Genocide disguised as incompetence

Genocide disguised as incompetence indeed.

Epidemiologist Slams U.S. Coronavirus Response: ‘Close To Genocide By Default’

A Yale epidemiologist pulled no punches with his searing assessment of the United States’ botched handling of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting it is now “getting awfully close to genocide by default.”

“How many people will die this summer, before Election Day?” tweeted Gregg Gonsalves, co-director of Yale’s Global Health Justice Partnership, on Wednesday morning, the day after President Donald Trump said the White House’s coronavirus task force would be wound down despite case numbers still rising. (Trump, however, tweeted later Wednesday morning that the group “will continue on indefinitely with its focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN.”)

“What proportion of the deaths will be among African-Americans, Latinos, other people of color?” asked Gonsalves. “This is getting awfully close to genocide by default. What else do you call mass death by public policy?”>What is happening in the US is purposeful, considered negligence, omission, failure to act by our leaders,” he wrote. “Can they be held responsible under international law?”

“So, what does it mean to let thousands die by negligence, omission, failure to act, in a legal sense under international law?” Gonsalves added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes on its website how “current data suggest a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.” Almost one-third of those who have died from the disease in the U.S. are Black, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Just Trump? Really?

Americans are dying because of presidential decisions that can be traced directly to President Trump. Took him forever to utilize DPA only because the administration wasn't ready to implement the program. Administration moved slowly to establish medical equipment purchases.

How is it that no one is blaming Newsom or Cuomo for not closing their borders until late March? Or addressing the nursing home situation like the Washington governor did? Or take any of the other necessary steps that only Trump is being blamed for? Or any of the republican governors that didn't do anything at all and now have sent people back to work.

Have you been following the nursing and veteran homes scandal where the staff were deliberately not given PPE or took any other steps to keep the virus out after the Washington state nursing home story broke in January? Tens of thousands of deaths are reported daily with numbers as high as over 100 a day. How about the numbers of deaths that are coming from the prisons where many states will not release those who are in there for minor infractions? When will those numbers be released? Why haven't they already? Or the many other places where deaths could be avoided but they are allowed to die?

I am listening to a book written back in the 198o's that is located on the other side of the Hamptons before the PTB started their murderous transfers of wealth and other policies that saw the poorest among us starting to get more poor. I thought of the area today when many families that had lived there have been pushed out and now it is just full of the people who have sold their souls and profited from their actions so that they could be rewarded for their actions and be allowed to buy property in the area. Then I thought of Clinton's welfare reform and of the great tax heists that Obama committed and wondered how anyone could set out to do a slow genocide of the working class. And now this blatant in your f'ing face of the biggest heist and corporate coup ever. This goes beyond just Trump because of course it does. Democrats did not have to sign on to pass it.

The house is an equal branch of congress as is the senate and maybe even more so because they hold the power of the purse. As I showed in last night's evening blues it only takes one person to stand against any bill in the senate to block the whole damn thing until he/she gets what they want. The republicans did this all through Obama's tenure, but the democrats rarely used it during Bush's. Why? You know why. Anything that helps the elite class gets bipartisan support and anything that helps the working class gets bipartisan "Oh Hell No We Will Not Allow That!!" This is why Bernie's rant against Lindsay was just so in your face kabuki theater. As is everything AOC rants about and especially because she only raves about what the republicans are doing, but never says that they have Nancy Pelosi's blessings to do it.

And can anything be more in your face that your life does not matter to them to have one half of congress sitting home while 30 million plus are losing everything that they worked for and still millions have not seen a dime from the measly amount we the people got? This after the first bill that went to the elite class was finalized without any discussion from the rest of congress. Did you know that Pelosi worked with Mnunchin, McConnell and Schumer behind closed doors? Yes that is what happened. Then they gave the rest of congress the 100 plus page bill and said that we are voting for it before you have time to read it. Who objected to that?

But until enough people start seeing this isn't a D or R problem we will never unite and stop fighting amongst ourselves and start fighting those who aim to kill us.

Now the nursing home lobby is asking congress to give them immunity. Both Newsom and Cuomo have already agreed. Congress and especially Mitch McConnell are saying any new bills coming from the have to give companies immunity from lawsuits and McConnell stated that is his red line. Schumer has said that he would consider doing it. I won't rehash the bills that have come out already that went just to the one percent, but I will note that now some democrats are once again raising desperate people's hopes that yes drastic help is on the way. You can say that you will pass all of Bernie's platform know damn well that it will die in the senate before it even gets to Trump's veto. But hey, it sure makes them look good doesn't it?

