This week, Dan and John talk about:
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The show title refers to Nixon trying to sell capitalism to Khrushchev by talking about the great American products like toasters that people are going to want.
Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.
John teaching his daughter to ride a bicycle (RW181)
His daughter and her little friend across the street have been suffering, not being able to see one another for weeks, and she learned to ride her bike a few days ago. Now the little girl across the street is inspired by this and is trying to learn how to ride her bike. It is exciting that John has been encouraging the girl across the street and they are out there with her riding her bike, but if he turns around for three minutes the two little girls have thrown their bikes on the grass and are sitting under a tree doing whatever that witchy shit is that little girls do: ”Hey, you are not supposed to be playing and sitting there in the grass. You are supposed to be either on your bikes or not hanging out!” - ”Oh, okay” and they are back on their bikes.
In the course of this bike-riding thing she has been with other kids, which is a vector of exposure, and John’s hypochondria will latch on to the fact that in kissing his daughter good night, he is effectively kissing every kid in this neighborhood and he is super-grossed out now. But John’s family is all fine. It is allergy season and John is in this house that has an oil furnace and there is a dryness to the air and a scratchiness. John doesn’t think of himself as healthy as he could be. All that is combining to make him feel everyday: ”Am I okay? Am I okay?”, checking in with himself all the time. That is just nerve-wrecking!
Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom is not that much older than John is, but he is definitely less healthy that John is. John knows a handful of people his age who have been infected.
Dan being more relaxed during the coronavirus pandemic (RW181)
John is experiencing hypochondria because he spends a lot of time reading about the effects of the novel COVID-19 Coronavirus and anytime he feels a little bit sick he thinks it is the end times. He goes outside every day for a bike ride or a long walk and in the course of doing that he passes people on the street and they are both very careful to go around each other with a six foot distance, but we know so little that it is possible that there are viruses hanging in the trees.
Dan already has hypochondria, but he is doing fine. Merlin found some article that was talking about how some people who already have anxiety and other issues maybe are even feeling better during this time. Dan is already normally a hypochondriac, although he is much better than he used to be and is able to set it aside now, but having a lifetime of germaphobia and worrying about getting sick and worried that the scratch on your arm is cancer, that kind of thing, Dan is actually not stressed out very much by this. People are joking on Twitter that they have been preparing his whole life for this because they are hypochondriacs or germaphobe or whatever.
Dan does also feel that way. He is less worried about all of this stuff because he has been doing this for so long. If it was your first time to slide down the pole at the fire station to go on your first call to put out a fire, you are going to feel different than if it is your 500th time. That doesn't mean that the guy who is doing the 500th time is not worries, he is because he is going to put out the big fire and he could die and he knows that, but it is not his first time. People are saying: ”You can open a door using your elbow or the sleeve…” - ”Welcome to me at age 6!” - ”You should pay attention when you are holding something and then you are touching your face!” - ”Yeah, yeah,
thanks for the advice, pops!” Dan has been thinking about that stuff his whole life and he has mastered it.
Dan can leave his office, go down a flight of stairs to the restroom, open the door, relieve himself, clean up, and come back without even using his hands, without even having to unbutton his jeans. This is old hat! But it doesn’t mean that he is not concerned about it. There is a little small form of glee in being able to wear a mask around because he always wanted to. The stops have been lifted and he can do what he finally wanted to do!
There was a guy Dan saw in an airport one time when he was going to California who had a surgeon's mask on and he had on yellow dish gloves that you would use if you were washing the hot dishes as a 1950s mom and he had some kind of apron. He was in the airport walking around like this was not something weird to do and Dan was jealous because that is how he wants to be in the airport, but now he could be and there is that feeling that now Dan be himself and he is actually less stressed.
His mom is in her early 70s, she is in Florida, and she is in a state of terror at all times although he hasn’t left the house in four weeks. She is worrying like it is banging on the door, trying to get to her. She didn't make herself one face mask, but she made eight by hand. She only eats produce and she had washed it with soap, but then Don Schaffner had said you were not supposed to use soap on it and she threw it away and then didn't have any. If she gets a package delivered she is isolating it for a week in the garage and Dan can't tell her not to do that because somebody on the news said to do it.
