HISTORY & COMMON SENSE

HISTORICAL PANORAMA ‑‑ IT WAS AS WE WISH ‑‑ PROCRUSTEAN SURGERY ‑ ‑ WISHFUL PROGRESS ‑‑ THE SINKING OF AMERICA ‑‑ REWRITING HISTORY ‑‑ THE PUTRID VIRTUES ‑‑ USA-MEXICO-CANADA

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HISTORICAL PANORAMA

We are victims of our ignorance of history.

Our ancestors of 1000 or 2000 years ago hardly knew anything about chemistry, electricity, aviation, nuclear physics, cybernetics and many others of today technical advances .
However, in matters of freedom, justice, human emotions, love, jealousy, hatred, kindness, cruelty, family, honor, virtue, courage, pleasure, suffering, personal power and oppression... we are approximately on a same basic level as our ancestors of 2‑3000 years ago..

What appears to be improved is not human nature, but what results from merely techical advances like printing, communication, production, scientific and technological innovations.

When we consider traditional human conditions, customs and institutions rooted in our most distant past, we often treat them as if they had been created by primitives far below our present cultural level.

A tradition is the result of what succeeded against all attempts to change, forget or ignore it.
We ignore it at our expense.

Instead of investigating what insured the long success, we belittle it with disparagement.
The price we pay for ignoring the lessons of the last 2‑3000 years is that we start again from a level that our ancestors of 2000 years ago would consider primitive.

Instead of studying and reinforcing our success, we distort it into something new, not because the new is proven, but because it harmonizes with some pet ideal that primitives without recorded history could have..

Wishful thinking, typical of overconfident children.

The new "truth" comes to us, as loud as an empty drum, with the trappings of a monumental body of wisdom.

It is first adopted and taught by inexperienced intellectuals, students, professors and other gullible people, who are impatient with a reality they believe they master with definitions and opinions that they call knowledge.

The wishful thinking proliferates philosophies, ideals, theories, religions, laws, which are treated as if they were the zenith of evolution.

Some of it may work, but, more often, our beliefs are contrived interpretations of facts that have been fixated by ancestral factors we don't know any more.
These rationalizations are easier to manage than the intricacies of truth.

We presume to create our cultural patterns according to the beliefs of our time.
The present time is regarded as the depository of "the true, the good and the beautiful".

Much of this is because we neglect or misunderstand history.
So, we have to re‑invent the fire and the wheel, with devastating results.

One of the first victims is the family.
Its roots of thousands of years were established in a proven form by historic factors we now ignore.
Instead of researching and reinforcing those factors, we question the very essence of the family, if it does not fit a new fad which could not survive any serious historical analysis.
It is like losing our genes.

Rather than the fad, we change the family and other pillars of our culture, to conform to the fashion, which may be disguised in religion, psychology or other dignified forms.
This can happen in just one or two generations. Therefore, it has destroyed cultures and empires.

We could experiment with theories and change them at will, but we should not do it with the family, which is inserted as a permanent link between the past and future, with all its consequences.
What could be more irresponsible?

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IT WAS AS WE WISH

Tacitus, the Roman historian of two millennia ago, extolled the virtues of the German tribes in a manner that was moralizing, not historically correct.
The general complaint of the time was that the Romans had become soft and peace‑loving.

He stated that the German young men were so proud and brave, that they left their tribe, if it was too peaceful, and joined another tribe that would offer opportunities for war, no matter why and against whom (including against their own original tribe).
That image, with edifying details, was then used with the hope of inspiring a noble warlike attitude in the young leisure‑loving Romans.

Other cultures, before and after, also got into bending history to inspire whatever virtues were desired.

After historians tightened their rules of investigating and reporting, this wishful narrative remained the habit of political, religious and other demagogues.

In America, we have numerous examples.

One category is at the service of American chauvinism. This is directed against famous nations or cultures of which we may be jealous or resentful, but in a wrong way that mistakes our enemy's vices as virtues and vice versa.
Take the above mentioned Romans.
The average American knows hardly more, about them, than orgies, gladiator fights and persecutions against the Christians.

Yet, Rome formed Europe and produced the Western culture, brought peace and civilization to chronically warring European tribes, taught them to build houses, roads and public structures, organized and spread Christianity in the world, gave us the "English" alphabet, laws, civil and military organization, public administration, and gave Roman citizenship to the people it civilized.
No other culture did nearly as much.

By the way, the Christians persecuted thousands of pagans for every Christian that had been previously persecuted by the pagans...

The anti‑Rome syndrome was presumably originated by Protestantism's fearful hostility against anything papal Christian and Roman.

Another category of wishful history is the one that praises those we consider below our fear or envy.
We attribute them the virtues we want our audience to be inspired by, as the moralizing Roman historian did with the ancient Germans.
To wit: our eagerness to praise the blacks, the Indians ("native Americans"), women, children...

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PROCRUSTEAN SURGERY                

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a famous warlord of Attica who used to stretch or mutilate his guests to conform them to the size of the bed reserved for them.

When we face reality, we operate like Procrustes.
Rather than accept reality as it is, we stretch and mutilate it into images we understand and prefer.
The effort to find and understand the truth is too much of a burden.

The ideals we proudly formulate are simple‑minded substitutes for the reality we have lost sight of.

 Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) said that man's ideals are nothing but his own inventions.

If we believe in something, we evaluate everything on the basis of whether it conforms to our belief.
Accordingly, we deform the normal course of things on our preconceived ideas.
The distortion may happen in the name of freedom, despotism, peace, war or even love.
We really created those concepts or their definitions, but we act as if they were laws of nature.

Reality is independent of our convictions.
It is obvious, but we need to be reminded of it.
We kill, deform or ignore its image, but it keeps coming back with the consequences of our blunders.

We don't take the trouble of understanding what really exists. Often, we lack the necessary means even to perceive it.

Why is our society patriarchal?
Why do some cultures apparently handicap women more than men?
What is "justice"?
Why do we make such fuss about sex?
Why persist in so many languages and so many nations?
Why are some peoples mostly persecuted?
Why racial discrimination?
Why are sexual differences either exaggerated or negated?
Why are we able but unwilling to avoid war?

