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Baltimore’s black youth intifada
In this entry I have posted three stunning items sent by John Hagan relating to black racial violence in America. First is a column by radio host and Baltimore Sun columnist Ron Smith which was spiked by the Sun and posted yesterday by Smith at his radio show web page. No wonder the Sun refused to publish it. Smith quotes at length author Jack Weatherford’s argument that civilization is failing because in the world’s cities, especially in the West, the “savages” who once had been banished and driven back by civilization are wreaking their revenge, with Washington D.C. as the ultimate example of this savagery. Oddly, Weatherford seems to be a man of the left, as most of his argument reads like an ecological version of Rousseau: civilization by its very nature is abusive to the environment, and every civilization that has ever existed has died from consuming too much. But, after that PC opening, Weatherford, as quoted by Smith, says these incredible things about “savages” attacking civilization. For Weatherford, the savages are not noble.
As Mr. Hagan points out, the particular reason the Sun would have been sensitive about Smith’s column, in addition to its general racial import, is that it comes in the midst of a recent wave of violent assaults on white people by roving gangs of black youth in the downtown and Inner Harbor areas of Baltimore, which the Sun itself highlighted in a big article on May 31, reproduced below. Also, supporting our discussion yesterday about how the authorities and media of liberal society automatically describe as “random” virtually all violence in which the perpetrator does not personally know the victim, note that the Sun article four times characterizes the Baltimore attacks, all of which have followed the same pattern, as “random.” This would be like describing periodic Indian raids on white settlers’ homesteads in the American frontier as “random,” simply because it’s not known which settler will be targeted next.
The final item in this entry is an article from the blog A Race Against Time which puts the Sun article in perspective by spelling out racial facts that the Sun omits (namely that all the attacks it tells about, not just one of them, were black-on-white) and cataloguing violent black assaults on whites in Baltimore over the last few years. (Also, the Sun article is much more PC than I had initially realized. See my exchange with David B., below.)
Ron Smith column
The Column the Baltimore Sun Would Not Publish
Friday, June 05, 2009—Ron Smith
Here is the column that was submitted by Ron Smith, a weekly Baltimore Sun columnist, to the newspaper. However, The Sun decided not to run the piece today for various reasons. Decide for yourself whether the decision makers at The Sun made the right decision.
Because of all the reports I’ve read and conversations I’ve had on the radio this week about Baltimore’s notorious violence being directed these days randomly at people going about their daily business even in the supposedly safe “touristy” areas of the city, I reached for my copy of Anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s book, “Savages and Civilization: Who Will Survive?”
Weatherford has traveled just about everywhere in his long and distinguished career and during his research began to perceive that the modern world was near its end. He argues that cities, the centers of civilization, are inherently destructive. “They consume the areas around themselves,” he writes, “and if they cannot find new materials, they die.” Think of it this way: the discipline of archeology arose from what? From the study of dead cities, strewn about the landscape of the world. What kills them? He says the cause is the extravagant habits of consumption and destruction that are at the heart of civilization. Everything is eventually consumed. The forests are denuded. Water, plants, stone, metal, animals, even the land itself is used up. It took thousands of years to consume and destroy the birthplace of civilization in Mesopotamia, and then the pattern continued in the Mediterranean and Europe, with the eventual need to find vast new areas, the Americas and Australia, in order to obtain the resources to replace that which had been consumed.
That game is now over. What can be civilized has been. How, you might wonder, does this tie into the increasing violence in our big cities? I’ll tell you. Jack Weatherford is an expert on tribal cultures. He has written books about the epic clash between the Native American and European cultures during the 300 years of warfare between the two. Civilized people have defeated the tribal peoples of the world, who have been killed or scattered. But the tribal people who survived have been moving en masse into the worlds’ major urban areas. And as he notes, “Neither the classless society of communism nor the global village of capitalism managed to homogenize the world during the twentieth century.” Group conflict, far from being eradicated, has been heightened in modern times. The nation-state swallowed the remaining tribal people but could not digest them.