John suggests you could make a superhero costume that actually was there to move through airports in a state of clean room. If you walk through an airport in an apron with a surgical mask and rubber gloves on, you look like a maniac, but if you put together some kind of suit that looked like it was a ComicCon cosplay. If you had a Galaxy Quest Captain's uniform, except it wasn't made to look quite that Star Trekkie, but it just said ”Dan”, but you were actually building it as a germ-proof suit and you could actually wear it in the world and have it be your safety suit.
Dan has tried to go the other way, which is to teach himself that it is okay, but what John is saying is tempting. The awareness that he has of what whether he has touched something or not, whether he then would touch his face or not… He doesn’t touch his face. Period. Unless it is very conscious. You wouldn't take your your shoes and socks off and pick your toenails while you were sitting in a public restaurant. That wouldn't occur to you to do in the same way that it would not occur to Dan to touch his face.
John’s mom and sister being health-fanatic-adjacent (RW181)
John’s mom and sister are both health-fanatic-adjacent in the sense that go from recent study to recent study, New York Times bestseller to New York Times bestseller, searching for a magical combination of a new spirituality, the most recent developments in psychology, the latest insights into health and nutrition, and they are always linking these studies and books they are reading, then they change their lifestyle to accommodate this latest thing.
In 1980, John’s mom said she was an INFJ and that means that from now on when she does this she is going to be aware of this. She read this book about FOD maps and it is because she is allergic to nightshades that she is not eating these and she is eating these and she has replaced this with that. She read this book that we were all once Mayan warriors and our Mayan traditions mean that we blankety blank.
John’s mom and sister are seekers and they are always searching for the right combination of food, exercise, science and religion. If they can click on it they are hoping that it is going to get them in the clear, their worries are going to pass away, their nutrition is going to be optimized, it seems like part of a project to live forever.
John does not share it with them, but because he is closest to them he is the first line of defense against them for the rest of the world because they direct all that energy at me. ”You got to read this book! Oh, my God, you are still eating nightshades?” This kind of thing.
Years ago John’s sister said he had to wash his hands every time he can, every time he goes out, and don't touch your face until you wash your hands. John dismissed it, but he gets sick and gets colds all the time. She hammered this for so many years through so many other fads that John started to do it and it really reduced the frequency and severity of the colds he got. It made sense, it was not some crackpot fad involving the Mayans and a FAD map, but it was trues! John touches people and they got germs on them and then he puts it in his nose.
John have become one of those people that washes his hands all the time, just like he drinks a glass of water every time he walks past the sink. When he has to scratch his nose or has an itch in his eyebrow he uses the back of his knuckle. The one problem is that John bites his fingernails and so it all goes to shit. All day long he is consciously itching his eyebrow with the first knuckle of his thumb and then he chews on the cuticle. Fuck!
People who enjoy the state of isolation, what if the world comes back online? (RW181)
The crazy thing about introverts, social-distancers, Seattle Freeze people, and germaphobes is this guilty lowering of the voice and you can hear the smile in their tone and they say: ”I like this better! I have been waiting for this for years! I don't want to go back. I don't ever want to get in my car again. I don't want to have to go to things!” and John knows a lot of people that are going crazy because they want to go to things and they have to go to things, but hearing from this unusual class of people that John is a member of and friends with, who have that that unique set of conditions where they don't actually have to go out to earn a living and they used to have to go out to earn a portion of their living, but since that whole industry is shut down, they can't. Not only can't they, but no one can, and the environmentalists and so forth.
John was on the phone with a friend last night who is working two jobs, one of them is at a UPS transfer station where he is loading 300 boxes an hour off of a conveyor belt. He is a former Marine and he says that this is the hardest job he has ever done. His wife is a makeup artist and her job is over, she went from 100 to 0 in a day. At his other job his salary got cut in half and he had to get another job because we went from two salaries to one half of a salary. He actually still has a job and then he got another job. He is working his ass off, but he has work while so many people don't have any.
John was talking to a friend who said that this is how she wants to live and when the world comes back online she is going to continue to live like this. It started to dawn on John that we always had the ability to live like this, the introvert asocials. John is a hyper-social person when he is forced to be, which is most of the time, but he has not missed other people. Ken Jennings said that the first thing he misses is eating in restaurants, the second thing he misses is going to the movies, the third thing he misses is going to… and he went down this list and he got to number five and he was like: ”… and I guess… friends?” - ”Right, friends! Coming in at number five!” He hadn't even mentioned going to shows or doing public public appearances or events.
