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I really enjoy these podcasts. Long-time fan of the Exile here. I actually got to have some exchanges with Ames (was a source for some stuff he wanted to do regarding Brazil that never panned out) Taibbi (by complete accident, as he was looking into going to the hospital I was working at for his back problems, because traveling overseas to be treated at a high-end hospital is way less expensive than doing some procedures in the US thanks to hosed-up healthcare) and Dolan. So happy that Dolan is finally getting some steady income and doing what he likes. Guy really paid a price for his antiwar columns, which is hilariously tragic if you consider how many actual monsters not only skated free but grew richer and more influential for supporting it. I and the other guys at Pando were the ones who urged him to set up a Patreon rather than bounce between crappy overseas teaching jobs where your superiors are ever eager to shitcan you to please some Saudi-fellating investor. Of course, the irony is that now I'm too poor to actually get onto said Patreon and get my fill. Thankfully he opens some posts now and then, but Im still itching to listen to the one about Italy in WW1 (great-grandfather was taken prisoner there) and a few others.
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Feb 28, 2017 16:02
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Ames was a genuinely poo poo person. Brave (thanks to massive doses of drugs and not giving a gently caress) A good writer and a decent collector of the types you need for a ragtag band of talented alt-paper guys, but not someone you'd want around in polite company. He's had sex with underage hookers, thrown horse sperm pies in the face of apparatchiks and spent some 5-6 years in a crazy daze trying to one-up Hunter Thompson in a disintegrating former superpower. He's gotten a lot better after Putin closed his paper and kicked him out. Calmed down, gotten married, had a kid, lost the Edgelord-bro vibe. If that is enough for you to heed his opinions, that's up to you. I can understand writing him off as a creep. He is very committed to afflicting the comfortable, picks his targets very well in the current context, and clearly cares a lot for Dr. Dolan. His book 'Going Postal' is a harrowing good read.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:18
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prefect posted:Maybe I'm just brainwashed by the mainstream media, but Mark Ames seems super-negative towards anyone who says bad things about Russia, including the Bellingcat people. Ames had his business literally shut down by Putin, so it's hard to imagine he's a Kremlin shill. He -does- take issue with neocon war boosters and think-tank kreminologists hyping the latest Russia scandal to get a new Cold War going now that the GWOT is losing steam. Michael Weiss, in particular, but also a few others. Both he and Taibbi have horror stories about the russian government for days, but tend to draw the line at the "We should DO something about these evil soviets" talk, and that's enough to get them both ostracized.
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Apr 2, 2017 00:56
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Again, not to say I'm friends with either, but I've had some contact with both. It does feel that both of them were in a different spot back then, and dealt with the change in different ways. Even then, they made no secret that being in Russia was basically extending your teenage years, only with more power and less consequences. Drugs, booze, prostitutes and a corrupt decaying society that validated/excused your excesses because after all, you were against it. Then both had to come back to a place where you can't throw a horse sperm pie on an executive's face trust the establishment to be too drunk/failed to care. Taibbi landed better, thanks to having some better existing contacts and support. Ive heard that the falling out between them was partly due to that, meaning Ames wanted to stay in the region (if not Russia itself) or do another venture together and Taibbi was already transitioning to a more respectable position. That's just rumors, though. So basically, both had to become adults fast and discover that good writing and the right politics only go so far in making you a tolerable human being.
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Apr 2, 2017 18:47
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How Darwinian posted:Army of Darkness is not a war movie... Huge disappointment. I think there was a War Nerd column on the Jarhead book, ages ago. It was fairly gushing on it. The Robert Parry episode is sure to sour your mood for at least a day, no matter how jaded you already are about US media...but having Dolan and Ames doing competing Al Pacino impressions was kind of adorable.
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Apr 6, 2017 02:01
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Dapper_Swindler posted:I want to like them and there are some really good episodes(iran iraq war, ww1 Italian front) but holy poo poo, they bend over backwards to suck putin and assads dicks. like i get the view of there are no good/sane factions in syria, but everything is apperently a western/american lie and it comes off as very tankie/ameriKKKa at times. this is coming from someone who likes chapo and other left leaning poo poo and is mixed about the russia conspiracy poo poo. Can you give some examples? Most of the stuff I heard (And I listened to few episodes, so my sample is skewed) mostly describes Russia/Putin as smart but thuggish, like a capable mob boss. Ames went so far as so openly say that it was russians or one of their aligned militias that shot down a passenger plane in Ukraine. Their line seems to be that there is a method to Putin's actions, and that blaming everything from Bernie to the election to ISIS to Brexit onto Moscow works mostly to boost a cadre of DC hacks back into the spotlight. It's not that different from Iraq pre-2003, in my book. Not a nice place and not a nice ruler, but there was a big interest in hyping it as a Big Threat that was half hysteria and half naked self-interest by the usual suspects.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:34
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Yossarian-22 posted:
That, and very anti-British when talking about historical wars, on Dolan's side. Which is not hard to understand given 1) how vile and far-reaching the brits were during their Empire and 2) how everyone just basically forgot it even while it was happening, let alone now.
