The Local has has published an article in which a British ex-pat lists 17 dreadful things about Spain. I can't see anything wrong with it.
Our personalities are fixed from a young age, Yes? Well, allegedly not. According to a groundbreaking study
spanning six decades it's been established that that they change
“beyond recognition” between adolescence and old age as life
takes its toll. I can't cite the article from The Times, so it's pasted at the end of this post.
I'm driving to
Portsmouth early this morning, to catch the ferry to Santander. So,
being short on time, I've shamelessly plundered Lenox Napier's last
Business Over Tapas for all the following items, under my heading of
Life in Spain:
- A Government decree has set up an extra-judicial process for settling claims from those borrowers who were hit with an illegal floor-clause by their bank. Ostensibly, this will make the process quicker and cheaper for both sides and avoid clogging up the courts. In reality, the decree tilts the playing field in favour of banks at the expense of borrowers. So, no surprise there.
- The Government has a plan to close down all the polling stations in Catalonia on the day of the referendum – which may be celebrated before summer. It’s not going to end well.
- Spaniards only give their media 4.3 out of 10 for credibility. Some 15% of the population never or almost never trusts the media, compared to 2.5% who always or nearly always do so.
- The Carrefour supermarket group – which is French – says it will eliminate paper receipts. Instead, customers will be able to receive a digital version through its Mi Carrefour app.
- Spain is one of those European countries which fails to spend 2% of GDP on defence. At 0.9% this is the same as Slovenia and Belgium.
- The government has proposed a new 'digital canon', to replace the one deemed illegal by Brussels. It could increase the price of some items by at least €10, say critics. It's aimed at providing extra funds for copyright owners. One things's for sure . . . it'll create new public employee jobs and more bureaucracy. The traditional Spanish answer to almost every problem or challenge to existing commercial operations. At least for those big enough to have links with the government. And on that score . . .
- The latest member of the board the Red Electrica de España is another retired PP politician, the ex-head of the Guardia Civil. Needless to say he has no knowledge about the electricity industry whatsoever. And probably can't decipher his bills any more than the rest of us can.
Another Bill Tidy cartoon:
Finally . . . A Correction; My self-appointed fact-checker and all round pain in the arse, Alfie Mittington, has pointed out that Wellington's battle success in Vitoria/Vittoria took place in NE Spain and not NW Portugal. As if anyone in Birkenhead really knows or cares. Or anyone else, for that matter.
THE TRUMP ARTICLE
The Peril of Potemkin Democracy
Trump doesn't have to
be Hitler to bring an end to the Republic.
One of the most
difficult puzzles of the Trump administration is figuring out which
dystopian scenario to worry about. Depending on who you listen to,
everything Trump does is a feint meant to misdirect us away from the
main threat, which is somewhere else.
Maybe Kellyanne
Conway's "alternative facts", Stephen Miller's assertion
that the president's power "will not be questioned", or the
president's own declaration that CNN and the other mainstream news
sources are "enemies of the American People" are assaults
on the fundamental basis of democratic governance, or maybe they're
shiny objects intended to distract the press from digging into
Trump's radical appointments. Or maybe putting a buffoon like Rick
Perry in charge of our nuclear energy programs is itself meant to
split Congress on partisan lines so that neither party will get
around to investigating Trump's relationship with Russia. Maybe
Russia is a red herring, and we ought to be paying attention to all
the ways Trump and his cronies are setting themselves up to profit
from his presidency. Or maybe the profiteering is small potatoes next
to the alt-right influence of Steve Bannon, whose prophecy of a
global war with Islam might be self-fulfilling if Islamophobic
policies like the Muslim ban recruit enough young people into
terrorism. Or maybe the Muslim ban is just a stalking horse meant to
produce a clash with the judiciary, which Trump hopes to crush in the
ensuing constitutional crisis.
I could keep going.
Like a comic-book villain, Trump seems to be advancing towards the
Apocalypse in all directions at once. Does that mean all roads need
to be guarded equally? Or are all but one or two of the threats just
distractions intended to split opposition forces? Is each proposal
just the first step on a long march towards tyranny? Or is Trump like
any other new president, checking off boxes on his list of campaign
promises and hoping his various constituencies will be satisfied with
a few symbolic baubles, so he can eventually focus on the things he
really cares about? And what are those things?