We have always been able to do this. John could have stopped doing things six years ago and in a way he really cut down on doing things 10 years ago. He doesn’t’ have to go to MaxFunCon every year or on the JoCo Cruise. He doesn’t have to do anything! But the reason he is enjoying this so much is that no-one can do anything. If the world comes back online and everybody else is doing things again, MaxFunCon is back on and the JoCo Cruise is back on and all these conferences and all these things that John has to go fly to do, if they all are happening again, then he has to go do them because it is a form of FOMO.
If life is happening John wants to be part of life. He doesn't want to not go to concerts and plays, even if it feels like a drag to have to put on real clothes and drag himself out of the house and go across the town to do the event, but once he is there he likes it and he would be bummed to miss it. The insight is that this shutdown feels amazing, but when the world comes back John has to go join the world, he doesn’t want to live like this if he is the only one doing it. He doesn’t want to wear a mask for a year. If the disease remains a constant threat, which it probably will, maybe there will be a vaccine for it. John is very concerned about dying of pneumonia.
The challenges of the event industry (RW181)
For the next nine months at least it is going to be pretty unusual to see the Rock concert industry just go right back where it started. When is the next time you are going to go to a Rock festival or go to a club with 1200 other people packed together to watch a band. That was John’s life since 1990. When is he going to want to do that? He can't imagine! And he can't imagine being on stage and looking out at an audience and everybody is wearing an N95 mask, that is just a totally different universe!
The music industry has been headed this way for a long time. People are just sitting in their bedrooms and making songs and putting them out there and everybody subscribes or pays $0.99 cents to a SoundCloud thing. It has been headed that way and musicians will survive because musicians are like roaches, you cannot kill them, but the concert industry, which is a lot of John’s friends, that is all they know, all they have ever done for 30 years, they have been working in live music in some capacity, either as the club owner or the security or the sound engineers or the bookers, everybody, and the whole industry John doesn't see it coming back.
All of these people, none of them have savings, but they work in the Rock concert business, they haven't been putting $20.000 away a year for the last 30 years, they are not ready to retire. If the music venues and the touring industry doesn't come back in four months or six months, then when it does come back it is not that all those clubs are just going to pop open full of all those same people who have just been cryogenically frozen for a year, waiting for that to happen, but they are going to have to find something to do. They are going to have to find other jobs. Something has to happen in the meantime!
John was booked to do a show at the THING Festival, which was supposed to happen this spring, the new version of the Sasquatch festival, which shut down a couple of years ago. The guy that put that on started a new festival over in in Kitsap County called THING that was supposed to happen around Labor Day, but now it got postponed and is going to be in August instead of May. John has two booking agents and the only way that they make money is that people are out playing shows and they are getting a percentage. What are they doing right now? What are they going to do for the next six months?
That is just one aspect of show business. What are stand-up comedians doing? The artist can survive because the artists just moves online and plays virtual shows. People who work in recording studios are working with such a small group of people, they can just say: ”Okay, do you guys have Coronavirus? No? Okay! Let's make a record!” You are trapped in a studio with each other, you are going to be breathing on each other, but you can contain it to a certain degree and those people can keep working, but live production? All the theater-people! All of Broadway is shut down, not to mention the movie theater business. Big movies have delayed their releases and some are thinking about if they are even going to release to a movie theater at all now. When is the next time you are going to go sit in a movie theater?
How environmentalism and hope for the future has changed since the 1970s/80s (RW181)
There is an editorial in The New Yorker or The New York Times where some East Coast deep thinker is saying: ”Hey, maybe this is an opportunity!” Anytime you look at a picture of Los Angeles that has been taken in the last week where the sky is clear and the pollution has all washed out to sea… what if it was like this? Most of the time in Los Angeles the people that are there have have 10% of their brain just filtering out the fact that Los Angeles is incredibly polluted. If they are driving somewhere up in the hills and they look out across the vista and they see that they cannot see into the distance, all they see is that brown fog of death that is over the city, that 10% of their brain just tries hard not to see it.