And that brings us to this startling observation from Mr. Weatherford after spending some time doing field research in Washington, D.C.: “Nowhere in the world had I witnessed as much savagery, brutality, crime and cruelty as I did on the streets of the capital city of the United States.” He worked at a bookstore. The clerk who worked at it before him was shot in the head and killed. The clerk who replaced him was beaten with a metal pipe and left for dead. “On the streets of Washington,” he writes, “I saw forms of social organization and culture that I had never seen among any tribal people. Everywhere in the world, tribal life centers on the family and family units, but in the center cities of America, the family has broken down.” The welfare state put the finishing touches on the destruction of the family.
In the fifteen years since his book was published, we can safely assume things have degenerated even more. Young males in the inner cities pursue their lives and interests separate from the females with whom they beget children. “Much of the male activity,” Weatherford observes, “varies between idle boredom and fierce violence.” The males coalesce into gangs that operate with warrior bravado. This is the reality: “Aside from a few exclusive and heavily guarded enclaves, the central city is home to the lost.” And the lost are lashing out at the rest of us. Wherever uncontrolled crime appears, vigilantism soon follows.
“Soon,” writes Weatherford, “it becomes difficult to distinguish one group from the other as the criminals and vigilantes both operate outside the law…in their struggle for control of the streets and the neighborhoods.”
Strange things are happening. Unease is widespread. With good reason.
[end of Smith column]
Baltimore Sun article
Assaults on rise in downtown, Inner Harbor
Victims report attacks by bands of young people By Justin Fenton | justin.fenton@baltsun.com May 31, 2009
An increasing number of Baltimore residents and tourists have been victims of random, unprovoked attacks in the downtown area over the past month by roving groups of young people, even as police beef up their presence around the Inner Harbor.
Many of the assaults, which have been reported in areas within walking distance of the harbor, follow a similar pattern. The victims report being attacked from behind while they walk, punched and kicked in the head and upper body by groups of males and females. Items are rarely taken, and few, if any, words are spoken.
Not even police are immune from the attacks: An off-duty officer from New Jersey said he and his girlfriend were beaten in the downtown area last weekend by males and females who he believed were gang members.
“In the past, we have never felt unsafe in your city, but we most certainly do now,” George Williams, a 35-year-old patrol officer from Brick Township, N.J., wrote in a letter to Mayor Sheila Dixon. “Your office, as well as your police command staff, has an obligation to keep all citizens living in and/or visiting the city safe and that is simply not happening.”
The attack involving Williams comes after several other violent incidents recently:
- About 9:30 p.m. April 25, a double stabbing and fight involving teens among a huge Inner Harbor crowd caused some businesses at the tourist attraction to close early.
- Three people were beaten in separate incidents May 9 in Mount Vernon, including a man who was knocked unconscious and lost two teeth about 11 p.m., and a woman who was assaulted from behind by a group of girls at 11:30 p.m.
- At 9:30 a.m. May 6, a 34-year-old man was attacked by three teenage boys as he walked in the Otterbein. The teens said nothing and took nothing, according to police, who believe they were all students.
- About 4 p.m. May 20, a man walking west of the Inner Harbor was accosted by 10 juveniles walking toward a light rail stop who took his BlackBerry. Police believe local high school students are responsible for the crime.
Such assaults are not restricted to Baltimore’s upscale communities, but they come at a time as the city is working to restore confidence in its downtown areas after the stabbing. There are about 40 officers now working the waterfront most nights—up from a typical complement of 12—and foot patrols have been increased in outlying areas.
Officials note that despite the rash of incidents, the downtown area remains among the safest in the city, particularly during peak business hours.
“Keeping residents and visitors safe in Baltimore is the highest priority for the mayor and this administration, and Commissioner [Frederick H.] Bealefeld [III] has assured the mayor that there will be increased visible presence and enforcement in the downtown area,” said Dixon spokesman Scott Peterson.
Because assault and robbery statistics each encompass various types of attacks, the numbers do not capture the specific type of incidents seen recently. But police acknowledge anecdotally that there has been a rash of random attacks in the downtown area, and they have mobilized resources in response.
But privately, they are struggling to figure out how to prevent random attacks committed by juveniles who show no apparent motive. The problem, coupled with violence they say is associated with some downtown clubs and bars, is stretching police resources thin, with neighboring districts forced to lend officers to downtown areas.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s very clearly a behavior problem,” said Councilman William H. Cole IV, whose district includes the downtown area. “I don’t know how you can explain the phenomenon of randomly attacking someone. I also don’t know how you search for it, if you’re the police.”
