Friday, June 26, 2026

Are Democrats committing brand suicide?

"We are all outlaws in the eyes of America. . . 
We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent
And young"
        Jefferson Airplane, "We can be together," 1969

Democratic pundits are wetting their pants. I'm not.

I'm not a Democratic Socialist. But I feel pretty serene about what happened in New York's primary on Tuesday. Three Democratic Socialist candidates won Democratic nominations for Congress — two of them defeating incumbents. Democrats need a shakeup, and they're getting one.

The candidate drawing the most attention is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who wrote things on social media between a half dozen years ago that will sound extreme to a lot of voters, including me: Abolish all policing, abolish prisons, abolish all national borders, nationalize utilities and hospitals, seize property from landlords. Fox News will repeat this on a loop and call it Democratic Party policy.

She tried to delete those posts. The internet never forgets.

But I discount to approximately zero the things political activists write in graduate school. Universities are hothouses — incubators for brainstorms, new paradigms, ideas tried out free of the constraints of inertia, opposition, and how the ideas get paid for. That's their purpose. I take these candidates seriously, but not literally.

What we saw in New York wasn't a policy agenda. It was youth, impatience, and energy. Voters wanted the Pepsi Generation vibe — politics for "those who think young." The incumbent Chevalier defeated is 69. She is 32.

Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani is, whatever else, charismatic and good-looking. He smiles. He's bright, articulate, and energetic. Do I agree with everything he says? No. But his most ambitious proposals won't happen — the weight of opposition and inertia will see to that. What I'm ready for is politics that feels cool again. The establishment face of the Democratic Party is not cool.

Democratic voters want someone who makes politics feel like it can change the world. They want candidates who address unaffordable housing, the widening gap between new billionaires and shrinking middle-class incomes, naked corporate pay-to-play, and the feeling among young people that the generation in power has left them holding the bag.

I understand that impatience. Fifty-four years ago, I dropped out of graduate school because I decided historians wouldn't change the world — but good politicians might.

Sixty years ago, young people looked and sounded weird and offensive to those in power, as we pushed for disruptive change on race and the role of women. We frightened Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan. Jefferson Airplane sang about being transgressive, upsetting to the Establishment, and then the final insult: "young." 

The Beatles asked for a nonviolent revolution. "We all want to save the world," they sang. It was inspiring. I wanted to be inspired. JFK had inspired me. America could be a force for good. It is exciting to think that some great, good change is possible. 

I see the New York results as a crack in the wall. Will this destroy the Democratic brand? Not if Democrats absorb and co-opt the best of these ideas — diluted, moderated, made workable. Democratic Socialists will see them as watered down and moderated, and they will complain. This is a feature, not a bug, for Democrats. A Jon Ossoff, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, or someone not yet on our radar will be a stronger candidate in the battleground states if voters see this criticism from his left flank.

Edgy, cool candidates from bright-blue districts are how positive change starts. Change is hard. Change is slow. But it starts somewhere.



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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Showdown: Tina Kotek vs. Christine Drazan.

Democratic incumbent Governor Tina Kotek is stuck with the gas tax and what it represents. 

Her Republican challenger, state Senator Christine Drazan, is stuck with Trump and what he represents.

Christine Drazan and Tina Kotek

Eighty-three percent of Oregonians voted "NO" on Measure 120, the gas tax, registration, and fee hikes referendum. Democrats passed the measure in a special session to keep the Oregon Department of Transportation from laying off snow plow drivers and closing DMV offices. Republicans quickly gathered petition signatures to put it on the May ballot, giving voters a chance to rescind the "Democratic tax." Democrats have large majorities in the legislature, and Democrats hold all the statewide offices. Tina Kotek is up for re-election this year.

The measure was a litmus test on how feel people about taxes, yes, but also about how they feel about Democrats. Oregonians were voting about the cost of living, homelessness and homeless encampments, Oregon's low rank in education, the hollowing out of Portland's downtown, the high cost of housing, job losses in Oregon, Oregon's 10 percent state income tax, and Oregon losing population because people are moving to other states. 