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Apr 12, 2017 04:02
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snoremac posted:Listened to Robert Parry. I'm trying to unpack the sheer tenacity of Nixon committing treason before the election, being inexplicably excused for it by LBJ, and then threatening LBJ with blackmail for having eavesdropped on him in the first place. I wasn't even aware he committed treason in the first place, despite doing a politics subject in university specifically on the Nixon-Carter years. Is it a little known thing? I was aware of the Reagan-Iranian hostage deal. The whole "Nixon making GBS threads on the Vietnam peace talks" issue is explored a bit in Rick Perlstein's book 'Nixonland', I believe. Which is also a good but harrowing read in general. But yeah, it's weird how we got tons of books and movies about Watergate and zero about this. I'm guessing it has to do with the whole "We've moved on, it's a center-right country" mindset of the media once it was finally released.
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Apr 16, 2017 19:39
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Very true. Still, you'd think Oliver Stone or someone would try to build a script around it. Maybe using the POV of the diplomats on the ground trying to get the peace deal going, even. But as Matt Taibbi wrote in Griftopia, the big narrative will let you tut-tut at the corruption in power, but freaks the gently caress out if you actually try to de-legitimize the system around it. Trump may be a vile bufoon, but his electors (and by extension the country) have to stay as decent people. Nixon was the prototype of divisive politics gone big, but he has to stay a temporary slip on the rightous path of history, not the blueprint of how politics was going to happen for decades afterward.
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Apr 16, 2017 23:12
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Dolan has always had this weird comic vibe. The first piece by him I read was about the Shia, in which he was describing how grim and determined they tend to be in their conflicts, given their founding myth. It went something like "If a shia was coaching your kid's little league soccer team, every practice would start with a screening of the team's most humiliating defeat. 'Here's Timmy missing the penalty shot by a country mile! '". For some reason I couldn't stop laughing after reading that, and I was interning at a radio station so it drew some looks.
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Apr 18, 2017 18:44
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Holy crap, it's out! I remember them mentioning it in one of the first free episodes, about how the Iliad should be rescued from dusty humanities teachers and updated into being closer to what it was, the Pulp Fiction/Marvel Crossover of its day, with people suffering gory ironic deaths, heroes facing off and the gods sticking their fingers all over the place... hell both the iliad and Batman vs. Superman end with the funeral of a main character slain fighting his nemesis.
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Apr 19, 2017 01:47
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If we can get a Khan-descended Mongol historian on the show Dolan might elope with him and start the nerdiest khalasar ever.
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May 1, 2017 16:51
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How big are the newsletters, usually? Articles, or just preview stuff?
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May 8, 2017 05:34
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That episode is really good, yeah. I don't know some of the authors they mention, but they do a good job of offering context and exploring why some decisions and themes were used the way they did.
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Jul 3, 2017 02:14
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Playing the Snes game of Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a huge nostalgia trip for me. Used to stay way up late with my friends as a kid, bungling through history, setting battlefields on fire, throwing boulders down onto sieging armies. It was my first contact with non-european history.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:57
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Dolan's mauling of James Frey is just a thing of beauty. That fact that this weepy fraud still makes money in publishing while Dolan is so unknown is nothing short of criminal.
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Aug 30, 2017 02:59
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Dreylad posted:What a stupid, petty squabble. I was about to post just that. For such a grim topic (fascism and violence at home), they were far less pessimistic and cynical than usual, because for once it felt like people were on the ball. But I guess the 'common sense' part of the left just has to poo poo on anything smelling of popular engagement or action.
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Aug 31, 2017 18:57
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Thug Lessons posted:"Mediocre lunacy" is a great way to describe late liberalism My exact thought when I read it. It's not even a wild, interesting lunacy. It's about re-fighting every war that has already been won to stomp harder on the losers and throw more confetti onto themselves.