Then you come down out of the hills and you are down in the streets and you look up and it is a sunny day and you just pretend that you are not living in and under a cloud of airborn death. There are enough people that have been living in Los Angeles for long enough under these conditions that we all know that you don't die from it and people in L.A. are just as healthy and live as long as anybody else does and there is not any greater cancer or whatever, it is not death exactly. One of the great things about coming to Seattle, as you land in Seattle, even more powerful than the smell of aviation gasoline at the airport you are aware of the smell of pines. You can smell the pine trees immediately and the air just smells fresh.
The pollution in Los Angeles is gone now and it was so easy to accomplish. We just said: ”Everybody stay inside for three weeks or you will die!” and the pollution is gone mostly. All of a sudden there are deer walking in the streets and the sea lions have formed a government. The world is just waiting there for us to just shut the fuck up for 5 minutes. The salmon start spawning up the streams. Those of us who came up as 1970/80s environmentalists, where the idea was: ”All we need to do is take the dams down on the Snake River and the salmon will come back and they will feed the bears and the bears will control the population of varmints and the forests will return.
That was what environmentalism was then. Global warming didn't exist so much in our minds and we just wanted to reforest the mountains and bring the animals back and get the eco system going and the cycle of life restarted. It really felt like we weren't that far from a time when all that stuff worked. The 19th and 20th centuries were a thing that we could roll back. Sure, we had killed a lot of whales, but the whales could return. Maybe the passenger pigeon was gone forever, but there were still some buffalo, a handful of them, and if we treated those buffalo well and we took some fences down, maybe there would be millions again.
All of our hopefulness has all turned so apocalyptic. Environmentalists now don't have that sunny horizon that we did in that in the 1970s and 80s because it doesn't feel possible to roll it back. It is all doom and gloom. If we could change everything in the Earth and sacrifice their own life, maybe we could just arrest the devastation so that 200 years from now we would not all be living knee-deep in lava. There is no fun in it. It is all just apocalypse.
In the 1970s and 80s we really believed that we were on a path to achieve racial equality and to end racial bias. We had instituted new policies, we changed the way we thought about public housing and public nutrition, we changed the way the schools operate, we instituted affirmative action, and there was hope in it because we felt like we could over the course of a couple of generations erase bias and root it out of institutions. The premise was that people don't naturally have bias. You look at a bunch of 6 year olds playing together and they are not aware of it, so if we could just maintain that childhood lack of bias by erasing bias in institutions and doing it through the law, but also through a sense of common cause, in a couple of generations we can erase bias and we will be in the clear.
Now there is not any sense of that. What we are leading up to is a war, we are not attempting to peacefully erase bias, but we are confident now that we have to violently erase bias. John has no idea what those people’s plan is. They are not stockpiling nearly enough guns if they think they are going to violently eliminate bias. It is not going to work, that is not the path. But if you try to talk about the path of believing that you can socially and collectively eliminate bias, nobody believes it now.
In the 1970s and 80s they were living in constant threat of nuclear war, but they had all this hope about science and social action, and it had all this potential to help us, and we made tremendous progress, but our bad behavior caught up to us and we lost faith in one another along the way. We completely lost faith in institutions, even though we were in the process of modifying them and have successfully modified them compared to what institutions were in the 1960s. We have made tremendous modifications to the way we do business in terms of environmentally and socially, the way we do business, the way the law operates, the way the police think, the way the government conducts its business, the way we think of the Earth as an organism, but also the way we think of the Earth as a society and as a machine. We think of it so differently and that is entirely because of the work that we did, the work that the Boomers did, the work that we did as Generation X, the work that Generation Y has done, we have changed the world!
In the course of watching Friendly Fire they have noticed that war movies and thrillers that were made in the Denzel Washington era, the mid 1990s, there would be a thriller or a cop procedural or a submarine movie, and Denzel would get cast in a role and there would be no reference to his race. He was not a black cop, he was not the black mayor of San Francisco, he was not a black astronaut, but he was just a cop or an astronaut. He was Denzel. This is true across all culture in this era that was the 1980s-90s. There was a lot going on, the crack epidemic had happened, the gangsta rap had culturally changed what Hip Hop was saying and doing, it was the attempt to make a post-racial society. Oprah was the richest woman in the world.