Tina Kotek has a problem. Drazan is a credible candidate, an establishment Republican. If the election is a referendum on Kotek, I predict Kotek will lose.

Kotek needs to change the frame and make the election about Trump and his Republican enablers and sycophants. Kotek is an incumbent, so it is inevitable it will be in part about her; she is stuck with that. But she isn't stuck with its being a referendum on her alone. It can be two referenda: on Kotek and Trump. Trump makes that possible; inevitable, even. He insists on being the center of attention, always making news, always shocking, always ferocious in his opposition to Democrats. The news is about him, him, him. That suits Kotek's frame perfectly. Trump has been open about targeting blue states, and his attempts to ban vote-by-mail put this attack front and center right at election time. 

Let the two faces in the voters' minds be Kotek's and Trump's. Let Trump be seen as the dangerous disrupter.

Shape the referenda with Kotek in the role of Oregon's embattled defender; Trump is the troublemaker.

--  Gasoline prices are high? Kotek didn't go to war with Iran; Trump did.

--  Tariffs raising prices and destroying the markets for wheat and wine? They are Trump's tariffs. Oregon led the states in filing objections to the tariffs.

--  Grocery prices are high? Blame Trump's ICE for targeting the wrong people: farm workers in stead of criminals. 

--  Home building is down? Trump's tariffs on Canadian softwood and steel raised the price of new construction.

--  Education is struggling? Trump cut the Department of Education.

--  Forest management is neglected? Trump's DOGE made disastrous cuts to the U.S. Forest Service, over Oregon's objections.

--  Taxes are high? Trump gave tax breaks to billionaire campaign contributors.

On Tuesday I wrote a controversial post saying that a Democrat running for Congress has a longshot chance of winning election in my bright-red congressional district. How? By avoiding making it a comparison election between a Democrat and a Republican. Instead, make it a referendum election on Trump and his GOP enablers.

Kotek has the same opportunity.  A comparison election with Drazan makes it about Oregon discontent, and voters want change. That positions Kotek as the villain. But a referendum on Trump makes Kotek a hero, Trump the villain, and Drazan a sidekick of the villain. Trump likes being the strong guy in charge of everything. Let him play that role. Be the guy who created this status quo.

Drazan will be talking about the gas tax, as the symbol of what is wrong with Kotek. That's her best play. Kotek will be talking about Trump, as the symbol of what is wrong with Drazan. That's Kotek's play.

Kotek is more popular than Trump.



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Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Artificial intelligence writes a sonnet about my vineyard

I write these posts myself.

My experiments asking an artificial intelligence program to write a post for me have been unsatisfactory, even as a first draft. 

They seem to me to be like Wonder Bread: empty calories. Experimental posts sound knowledgeable, but they don't make clear arguments that are persuasive to me. Or maybe the real problem for me is that they don't sound like me to my own ear, and I am vain. In any case, I write these blog posts the old-fashioned way.

I am going to keep experimenting. Ten years from now we may think that the most important life skill people need to learn is how to write a good prompt, a key, I think, to successful use of AI as a tool. I am doing what children do to find out about the world: play. I goof around, trying to learn what it can do. You can use several AI programs for free, up to a limited amount. I just subscribed to claude.ai for $20/month, so that I could have all the practice I have time for.

Today will be an untypical post, about AI, not politics. I want to be at my vineyard early today, by 6 a.m. if possible, to beat the heat, so I am dashing this off. My grandnephew, Liam, who is staying at the farmhouse this summer, will have started work at 6. I will join him working through the rows, doing the maintenance tasks of a vineyard in this part of the summer: tucking vines into the wires, clipping unruly vines, checking the plants for water, removing leaves from in front of the grapes on the east side of the row, and looking for the noxious puncture-vine weed. Here is what we looked like yesterday at noon.



So today's post is a quick report on my AI play. I first asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet. I wanted to challenge it on issues of tone so I described my own situation, I am the fourth generation on a farm, but like most landowners of rural land lacking heirs who want to farm. I am not surprised. Wanting to do professional work "in town" shows good judgment on their part. It is hard to make a living working on a farm, and much farmwork is hard, uncomfortable, dirty, sweaty, and tedious. I thought I would see if AI programs could communicate a nuanced emotion about my situation as well as I could. 