One of the women attacked in Mount Vernon said the teens gave no warning before accosting her and her boyfriend.
“My boyfriend said he heard someone say, ‘Finish them off’ a split second before it happened,” Cristina Homa wrote in an e-mail to The Baltimore Sun. “I was punched in the back of the head, turned around and there was a mob of kids yelling at us and calling us names.”
An area resident, who did not want to give her name, said she saw teens clutching a video camera one night as police worked to disperse a large, unruly crowd around the Belvedere hotel. The teens tossed the camera around as an officer tried to recover it, she said. Police were unable to confirm the incident.
Williams, whose New Jersey jurisdiction was ranked in 2006 as America’s Safest City by a national publication, was visiting the city with his girlfriend, Marisa Parish, 29. He recounted how they were attacked on Lombard Street, not far from an area of bars and clubs, by four males and three females.
One of the males pulled a knife and put it to Parish’s face as a female held her from behind. Two of the males started punching and kicking him, throwing him to the ground in a struggle. He said the males started kicking his head, neck and upper body, and one said, “You’re dead.”
Parish broke free and protected her boyfriend’s head with her body, and was knocked unconscious. The attackers then scattered.
“They were using my head for a soccer ball—back and forth, back and forth,” Williams said in an interview.
Williams, who is white, said he believes race played a factor, with one of the attacking teens, who were black, accusing him of shouting a racial epithet, which he denies.
But Williams said he was especially disturbed by what he described as a strong gang presence. He said he was told by city police officers that gangs had been moving into the area the past few weeks, and that not enough police were on duty to combat the problem. Williams said that officers told him there had been 11 similar assaults that night alone and that police believed the attacks were related to gangs.
Central District Maj. John Bailey rebutted those claims, saying police have stepped up their presence and that there is “no indication of any gang affiliation with any of this stuff.”
“They don’t come here wearing red and blue,” Bailey said, referring to colors often associated with Bloods and Crips. “They’re wearing normal clothes. I think these kids just become empowered by being in large groups. They’re showing off for one another.”
Police sources not authorized to comment agreed that the attacks could be juveniles simply acting out, but that gang initiation rituals have in the past been blamed for similar incidents.
Cole, who has recently been venturing out at night with police to observe the area’s problems, said the department is doing an “outstanding job putting resources in place to nip whatever trend may be out there in the bud.”
“I think the word is out that if you want to come down and act like a jerk, you can do it downtown, and we need to send a clear message that we’re not going to tolerate it,” Cole said.
Bealefeld and Dixon have spoken out about police shouldering too much of the blame and parents not controlling their children.
“Everybody thinks it’s someone else’s job to do everything,” Bealefeld said on a recent radio appearance. “People have to step up and be accountable. Who’s paying attention to these [kids]?”
Neighborhood activists in Mount Vernon believe several recent attacks there were related to a BYOB “bottle club” located in the basement of the Belvedere. The club has “Teen Takeova” nights on Saturdays, which sometimes have attracted hundreds of young people. Police and residents say the club has been the catalyst for a double shooting and a host of assaults and other complaints. They are pushing for the club to be shut down.
Robert F. Cherry, a former Baltimore homicide detective who heads the city’s Fraternal Order of Police lodge, was jumped in that area last fall. A group of eight to nine young men stole his hat, then turned on him after he attempted to get it back. He was able to fight them off and was not seriously hurt.
Cherry confirmed the incident but declined to comment further. The union has been speaking out about deficient patrol strength downtown after off-duty officers were prohibited from working outside bars and clubs, and Cherry said he did not want to exploit the incident in which he was attacked.
In South Baltimore, police believe at least some of the attacks have been committed by area students. In an e-mail to residents, Southern District Maj. Scott Bloodsworth said additional officers have been assigned to the Inner Harbor during evening hours, and extra officers now patrol in Federal Hill and the Otterbein to assist with crowds and robbery prevention on Fridays and Saturdays.
Williams, the New Jersey officer, said that police “can only work with the tools they’re given” and that he wrote to Dixon because he believes the city needs to provide more resources.