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Sep 22, 2017 02:24
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Has any cast ever addressed why Dolan is still wandering all over the globe like he's been cursed by a vengeful old-testament god? I mean, years back I know he was doing teaching work overseas because academia is a toxic cesspit if you don't play their little byzantine game and he was seen as 'tainted' from his War Nerd stuff, but I hoped he'd be able to settle down a bit with the Patreon doin well. Then again, if he enjoys it, all the better. Just a bit worried, is all.
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Nov 3, 2017 18:20
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I strongly object to the characterization that Ames "glorified" rape. Seconded. Honestly, I was quite down on Ames after reading the Exile book, but after recently learning just how many of the paper's "contributors" were entirely fictitious, the whole "It was all a parody of Yeltsin-era debauchery and lawlessness" defense got some traction with me. Hell, I even remember feeling like a teen loser reading one of their columns by some wealthy russian playboy with a stunning wife bringing in her hot model girlfriends in for threesomes, and just learned that said guy never existed.
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Nov 5, 2017 23:36
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GoluboiOgon posted:The one issue of eXiled that i read had a story in which two of the reporters had sex with Estonian prostitutes, including non-consensual anal. Not sure about the whole magazine, but that issue absolutely glorified rape (and worse, treated the encounter as some way of paying Estonia back for importing so many Russian women as sex workers). That may have been your cue to see it as extreme satire. I'll admit it flew over my head more than once. I don't blame anyone for not getting it or not finding it funny/acceptable if they do get it. I'm not sure how I feel about it overall. Relieved that they were not raping/harrassing women wholesale (low loving bar, I know). but also a bit irked at the bro-ish amplified antics. It's the Eric Cartman paradox; no matter how vile your satirical jerk is, some people will end up thinking he's a cool anti-PC truth-teller rebel. It's easy to get lost in the Bukowski/Hunter Thompson corridors of trangressive writing.
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Nov 6, 2017 04:56
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The Lepanto episode is just adorable, but for the nerdy Dune references and the squeamishness when describing the torture of a captured garrison commander. It just makes me want to hug Dolan.
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Dec 5, 2017 22:52
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I think the rules that they gave Van Riper were unrealistic to begin with, like they made him use bike messengers in 2002 - so he made the motorcycles travel at light speed or something. It's all 90% kabuki theather anyway. Eventually they were going to get a guy who wouldn't just lose with a smile and would poo poo in the punch bowl. They were lucky Riper was too old to have played RTS games, or he'd have used his priests to go "Olololo" and start converting enemy units to his side. It would have been amazing.
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Jul 28, 2018 00:49
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Plutonis posted:I follow Carl Zha's twitter and apparently he's been talking about a Russian-Chinese rapprochement after almost fifty years of rivalry and pics of joint russian-chinese military exercises. Is there anywhere I can read more about this because lol that's probably the biggest loving setback in US foreign policy of the century. That's really big, if true. China has been very bad about concealing its historical boner for Siberia and all its resources, and the temptation to just roll in and take it if Russia weakens juuust enough.
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Sep 16, 2018 01:03
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Half of me wants them to do an episode about the whole Kashoggi debacle, but the other half fears there's not much that can be done with it other than just going "Crazy, huh? This is where we're at."
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Oct 20, 2018 18:20
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420 Gank Mid posted:"actually I jacked off to your mom getting killed" They can never -not- give themselves away, can they?
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Oct 29, 2018 01:23
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StashAugustine posted:Btw the guest mentioned that there's a theory evangelical missionaries were encouraged to chip away at liberation theology, does anyone have a good source on that? I haven't listened to the episode yet, but as a brazilian? Local evangelical churches (which went from like 8% of the population to over 30% in a couple of decades) -abhor- liberation theology. And local folk religions like candomble. It's mostly a minor talking point now since they have much juicier targets (the left, gays, public education) as it becomes a proper power in Brazil. I remember it coming up in some of their sermons in the 90s when they were more focused on fighting the catholic church directly. Since then, they have mostly gone full culture war and just trusted that conservative cahtolics and people who like their religion active will migrate to them naturally, and they have mostly been right about it.
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Oct 29, 2018 02:05
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Any good humor (political or otehrwise) casts you guys recommend? Bolsonaro is gearing up to take charge of my country and I need a bit of a mood-lifter. Chapo and War Nerd are great but hard to obtain, and well, sometimes they can be quite gloomy (with good reason).