These and other headline postures do not derive from traceable ideals or theories.
They seem to have a primordial raison d'être.
We may want to call them prejudices, instincts, folklore, political views or whatever, but we miss the point, because we don't know for sure what really underlies them.

In our impatience, we treat each of them on the block of our ideals of freedom, socialism, capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, feminism and other oversimplifications that we find much easier to deal with than reality itself.

Then, when we fit the various components of our undertakings into what we understand, we call it reality.
Until the true reality is lost.                                           

Most politicians and public figures are partially or totally motivated by prejudices, but they carefully conceal them (even to themselves) and profess opposition to them.
The rest of the population is intimidated by the official thinking in a similar manner as our ancestors were intimidated by the Inquisition.

History has an impressive record of the consequences faced by nonconformists.

Rather than judging on the basis of ideals abstracted from our mental level, we could try to define reality, as we find it, like a game: discover its rules and find out how the game is played.

We could learn the game, become skillful at it and enjoy it.
The results may be surprisingly enlightening, especially because we seem to develop harmony in a game as much as we develop vicious divisiveness in ideals.  

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WISHFUL PROGRESS                   

If we compile a tentative list of evolutionary changes to be expected, according to present knowledge, it seems that progress tends toward what we assume to be practical.
For instance:

Short hair or no hair at all.

Clothing made for versatility and durability, rather than esthetics.
On the other hand, we know little about the practical function of esthetics.

Food made for its effects on our health and functions rather than for its taste. For both, whenever possible

Automobiles in the shape of station‑wagon or vans, since it is the most logical design for space utilization.

‑ Both capitalism and socialism -probably even democracy- will be obsolete, but our society will be structured in accordance with new behaviorist knowledge, beyond our present ideas and compatible with freedom, justice, equality, rights etc.
The structuring will be made inevitable by cybernetic developments.
Computers bring more radical changes than "nuclear" and "space age".

 In  few centuries or less, circumcision will be remembered as a freak "believe‑it‑or‑not" of ancient (that is: 21st century's) American medicine.

 As to the behaviorist knowledge, let's pray that we won't blunder again.  

Convincing evidence by the American sociologist S.C. Gilfillan (in 1966) shows that the ancient Romans were progressively poisoning themselves with lead in plumbing, cooking utensils, cosmetics and various compositions, without knowing or suspecting it.
What proof do we have?

We must be doing the same to ourselves with who knows how many factors of which we have neither knowledge nor suspicion.

Since the Crusades, between the 12th and 16th centuries, women passed from 5000 years of contempt to increasing respect.
The reason is not autonomous evolution of the Western culture, but the civilizing influence the Arabs and the East‑Roman Empire had on the post‑ Roman Western world.
Yet, the AfghanTaliban were able to repeal progress and to transform their women into... "walking tents".

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THE SINKING OF AMERICA

What drags us down:

 ‑ Man/woman competition is replacing man/woman devotion.

‑ Rights are used to corrode family and society.

‑ Rampant divorce: a remedy that kills the family to cure it.

‑ Ultra-feminism: arrogant anti‑male and anti-family notions based on malevolently wishful assumptions.

‑ Equal rights with unequal merits.

‑ Demagoguery inducing people to believe that wishing for something is all they have to do to deserve it.

‑ One‑man‑one‑vote enabling a dangerous dimwit to neutralize a useful genius.

‑ Election circus granting success to popularity, not to usefulness.

‑ Unions eroding cooperation, entrepreneurship and productivity.

‑ Big corporations suffocating entrepreneurship and productivity.

‑ Government controls stifling entrepreneurship and productivity.

‑ Our cumbersome and irrational mile/inch/gallon/pound/Fahrenheit system. All other nations have the metric system's advantage against us.

‑ Our sick spelling and grammar. The language is losing precision in favor of the general tendency to sloppiness. It menaces language's slow suicide.
The "he‑or‑she", "person", "men-and-women", "African American" and other politicized language fad‑fetishisms.

‑ Lawyers have transformed logics and morals into mercenary rationalization.
Their 'no-fault-divorce" is the lawyer's lucrative  AIDS of the family institution.

‑ Open season for lawyers to attack anyone in the name of some "rights" they keep concocting to cause more illegal situations generating more legal fees, more law enforcement and incessantly oppressive government control..

‑ Teacher unions have given the educational system a pro‑teachers hidden-anti‑education slant.
They worsen the inferior education with higher salaries, more funds and expensive means to perpetuate incompetent teaching and disastrous methods.

‑ Artificial "poverty standards" vampirize financial blood from the American tax‑paying public. Some of today's "minimum requirements" are even above those enjoyed by some wealthy people and rulers one or two centuries ago.

‑ "Affirmative action": the legislated crime of compensating undamaged blacks to punish innocent whites, and substituting a competitive "racism" with a standard‑downgrading racism.

If the sanctimoniously disguised form of "eye for an eye" were applied generally, it would give almost every ethnic group, race, nation, region, city and village reasons to use its permanent corrosiveness in many ways.

If we dig in history, human society, or merely individuals, we can hardly find anyone without a recent or distant ancestor who did not suffer injustices comparable to, or worse than, those against the enslaved ancestors of our blacks.
From still another perspective, what about the Druids repossessing their original lands and chasing the present occupants from France, Ireland, England etc.?

‑ Protection of "endangered species" against evolution.
If it goes on like now, most protected species will slowly lose all their ability to survive outside of a zoo.
Furthermore, the delicate balance of nature is perverted by the "protective" interference by incompetent humans who endanger several forms of life for each one they "protect", let alone impoverishing and bankrupting farmers by denying them irrigation water to save a few (probably) endangered fish.

‑ Degenerating the human species by sacrificing the fit to the unfit and by enhancing multiplication of the unfit. Correction of this evil by exterminating the unfit revealed the added moral degeneration.

‑ Our "better than thou" attitude toward the world kills our incentives for progress and our ability to maintain what we have gained. We even believe that the foreigners stole "our" ideas before we had them... Then, we fall into the opposite claim that the white males and Western culture have caused all the evils affecting other cultures, races and women.

‑ The suicidal hostility against entrepreneurs and successful people, who are the creators of our wealth, jobs and taxes.

‑ Witch‑hunt against the chemical and other industries to whom mankind owes its survival, progress and health-saving products and processes themselves.

‑ "American-Indian" reservations embalm children and adults into addictive and self-righteous primitivism.