OF course there has already been plans made at the federal level to respond to any disaster. They just didn't implement it. Well except that the government stole many of the supplies that the states ordered for themselves. Why? Damn good question, but no one is asking it. How else can you explain farmers having to dump millions of pounds of their products without an immediate response from the government? Even after they were getting calls from them it took over a month for someone to address it and say that we are now working on it? Why didn't state governors get their national guard on the problem and step in before the food went to waste? Why else would the big meat processing plants not do everything in it's power to keep their workers safe and instead see hundreds of workers get sick and then many die and the plant has to shut down to be cleaned before making the workers report back to work. How about Amazon and its dereliction of duty to make sure that it is doing all it can to keep workers safe? Bezos BTW has made close to $40 billion since January. Seriously? And does anyone think he will cough up one penny in taxes on it?

How many other essential industries is that happening in?

And there is what is being done to the economy that will see more people lose everything and just how many will kill themselves or turn to drug or outright rioting and looting?

This is setting up conditions for massive social unrest where people will rise up and we might see the Occupy Wall Street folks join with the Tea Party folks before they were taken over by the Koch Brothers and their ilk. But then the government has unconstitutional laws in place to stamp that out.

This is both genocide and class war and I have just touched the few obvious issues that have set this country on its course. Hopefully others will fill in what I have left out. We the People have a chance to fight back against this with work stoppages or general strikes, but that window is closing fast. The people who want to reopen the economy sure could be valuable allies if they would join with those that see what has been happening for decades and fight back against the true enemy. How to get them to see that message I can't answer. We did that once after the Great Depression and it scared the crap out of the elites. Roosevelt said that we have to give them something or else they are going to take everything.

We hold the power and it has been proven by those that are called essential workers who are risking their lives for us so we can continue to eat, ect. The people who work in the meat processing plants are being told to their faces that their lives are disposable to the Elite class.

I will end here even though I think I could add to this all day and still miss a lot of other things. Apologies if it comes across discombobulated and I don't know why the whole essay is block quoted. Murphy I suppose.

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snoopydawg's picture

Cruel indeed.

Body Bags Instead of Requested Covid-19 Testing Kits for Native American Clinic Seen as Cruel Metaphor

A Seattle-area Native American health center in April received body bags instead of requested equipment to handle the coronavirus in what tribal officials described as a "metaphor" for how the Indigenous population is being treated by local, state, and federal governments around the country as the pandemic continues to rage.

"My question is: Are we going to keep getting body bags or are we going to get what we actually need?" Seattle Indian Health Board chief research officer Abigail Echo-Hawk told NBC News.

NBC News reported on Tuesday that the experience of the Seattle-area health center came after a request for testing equipment:

"My team turned ghost white," said Esther Lucero, chief executive officer of the Seattle Indian Health Board. "We asked for tests, and they sent us a box of body bags."

The health board's center—serving about 6,000 people a year in Seattle and King County—still has the package, which is filled with zippered white bags and beige tags that read "attach to toe."

While the Trump administration's reaction to the crisis has been denounced as grossly inadequate, residents of Ireland have stepped up to help out, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to a GoFundMe for the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation that has raised a total of over $1.8 million so far. The Irish people have cited a $170 gift from over 170 years ago from the Choctaw tribe during the Irish Famine as a motivator for the donations.

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When I saw the large number of infections in western Colorado, western New Mexico and Arizona a couple weeks ago it was shocking. Those areas have relatively low population density and many people live in rural areas. This really feels like another wave of genocide.

With a population of 350,000 and territory encompassing over 27,000 square miles, the Navajo Nation is the largest Indigenous reservation in the country, bigger than West Virginia and nine other US states. Today, the rural community has more per-capita COVID-19 infections than any place outside of New York and New Jersey. In April, its rate of infection was 10 times higher than that of Arizona, which encircles most of the Nation. Since the first cases cropped up on the reservation more than one month ago, more than 2,373 people have been infected, and the death toll stands at 73—higher than those of 11 states. “The need for the Navajo is far greater than any other tribe I have seen,” says Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), whose district includes part of the reservation.

Indian Health Service workers, school nurses, and community center officials could have done more to inform Navajo people about the importance of social distancing before their officials were forced to implement widespread closures and intense weekend-long curfews, says Solomon. She only began to hear KTNN feature local leaders on hand-washing, social distancing, and other mitigation measures around the start of April, long after such advisories became widespread elsewhere. The Navajo Department of Health first imposed stay-at-home orders on March 20. Some Navajo bragged about “rebelling” against these orders, since historically, white government officials “always tried to come in here and force things on us,” says Solomon.