The answer is yes.

Note that I am polite in my prompt, saying "please" to a piece of software, which is silly. I anthropomorphize the AI program because it seems so human in its interactions.

My prompt:
Please write a sonnet in the classic Shakespearean form reflecting the thoughts of a 76 year old man planting a vineyard, knowing that the grapes, and eventually the wine, will be enjoyed by people he won't know, long after he is gone. He reflects that he has no heirs who would want to own or manage the vineyard. But the wine will be a legacy of a sort. The man is a bit somber, but ok with that outcome.

Here is how ChatGPT responded, within two seconds:
Upon this slope I set the tender vine,
Though I shall never taste its fullest grace;
The clusters yet unborn, the future wine,
Will ripen for another time and place.
No eager child stands waiting for this land,
No heir will walk these rows when I am gone;
No blood of mine will guide a weathered hand
To greet the dew and watch the coming dawn.
At seventy-six, I know the seasons' claim;
The frost, the sun, the harvest, and decline.
Yet still I bend to earth and stake each frame,
Entrusting years beyond the reach of mine.
 
Though none may speak my name when corks are drawn,
My vintage shall endure when I am gone.
I doubt if I could have written that sonnet, but if I tried, it would have been a labor of many hours. Possibly a reader with well-developed taste in literature or poetry thinks the sonnet poor in quality, but to my mind it is quite good. Or at least for most purposes, good enough, and a better use of my time than laboring for days to try to duplicate it.

I wondered what the AI program Claude would do. I gave it the identical prompt. In two seconds this emerged:

These vines I press to earth with aging hands
Will never yield their fruit to eyes of mine;
The harvest waits for those in distant lands
Of time, who'll lift a glass of unknown wine.

No son stoops here beside me in the row,
No daughter asks the names of root and cane;
The ones I loved have other fields to sow,
And so I work this dark and patient plain.

Yet something in the soil will hold my name—
Not written, but pressed deep in root and stone,
In tannin, in the color of the flame
That warms a stranger's glass when I am gone.

    I plant not for myself, nor blood, nor kin—
    But for the joy that I was ever in.

I am amazed by this one, too. A sonnet in perfect form and rhyme pattern, done instantly! My criticism of the two poems is essentially criticism of my prompt. The two poems hit the issue of not having heirs who want to farm harder than I really feel, but that is on me, not AI. My prompt mentioned that issue, not how much I enjoy the farm, so, it gave me what I said I wanted.

It is 5:38 a.m. and I am going out the door, leaving a realm of ideas, information, and abstractions to enter another realm: real life. Vineyards are plants growing in dirt. Real dirt, not the idea of dirt. I am a real, live person, who will have clippers in my hand. The vines are alive, green, leafy, and there are very young grapes on them. The baby grapes are in a  process of becoming, but I will deal with them existing as they are right now, this morning, not as they might be at harvest. The vineyard is here, now, physical, and real. 


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Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Can a Demoocrat win in a bright red congressional district?

The question is on my mind because I live in one: Oregon's Second Congressional District.

Is there a strategy or issue-frame that might work to elect a Democrat? 

I think there is.




The second congressional district includes the reddest part of the state. Voters in rural Eastern Oregon wanted their own district where they could elect one of their own; Democrats gave it to them. The incumbent Republican U.S. Representative, Cliff Bentz, has been winning general elections by a two-to-one margin.

 

We have experience in what does not work for a Democrat to get elected. Good people have tried. They have been plausible candidates for winning swing districts. They visited the country fairs and talked easily with farmers and ranchers. They tried to sell themselves. [See? I'm a good person, a reasonable person, a Democrat you can like.] It didn't work. They still lost by 30 points.  

 

Democrats have good issues. Gasoline and grocery prices are up, the tariff wars hurt agricultural sales, the war with Iran is going poorly, and billionaires got tax cuts. The district has a significant skew toward people who use the Oregon Health Plan, Oregon's version of Medicaid. Republicans have tried to eliminate the ACA, and now, after the Big Beautiful Bill became law, people are learning that their insurance premiums will go up substantially, making coverage unaffordable for many people. Rep. Bentz is part of the caucus that fights the ACA and passed the Big Beautiful Bill. It should be a motivator for Republican voters to vote their interest on issues. They don’t. They vote their party.