‑ Dispensing condoms to children in schools, with assumption that they all practice promiscuous sex; then, forcing a politician to resign and be branded for life because he had sex with a 16‑year old promiscuous girl or prostitute...

‑ Declaring drug use a crime and then distributing clean needles to addicts to protect them from infection while committing the drug‑use crime...

- Americans keep circumcising their little boys.
This is a superstitious custom that relates to cleanliness like decapitation to head aches.
Besides, is is hopelessly irreversible, although some surgeons have been able to put together a rebuilding surgical procedures that creates an ersatz foreskin.
My sons don't need such complication to restore a foreskin they were never deprived of.
They can still opt for circumcision (the circumcised can not recover the lost foreskin), but no doctor has been able to explain any scientific reason why they should.
Check with your doctor, in case he was not informed.

 ‑ It is humiliating to realize that:

Our science cannot even remotely approach the chicken's ability to produce an egg.

We cannot match a tree in producing wood.

We cannot even imitate nature in producing food.

We are unable to produce the most elemental living cell.

We cannot poduce life by other means than any mammal can by simple mating.

We cannot match animals in natural living without clothing, especially in cold climates.

All medicine can do is facilitating what the body can do to survive and repair itself with its own processes that physicians can not quite understand, let alone duplicate or improve upon.

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REWRITING HISTORY

 It has been said that not even God can change the past.

American ultra-feminists (often called "feminazis"), black racists and civilrightniks are trying.
They think that our "elitisi-racist-male slanted" past must be censored and "changed", the same as lies can change the truth.

It escapes them that they could improve their understanding of reality, rather than distort it.

Reality exists as such, independently of our perception.
Our racist past has been successfully eraicated bt our laws, education and customs. It is only our interpretation, and the value attributed to it, that we can control.

We cannot assert that we are clairvoyant, invulnerable, or that we can eat rocks, just because we believe we should have those capabilities.
Residual racism, prejudices and dislikes of any kind are tobe handled with psycho- therapy, fines and education.

Nor can we institute an Inquisition that condemns all who dare to say that we are not clairvoyant, invulnerable and that we cannot eat rocks.

After instituting their Inquisition, our do-gooders are trying to eliminate all "elitist, sexist and racist" references in our books, historical records, literature, poetry, theater, cinema, television, songs, music, etc.

To be consistent, they  should eliminate everything from Homer to Shakespeare, from Jesus to Mohammed, the Bible, the Koran, practically all philosophical, religious, artistic, cultural, political, juridical,  scientific, medical, and any progress achieved by people with convictions incompatible with today's anti‑elitism, feminism and black racism.

What would be left?
Anti‑elitism, feminazism, and enforced result-equality have no cultural credentials, no history, literature, no science, philosophy, no conquests, no evolution...
They are the products of a bright‑eyed wishful thinking on a primitive cultural level.

Should we then accept that women be "subservient" to men, that blacks are "inferior", and that some people are "privileged"?
Words, words, trap‑words and word‑traps.

The undisputable fact is that the so‑called "elitists", "male and white supremacists" have the best quoted credentials because of prejudicial distortions: not only the most famous men and women of culture, science, art, government in the whole history of mankind  but most events of historical and cultural importance represent that very current,.

Elitism, male and white supremacy were seldom more than marginal issues, mainly as changeable corollaries of existential matters.
Questions of sexism, racism and elitism relate to culture are like gossip to history.
People who gossip cannot be silenced or punished just because their gossip is not history., but their gossip is nothing more than frivolous chatter.           

Aristotle, for instance, or Shakespeare, Lincoln and most great minds, uttered opinions that sound now unmistakably "sexist" or "racist", but those opinions were peripheral, relative and subject to any modification caused by the evolution of the more important issues.

Only today issues like racism and feminism have become so central and defined that they distort reality and corrupt the basics of culture.
Sexism, racism and elitism, for instance, are not less symptoms of their culture than yellow is the symptom of jaundice.
Painting merely the symptoms like the skin and the eyeballs the color of our choice worsens the ailment instead of curing it.

Sexism, racism, "elitism" are obviated by improving the culture; the same as curing hepatitis (if that is the cause) obviates the jaundice yellow.

If we have no patience to wait for integration and equality to result from cultural evolution, it only means that we have not yet been able to find the cure.

The urgency is: find the cure the cause behind the symptoms.
Legislating integration and equality and ignoring their causes is like painting red over the jaundice yellow.
It would be as nonsensical as treating a cancer by forbidding it, instead of curing it.

The feminists, the black racists and the equalrightniks want to repeat the ieccesses of the Dark Ages, Inquisition and Nazism, which burned and forbade books (practically all books by "others") that did not say what the Nazis wanted to read.

On one side of the spectrum, we find a "solution" in changing a label from "Negro" to "black", "minority" and again to "African", and again to "African‑American", from "homosexual" to "gay", from "black racism" to "affirmative action".

On the other side, we seem unable to understand that "racism", "male chauvinism", "elitism" are labels rather than reality, or, at the utmost, symptoms of a cultural degeneration.

Take the venom‑charged word: "racism".
For millennia, racism has been viewed like an ethnic "esprit de corps", like national or family pride, extended provincialism, cultural patriotism, or merely racial chauvinism.

No one, in the past, seriously proposed the fraudulent claim that races are equal in talents and capabilities, merely because of a pious theory of equal rights without equal merits.
Focusing on race rights is destructive, because race is only definable, not changeable.
The focus must be on culture.
Races have always competed, lost, conquered, melted, faded away..., according to their evolving capabilities and trends.
Only cultures can e-----+++----------cvolve and fuse. Therefore a white and a black with the same convictions are more compatible that two whites or two blacks with opposite convictions.
Our social progress is the result of beneficial cultural processes, not of racial equality enforcement.

We must correct our interpretation of the racial injustices and blunders caused by our ignorance, not the biological "racism" itself.

The presently successful Anglo‑Saxons, Slavs and Orientals used to be at a very low level not many centuries ago.
The word "slave" comes from the fact that the Slavs comprised the majority of people captured and owned by the conquering races of long ago.
Later, the Slavs conquered their freedom and prominence by their own efforts.

Fortunately for them, there were no civil‑rights laws to embalm them into artificial equality and perpetuate their weaknesses.