There was all this black culture that was made by blacks and the black community was profiting from it, it wasn't what had traditionally been the American style, which was that black musicians and actors and so forth were being exploited by or were working within a white system. All of a sudden it seemed we had a post-racial society and that was what we had been working toward for all these years and it was happening! When you cast a black actor in a movie they no longer are the black one, they are just the hero of the story. It was a small thing, but at the time it felt like we were over a hump and we were in a world now where race was not playing the ultimately deciding role in every choice. It was only a small side of the of the world, but it real progress. Sidney Poitier! Stuff had happened!
The thing that happened in the last 10 years was that through the proliferation of cameras we realized that that had not changed the material conditions of life for most African-Americans in the United States and for most American blacks, no matter how affluent they were, no matter how much they were living in a post-racial society, all they had to do was walk into a jewelry store and they had a very different experience walking into a jewelry store or walking down the street in the middle of the day than their white friends did.
That awareness of the gulf, which was always there and which no black American ever was not conscious of, and our focus on that gulf and the understanding that it is one thing to go to a Denzel movie and say we are living in a post-racial America, but it is a very different thing to actually achieve that globally. It seemed that awareness erased all of the progress that we had made in our own minds and imaginations, it had erased to the fact that we are so much further than we were in 1950, there is so much hard work we have done that has produced real results that we should be justifiably proud of, everybody in the United States who has worked in civil rights, everybody who has made a personal change, everybody who has worked to make institutional change.
We are no longer just trying to extend the Voting Rights Act, but we are trying to make a world in which you can be black and walk into a jewelry store and they don't lock all the cases. It was our dream in the 1970s and 80s through several generations of educating people differently and changing institutions to eradicate bias just by pushing the borders of it a little bit every generation until you can be a kid like John’s daughter that grows up in a world where no-one ever refers to somebody as her black friend.
John didn't grow up in that world. When he had a black friend, his extremely woke parents would call him his black friend. His dad's best friend was black, but he never forgot to mention it. Judge Tanner would say about John’s dad: ”My best friend is white!” with a tone that was very definitely a reference. Even in the 1950s and 60s they had a relationship where Judge Tanner could make a reverse affirmative action joke about his relationship with John’s dad and they would all laugh in a Sammy Davis Jr with the Rat Pack kind of way. It felt like progress then, but now 70 years later that joke would be harder, not easier. It would be less funny now instead of more funny.
The lack of leadership in the coronavirus situation (RW181)
Looking at our current situation John gets that 1970s and 80s feeling of hope again that somehow through all of this we come out the other side with a reordering. The problem is that at the top we have no guidance right now, but there is a huge vacuum. It be a different universe If Obama was president right now or Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush! Until six weeks ago John still thought Bush was the worst president in history, but it is not that Trump is a bad president, he is just a nothing. They are so wrong, absent and dull-witted people up there!
John really hopes somebody steps forward! He is so disappointed in Biden because he is such a nothing, too. He is running for president instead of standing up and trying to galvanize the country and that is boring because he is tired. If there was somebody that could step into this void and say: ”Rally around my flag!” and it wasn't Bernie either! John wishes it were himself, that he had that kind of like soul resilience to be able to make that kind of sacrifice. The problem is that you have to have a certain kind of personality, a certain kind of soul, and then be willing to sacrifice yourself in order to stand up and truly be the anchor man. That is what we need and if we had it you could rally people!
Is there a difference between Bernie and Biden, or Bush and Gore? (RW181)
John made the mistake of following some Twitter thread and he realized that all of the Bernie crowd said if Bernie is not the nominee then they won't vote. John thought that that was gone and the stuff that we were arguing about on the Internet a month and a half ago all went away, but it is still there! There is still a whole generation of voters that say: ”I am not voting for Biden!”
It is the exact same things they said about George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. John 100% made those exact comments: ”There is no difference between Bush and Gore! They are two sides of the same coin! They are two sides of the capitalist, neoconservative, war-mongering, white East Coast, Ivy League elite and if you think that voting for Gore is better than Bush, then you are living a lie!” John voted for Nader proudly!