Uncertainty of threat
leads to uncertainty of response. Should we focus on throwing Trump's
allies out of Congress in 2018, or will that be too little too late?
Right now, should we be calling our congresspeople? Marching in the
streets? Planning our escape to Canada or Sweden? Or stockpiling arms
for the inevitable civil war? Is paranoia making you worry too much?
Or is denial making you too complacent?
A key point in Trumpian
strategy is to keep your opponents rattled, and in that he is
definitely succeeding. Probably the best line in SNL's People's Court
skit wasn't trying to be funny at all. The judge says: "I want
one day without a CNN alert that scares the hell out of me."
Lots of us do.
So, acknowledging the
uncertainties and the twin risks of paranoia and complacency, let's
see if we unrattle ourselves and focus our concern in the right
places.
Why do people do what
they do? This observation isn't terribly deep, but it does help
organize my analysis: What people do is always a combination of what
they intend and the opportunities they happen across. For example,
some people are in the careers they've pictured since they were kids,
while others went wherever the jobs were when they graduated. Two
people might work across a desk from each other, but one got there
through a long-term plan and the other happened into it.
World leaders are the
same way: They do some things because that's why they set out to
become world leaders in the first place. They do other things because
the opportunity presents itself or some situation thrusts itself upon
them. Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society because that's what
he always wanted to do; he saw himself as a protege of FDR, so he
wanted to be remembered as the president who completed the New Deal.
But his response to an unanticipated challenge also made him the
Vietnam War president.
So there are two parts
to figuring out what to fear from Trump. First, what drives him, so
that he will set out to make it happen? And second, where are the
opportunities he might try to exploit?
Drives. Let me start by
saying that I've never met Donald Trump, so all my opinions about him
come at a distance. But at the same time, he has been in the public
eye for decades and hasn't exactly hidden his personality, so I'm not
just shooting blind.
My take on Trump is
that his drives are all personal, and he has no fixed political goals
at all. This is the biggest reason why comparisons to Hitler are
misguided. Hitler was ideological. Any unscrupulous German politician
might have opportunistically used anti-Semitism to rabble-rouse. But
Hitler was so identified with it that he carried out the Final
Solution in secret, and speeded it up as the war began to go badly.
He seemed haunted by the idea that he might lose power before he
finished his genocide. Similarly, he was always planning to attack
Russia; the German people needed to expand in the east at the expense
of the racially inferior Slavs.
You'll search in vain
for any similar fixed political goals, good or bad, in Trump. He's
been both pro- and anti-abortion. He's been a libertine and the
candidate of the Religious Right. He was for the Iraq War until he
decided he had always been against it. During the campaign, his
policy prescriptions were all over the map: The government spends too
much, but should start a massive infrastructure project. It should
both get out of healthcare and make sure everybody gets covered. He
is simultaneously a hawk and an isolationist, a champion of both the
working stiff and the billionaire who keeps wages low.
One reason Congress is
so frozen at the moment is that even after face-to-face meetings
where public pandering can be put aside, Ryan and McConnell still
have no idea what Trump really wants them to do. Even ObamaCare
repeal -- which every Republican from Trump on down pledged to do on
Day 1 -- is frozen, largely because Trump has not committed himself.
He has left Congress to face the real-life difficulties of
healthcare, while he floats vaguely above them, ready to tweet out
his wrath if Congress' program doesn't fulfill his impossible
promises.
But Trump is a bundle
of personal drives: He wants to be the center of attention, to be
admired and idolized. He needs to win, to never be wrong, and to be
better than whoever people might compare him to. Fame and TV ratings
and crowds are a few ways he measures his success, but the biggest is
money and the appearance of money.
Politics is just
another game that he can win, and so prove his superiority. And if
being president also makes him a lot of money, that's a double win.
Everything else is just a move in that game. Does he hate Muslims or
Mexicans? Not really, I think. But a lot of people do, and they'll
cheer for him if he says and does anti-Muslim or anti-Mexican stuff.
While he is not
ideologically racist, he is favorably inclined towards any argument
that justifies his own superiority. In practice, that can sometimes
lead to the same result. Sexism, I believe, runs a little deeper:
Women are simultaneously individuals to be dominated as well as chips
in his competition with other men. Being shown up grates on him, but
being shown up by a woman is doubly galling.