We cannot eliminate "racism", any more than we cannot eliminate human nature.

We can only change our interpretation of the existing phenomenon.
We can recognize its existence with a meaning which subjects it to a culture‑induced metamorphosis.
If we cannot do it, we face the American anti‑white and anti‑black racism, where our pundits do the same as condemning water because of drownings and creating a desert to remove the jungle problems.

We falsify the truth when we attribute racism only to the white against the blacks.

Racism exists in its most virulent form among the blacks themselves in Africa, where tribes even build enormous piles of hands, feet and/or heads cut from those they have slaughtered in tribal raids.

Daily reports of its gruesome reality are appalling and continually hidden from our public.
They practice genocide, cannibalism, methodic gruesome torture, planned starvation on a scale that is nothing less than colossal.

The phenomenon is endemic of Africa now, as it was before the whites colonized them.
To our sanctimonious horror, we are finding out that the black Africans were better off during the infamous "colonial" era than before or after it.

 

To our knowledge, only the Romans were able to develop assimilation and full citizenship after colonization, as it happened with Europe.

Racism can be genocide, as practiced in Germany by the Nazis, worse yet in Africa by Africans, in Russia by Russians, in China by Chinese or in some areas of the world, of which we hardly hear.

Or it can be employment discrimination in USA, where it is perpetuated by forcing employment of minorities regardless of skill, thereby taking from them the incentive to develop talents and improve themselves.

Racism may be discrimination against a particular race or ethnic group, on the basis of what other people think of them, justly or not.
One day we may decide that anything whatsoever one says ‑or thinks‑ about the blacks is "racist", even if we don't judge it that way now.
"Political correctness" knows no limits.

When I came to the USA, anti‑Italian "racism" was open, accepted and encouraged by special immigration quotas.
I found Italian neighborhoods that unwittingly sustained the anti‑Italian prejudices by just remaining ethnic in an artificial pattern that had never existed in Italy before.
They were proud of their Italian heritage, but they mutated that heritage into distorted images in an environment characterized by WASP myths.

Italians succeeded in USA almost only when they assimilated the Anglo-Saxon pattern in the Anglo-Saxon culture.

"Native American" who cling to their ancestral traditions in the midst of the USA culture are sitting in a cultural morass and quick sands, increasingly unable to fit in the mainstream.

History cannot stop for them or any tradition.
Instead, they could melt with the surrounding human environment, just as our forefathers (and theirs, centuries ago), or immigrants from any part of the world did.

Once accepted, this process is, at its worst, more beneficial than the present enforced integration and/or preservation, which victimizes innocents who deserve the rewards given instead to undeserving individuals who have never been wronged.
This is an extremely unpopular statement with the recipients of the undeserved favors and with the politicians who thrive on them, but it is nonetheless true.

The free blacks of today are no more wronged by descending from slaves than millions of others, including the white WASPs, who descend from other slavery, oppression, persecution and genocide from other sources.

The infamous "male chauvinism" is grossly overrated.
First, it is the product of female not less than male tradition.

What if we tolerate the "anti‑woman" slant of famous sources that range from Buddha to Jesus, from Aristotle to our Founding Fathers, from Homer to Shakespeare?

Should we rather eliminate Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, philosophy, art, poetry, virtually all cultures...?

What is being said by "male chauvinist pigs" is not worse than what is being said by female chauvinist sows, or "feminazis".

Ultra-feminism is a poison by frustrated women who have sharpened their anti‑male hostility but have obtuse notions of history, culture and reality.
Successful complete women are no more feminist than creative entrepreneurs are socialist.

The injustices perpetrated by men against women are politically easier to label than those by men against men and by women against men and women. The latter are more numerous than the former, because they are not controlled or forbidden.

Like all other human matters, male and female chauvinism are a banal matter that is being continuously corrected by human progress, not by legislation by glib feminazis and political opportunists who think they understand it.

As far as elitism, let us pray that it is still available as a reward for merit, and not choked to suffocate motivation for achievement.

THE PUTRID VIRTUES

The outrage Freud caused with his descriptions of love as sublimed sex could be mild compared to the humiliating discovery of the motivations of many virtues.

For instance, the number of spouses who remain faithful to their mates only because of lack of opportunity is remarkable, like the number of those who resist temptation only because the tempter is not attractive enough..

Many cannot be bribed only because the bribes offered are smaller than what they would accept.

Patriotism is often disregarded if one finds that another country offers more.
Those who remain faithful to their country because they are convinced it is the richest and most powerful are not "better" than those who emigrate from a poor and unfortunate country.

Help to the unfortunate may be motivated by the wish to make a good impression for vanity, political or social reasons.

Many use passionate devotion to noble causes as an excuse to hate somebody else.        ***/

Religion is a superb cover for deception, hypocrisy, ignorance, sordid vices, exploitation and fraud.

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Miscellanea:

‑ When president Reagan visited a German cemetery where WW2 German soldiers were buried, as a gesture of good will, the Jewish community expressed a violent outrage. Its characteristic was the perpetuation of vendetta, prejudices, national hatred. That attitude works against the Jews. It may explain the persecutions against the Jews who, by the way, wronged others when they had the power.

 ‑ The best our physicians can do is postponing death.

 ‑ Mankind could probably accomplish millions of years of evolution in one generation by preventing the unfit from being conceived.

 ‑ Literature and history are like journalism insofar as they report the abnormal.
It is thus not surprising that they tend to distort reality. 

‑ Nowadays "peace" has a new meaning: "absence of nuclear war between the superpowers".

Non‑nuclear wars are raging ferociously among the rest of mankind, causing more death and horrors than in most previous wars, but we hardly notice them beyond sporadic third‑page mention.

 ‑ Machiavelli:
"A neutral is hated by those who lose and despised by those who win".
"...when men are well governed, they neither seek nor desire any other liberty".

 ‑ The cause of insurrections and revolutions is bad government not the desire for liberty, as it happens in South America, Africa, etc.

 ‑ Our TV, radio, newspapers nowadays tend to propagate the same ideas in the service of the leftist liberal Inquisition.
They are debilitating the nation through misinformation.

‑ Canada's "historical insignificance" is a hidden mark of superiority and sophistication.
Refined and superior people make no history, because they have little motivation for strife, violence and the horrors that make history.