Looking back he 100% understands where he was coming from and the only thing that scrubbed that naïveté out from under his fingernails was the very clear recognition that after September 11 there would have been a huge difference between Bush and Gore. If Al Gore had been president on September 11th, we would be living in such a markedly different world right now!
His response to 9/11 would not have been to invade Iraq, that would not have even been on the table because it shouldn't have been, it was irrelevant, it had nothing to do with that. Invading Iraq wouldn't have even been on the list of things. The response would have been a targeted Special Forces response to get bin Laden and they would have gotten him because they weren't distracted by ramping up for a tank invasion of Iraq, but they could have just chased him up into Tora Bora and found him.
There would have been from Al Gore a sense and a recognition within his class of State Department wonks and Ivy League intellectuals, all the people that we think are the problem, that there was a tremendous gulf between the Muslim world and our world, and they would have through their capitalism and through their neocolonialism at least recognized that there was another thing to do besides drop bombs. They would have practiced diplomacy, they would have tried to repair the damage, maybe they would not have encouraged the Arab Spring any more than Bush did, although John thinks they would have and that Arab Spring happened under Obama.
There would have been a diplomatic world that would have been greater than the war making world. The war in Iraq and subsequent war in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban created a global environment that is effectively perpetual war ad nauseam that accomplished nothing and that did lead to Arab Spring and the fallout from that, which is perpetual war in Syria, which is Islamic State. All those things are direct consequences not of Osama bin Laden, not of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but of George Bush's decision to fight those wars in the way that he decided.
Al Gore wouldn't have done it that way because that just wouldn't have been the way they thought at all because they were diplomats. The Secretary of State was the top job in those Democratic administrations, not chief of staff of the army or national security adviser or special adviser to the president. That is all gone, that was a squandered opportunity. John’s vote for Nader in Washington state wasn't the deciding vote, but his generation believed that these were protest votes and we were going to pull the country to the left by announcing our intentions and by forcing the Democrats to take a hard look at themselves.
What they did was force the Democrats out of power and the Republicans are way worse and demonstrably worse, not just theoretically worse or philosophically worse. Just whether they think the secretary of the state is the top job or not, that alone makes them worse in every respect, in terms of this hope that we used to have that we were on our way to creating a global world. The WTO had the idea that the way we were going to create a global world was through economics and we were going to create a global economy first, but we hated that so much. That was such a neoconservative Democrat mentality!
We were going to open up the markets and we were going to reduce barriers to trade and manufacturing and that was going to bring freedom to the world. It was just so cynical and we hated it and fought it. At its core somewhere way up the chain there was an idealism that if you opened all those markets, if you reduced those barriers to trade, that trade would open China and trade would open Saudi Arabia and if we could just get those Denzel movies into theaters around the world, then the government of Indonesia wouldn't be able to be repressive because people could see! It was the Khrushchev argument. We were fighting a war of toasters!
That is an expression that John just invented. Nixon went to Moscow and met Khrushchev and they walked around and there was an American demonstration of what we were capable of, like: ”Look at all the toasters that we can make!” This was the late 1950s era where the housewife got freed from her labors by all these apply these modern appliances and she is liberated to live a sparkling life of cocktail party conversation and she can sit with her friends and they can do their nails together while the dishes are washed by an autonomous machine in the other room.
Nixon was vice president and he was trying to make the argument to Khrushchev and to the world that capitalism was better than communism because of what it produces and how our society is making the world a better place. Khrushchev pushed back and said: ”How is this toaster going to feed the world's poor? It is not! What the world needs is the global communist revolution because it benefits the greatest good!”
That has been the American argument for 100 years: If we just show people how fun our all-school dances are, they are going to try to adopt our way of life and open their markets to us and that will be a cascading freedom wave! If you buy an American toaster, then when that stopped working, you buy a second American toaster, and pretty soon you want American Rock’n’Roll and Denzel movies and pretty soon you are releasing your political dissidents and you legalize marijuana and then we have a global world where we all agree that America makes the best toasters. It is the American chauvinism: We want the world to be united behind the idea that our toasters are best. We want there to be an end to war, but we want to keep selling the world guns. We want there to be only fun wars that we win and our friends win. Only bad guys die and everybody else gets a toaster!
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