There were early rumors spread in poor African American communities that Covid-19 can only affect white people. Community education was slow.

Take water. Decades of uranium mining on Navajo lands contributed to the well-documented pollution of drinking water in the area. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s remediation efforts, 40 percent of Navajo Nation still lacks reliable access to clean water. “If you’re having to haul water from a well many miles down a dirt road, and bring it back to water the animals, and also use it for washing and cooking and things like that, it’s really hard to wash your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds,” says Daniel Derksen, a public health professor who directs the University of Arizona’s Center for Rural Health.

Like the situation in Detroit on steroids. This situation has been going on a long time.

https://globalpossibilities.org/navajo-nation-is-behind-only-new-york-an...

Meanwhile in Wyoming:

Many tribal members, like those throughout Indian County, already are more susceptible to the virus due to higher rates of preexisting health conditions, but adding to the challenge of containing the illness is the lack of housing and overcrowded conditions.

“We out here, unfortunately, live two to three families in one home,” Northern Arapaho Business Council Chairman Lee Spoohunter explained. “If you have one person who tests positive in the house of seven, it really puts a lot of people at risk. And there are even some families that (have) higher numbers than seven in a household.”

https://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/health/northern-arapaho-deaths-...

Then there is the situation in Brazil. This is a disaster for the indigeneous people in the Amazon basin. Drug gangs in Brazil are imposing curfews and breaking up gatherings in favelas; the government is denying that there is a problem.

Many of Brazil’s 850,000 indigenous people live in remote Amazon areas with little access to healthcare, and indigenous groups say the government of President Jair Bolsonaro has not included the communities in national plans to fight the virus.

In a letter to WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus they asked for help to provide personal protective equipment that is unavailable to health workers in tribal reservations and villages.

“It is a real emergency,” Joenia Wapichana, the leader of the appeal to the WHO and the first indigenous woman elected to Brazil’s Congress, told Reuters.

“Indigenous people are vulnerable and have no protection.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil-indigenous-...

This is enough to discombobulate any decent person.

When does premeditated neglect become negligent homicide?

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gulfgal98's picture

the numbers of people of color who are affected is disproportionate to their percentage of the population. And yet, when I have gone out to the grocery store, the majority of people I see wearing a mask are people of color, which in my town are mostly blacks.

There is a culling of the herd going on, whether by design or incompetence and it is directly affecting in disproportionate numbers people of color, poor people, and the elderly. The oligarchy does not really care about people, in general, and these people, in particular because they are seen as "takers." The neoliberal establishment see themselves as better than the rest of us, particularly the poor and minorities.

I just read a scathing article in the Nation by Jeet Heer in which he calls Trump a war criminal. Below are two excerpts from that article.

This first one sent chills down my spine when I read what Trump had said implying that some people will have to be sacrificed in order to re-open the economy. It shows just how depraved and numb to death that we as a country have become when there is very little outrage that the President has said so horrific out loud.

Trump’s comment that Americans “should think of themselves as warriors” becomes more ominous when coupled with his frank acknowledgment that the death count from the pandemic will rise. “Will some people be affected badly? Yes,” Trump admitted in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday.

Later in the article, Heer calls out Trum for his abysmal lack of leadership.

If Trump is, as he calls himself, “a wartime president,” then his leadership deserves to be judged by the standards we expect from military men. Sacrificial death is justified in war, but only if it serves a purpose.

As a wartime leader, Trump is close to being a Gen. William Westmoreland, an incompetent commander in an unjust war. Of course, defeating the pandemic is itself justified. But what makes Trump’s conduct horrific is that he’s calling on sacrifices for other purposes, including boosting the economy and ensuring his own reelection.

Paraphrasing Joe Biden's comment to Tara Reade, this is exactly how our leaders in Washington think of us. We are nothing to them. We are disposable and dispensable to them.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

snoopydawg's picture

@gulfgal98

to COVID nor did Bush do it when Katrina hit. As the author of the article states it’s willful genocide. Culling of the herd or population control. It all amounts to the same thing. But as I have been saying he wasn’t the only one who has done it. States could have done what everyone is bitching about Trump not doing it and this especially goes for Cuomo who let airports stay open until the middle of March.

Next add congress’s response to bailout every company that didn’t need to be while doing nothing to help us.

I remember the flack I got for saying this is deliberately culling the herd. lol.. now not so much. But then no one knew how bad it was going to get or that we’d see the high numbers of deaths from nursing homes. We were once told that people couldn’t go back to work until the numbers of deaths went down. Utah is reporting ever increasing daily deaths, but it’s still opening the businesses up.

