It’s Really About Controlling Our Lives ... Paul Driessen

It’s really about controlling our lives
“Low carbon fuel standards” mean higher costs, few environmental benefits and less liberty
Paul Driessen
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Within days, Majority Leader Harry Reid intends to bring sweeping energy and climate legislation to the Senate floor. He won't call it cap-and-trade or cap-tax-and-trade, and certainly not a carbon tax.

“Those words are not in my vocabulary,” he says. “We’re going to work on pollution.”
Senator Reid’s twenty-pound bill will be laden with lofty language about “clean energy,” energy conservation, “green jobs,” reducing “dangerous” power plant emissions, ending our “addiction” to oil, creating a renewable economy, and saving the planet from “imminent climate disaster.”

Environmental euphemisms aside, however, the legislation is really about imposing national “low carbon fuel standards” (LCFS) and forcing dramatic reductions in the use of oil, natural gas and especially coal. It would expand on existing laws, regulations and decrees, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that carbon dioxide somehow “endangers human health and welfare,” EPA’s June 30 invalidation of flexible air quality permits for Texas refineries, Interior Secretary Salazar’s offshore drilling moratorium, multiple state and federal renewable energy standards and mandates, and various state and regional “greenhouse gas initiatives” that restrict emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.

The EPA, Energy Information Administration, White House and Mr. Reid insist that America can easily limit hydrocarbon use and switch to “eco-friendly” wind, solar and biofuel energy – at low cost and minimal harm to families, businesses and jobs. However, their self-serving, other-planet claims are flatly contradicted by a host of studies by reputable analysts with a solid history of integrity and accuracy.

The most recent is a June 17 report by Charles River Associates, examining the “Economic and Energy Impacts Resulting from a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard.” Prepared for the Consumer Energy Alliance, the study looked only at transportation fuels. (Including coal for electricity generation and other uses would dramatically increase its cost estimates.)

Nevertheless, the study found that national standards implemented in 2015 would:
* Increase average gasoline and diesel prices by up to 80% in five years, and 170% within ten years – sending regular gasoline prices soaring to nearly $5 per gallon by 2020 and $7.50 per gallon by 2025 (assuming other international price pressures remain unchanged);
* Spur sharp cost increases for petrochemicals in plastics, pharmaceuticals and other vital products;

* Reduce employment and consumer demand significantly, by increasing the cost of transporting people, equipment, supplies, raw materials, food and finished products – for work, school, healthcare, business, manufacturing, vacation and other purposes;

* Cut business investment by $200-320 billion annually, compared to the no-LCFS baseline;

* Slash gross domestic product by $410-750 billion annually by 2025;

* Cost 2.3 million to 4.5 million American jobs, including up to 1.5 million in manufacturing and 3.0 million in the service sector; and

* Force household purchasing power downward by $1,400 to $2,400 for a family of four by 2025 – impacting minority, elderly and other low and fixed income families worst of all.

None of this should be surprising. As President Obama himself has said, the very purpose of energy and climate policies like LCFS is to ensure that prices “necessarily skyrocket.” It is to force people to use less fuel, compel companies to change power generation and use practices, drive coal companies and utilities out of business, and force the development of new fuels and technologies that may or may not work.

All on the premise that we waste energy and are causing a planetary meltdown. Climate change is real, and has been since the dawn of time. But there is no consensus and no evidence that carbon dioxide is the primary factor in global warming and cooling, or that humans are causing a climate disaster. Assertions, assumptions and computer models are not evidence, and cannot justify what Harry Reid is pushing.

Restricting, taxing, regulating and penalizing the hydrocarbon fuels that provide 85% of America’s energy would severely hobble our free enterprise system and impact jobs, families, living standards, and basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Doubling the price of electricity in our industrial heartland – where coal provides 50-95% of all electrical power – would kill millions of jobs, and send millions of families into fuel poverty.

Renewable energy is intermittent, unreliable, land and raw materials intensive, and unsustainable without government mandates and constant infusions of “other people’s money” in the form of subsidies. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus might be ecstatic that an F/A-18 fighter jet recently flew on biofuel av-gas. But brewing $65-per-gallon fuel from camelina is hardly sustainable, even for the Defense Department.