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Nov 23, 2018 03:34
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THS posted:also pener, that’s a great example with the Harrison Bergeron reference. i realized my dad was a moron when i reread that in college. he’s a dyed in the wool ayn rand objectivist (and now just a straight up racist republican as he gets older, funny how that goes) and always cited Harrison Bergeron as one of his favorites "So, it's the 90s, everyone is making piles of cash fluffing this whole Russian debacle and licking plutocrats like they were made of sugar. Not to mention hyping the american hyperpower as the coolest, smartest thing ever. So the ticket to being rich'n'famous and make conservatives love me is to mock BOTH of those truisms -hard-! That's the ticket!" The liberal urge to always exact 2000% of vengeance over imagined slights on anyone without any shred of power or influence, while fellating those that sell them down the river every time, is something to behold.
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Jan 23, 2019 05:02
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I wish there was a War Nerd meet or something here in Buenos Aires while Dolan is still around. I did message him (have talked on and off since his Exile days) about it but got no response. Then again, it seems he's been having health issues.
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Mar 4, 2019 17:47
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pangstrom posted:You probably can find him if cruise the hospital entrances and see a large american fidgeting about whether or not to go in. I feel enough like a stalker already. I mean, inviting a great writer for a meal and some nerd talk, it's 'notice me sempai' enough!
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Mar 4, 2019 18:10
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Often Abbreviated posted:I'm sure there are writers in the world who would be totally up for lunch with random fans in Buenos Aires and would have a great time doing it but I suspect our boy John is not one of them. No shade on you for trying, though. 1990s: "Get in the loving robot, Shinji". 2010s: "Get in the loving parrilla restaurant, Dolan."
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Mar 5, 2019 16:52
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gh0stpinballa posted:as an 18 year old vague lib, who thought having good politics meant respecting john mccain while reading the correct new yorker approved literature, and believing conservatives were people too, finding the eXile was like smoking that good weed for the first time. ames and taibbi and levine did the kind of journalism people at the NYT and guardian think *they* do, but tbh it was dolan's loving incredible demolition job of david foster wallace and his cronies that absolutely blew my little mind. i didn't know you were allowed to hate the saints, or be funnier and better informed than them. the way they just insisted on showing you that all the people liberal society says you're supposed to admire are varying degrees of lovely or psychotic pretty much turbo charged my journey to the left. Seconded. It's almost scary how deep I was in the 'End of history' bullshit when the one-two combo of 9-11and finding the Exile showed me that the world was far dirtier and more chaotic than the sanitized 90s culture I was steeped in led me to believe. I was already slightly (and guiltily) skeptical of the star pundits and thought-peddlers of the age, but still believed that hey, they made it into the op-eds and best-seller lists, they MUST know something, right? Our meritocratic system would never elevate crooks and morons....oh. Oh.
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Jul 15, 2019 16:20
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Dolan should watch Grave of the Fireflies so that his eyes can roll so far into his skull they fall down his trachea. And gets in the mood to write his eXile book/movie reviews using the word 'bathos' a lot.
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Jul 25, 2019 01:12
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snoremac posted:Venice was also a super interesting Civ in Civ 5 in that it bought city-states rather than send settlers out and it got double trade routes and raked in insane cash. I just played it with friends, actually. Random civs. It's fun, but also frustrating. Only getting puppets besides your capital limits you a lot, and you leave so much prime real estate empty because you have no settlers. Iron, coal, luxuries, all left there unexplored. I kept hoping someone would make cities in nearby choice spots so I could at least take them over. Also, it's super easy for a player to shut you dpwn by just hovering near your capital and eating all your trade routes. Based on the episode, though, they should have better spies and expanded navy options.
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Dec 1, 2019 14:20
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That's just loving adorable.
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Apr 15, 2020 03:24
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Is there an episode about unlikely great generals and conquerors? Those who were lame, ugly, overweight or such and went on to build or expand empires? I think I remember a preview but can't place the episode.
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Aug 31, 2020 17:54
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As great as RWN is, I really miss Dolan's writing as well. The few things I've seen of his newsletter were great.
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Jul 3, 2021 20:49
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Hey, thanks to the need to keep pampering the military with promotions and pensions so they don't take over again, Brazil's Navy has more admirals than it has actual ships. Many times over.
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Sep 23, 2021 00:51
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Thank you so much! This really helps.
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Oct 6, 2021 03:56
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