And guess who is doing just that? Mostly the people who can’t afford to stay home.

We are disposable and dispensable to them.

Never again has become a joke. Or something else because it shouldn’t just apply to one group of people.

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Bob In Portland's picture

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg As I recall George HW Bush had been a big supporter of family planning in Africa early in his polical career, but in the early seventies switched to being a right-to-lifer right before the large-scale smallpox vaccination program in central Africa (which many believe was the vector used to infect Africans with HIV). You have to understand his motivation and by example the motivation of the ruling class. AIDS had the potential of killing more Africans than family planning had in stopping pregnancies.

I hear almost no news about Covid-19. It's almost like a news blackout.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Bob In Portland

at the level it should, but sadly it doesn’t. Bill Gates has done a great job too with his plan for depopulation starting with African kids. He literally experimented on them and caused some very bad issues with their health. How is he any different than Josef Mengala? He isn’t. And now he is working on creating a vaccine for COVID that will at the least a tracking system and at worst something in that causes sterility or death. Cuomo has Gates in charge of medical issues in NYC. Not medical scientists, but someone who created a flawed operating system for computers.

Speaking of infecting people with HIV it makes me wonder if there was any truth to the story of the 8 men in NYC who thought they were getting a hepatitis vaccine, but instead were infected with it. If so just another group of disposable people right?

I think we should just stop fighting against climate change because by the time it hits people are going to be living in squalor and slavery to the elite and their lot doesn’t deserve to live after what they have done to the human race. What gives them the right to do what they are?

Guess I’ll go for a walk and clear my head and my soul.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Bob In Portland

Here is the latest post on COVID.

It has been interesting to see how the owner has evolved on how he thinks about the seriousness of the epidemic.

Zero Hedges has some decent coverage of it too, but just keep an open mind on some of its topics.

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Bob In Portland's picture

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snoopydawg's picture

@Bob In Portland

I don’t know why people wouldn’t consider that this epidemic was the result of biological weapons and deliberately let loose on the world because there is a history of this country releasing biological agents on us going back decades just to see how they would affect people and to see how many die from it. This was the topic of the article I posted last night in the EBs and it showed some of that and how people here worked with Hitler and his genocidal goons such as Mengala. I hope you had a chance to read it.

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RantingRooster's picture

for the 2nd amendment. I'll just leave it at that...

Drinks Happy Hunting!

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Bob In Portland's picture

@RantingRooster Unfortunately, the Second Amendment isn't terribly effective against covid, or the people who develop these things.

So far the only thing that the 2nd Amendment has done was to use assault rifles against the State of Michigan in order for people who think that guns solve problems to try to go back to work. Imagine that, instead, these people were waving around their weapons to ensure that they had living wages? The National Guard would have been out with tanks.

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RantingRooster's picture

@Bob In Portland

From RightwingWatch:

Trump loving radical right-wing activist Scott Lively warned listeners during an online Bible study yesterday that they need to establish a modern-day Underground Railroad for Christians to escape coming persecution and prepare to wage a violent revolution against those who seek to use the current COVID-19 pandemic to impose a socialist End Times “emerging Beast government” on the United States.

Then there's this from News4 Oaklahoma:

One employee was hit in the arm, a second was hit with shrapnel in the neck/shoulder and a third employee was hit with shrapnel in the side. Two of the employees are 16 years old, according to police. They were all taken to the hospital and are expected to be OK.

Oklahoma City police say the woman became agitated when told the restaurant’s dining rooms were closed due to COVID-19.

I'm telling ya, we need to arm up, if for no other reason, to protect ourselves from the crazies (ignorant white people) on the loose!

Otherwise we will have more of this...

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

"People of color", indeed - as if African-Americans and Hispanics are in any way interchangeable. The fact that that term is deemed acceptable (let alone borderline-mandatory) in the era of "identity politics" speaks volumes, none of it good.

Orientals? Middle Easterners? Don't make me laugh. I grew up surrounded by people like that (anybody who would have you believe Silicon Valley is some kind of 'New England of the West Coast' or whatever is whitewashing in the truest sense of that term).

Don't get me started on Jews - my grandparents had a cute story about being on a plane one time next to a Bible-thumper lady with a rather interesting theology for reconciling Christianity's central edict of "believe or be damned" with the contemporary mandate against anti-Semitism, and to make a long story short she was able to recognize my dark-skinned grandfather as a Jew but not so my lighter-skinned grandmother. Who the fuck is writing these rules, and how dare they rope the rest of us into them?!? My grandparents' parents did not sail to this country just so their descendants could get soul-raped by the bullshit political religion of a dying empire (and where are any of us today supposed to emigrate, Mars?)!