 

Being well-known and having a reputation for hard work, moderation, and attentiveness to the district has been tried, and it fails. Oregon's Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, has had town meetings in every county in the district, including the very small ones, every year, and has done so for decades. Wyden handily wins the state, but he failed to get a majority of the votes in this district in the 2022 election, losing to a Republican who didn't bother campaigning. 

 

Winning this district any year would be hard. The Democrat's task is made harder by the fact that animal rights advocates circulated an initiative petition and got onto this November's ballot a law to ban fishing and hunting in Oregon. Really. I expect a giant turnout from rural Oregon voters. 

 

There is another approach:


Make the election a referendum, an up-or-down vote on whether the country is on the right track under Trump and this Congress. Define the election as an opportunity to send a message. People are feeling ornery. Give them a clear, direct way to express that emotion. Strip away most of the salesmanship about what a great human being the Democrat is. Voters won't believe it. Sell something they believe: The status quo is bad and getting worse and any change is worth trying.


Such a campaign would take self-discipline for the candidate. Every candidate has an ego and a desire to please. But the more the campaign is about the fine, upstanding Democrat and his oh-so-reasonable Democratic positions on good issues, the more muddled the election would be as a referendum. Resist that temptation to make it about the good-guy Democrat, except insofar as it is about the candidate's good sense to be against an unsatisfactory status quo. The Democrat will have his views, of course, and Democrats and many non-affiliated voters will like them, but if the campaign is about selling the Democrat, then it is a comparison election. That is a loser. It is better that the election be about whether people are happy with the status quo, with Trump, and with a congressman who does nothing to put limits on Trump. Bentz-is-Trump-is-the-status-quo. Are you happy? Are you OK with a do-nothing congressman?


If you want change, vote NO on Bentz. Say no to the puppet Congress that lets Trump run up gasoline and grocery prices, no to high healthcare premiums, no to the White House ballroom, no to midnight tweets depicting Trump as Jesus, no to war with Iran.


Recognize that a lot of people like Trump. The strategy won't win every vote. But a majority of voters want change, so make that the slogan, theme, and brand for the campaign. Bentz is stuck trying to defend the status quo that Trump and Congress created. His is the harder job.


Democrats have work to do to return to being a party that wins majorities in rural America. A candidate who wins can begin doing that repair work in office by supporting good policies and messages. Good government is good politics.


Satisfied with how things are going: 21 percent. Dissatisfied: 76 percent.


Approve of this Congress 10 percent. Disapprove of this Congress 86 percent.
 

Will it work? When conditions are bad enough, it just might. People aren't happy, and the trends are getting worse. 



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Monday, June 22, 2026

Public ownership of the data we create

This is the Fox News headline that triggered my thinking:

This is socialism. 

But let's not call it that. Let's call it tax reduction. Or a dividend.

North Dakota claims an ownership interest in the income from the oil and gas found in that state. The result is lower taxes for residents. Fox cheers.

Alaskans also share in the income from oil and gas drilled in their state. They pay no state income tax or sales tax at all. In fact, Alaskans get paid annual dividends from the Permanent Fund accumulated from oil revenue just for staying alive and living there. Alaskans like it.

When I was a county commissioner in Jackson County, Oregon, the county was a beneficiary of this form of resource socialism. Jackson County government had general fund and road revenue from timber harvested in the county off U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land. The income was so substantial that the county had 1000 employees when I was elected in 1980 and we had essentially no county tax. Timber revenue pretty much paid for county government.

Andrew Yang ran for U.S president in 2019 and 2020 with an idea that seemed fantastical. He said that the U.S. should pay an annual income of $1,000 per month to each and every American citizen. It would replace most public assistance programs, he said. It wasn't welfare. It was our dividend from an ownership interest in the data that Americans have given to our technology companies. That information is valuable -- perhaps as valuable as the revenue businesses get on the margin between what they sell and what it costs them to make what they sell. Businesses, especially tech companies, scraped the data from our libraries with information accumulated over centuries. They gather our universities' research. They collect data from our phone calls, our grocery purchases, the movement of our cars, our electric usage, our traffic cameras, our emails, our TV shows -- the entire wealth of American commerce and culture. 