 ‑ Trade, professional and labor organizations, as well as parties, ethnic, religious and other organized groups, nations, ultimately result in conspiracies against the rest of the world.

 ‑ Nothing new under the sun, but, when the told is retold, it has to be put together anew, like old elements in a new formula, or like new elements in an old formula.

‑ People in a royal mansion can be as unhappy as people in a hut. Old hat? Yes, but we must keep repeating it.

 ‑ 1988. It is remarkable that Russians defecting to the West are almost all Jews. I
It seems that our leaders want to hide the fact that they are Jews by calling them only "Russians".
Why is it that mostly Jews want to leave Russia? Why is this matter deliberately kept out of focus?

 ‑ Cultivation and progress of philosophy, literature, art, history, sociology and other humanities have come to their lowest ebb with the excuse of fighting elitism, sexism and racism.

‑ When more women and blacks must be hired for "equal opportunities", the fact that not enough competent persons can be found proves that the goal is only based on wishful thinking from a politicized premise of "unequal opportunities".

 ‑ The high priests of anti‑elitism, integration and anti‑sexism are the same custodians of the humanities, which are the repositories of pure elitism, selective refinement and individual excellence.
Elitism is also preserved in the sciences and technical fields, where equalitarianism is absurd.
Sociology, psychology, liberal arts and politics remained as the last but feared refuge of elitism.

 ‑ Our present set of values discards the woman over 40‑45, after menopause.
What is she for and who wants her? Nature and history have the answer: the extended family.
The old man can still procreate, and he must, to be useful, for his unique function is copulation.
Woman's special function begins after copulation: bearing, raising children and nurturing the extended family.

‑ Hobbes said that if 2+2=4 were stated in politics, the opposite party would deny it.

 ‑ Black opportunists want to be treated as privileged recipients, not as competitive human beings.

 ‑ Today's racial and sex equality and rights ideas are  impossible without rejecting our history, literature, art, philosophy, religion and virtually all cultural traditions of mankind.

The allegedly most blatant forms of racism and male chauvinism pervade everything mankind experienced from the Stone Age to now.
We would have to deny all for our civil rights and feminism. Since that would be like denying our very essence, it is clear that we must accept the traditional sex and racial differences, but change our present perspective of them.

 ‑ We should wonder what the aftermath of compassion by the do-gooders is.
Compassion sounds good and proper, but it is ephemeral outside of forgiveness, in which case it sides with the weak and defeated without overcoming the weakness or defeat.

‑ We risk ominous damages to our environment and to any form of life when we try to improve on them on the basis of our limited knowledge, which could be more dangerous than ignorance.
This is the reason why some environmentalists are more dangerous than the unconcerned.

‑ Our human‑rights concern has become a fetish that impairs our ability to deal with AIDS and other problems to the point that we risk self‑ destruction in the name of our beliefs.
The dangers of AIDS and other public calamities require measures that override our civil‑rights dogmas.

‑ To say "you are saying nothing new" is the same as saying that the words or language we use have been used by others before.
I use the same English, words and general ideas others have used before. Even the most original writer does it. What makes the difference is the different perspective, emphasis, focus or sequence.

‑ Democracy is like the open knowledge from Eve's apple: metaphysical knowledge of right and wrong means no longer obeying the law, but arguing it.

To argue that democracy promotes evolutionary competition presumes a true competition, not the ultimate triumph of the ever growing crowd of the losers. So, our democracy is evolution downward, or decay.

We protect "minorities". Protection emasculates them but increases their number until they suffocate the rest of us.
The continuous medications of democracy by legislation may correct it in the same phony way as the faith healers try to correct Christianity's nihilism.
As a result, both misdirected democracy and Christianity nurture the self‑destruction seed in their practice.

 ‑ The constant question is: to love one person or group at the expense of mankind or to love mankind at the expense of one individual or group?

‑ To save all those children from starvation without lifting them from the cultural patterns that caused their starvation is crueler than letting them die of starvation. 

‑ I don't think we have a clear evaluation of life, death, killing and punishable guilt.
Let's imagine asking a person who is about to be killed with a bomb dropped by our liberating bombers: "Would you accept this bomb and immediate death, or would prefer being put in a concentration camp on a starvation diet and gas chamber at the end?”
I would prefer taking a chance in a concentration camp...
What the hell of a choice...

Ancient Roman gladiator games: another famous atrocity?
The point is that most other peoples in the same historical period did worse.
Again, let us ask one on death row: "Would you prefer to be executed now or take your chances in a mortal combat with another death‑rower?”

Ghoulish thoughts?
I would say: less ghoulish than the present obsessive vendettas in name of an argued justice.

 ‑ When we observe a law of nature, we don't think that it may be just or unjust. We simply accept it as a reality.
Only in human matters we judge the right and the wrong.

Our society abrogates the right to decide that its members must ignore their racial realities and accept an imposed togetherness and equality with the race they instinctively dislike.
The very description of this occurrence, as here written, makes the one race guilty of the sin ‑rather than fact‑ of discrimination.

If a lie is imposed on reality, it is never going to work, because it never worked and never will.
What then, must we allow the injustice of discrimination?
The question is irrelevant, because injustice and discrimination are concepts that exist in our imagination much more than in the facts.

We ignore "injustice" and "discrimination" when we allow the play of a free economy or society.
Money losses or even bankruptcy are accepted like laws of physics.

Allowing racial competition in a free contest will produce an evolutionary real racial integration much faster than a legislation which actually kills genuine integration by obstructing the most effective motivations any race may have to adapt and integrate toward a successful pattern.
To make successful people adapt to the ones who failed, and not vice versa, is the same as forcing decay.

‑ If we don't like reality, we should understand that the "reality" we perceive is only our interpretation of it.
If that is clear, our problem is greatly reduced, because changing our interpretation of reality is far more plausible than our presumption to change reality.

Many facts can cause happiness or unhappiness not by themselves, but only on the basis of our interpretation.

The birth of a child can be a joyous event for child‑loving parents or a calamity for others.

Victory in a game is also a loss, depending on whom we root for. Or it could be sheer game enjoyment for impartial spectators.

The one who is emotionally crushed by his team's defeat could bring himself back to sanity by realizing that he could choose to be indifferent and therefore unaffected.