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

snoopydawg's picture

We see this.

Cuomo had the option to expand Medicaid with money from the Gaza, the government, but instead he refused it and he too is cutting it.

Is there any doubt that they want us to just die and as quickly as possible? Democrat are bailing out the insurance company by paying for COBRA instead of giving people MFA.

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lotlizard's picture

https://medium.com/@SonofBaldwin/let-them-fucking-die-c316eee34212

https://www.theroot.com/college-campus-shut-down-after-professors-letthe...

In Hawaii too, there’s a thesis on the street that in the whole history of the Islands, the problem boils down to “haoles” (folks of the Caucasian persuasion) …

The anti-white phase of the war for historical narrative — ethnocentric populist appeals that, after all, are addressing real reasons for resentment — fine-tuned in academia and adopted as Left by the Left, oddly never characterized by pundits and analysts as “populism” …

Helpless white people in nursing homes have to hope that none of their care providers seize up at a critical moment, feeling emotional turmoil having seen friends or professors retweeting such screeds.

I know, boo hoo, it’s only white people, the oppressor; why am I supporting the oppressor? Academics say it’s never racist if it’s against the oppressor? Whites are like Germans today in Germany, expected to be so superhumanly “universalist” (as no one else is, or ever was, expected to be, anywhere) as to celebrate their own families’ death and loss and rape (referring to the Greens and the Left Party proposing to make May 8 a national holiday, “Liberation Day”).

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snoopydawg's picture

@lotlizard

Both articles are a great point and worth a read.

What does it mean, in general, when victims of bigotry save the lives of bigots?

For centuries, black people have been regarded as sub-human workhorses whose entire purpose is to serve white people’s whimsies.

For centuries, queer people have been regarded as sub-human degenerates whose whole existence was an anathema to cisgender heterosexual people’s off-hand sensibilities.

Reminds me of what happened during the early days of the AIDS epidemic when gay men were kicked out of their families for both being gay and infected and started dying. Many people didn’t give a damn that it was just gays who were dying from it until straight people started getting sick because it had gotten into the blood supply and then kids with hemophilia showed up being HIV positive and more straights too. Guess who took care of both groups? Gays and lesbians because they had been drawn into a field of healing and compassion. Oops. And the band played on covered this so eloquently.

I know, boo hoo, it’s only white people, the oppressor; why am I supporting the oppressor? Academics say it’s never racist if it’s against the oppressor?

Funny that huh? Thanks for posting them.

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lotlizard's picture

@snoopydawg  
The people who have, in my life, treated me the absolute worst over LGBTQ+ issues — disinviting me from weddings and other family shindigs, declaring that any, even the most fleeting, contact with their kids would be bad for their kids’ “normal sexual development,” and in the Internet era ghosting me and declining contact: my own brother and sister-in-law. Not Christian conservatives or otherwise right wing, but non-religious liberal Asian-American Democrats in Portland, Oregon.

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snoopydawg's picture

@lotlizard

I remember you talking about this a few years ago and it broke my heart. How anyone can reject someone in your family is beyond me, but it happened with my brother too. My stepdad kicked him out when he was 16 and my mom went along with him. And just a few months before he died he went inside a camera store while mom waited outside. He never came out so she went in to see what happened. She found him sitting on the floor because no one would help him because of how sick he looked. This haunts me to this day.

When he found out he was positive my older brother refused to let his kids visit with him. This is why I consider myself an only child and now an orphan even though both he and my stepdad are still alive. My brother considers himself a Mormon. He certainly doesn’t live up to their values when it comes to me and I just think of him as an hypocritical asshole and leave it at that.

You are valuable to me and I’m here if you want to talk.

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lotlizard's picture

@snoopydawg  
I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Still, it is a relief sometimes to be able to speak openly of “that which is the case.”

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The coronavirus is disproportionately killing people with existing health problems. Up to this point poor health very much tracked poverty, class, and race. African American males for example have 2x the rate of diabetes of white males, and suffer much higher rates of complications like heart disease, which from what I read is thee number one trait of those hospitalized.

I am sure some communities are being neglected, but in other cases, it may not be lack of testing or a hospital bed but that people were set up to die because of inadequate health care, lack of food, or an over abundance of bad foods as they were the most affordable, etc.

In a way, the country has been setting up mass death of Americans for decades now.

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