“They need to swamp the area with police officers, and that’s not happening,” Williams said in an interview. “When you wait for something to happen, this is what’s going to happen.”
[end of Sun article]
Entry
from “A Race Against Time” blog
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
More Racially Motivated Attacks Reported in Baltimore
The Baltimore Sun reports that an increasing number of Baltimore residents and tourists have been victims of random, unprovoked attacks in the downtown area over the past month by roving groups of young people.
The victims report being attacked from behind while they walk, punched and kicked in the head and upper body by groups of males and females. Items are rarely taken, so police don’t believe robbery is a motive.
In one of the attacks, a man was repeatedly kicked in the head while a knife was held to his girlfriend’s face. Marisa Parish, 29, watched helplessly as her boyfriend, George Williams, 35, had his head kicked back and forth like a soccer ball. After one of the attackers told her boyfriend “You’re dead,” Parish broke free and tried desperately to protect her boyfriend’s head. Parish was knocked unconscious, but she did save her Williams’ life.
The attacked couple was white, and all of their attackers were black. The victims believe race was a factor in their assault. One of the black attackers accused the man of shouting a racial epithet; the couple denies this.
According to the article, the attack on Williams and Parish was only one of the 12 assaults that occurred that night in Baltimore. Although the article doesn’t mention the races of the suspects and victims of the other 11 attacks, we can safely guess that most of the attacks were black-on-white. There have been a number of gruesome black-on-white attacks in Baltimore in recent years.
- In December 2007, Sarah Kreager, a 26-year-old white woman, suffered broken facial bones after she was punched, kicked and dragged off a bus in Baltimore by a group of black youths. The group also attacked Kreager’s boyfriend and menaced an elderly white passenger. Kreager’s beating was so vicious that two seats and the bus’s rear glass were destroyed during the attack. The Maryland Transit Authority initially said it was investigating the attack as a hate crime, but no hate crimes charges were ever filed.
As in the recent beating of Williams and Parish, Kreager’s attackers tried to blame the victim by claiming she had used the word “nigger.” This tactic is commonly used to try to deflect blame onto white victims. For example, Mychal Bell, the 4-time convicted jevenile felon who was one of the Jena 6, claimed the white student he knocked unconscious had used the word “nigger;” dozens of other witness statements, by white and black students, disputed this allegation.
- Less than a week after the attack on Kreager, two white men were beaten by a group of black youths on another Baltimore bus. One of the victims, Patrick Green, was adamant that he had been the victim of a hate crime. “It was a hate crime against me because I was white. I did not know these gentlemen. The whole time during the beating it was, ‘white this, white that.’ They didn’t want anything from me except to see me beaten.”
Following this second bus attack, Baltimore mayor Sheila Dixon (who is under indictment) publicly refuted Green’s allegations, declaring that the motives for the attacks were “not race based.” In response, Green asked the Maryland Transit Authority officials to release surveillance video of the attack, saying it would prove the beating was a hate crime. The MTA refused Green’s request.
Instead, the MTA introduced a program to monetarily reward black students who pledged to refrain from attacking white people while riding the bus. Discount cards good at local businesses were handed out at the African American Heritage Festival to students who pledged good behavior.
The victims of the bus attacks were lucky in that they lived to tell what happened to them. Other white victims haven’t had the opportunity to tell their story.
What seemed like a slam-dunk, open-and-shut murder case went south when the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office cut the teen loose because the arresting officer had only a consent search to look at the cell phone’s contents, not a warrant. The murderer walked.
When whites accused of harming non-whites are acquitted, either by an “all-white jury” or on a legal technicality, politicians and black activists step forward to demand the white suspects face federal “civil rights” charges. When non-whites avoid prison after killing whites, as in the Morelock and Woycio murders, demands for civil rights charges aren’t made and the cases are quietly dropped altogether.
- In November 2008, Aysha Ring, a 24-year-old white woman, was waiting in line at a liquor store when David Aaron Briggs, a 23-year-old black man, walked up behind her and slit her throat. Ring was taken to Shock Trauma, where she died. Briggs didn’t say or take anything during the stabbing.
Hate crimes are defined as crimes in which the offender’s criminal act is motivated, in whole or part, by his/her bias. FBI guidelines list a number of factors that, when combined, are support for a finding of a hate crime. Several of these factors were at play in one or more of the incidents described in this article:
1. The offender and the victim were of different race
All of the assaults described in this article involve black offenders and white victims.