What I don't see in him
is an urge to remake society in his own image. He has no vision like
a thousand-year Reich, a new Soviet man, or anything else that would
lead to a micro-managed totalitarian system.
The opportunity that
doesn't exist. Even if Trump didn't intend to go there, you might
still imagine him opportunistically drifting into a Hitler-shaped or
Stalin-shaped hole in American society. I firmly believe that there
is no such hole. The 21st-century authoritarian model is quite
different (as we'll discuss below).
Germany in 1933 and
Russia in 1917 were both countries in great economic distress,
dealing with the aftermath of a humiliating defeat in war. Both had
nostalgia for a former era when a strong ruler was firmly in charge.
Trump's appeal is based
on a dim echo of that situation. Many Americans are disappointed
in their economic prospects, but compared to Depression-era Germany,
few are desperate. (Wondering whether your salary will ever justify
your student loans is a world away from wondering what bread will
cost next week.) America's persistent inability to wipe out enemies
in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Syria is frustrating, but doesn't
compare to Russia's or Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I.
Trump's rhetoric is nostalgic, but the leaders of those
warmly-recalled eras were grandfatherly men like Eisenhower or
Reagan, not iron-fisted czars or kaisers.
Trump has many fans,
but Trumpism runs shallow compared to Hitlerism. In 1933, virtually
every part of German society had its own Nazi movement eager to take
power. In 2017, it's hard to picture what a Trumpist takeover of the
universities or of California would even mean, much less who would do
it or how. The difficulty Trump is having staffing his administration
is a symptom of this shallowness. He won with 46% of the vote, after
all, and many who voted for him were not happy about it.
The appeal of Potemkin democracy. While America as a nation is not experiencing the kind of despair and defeat that leads to totalitarianism, many groups within America have seen a long-term decline in their influence and status, with no end in sight. Many members of these groups are deeply nostalgic, and prior to Trump's election felt the kind of hopelessness that yearns for radical change.
These are the people I
described in 2012 in "The Distress of the Privileged":
whites, men, conservative Christians, native-born English-speakers,
and so on. These groups have never been oppressed in America and face
no prospect of it, but they used to dominate society to an extent
that they no longer do. That relative loss of power feels like
persecution, even if in reality it is nothing more than a loss of
privilege. [1]
But many of them
experience that pseudo-persecution intensely, and believe it is being
thrown in their faces constantly: when their doctrines are no longer
taught or their prayers recited in public schools; when they have to
compete in the workplace on near-equal terms with blacks and
immigrants and women; when courts take the side of gay couples
against the Christians who want to discriminate against them; when
they express their distress in public and do not see their problems
move immediately to the top of the agenda; when history classes call
attention to the flaws of their heroes, or to the contributions of
members of other groups; and on many other occasions. Those who look
for these insults to their pride, and seek out media that highlights
and exaggerates them, can find something every day.
These are the people
who make up the bulk of Trump's base, and who will be willing to
watch democracy crumble if it allows them to regain the privileges
they believe are rightfully theirs. While the extreme edge of this
group contains open white supremacists, theocratic Dominionists, and
even self-proclaimed Nazis, for the most part its members are not
that radical: They're happy with an American-style democracy as long
as they're comfortably in the majority and the elected government
favors them. That's what they're nostalgic for.
But as they have sunk
towards minority status, more extreme methods have begun to appeal:
suppressing other voters in the guise of preventing "voter
fraud", gerrymandering legislative districts so that their
minority of votes can dominate Congress and the state legislatures,
shutting down immigration from people not like them, suppressing
protest with police violence, and so on.
For the most part,
their ideal America would be a Potemkin democracy. It would have the
appearance of free institutions: elections, media not directly
controlled by the government, opposition politicians not in jail, and
so on. But the outcomes of those elections would never be in doubt,
and democratic methods would never be sufficient to achieve equality
for non-whites, non-Christians, or those that white Christians
disapprove of (like gays).
The autocracy model
that works. In a recent article in The Atlantic, David Frum described
how democracy slipped away in 21st-century countries like Hungary,
South Africa, and Venezuela. The Washington Post paints a similar (if
less fully developed) picture of the year-old populist government in
Poland.