As to the great utopian vision of “green jobs,” Spain’s subsidy-driven wind turbine industry cost the country 2.2 jobs for every eco-job it created, according to studies by Dr. Gabriel Calzada. And when the global recession hit, the subsidies dried up, the turbine-making jobs disappeared, and hundreds of wind and solar companies were driven to the precipice of bankruptcy.

Wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars require “rare earth” metals. America’s probable deposits are locked up in wilderness areas, which leaves China as the world’s predominant producer. So the bulk of the green manufacturing jobs will be in China – while we will get the temp jobs hauling, assembling and installing components made in the Middle Kingdom and shipped to the United States.

Thus, China, India and Brazil will continue to surge forward on plentiful coal and metals, cheap labor, affordable electricity, a can-do attitude, laxer environmental standards, and a rational refusal to accept legally binding carbon dioxide reductions. Thus, even if the USA went cold turkey, and completely shut down all greenhouse-gas-spewing factories, homes and cars, these developing country emissions would overwhelm our sacrifices within a few months, and atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise.

And for what? Cars and power plants are already 90% cleaner than their 1970s era predecessors. Climate change is moderate and primarily natural. Mr. Reid’s formula is all pain, for no environmental gain.

Even bright high school students understand this. US senators certainly ought to. But Harry Reid is hoping 60 do not. That’s the magic number he needs to regulate not just one-sixth of our economy (the healthcare sector), but 100% – because nothing happens without abundant, reliable, affordable energy. And enacting any form of fuel rationing legislation will put Congress and bureaucrats firmly in charge of our lives, liberties, hopes, dreams and rights.

Either Mr. Reid’s cadre doesn’t understand these basic facts – or they are so blinded by power, ambition, ideology and desire to control that they willfully ignore them.
Climate change truly is a huge moral issue. What the Political-Activist-Industrial Complex is doing in the name of preventing climate change and creating a green economy is un-American and immoral. Applied to poor countries, to restrict their access to abundant, reliable energy, it becomes lethal and inhumane. It can no longer be tolerated.

Be alert. Speak out. And beware of energy and climate dictators and charlatans, and any lame duck session that may come after citizens vote to replace many of the control freaks on Capitol Hill.

Paul Driessen
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Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (http://www.cfact.org/) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

Energy Policy? What Energy Policy? ... Alan Caruba

Energy Policy? What Energy Policy?
By Alan Caruba

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When the government controls the provision of energy, it controls the lives of all citizens and the growth or failure of the nation’s economy. Everything else, including national defense, runs second when it comes to this single factor.

Recently the fourth annual survey of more than a hundred executives in the U.S. and Canadian electric and natural gas industries was released by Platts and Capgemini. Platts is a global provider of energy and metals information and Capgemini is a leading provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The objective of the survey was to determine the opinion of energy industry executives regarding the first year and a half of the Obama administration’s energy policies.

The Obama administration’s energy policy is to have as little as possible.

The administration is bent on reducing access to national energy resources, coal, oil and natural gas, combined with a bizarre emphasis on “alternative” or “renewable” sources in the form of wind and solar energy. European nations that went this course ended up with fewer jobs, insufficient energy for the money invested, and massive fraud in its carbon credits exchanges.

It is essential to understand that the nation’s utilities have all signed onto the bogus “global warming” theory that carbon dioxide emissions threaten all life on Earth because they can make gobs of money raising the rates they currently charge for electricity. They expect to do so via the bogus selling and trade of “carbon credits”, a key element of the Cap-and-Tax bill currently in the Senate. It is a massive robbery of all energy consumers and that means everyone.

Under intense pressure from the government and from environmental organizations, many utilities have wasted millions on the installation of wind and solar farms, none of which provide enough electricity to even begin to meet their consumer’s needs. Moreover, they must all maintain traditional coal-burning, nuclear, and other forms of energy generation plants because neither wind or solar provide a reliable source of electricity.

This is the big, dirty secret of the so-called “sustainable” energy from wind and solar. It is not sustainable if the wind is not blowing and the sun is obscured by clouds. Wind energy provides about one percent of all the electricity used daily in America. In 2006 solar power provided 0.1 percent! By contrast, nuclear provides about 20 percent and coal provides just over 50 percent!