2. Bias-related oral comments, written statements, or gestures were made by the offender which indicated his/her bias.
Racially-abusive language was during many of the attacks.
5. The victim is a member of a racial … group … who is overwhelmingly outnumbered by members of another group
Baltimore is 65% black and 30% white. The 2 bus beatings and the recent beatings in the Inner Harbor area all involve large groups of young black boys and girls attacking one or two white individuals.
6. The victim was visiting a neighborhood where previous hate crimes have been committed against other members of his/her race … and where tensions remain high against his/her group.
40 Baltimore police officers are assigned each night to patrol the waterfront, but they seem powerless to stop the rash of recent attacks.
7. Several incidents have occurred in the same locality, at or about the same time, and the victim(s) were all of the same racial group.
In December 2007, two black-on-white beatings occurred within a week of each other on MTA buses. Recently, there has been a rash of black-on-white beatings in the Inner Harbor area.
Most of the crimes described in this article appear to meet the definition of a hate crime, yet none of them have been prosecuted as such. The black-on-white attacks will continue, and there will be more victims like Sarah Kreager, George Williams, and Marisa Parish, until white people in Baltimore stand up and take action to protect themselves.
[end of article in A Race Against Time]
- end of initial entry -
Mark A. writes:
Fascinating. Kudos to you for writing about this and major kudos to Ron Smith as well.
The psychopathy of the Baltimore Negro youth doesn’t surprise me, though. I’m surprised there isn’t more of it. The insolence of black Americans is somewhat amusing, however. They grow none of their own food, produce none of their own electricity, and earn virtually no legal income. If white society collapses, they will be left with nothing. They can merely attempt to venture out in the suburbs to loot, but if anarchy was the rule of the day, they would be gunned down by angry white gun-owners. They are, of course, too stupid to think about this.
David B. writes:
At first glance, you would swear that the Baltimore Sun article was a parody. It refers to the attackers as “young people, males and females, group of girls, teens, juveniles, high school students, young men, etc.”
When I would raise the issue of these kind of crimes, my ex-friend Professor F. would become indignant. The professor said, “I’m more concerned about blacks hanging from nooses in the 1920’s.” He claimed that crime rates were very low nowadays.
LA replies:
I was about to disagree with you in part, because I felt the mention of race in one attack, combined with the context and references given in the other attacks, made it clear that the attacks were black on white. But now I’ve read the article again and you are right. Here you have a wave of black and white assaults, with the authorities puzzled and troubled because they can find no pattern or motive to the assaults, and the article does not identify this phenomenon as what it is, a series of black on white assaults.
Consider the second paragraph of the article:
Many of the assaults, which have been reported in areas within walking distance of the harbor, follow a similar pattern. The victims report being attacked from behind while they walk, punched and kicked in the head and upper body by groups of males and females. Items are rarely taken, and few, if any, words are spoken.
Justin Fenton, the Sun reporter, refers to a “similar pattern,” but he leaves out of this “similar pattern” the fact—which is obvious from the context of the article as a whole—that all the attacks were by blacks against whites. Since the commonality of pattern was the subject of the paragraph, clearly Fenton was obligated to mention that. That he did not mention it wins him an honorable mention in the PC Hall of Fame, though his cover up does not equal that of the Canadian police authority a couple of years ago who described a group of arrested Muslim terror suspects not as Muslims, but as “diverse.”
Then there’s this:
But privately, they are struggling to figure out how to prevent random attacks committed by juveniles who show no apparent motive….
“I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s very clearly a behavior problem,” said Councilman William H. Cole IV, whose district includes the downtown area. “I don’t know how you can explain the phenomenon of randomly attacking someone. I also don’t know how you search for it, if you’re the police.”
Since all the attacks are by blacks on whites, doesn’t that suggest a motive? And doesn’t that suggest a remedy? Namely that the authorities and the schools should directly address the fact that blacks are attacking whites, and tell them this must stop. But since the authorities will not identify the nature and motive of the attacks, how can they speak up against them or stop them?