What has happened in
Hungary since 2010 offers an example—and a blueprint for would-be
strongmen. Hungary is a member state of the European Union and a
signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It has
elections and uncensored internet. Yet Hungary is ceasing to be a
free country.
The transition has been
nonviolent, often not even very dramatic. Opponents of the regime are
not murdered or imprisoned, although many are harassed with building
inspections and tax audits. If they work for the government, or for a
company susceptible to government pressure, they risk their jobs by
speaking out. Nonetheless, they are free to emigrate anytime they
like. Those with money can even take it with them. Day in and day
out, the regime works more through inducements than through
intimidation. The courts are packed, and forgiving of the regime’s
allies. Friends of the government win state contracts at high prices
and borrow on easy terms from the central bank. Those on the inside
grow rich by favoritism; those on the outside suffer from the general
deterioration of the economy. As one shrewd observer told me on a
recent visit, “The benefit of controlling a modern state is less
the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the
guilty.”
Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán’s rule over Hungary does depend on elections. These remain
open and more or less free—at least in the sense that ballots are
counted accurately. Yet they are not quite fair. Electoral rules
favor incumbent power-holders in ways both obvious and subtle.
Independent media lose advertising under government pressure;
government allies own more and more media outlets each year. The
government sustains support even in the face of bad news by artfully
generating an endless sequence of controversies that leave culturally
conservative Hungarians feeling misunderstood and victimized by
liberals, foreigners, and Jews.
In Poland:
- In merely a year, critics say, the nationalists have transformed Poland into a surreal and insular place — one where state-sponsored conspiracy theories and de facto propaganda distract the public as democracy erodes.
- In the land of Law and Justice, anti-intellectualism is king. Polish scientists are aghast at proposed curriculum changes in a new education bill that would downplay evolution theory and climate change and add hours for “patriotic” history lessons. In a Facebook chat, a top equal rights official mused that Polish hotels should not be forced to provide service to black or gay customers. After the official stepped down for unrelated reasons, his successor rejected an international convention to combat violence against women because it appeared to argue against traditional gender roles.
- The national broadcasting network has lost much of its independence, and the Catholic media outlets are happy with the new regime, so the overall news coverage is positive. Cosmopolitan Warsaw is dumbstruck, but in the countryside the new government is quite popular. Some say its economic policies -- subsidizing couples with children and lowering the retirement age -- aren't sound in the long term, but facts and numbers aren't making much of an impact on the public debate.
The ultimate model of a
21st-century autocrat, of course, is Vladimir Putin, whose praises
Trump often sings. Putin's situation gives him many advantages that
Trump lacks: Pre-Putin Russia in many ways resembled the
pre-totalitarian societies I discussed earlier, with extreme economic
distress, national pride wounded by defeat in the Cold War and the
collapse of its Soviet empire, and nostalgia for past dictators. But
even as Putin becomes (by some accounts) the world's richest
individual, and as his hold on government is increasingly
unassailable, Russia continues to have many of the trappings of
democracy. There are elections, even if it's hard to participate in
them.[2]
Some limited media criticism is tolerated, though
sufficiently annoying critics do sometimes drop dead under suspicious
circumstances. Putin even respected Russia's presidential term-limit
law, stepping into the Prime Minister's role for a term to let
someone else serve as a figurehead president.
Frum sums up:
Outside the Islamic
world, the 21st century is not an era of ideology. The grand utopian
visions of the 19th century have passed out of fashion. The nightmare
totalitarian projects of the 20th have been overthrown or have
disintegrated, leaving behind only outdated remnants: North Korea,
Cuba. What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by
rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of
Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on
rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation
of elites.
First steps. It's not
hard to find steps Trump has already taken down the Potemkin
democracy path. As often as he verbally attacks CNN, there is
virtually no chance of troops seizing its studios in a totalitarian
coup. But Jared Kushner has already met with a high executive of
CNN's corporate master, Time Warner, to criticize CNN's coverage of
the new administration. According to The Wall Street Journal, he
called out two commentators by name: Van Jones (a black) and Ana
Navarro (a Nicaraguan immigrant). The implied threat is all too
obvious: Billions of dollars hang on whether the Trump administration
approves Time Warner's proposed merger with AT&T.