Andrew Yang drew curious crowds trying to absorb the idea that there was value in that data and that it belonged to the people who created it.

 

A lot has changed in the past six years. Artificial intelligence has become a central issue in our lives and it is creating fortunes that are distorting the economy and our democracy. Companies that are involved in the industry have multitrillion-dollar valuations. The idea that there is value in the information that informs AI doesn't seem crazy at all. It seems obvious. AI is creating value, but it isn't creating information; it is organizing it and giving it back to us. We taught AI what it knows, and are doing so constantly. The raw material that AI processes comes from us. 

The political insight to absorb is that the original data is ours, and like the oil beneath the surface of North Dakota and Alaska, and the trees in the forests of O&C counties, the public has a right to a dividend from its extraction and use. We don't deserve all the income from AI, but we deserve some of it.

I don't know the fair amount of income we deserve from the AI Permanent Fund. Let's debate that. It may not be $1,000 per American. Not yet, anyway. But it should be something, and my purpose here is to assert its justice and fairness, and to put Andrew Yang's proposal back on the table.

I start this post with North Dakota and Alaska to make the point that even red-state legislators and Fox News think a certain amount of socialism is a good idea. They aren't calling it socialism, of course; they are calling it tax reduction. That's OK. Alaskans call it a dividend. That's OK, too. Its foundation is a premise that is moral and political: The public has a legitimate claim on raw material resources extracted from within its jurisdiction. 

This is an idea with bipartisan potential, so long as Democrats have the sense not to insist it be called "socialism."

The future has caught up with Yang's insight. We aren't supplicants. We are owners. If AI wants our data, and it does, then it needs to pay us for it.



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Sunday, June 21, 2026

Easy Sunday: Slash, Burn, and Run

Do you remember "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap?

In the 1990s he was a famous CEO at Scott Paper and appliance-maker Sunbeam. A few days after taking over at Sunbeam, he unsheathed his stock in trade: He fired most of the company's senior management, and announced 6,000 layoffs, about half of the firm's work force.  Sunbeam's stock soared. Then it crashed.

John Coster's guest post on Trump, who sold Americans that he was a turnaround CEO for a failing country, brought back memories of "Chainsaw Al."

Some of the most valuable assets of a company or a country are built up over generations. It is a reputation for integrity, reliability, and fair dealing. It is expertise within the employees. It is trust.

Coster had a long career managing multimillion-dollar development projects for high-volume users of electricity. He recently retired -- or is trying to. Amid the rush to build data hubs on Earth and in space, large technology companies keep trying to lure him back to work. They need his expertise.




Guest Post by John Coster
Your post Saturday quoting The Wall Street Journal got me thinking about how Trump, the “Turn-around CEO,” weaseled his way into power with the tacit endorsement of the business elite where he operates with a kind of corporate-valuation mindset. In this model, the CEO and his executive team drive up market valuation by slashing costs that produce short-term earnings that cause the market to react favorably for a few quarters. The CEO gets rewarded on earnings and market cap (or higher valuation for a sale) even if the long-term impact on the business is net-negative. Or worse, some of these companies just disappear, or get absorbed into something unrecognizable. The market understands these guys and plays the game.

Trump convinced enough people (think of the voters as the "Board of Directors") that the country was in his words “a disaster”; undervalued if you will, and only he could “turn it around.” And he promised to do it with swift, decisive and merciless action on trade, taxes, immigration, slashing environmental regulations, and entitlements – and especially all that social-equity malarky. Enough of the “The Board” liked what they heard and hired him – again.
 