Millions of lives, trillions of damages and nightmarish historical blunders could have been spared to the whole world, if the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (28 June 1914) had been considered a crime prosecutable in a normal court of justice, rather than a war‑provoking incident.

Instead of committing suicide, a scorned lover could have felt a joyous feeling of liberation, had she visualized that her beau was an overbearing ass who would have smothered her life in a continued togetherness.

‑ The present theory that the poor can only get poorer, if we don't help them, is contradicted by the fact that all the rich people of today come from a lineage that some time in the past was much poorer that today's poor. And they helped themselves.

We could indeed say that the chances of becoming rich would have been drastically reduced if the ancestors of today's rich had been subsidized by their governments.
Beside the obvious fact that we know how to make the rich poor but not how to make the poor rich, it is known but not heeded that our help to the poor is so incompetent that it tends to take away whatever incentive they could have to overcome their predicament. 

‑ It is the old story: philosophers, clergymen, politicians, historians speak and preach about liberty, justice, peace, human dignity, equality, brotherly love..., while they oppress, exploit, enslave and kill nations and races.

 ‑ Our "melting pot" theory about ourselves leads us into the conviction that we are so open and versatile, that we can learn much about, but nothing from, other peoples and cultures.
That is what makes the "ugly American".

 ‑ Humility which knows to be a virtue is crypto‑pompous hypocrisy.

 ‑ When we meet something new, we try to fit it with patterns we have accumulated within our experience.
Therefore, instead of learning the new, we only dig from inside of ourselves.

If we really want to learn the new, we need two of many methods:

1). Decrease the number and combination of patterns that we keep within ourselves to accommodate the new experiences.

2). Perceive the new experiences deliberately as additions to the previous patterns.
It is not easy, when we are not accustomed to it, but it may be an unavoidable necessity.

 ‑ Many facts that we should know are hidden from us by people who want to keep them secret. Many are natural behavioral patterns that people have been raised to be ashamed of and to deny. Others are exclusive facts or knowledge people are dependent on for a living.
These hidden matters show how competitively hostile people can be against each other.

 ‑ The revolution of the 1960's was a humanistic movement for humanistic goals elicited not by competent humanists, but by longing for humanistic goals by misinformed people who hoped to find in humanities the fulfillment they were denied by their ignorance and lack of self‑ discipline.

 ‑ Just as we have prejudices against some races, we are afflicted by prejudices in favor of other races.

One of the races we blatantly favor is the American Indian just because we don't fear them any more.
It is now traditional to ascribe noble, peace‑loving, almost Olympian attributes to them.
Yet, we forget how bloodthirsty they really were, certainly not less than the white invaders of America.

Like African, Mayas or other primitive cultures, the aboriginal Americans based their set of highest values on ability to kill.

In the Chicago Art Institute, I saw an ermine and feathers decorated coat intended as a reward for warriors who had killed, scalped, decapitated or physically hit an enemy.
What rewards and honors were bestowed for peaceful, non‑murderous reasons? None comparably glorifying, that I know of.
What if there was no war or enemy to kill or maim?
In that case, men withered in peaceful ignominy, just like... contemptible squaws... 

‑ Many customs, rules and cultural characteristics are the result of centuries or even millennia of experience.
For that reason alone, they should be more reliable that our life‑time experience.

In our society, we tend to arrogantly disregard that factor in favor of what we have learned in just a few years.
Directly or not, our arrogance is a consequence that history has been virtually removed from our education.
History is not just a record of things gone, but a combination of experience, facts and knowledge on which we base our wisdom and decisions.

A culture which relegates history in museums and books is like a business which ignores accounting, sales and production records, or like a science that ignores theories, tests and previous discoveries, or like ignoring our genes.

 ‑ The cruder a culture is, the more it needs a faith, a religion. Believing is much easier than thinking.
Devotion to a credo is much more comfortable than examining a reality.
The believer's intolerance is much easier than the thinker's tolerance.
That believing is not only of the religious kind, but also political, social, cultural, psychological.

The "high" of temporary happiness coming from a belief is easier to achieve than the inner harmony from reasoning.

 ‑ What attracts us to a goal is not what it actually delivers but what we expect from it.
For instance, what riches or power deliver is not the happiness we expected, and much less of the other advantages that they provide.
The discrepancy is of two kinds:
First, we don't really know the reality of a goal until we reach it.
Second, what we want is not necessarily what we need.
Often, what we want is so damaging that our only salvation would consist in failing the goal or having it taken away from us.

‑ Happiness is found in the little satisfactions we obtain during our ascent toward a goal, rather than in reaching the goal.

‑ In a society, the power of the good elements for progress is often less than the power the bad elements have for destruction.

‑ Our genetic commands are as distant in the evolution from the first cellular movements, as our intelligence from the coming together of the first monocells.

The path from the first cellular movements to our genetic commands is at least 99.9% of the path from the beginning of life toward the birth of our intelligence.
The last 0.1% (or less) stretch of this path is no more than the difference between the intelligence of an average mammal and the intellectual achievements of mankind.

The unawareness of this fact induces us to overrate the importance of human achievements relative to life in general. What mankind has achieved is insignificant compared to natural evolution.
Therefore, we should take nature as a guidance, rather than glibly trying to "improve" on nature.

Nature should be used as the touchstone for the evaluation of our ideals, morals, technology, philosophy, culture and social organization.

 ‑ Obstacles are the beginning of thought.

 ‑ Many crimes exist only because of the laws that created them.
Such crimes are eliminated by simply abolishing the pertinent laws.

There is an incredible number of ill‑conceived tax, traffic, regulatory, bureaucratic, and downright frivolous laws that cause far more damage through punishing the law‑breakers than the gains they are supposed to generate.

‑ The exasperating audience‑praises made by advertisers to flatter people into buying are the "
right thing" done for a wrong reason.

It is unbearable to be told that we are smart, interesting, that we deserve the best, have a sophisticated taste, by someone who obviously lies just to flatter people he knows nothing about.
All those lies could become truths if we were evaluated from a positive perspective.
This would not only lighten up reality, but it would promote an atmosphere of optimism, trust, improvement and reinforcement for progress.

To any individual we can honestly say: "You cannot do this... You cannot understand that...", about something or another.
The result would be to hinder or discourage someone in something.
Just as honestly, however, we can say: "You can... You understand... You deserve..." to any one about many subjects within the reach of that person.