There is no need for
Trump critics like Jones or Navarro to wind up in Guantanamo. It is
sufficient if he can get them shunted off to media outlets that only
liberals or people of color pay attention to.
Similarly, Trump has
talked about expanding the scope of libel laws to make it easier to
sue news organizations. Melania is already suing one, using the
lawyer that Peter Thiel used to kill Gawker. The point,
apparently, is not to recover damages, but to put critics out of
business.
Under the guise of
"reforming the bureaucracy" or "draining the swamp",
Trump seeks to populate government service with people loyal to him
rather than to the missions of their departments.
His refusal to separate
himself in any meaningful way from his business empire, his lack of
transparency about his finances, and his flagrant use of his position
as president to promote his profit-making properties are all part of
this pattern. Frum projects these trends into 2020:
Most Americans intuit
that their president and his relatives have become vastly wealthier
over the past four years. But rumors of graft are easy to dismiss.
Because Trump has never released his tax returns, no one really
knows.
The repeatability of
2016. As Trump is found of reminding us, the experts said he couldn't
win in 2016, and they were wrong.
But it's worth
considering exactly what they were wrong about. What made Trump's
victory so implausible was that he consistently spoke to a base that
was nowhere near a majority of the American people. It seemed obvious
that his appeal could not translate into a majority of the votes
cast. And it didn't: He got
46% of the vote to Hillary Clinton's 48%, a difference of nearly
three million votes. What everyone failed to see was that:
The combination of
sexism, a long-term build-up of anti-Hillary hype, Trump's relentless
lock-her-up negativity, and unethical meddling by Russia and the FBI
would make Clinton unacceptable to enough voters that the election
would be close, despite Trump's general unpopularity.
The inherent
gerrymandering of the Electoral College would allow Trump to win
despite being outvoted by a clear margin.
After taking office,
Trump has continued to speak only to his base, which is still an
electoral minority. Unsurprisingly, a whopping 55% of Americans now
view him unfavorably after only one month of his presidency.
But couldn't the same
strategy work again in 2020? Given enough repetition, a sufficiently
cowed media, new illicit meddling (maybe by a Trump-tamed NSA this
time), and relentless efforts to smear whoever the leading Democrat
turns out to be -- "Pocahontas" Warren, for example --
couldn't he repeat the same trick and be re-elected with no more
popularity than he had in 2016?
What to expect. What
Trump wants and has always wanted is to make vast amounts of money,
to be courted by his fellow billionaires, and to have the power to
take revenge on those who slight him. The repressive kleptocracy
model offers all that.
To stay in power -- and
ideally to hand power off to a chosen successor like son-in-law
Kushner or daughter Ivanka -- Trump must keep the loyalty of his
distressed/privileged base. In order to do that, he will offer them
some substantive benefits. But ultimately he has no loyalty to them,
so he will consistently attempt to give them symbolic victories that
cost him nothing, or to take credit for far more than he actually
does. The most efficient way for him to maintain their loyalty is to
keep them constantly agitated by imaginary insults from their
enemies, which Trump will defend them against. [3]
That base will continue
to be an ever-shrinking minority, but by making it increasingly
harder for others to vote, for immigrants to enter the country, for
resident aliens to become citizens, for opposition parties to bring
their case to the general public, and for voting majorities to
achieve actual power, Trump will endeavor to enlarge that minority's
power far beyond its numbers. In doing so, he will simply be
extending and exaggerating policies the Republican Party and the
conservative media have pursued for many years.
Accompanying these
policies will be the constant attempt to increase public cynicism.
Sure, Trump lies, Trump profits from government, Trump bends the
rules in his favor, but that's just politics. Everybody lies,
everybody cheats, all news is fake.
The threat, then, isn't
that some Reichstag-fire incident will set off a well-planned
takeover that overnight makes America unrecognizable. On the
contrary, American in 2020 will be very recognizable, as long as you
don't look too deeply.
[1] This is not to say
that some members of these groups don't have genuine problems worthy
of government help -- ex-workers of dying industries in
dying-industry towns, like West Virginia coal miners, for example.