Just like a typical “Turn-Around CEO,” he began doing what he said with little pushback from those who could if they had the courage. In this second re-hire, the assets he’s been stripping are not just financial; they are non-monetizable things like reputation, trust, and good-will, the loss of which is hard to restore. He is insulting our allies. He is threatening invasions. He treats trading partners like enemies. Ultimately the burden is on the well-being of the people who put their trust in him, and the likely irreparable damage to our admittedly imperfect, but working systems of government that will be impacted for generations to come. Like corporate raiders, he is impoverishing everything he is overseeing -- with the single goal of enriching himself and his insatiable ego.

And now the venerable WSJ notices.


 

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Saturday, June 20, 2026

Things fall apart

The Wall Street Journal admitted in an editorial this morning what I wrote about earlier this week.

Trump TACO-ed on Iran. He chickened out.

Trump has a glass jaw.



I gifted the short editorial here.

Here are some highlights:
Mr. Trump said at his Wednesday news conference. In so many words the President said the Iranians had him over a barrel—of oil. If he had fought on, the market “would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929,” he said. “The one President I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

There you have it: Mr. Trump was driven by fear of high oil prices and a falling stock market going into the midterm elections. . . .

The U.S. had options but Mr. Trump blinked at the risk. Instead, after two months of cease-fire weakness while the public soured and oil reserves declined, the President acknowledges he gave in to Iran’s economic pressure. . . .

The more hope Messrs. Trump and Vance express in the Iranian regime’s transformation, the more desperate they sound. How else to read their sudden defense of Iran’s missile program, after stopping it had been a declared U.S. war aim? Wishful thinking can’t cover up this deal’s origins in White House fears. As the President himself admits.

I understand that readers might presume that I take an uncharitable look at Trump because I mostly vote for Democrats, and because I have concluded that Trump is a narcissistic, corrupt autocrat with no respect for the country he leads. So of course I would write that his only principle in foreign policy is his own personal political advantage. But I am not alone. The Wall Street Journal shares my opinion.

But the blind cult of Trump is fraying. MAGA "America First" isolationists feel betrayed, and wonder if we are being led around by Israel. Israel hawks feel betrayed, so Trump is getting hurt in both directions. The Epstein mess makes Trump look like he is hiding something, which, of course, he is. Trump's fixations on the 2020 election, on the ballroom, on gold adornments, on the reflecting pool, on a grandiose arch, seem like sideshow distractions to all but people deep in the cult. I would like to think that bona fide Christians are uncomfortable with the way that he presents himself as a tight-with-Jesus Christian warrior. It looks like blasphemy and idolatry to me, but polls show that evangelical Christians are OK with Trump, so far at least.

The Wall Street Journal represents what remains an important part of the GOP coalition: the business establishment. That is a group that wants orderly, rule-of-law enforcement of contracts and patents, predictable interest rate policy, limited regulation, and low taxes on the wealthy. The establishment wants the government to leave it alone unless, and until, they need to be rescued, at which point they become socialists and claim that they must be subsidized to save capitalism and jobs for the downtrodden. I watched this happen in 1985 (savings and loan crisis), 1987 (Black Monday), 1991 (insurance crisis), 1998 (Long-Term Capital collapse), 2000 (internet bubble pops), 2021 (9/11 attack), 2008 (mortgage bubble triggers Great Financial Crisis), and repeatedly in Trump's terms of office whenTrump bailed out farmers to mitigate the effects on them of tariff retaliation, and at key points in the past decade when the government bailed out SpaceX and Tesla. 

The Wall Street Journal is inconsistent and hypocritical, but the newspaper is clear about its interest in defending the business establishment. Trump wants business to do well and he wants the stock market to soar, but he wants it so he can brag about it and be glorified by it. The WSJ is getting clear that Trump's goal is his own wealth and glory, not the country's, and that while the goals theoretically run in parallel, in fact they do not. Trump will happily flout the rule of law, and orderly, predictable process to achieve his goal of personal influence. For the WSJ government ownership of businesses is bad per se, it is socialism. For Trump, the government owning a piece of a business is a source of personal power -- a very good thing. It is a string he can pull to get something he wants. 

Trump is not governing the country on behalf of the WSJ. He is governing it on behalf of the audience of Fox News which glorifies and empowers Trump personally. They are different and, increasingly, they are in opposition. 

Things fall apart.


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