We keep forgetting it, either out of oversight, or because we are ourselves removed from the positive mood by our own failures and frustrations.

 ‑ Describe the electric light bulb, photography, telephone, airplanes, radio, the automobile, television... to a man of 400‑500 years ago, and he would consider any one of them as a miraculous source of happiness...
We have heard this observation many times.

We also know that most people cou ld describe some dream‑ realization that would make them happy, like: flying like a bird, being invisible, being selflessly lov ed by the whole world, controlling everyone's thoughts and wishes, having unlimited wealth and health...
Well, we have the radio, television, airplanes and countless things that would have made ancient people happy..., and we are as unhappy as they wer e without them...

That seems to be a sufficient evidence to con clude that none of our dream realizations would give us the happiness we expect from them.

We may be forced to conclude that happiness is a delusion or a temporary state of feelings, loke an orgasm.
 ‑ In our society, justice is a financial matter.

First, we must calculate how many dollars it costs to suffer injustice and how many to obtain justice.
We can obtain justice only if it is cheaper than suffering injustice.

Second, no attorney is going to help us ‑and we need one to go to court‑, unless h e finds financial gain in representing us.
He will do not what is best for us, but what produces the m ost money for him/her, as long as the law allows it.

Third, in any court dispute between a rich and a poor party, the rich can force the choice of the most expensive course of action, so that the poor cannot afford to fight...
Our laws have no provision for protecting anyone against such abuses, except in cases whiere the skillful attorneys of the rich commit blunders they are unlikely t o commit...

Justice for pay is n o better than the abuses of a t otalitarian s ystem.

Th e observation that poor people get free legal services is a sham, considering the quality of help they get and the abj ect indigence which is allowed such help.
After all, rich people don't systematically squeeze people who own nothing.

The main victim of the rich is the "middle class", that backbone of America where 90% of American productivity lies.
They are the ones who receive no real protection from the law and are the constant prey of the lawyers and rich vultures.

 ‑ More and more funds reach their own level of incompetence.
Do their recipients know how to manage money, and for wh at?
When institutions, schools, bureaucracies, politicians have exhausted the money they need or can use, they use their very failures as proofs they need more money to finish their tasks, not as evidence of their own incompetence.

-- TV and other media are full of ads for products for the female genitalia.
Very few products, if any, are advertised for the penis, beside pornography.

Wi th this overwhelming focus on the female crotch by both males and females, the feminists claim that sex in the me dia is female exploitation by the male is incomprehensible.

 ‑ Happiness always keeps one step ahead of what we have achieved. 

‑ The pattern of the hunt and excitement remains with us. We don't know how we c an fill the time, and we call it "pursuit of happiness".
The activities we have developed in our culture are just a way to fill the time after we have resolved the survival and hunt problems. They may consist of business, industry, poli tics or art, but the y are not as good and valuable as child games.

Evidently, children find happiness (or merely pleasure) in matters we don't enjoy any more.
We think, we don't enjoy them any more because we are adults.
In reality,  the growing up has corrupted us; therefore we have lost the capability of enjoying the pleasures the children experience. When a child loves playing with a stick and a loop, or a doll, and enjoy s what we can not, obviously the child can achieve what we cannot.
The great sophistication we have developed in bu siness, industry, art and philosophy becomes simply superfluous

=== We are reluctant to accept wbat history displays as evidence of the happiness cycle: it can easily fall into an orgasm pattern: emptyness after the apex: here agaon, body directs mind...

 ‑ As the history of mankind is primarily a measure of wars, conflicts, victories, conquests and defeats, so is our evaluation of reality falsified by those values.

The story of mankind is really a succession and evolution of unrecorded individual experiences and thoughts, family life, development and transmission of knowledge, unfolding of genetic factors, interactions of events, emotions and memories, strength of beliefs, love, indifference and passion... and countless factors historians don't k now how to collect, record and analyze.

At present, we are still in a primitive stage that sees only through war, victory and defeat, with the corollaries of blow and counter blow, offense and revenge, as ex pressed in the Old Testament's "eye for an eye".

Jesus'  message of loving our enemies and offering the other cheek has not been comprehended.
Yet, there is no other solution.
I recognize that I would be unable to forgive the murderer of my spouse, children or parents, but evolution shows no better path.

In many instances, literature, philosophy, theology have even indicated a path of lifeleong sexual abstinence that obviously conduces to mankind's extinction.
Our extinction horrifies conventional wisdom, but there is no cosmic reason to c onsider life worthy of continuation.

In fact, there is no reason why we could not consider the hypothesis that li fe (our kind of life, that is) is a cancerous anti-entropic growth in the cosmic reality.

We multiply as long as we evolve.
When our evolution is completed, we have no more reason to live on...
Is then killing life a deliverance, a good cosmic deed?

No, because killing would be no better than giving life, as a part of the same life/death causing cycle.
Our action of killing comes from life, whereas the evolution of life out of existence is a process of transforming life into lack of motivation for both life and death, as it is the purpose of some Buddhist and Hindu teachings.

- Most Christians have lost the cosmic meaning of Jesus' message.
They still think in terms of victory of Good over Evil.
This still tastes like right and wrong, offense an d revenge, reward and punishment.

There is, sure, a consequence for choosing the correct interpretation, but in the sense of seeing and going the correct wa y, not in the sense of reward and punishment.
If we take Route 66 instead of the correct Route 55, we are not sinners and we are not to be punished: we simply don't get where Route 55 leads.
And taking Route 55 gives us just the result of getting where 55 leads, which is more than a reward.

Reward and punishment are a regression or permanence in our primordial stage.
Probably they were a necessary first step where a physical or other evolutionary phase needed a competitive elimination of contending fo rms.

We are entering a new phase in which probably love and hatred, victory and defeat, reward and punishment have completed their evolutionary function and are no longer required.

T he new phase is beyond victory and defeat, beyond good and e vil, beyond pleasure and suffering.

On the other hand, this phase was always available for those who would choose it.

The problem was to present it in terms the believers would find attractive or comprehensible.
Jesus tried with his "Love thy neighbor" and humility version.
His followers fouled it with reward/punishment and with "Jesus‑did‑it‑all‑for‑us". Both approaches kill our possibilities to evolve from our primitivism.