But it’s even worse than what I just said. Unbelievable as it is, race is only mentioned ONCE in the article. Further, the person who says that race was a motive is not the reporter, and not the police. It’s one of the victims, a white man, George Williams, a police officer from New Jersey. Further, Fenton even suggests that Williams provoked the attack. Here it is:
Williams, whose New Jersey jurisdiction was ranked in 2006 as America’s Safest City by a national publication, was visiting the city with his girlfriend, Marisa Parish, 29. He recounted how they were attacked on Lombard Street, not far from an area of bars and clubs, by four males and three females.
One of the males pulled a knife and put it to Parish’s face as a female held her from behind. Two of the males started punching and kicking him, throwing him to the ground in a struggle. He said the males started kicking his head, neck and upper body, and one said, “You’re dead.”
Parish broke free and protected her boyfriend’s head with her body, and was knocked unconscious. The attackers then scattered.
“They were using my head for a soccer ball—back and forth, back and forth,” Williams said in an interview.
Williams, who is white, said he believes race played a factor, with one of the attacking teens, who were black, accusing him of shouting a racial epithet, which he denies.
That is the only time the word “black” appears in the article. And the account of the incident ends with Williams having to defend himself from the charge that he used a racial epithet against his attackers. The only person in the article who speaks of the obvious racial motive in the assaults, is put on the defensive himself, as a possible white racist.
Also, I think the reason I did not notice that “black” was only said once in the article was that the patterns of behavior being described were so obviously black. And this shows us the nature of PC in operation. The reporter indirectly lets on that the perpetrators are blacks, but he doesn’t actually say so. He tells us, in a subordinate clause, as a passing item not very important, that in one assault the perps were blacks and the victims were white. But if he knows and can tell us in this instance that the perps were blacks and the victims were white, then he obviously must know what the race of the perps and the victims were in the other assaults which he describes. But he makes no mention of that. Nor does he say, “While the attackers on Williams and his girlfriend were black, the attackers in the other instances were people of other races.” If they were of other races, surely he would have mentioned that in order to remove any anti-black implications raised by his article. The fact that he doesn’t mention that the other assailants were not black proves that all the attackers were black. A fact which, again, he has no excuse for not mentioning, especially as a major part of the article deals with the difficulty the police are encountering in stopping a wave of violent crimes when they are “random” and their “motive” is not known. Thus Fenton plays with the race issue, he taunts us with it. He makes it clear to us that he’s talking about blacks, but he also lets us know that he’s not going to say it.
All this is a mirror of the bifurcated mental state of liberal society as a whole when it comes to race. There are certain things that everyone knows to be true, but you can’t say them, and if you do, you get in trouble.
And what I just said sounds, not like the United States of America, but like Stalin’s Russia.
Tim W. writes:
One of the few positive developments in recent years is that even mainstream conservatives are starting to realize that there is indeed a black intifada. Here is a thread from FreeRepublic about a black Washington state race commissioner accused of beating a white man. Beginning with the second post on the thread, a racially PC poster gets all bent out of shape over the issue being brought up for discussion. Everyone else lets him have it, indicating that at least many conservatives are waking up.
Richard S. writes:
Nothing has changed since I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. Absolutely nothing. The same unwillingness of government to confront black savagery and reign it in. It can be done of course.
Rounding up the thugs for “broken windows” infractions and then sentencing them to long incarcerations has made a serious dent in the crime rate (which is to say black crime) when it has been tried. So the officials who are puzzled, confused and at a loss have no excuse.
They know what to do. They just won’t do it. Cowardice. And also an implicit agreement with the attacks on the part of the blacks who govern so many of our big cities.
The great trek of blacks from the South to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest that had already drastically changed city life by the late 1950s has forever changed city life: the impact of a race of which such a large proportion is chaotic and essentially uncivilizable cannot be undone. But it can be…managed. All it takes is one thing: a backbone.
LA replies:
This is a really good comment. You nailed it. Down to the basics.
And on this point:
“a race of which such a large proportion is chaotic and essentially uncivilizable”
I would add that if traditional morality were brought back, meaning almost all children are born to a married mother and father, the proportion of the chaotic and uncivilizable would drop. Which doesn’t mean that there would be racial equality of outcome, just that blacks in particular and society in general would become less savage and more civilized.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 06, 2009 11:46 AM | Send
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