. We stay out of the politics of the day and we maintain our oath to the Constitution no matter what party is in power,” Milley said.

However, Milley’s own tenure in the cabinet of former president Donald Trump was criticized as hardly apolitical. The general reportedly pushed against Trump’s orders to withdraw from Afghanistan by January 15, 2021, ahead of the president’s departure from the White House, preventing him from fulfilling a campaign promise and ending the US’ longest war. He also allegedly reached out to both the Chinese Communist Party and US intelligence agencies during Trump’s last days to open back channels of dialogue without his knowledge or permission, according to journalist Bob Woodward.

Even a handful of Trump critics, including key impeachment figure Alexander Vindman, were disturbed to learn Milley had not only gone behind the president’s back but kept his job afterwards. Milley continues to serve under Biden and appears to have fully embraced the administration’s “diversity” and “anti-extremism” politics. He blamed the January 6 Capitol riot on “white rage” and has defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point military academy. The general even apologized for walking next to Trump – Commander-in-Chief at the time – past Lafayette Park in June 2020 after the space had been cleared of Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/556270-milley-military-apolitical-trump/

 

 

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treasoner.....

US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley has implemented extra security measures for himself and his family after being criticized by former President Donald Trump in a statement that legacy media outlets characterized as a “death threat.”

Milley acknowledged fears for his safety in a CBS News interview that aired on Wednesday. Trump, who has long feuded with his former top military adviser, suggested in a Truth Social post on Friday that Milley had committed treason when he placed secret calls to his Chinese counterpart about the then-president’s military intentions during his last few months in office. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been death,” Trump said.

Asked whether he feared for his safety in the wake of the former commander-in-chief’s rebuke, Milley said, “I’ve got adequate safety precautions. I wish those comments had not been made, but they were, and we will take appropriate measures to ensure my safety and the safety of my family.”

Milley, who will end his term as America’s top-ranking general on Friday, argued that Trump’s criticism of him disrespected all members of the US armed forces. “As much as these comments are directed at me, it’s also directed at the institution of the military,” he said. “And there is 2.1 million of us in uniform, and the American people can take it to the bank that all of us -- every single one of us, from private to general -- are loyal to that Constitution and will never turn our back on it no matter what.”

With Milley set to retire at the end of this week, he has been the subject of multiple media profiles and interviews in recent days, largely to rehash his clashes with Trump. The general told The Atlantic in a profile published last week that Trump will be looking for vengeance if he’s elected president again in 2024. “He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list.”

Milley has repeatedly defended his calls to China behind Trump’s back, arguing that he never tried to circumvent the president’s authority. He reportedly spoke to Chinese General Li Zuocheng and other foreign military leaders to help allay fears that Trump might try to spark a war as his term wound down. He also assured then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that safeguards were in place to prevent Trump from launching a nuclear attack.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/583737-us-general-milley-trump-security-fears/

 

 

MILLEY WAS THE ONE WITH THE NUKE BUTTON IN HAND... THE LAST THING TRUMP WANTED TO DO IS NUKE ANYONE...

 

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happy retirement....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0U1LnGPfS4

 

IS MILEY GOING TO RETIRE AS A DIRECTOR OF RAYTHEON OR WHAT?

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

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