But even here, what thrusts them into public attention isn't the
degree of their distress, it's that they're native-born
English-speaking white men in distress. It's the
my-problem-should-move-to-the-top-of-the agenda privilege.
Tim Wise comments:
When white people are
hurting economically we're supposed to feel their pain and "bring
the jobs back" to their dying rural towns. But when people of
color lack jobs in the cities (in large part because of the decline
of manufacturing over 40 plus years, as well as discrimination) we
tell them to "move," to go to school and gain new skills,
and we lecture them on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps
because the government doesn't owe them anything. But apparently we
DO owe white coal miners and assembly line workers their jobs back
because remember, out of work white men are "salt of the earth"
while out of work people of color are lazy.
[2] Garry Kasparov
discusses the difficulties of getting on the ballot and campaigning
in Russia in his book Winter is Coming. For example, the rules
require your party to have a nominating convention of a certain size,
but what if no one is willing to displease the government by renting
you space for it?
[3] A good example was
his rally this week in Florida, which Melania opened with the Lord's
Prayer.
Not only does that give conservative Christians a
we're-still-in-charge-here thrill at no cost to Trump, it allowed the
pro-Trump side of the media to further their Christian-persecution
narrative.
Supposedly liberals
were up in arms about the prayer, but I would never have heard about
it if not for Fox News' coverage of how up-in-arms people like me
are. The liberal web sites I regularly cruise didn't find it worth
mentioning. (Fox' sources are social-media posts by ordinary people.
You could find similar posts objecting to more-or-less anything that
happens.)
In fact, a campaign
rally is a private event, so opening it with prayer does not violate
church-state separation. If Trump wants to signal to non-Christians
that they are not welcome at his rallies, that's up to him. I was not
offended and I suspect very few liberals were.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY
Life changes you,
60-year study finds
Perseverance,
stability, conscientiousness: character traits that, once instilled,
will last a lifetime.
Not according to a
groundbreaking study spanning six decades, which discovered that
personalities change “beyond recognition” between adolescence and
old age as life takes its toll.
In the longest such
study conducted, researchers from the University of Edinburgh found
that personal qualities they assumed were innate altered greatly
between the ages of 14 and 77.
The basis of the study
was a mental health survey conducted in Scotland in 1950 when the
personalities of more than 1,200 children were assessed. Their
teachers filled in six questionnaires, in which they assessed pupils’
levels of self-confidence, perseverance, stability of mood,
conscientiousness, originality and desire to learn. The six qualities
were amalgamated into a single score that researchers said was
similar to dependability. The children also took intelligence tests.
In 2012 researchers
tracked down 635 of those who participated in the original study and
again tested all who were willing. Now aged 77, the participants
rated themselves and nominated a close friend or relative to do the
same. They also completed a new round of intelligence tests and
answered questions on their general wellbeing.
The study was led by
Mathew Harris, research associate in brain imaging at the University
of Edinburgh, who admitted that the team was surprised by the lack of
correlated results. “We hypothesised that we would find evidence of
personality stability over . . . 63 years but our correlations did
not support this hypothesis,” the team said.
Only two of the traits
— stability of mood and conscientiousness — showed signs of
lasting a lifetime in a significant way but even then there was no
guarantee.
The researchers said
that it was hard to work out why these two traits turned out to be
more enduring. “A wide range of genetic and environmental factors
likely contribute to change in personality traits over time and it is
not yet clear why some traits might be more affected by these factors
than others,” they said.
The environmental
changes for this group, born in 1936, were dramatic, taking in the
Second World War and the digital revolution. The participants’
dependability at the age of 14 was not related to their wellbeing in
later life, seemingly contradicting previous research that has found
higher scores were associated with superior wellbeing decades later.
Previous personality
studies, conducted over shorter periods, have appeared to show some
consistency, for example when they compared childhood with middle
age, or middle age with old age.
Dr Harris suggested
that personalities changed slowly and incrementally, not suddenly in
response to key life events such as marriage or bereavement.
“Personality changes gradually throughout life.
There may be only
subtle changes over relatively short periods, but these changes
accumulate, leading to bigger differences over more time. It may
change more rapidly throughout certain times of life, such as
adolescent development, but whether specific life events have
substantial, lasting effects on personality is less clear,” the
researchers said.
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