The former, for the obvious implications of reward and punishment.
The latter for freeing us of any necessity to overcome our crude victory/defeat tendency, because Jesus has earned our reward in Heaven, no matter how we interpret what..

-As to the Old Testament, the Jews perpetuate the self‑ destructive permanence in the eye‑for‑an‑eye barbarism.
Their obsessive vindictiveness against the Germans is an ominous symbol of regressing evolution.
They are and do no worse than several other social groups, but the elevation of their vendetta to a religious zeal is like a cancerous growth in the international scene.

Shortly before the "Holocaust", the Soviets deliberately exterminated at least 9 million Ukrainians with not less genocidal purpose than the Nazi's.

Even more were killed by the Chinese.

The Japanese and others massacred millions and millions...

The Vietn amese have committed huge massacres very recently...

Black Africans are still now exterminating each other by the millions...

None of the non‑Jewish victims are following the bloodthirsty vendetta so dear to the Jews and, unfortunately, to everybody else who has expressed his posture in that regard.

- Gandhi, like Jesus, preached precisely against eye‑for‑an‑eye (“Eye for an eye makes the world blind"), but his people killed him ‑like Jesus‑ instead of listening.

- How long before we enter th e next phase?

 ‑ Like any other period in history, ours believes in the validity of its convictions.
Yet, historical experience shows that the future will obsolete, ridicule or condemn what we hold sacred today.

 ‑ The revolution of the 1960's was a humanistic movement for humanistic goals elicited not by competent humanists, but by longing for humanistic goals by misinformed people who hoped to find in humanities the fulfillment they were denied by their ignorance and lack of self‑ discipline.

 ‑ Many customs, rules and cultural characteristics are the result of centuries or millennia of experience.
For that reason alone, they should be more reliable than our life‑time experience.

In our society, we tend to arrogantly disregard that factor in favor of what we have learned in just a few years.
- Directly or not, our arrogance is a consequence that history has been virtually removed from our education.

- History is not just a record of things gone, but a combination of experience, facts and knowledge on which we can base our wisdom a nd decisions.
As I have said before.

=================

USA‑MEXICO‑CANADA

USA, Mexico and Canada should become one nation.

Community of interests already exists with dramatic urgency.

Fortunately, the real obstacles are not so great, unless we ignore them.

First, Latin Americans resent the lack of knowledge and interest of the American public and politicians about Latin America.

This resentment is compounded in Mexico.
It looks really ominous, when we consider that it is popular for Mexican politicians to show anti‑USA attitude.
The historic events and nationalistic sensitivities are a reality.
- On the other hand, obstacles that divide tw o nations can be surprisingly obviated by a merge in which both cultures, languages, customs and economies are fully respected.

Nations with less propensity for change than USA a nd Mexico have successfully overcome worse obstacles.
- We can overcome this obstacle as easily as the past hostilities against enemies who later became our f riends.
We need to focus on the problem correctly and work sincerely from there.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a serious danger that Latin America would pass into the communist world, for the communists had already conquered Cuba, Nicaragua and large secto rs of the Hispano‑ American populations.
- The Latin‑American complaint that we don't care beyond exploiting them should dissipate when we are united in a community of interests and nationality.
Once started, that will probably happen in a slow process, as it did in several European areas.
I experienced it in the Italian area, were the differences in economic development became almost hostile attitudes between North and South Italy. South Italy was favored by its central geographic position in the Mediterranean sea, which was the central of world culture until 1492 a.d. (discovery of America).
Then, since the cultural and economic center moved toward north and west, North Italy became the fulcrum of Italian activity, progress and wealth. As the more skilled and enterprising southern Italians kept moving North for better jobs and life, the South started and kept bleeding until now.
That generated the still present lament of the southern Itali ans that the North has abandoned and now keeps exploiting the South.
It will take a combination of natural evolution and innovations (perhaps still several generations) until the flood of progresswill raise all the boats equally.

The successful coexistence of three ethnic and language groups (German, French and Italian) in Switzerland is a reasonable proof for the viability of uniting Canadian, Mexican and American communities into a cohesive power block.

It could start as an economic community like the European Common Market and then European Union. The following evolution could undoubtedly be accelerated by the historical developments.

 ‑ In 356 B.C., Herostratus a typically forgettable man, used a concurrently absurd and logical means to acquire immortal fame: he burned down the magnificent temple of Artemis, in Ephesus, Greece, one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the classical example of undeserved immortal fame....

That same year, Alexander the Great of Macedonia (356-323 b. c.) was born. He was tutored from age 13 to 16 by Aristotle (384-322 b. c. ), one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. Alexander became one of the most famous generals in history. So, his fame was deserved for excellence, but he caused immensely more damages, destruction and deaths than Herostratus, to create an ephemeral empire that lasted only 10 years and collapsed ignominiously when he died, 323 B.C...

- Then came forgettable Bill Clinton, elected into unforget-ability as president of the United States of America.
As such, he  reached virtually immortal fame, whether he deserved it or not.

History is made by the most wildly different kinds of people, regardless of whether they deserve fame, admiration or oblivion.

 ‑ Like any other period in history, ours believes in the permanent validity of its convictions. Yet, historical experience shows that the future will obsolete, ridicule or condemn much of what we hold sacred today.

o801o1
My 844h birthday

= = =U.S. A. is now am ochlocracy (rule by nediocrity).

= = = Legality has displaced morality.
= = = Divorces outnumber marriages
in an obscene ratio.
Blind 50/50 wealth partition in contested cases is like granting 50 pounds of brass to the one and 50 pounds of gold to the other, because the lawyers did not know the difference... Then, the couts are hostile to tthe anti-divorce spouse. I got the brass (a mortgaged 23 room house and a rental) commercial buuilding and the guilt of anti-divorce spouse. Sh e got my chemucal nanucacturing ufacturing business and its buildintg. I am a chemist, founder (`959), 1oo% owner, president and crator of all product we manufacture. She is a
lawyer and worked for me only the last 20 years. The lawyers considered my plant (with 20+ employees) like a paint store,and me as an old and vision-impaired old man (83), but healthy and alert "genius" (over 160 I.Q.) scientist and businessman.I feel like facing an unknown form of life.

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