The alternative energy suppliers are sustained by a combination of taxpayer subsidies (your money) and mandates imposed on the utilities to include them with nuclear, coal and other energy sources. One way the government makes so-called sustainable energy appear to be a greater source is to include conventional hydroelectric energy.

According to the survey, “some 80% are dissatisfied with the U.S. government’s energy policy performance following the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration and amid a slowly rebounding economy,” adding, “there is considerable dissatisfaction in the lack of tangible and actionable policy and legislation.”

John Christens, vice president of Smart Energy Services for Capgemini, says, “Few utility executives consider the current solutions as satisfactory either in scale or feasibility.” That’s because there are NO current “solutions” to America’s growing needs for additional energy provision and the nation’s electrical grid is aging daily and in need of major upgrades.

Not surprisingly, since they stand to make billions if the Cap-and-Tax bill is passed, many utility executives were unhappy with the progress “on CO2 legislation and action, regulations which will increase the cost of power without addressing the root issue of atmospheric carbon…”

There is no “root issue” because carbon dioxide plays NO role whatever in climate change. The bloviations of Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are a huge package of lies based on flawed and deliberately spurious computer model projections.

In November 2009, the Climategate revelations that a handful of IPCC scientists had been misrepresenting the truth should have ended the global warming fraud, but it has only intensified the effort of those behind it to impose it on the world. At some point, having taken millions in government funding for research, particularly here in the U.S. and in England, some of these IPCC scientists should be on their way to jail if there is any justice to be had.

The survey is barely useful to the public because it was taken among the very utility executives who are guilty of supporting the global warming fraud in anticipation of reaping obscene profits. The cost of energy will soar if the Cap-and-Tax bill waiting a vote in the Senate is passed and signed into law by the president.

Meanwhile, the real energy policy of the Obama administration is to do everything in its immense power to thwart the building of any new coal-burning or nuclear plants while deceiving the public into believing that wind or solar has any real potential of meeting present and future needs. Dangling promises of “green jobs” is perhaps the cruelest lie of all. Virtually all of the technology required for wind or solar is manufactured overseas.

The Obama energy policy can be summed up as no new energy, no new jobs, and a very dark future for America.

Alan Caruba

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cap-and-Trade Treason ... Alan Caruba

Cap-and-Trade Treason
By Alan Caruba

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If you thought that the way the Obama administration and its cohort of Democrats in Congress rammed through the takeover of the nation’s healthcare system was appalling, prepare to watch the same process applied to Cap-and-Trade. Your government no longer represents you, the voter, the citizen.

Cap-and-Trade (H.R. 2454) allegedly is about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there is no scientific justification for this because there is no “global warming” that requires it, nor is manmade, anthropogenic, generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) a threat to the planet. Just the opposite, everything dies without it; all vegetation and all animal life. Life on Earth would thrive if there was even more CO2.

To what end would Congress impose such emission limits when they do not exist throughout China, India, third world “developing” nations, and are being abandoned by European Union nations where the Kyoto Protocol limits have harmed their economies?

Global warming has been exposed as a massive hoax and fraud. Why would the United States Senate proceed to enact a bill based on it? In essence, it will make some corporations, utilities, and people very rich and impoverish the rest of us.

Having passed the House, the Senate will be handed a huge bill that, like healthcare, few will have read before they vote. It will impose the largest tax the nation has ever seen.

The act will bless the various “exchanges” created for the sale and trade of “carbon credits” that have no value whatever. It creates a bubble comparable to the sub-prime mortgage debacle that triggered the 2008 financial crisis and resulting recession.

The amount of CO2 will not be reduced because the Earth produces 97% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Even then, that amount is the smallest part of the atmosphere that consists of more than 95 percent water vapor!

Cap-and-Trade is an act of betrayal because it will destroy the U.S. economy, destroy jobs, and further impoverish Americans in a variety of ways.

The Cap-and-Trade Act that has already passed the House will be put in play by Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joseph Lieberman. It was created in the House by Rep. Henry Waxman and Rep. Edward Markey. They know the bill will set in motion the destruction of the nation whose life’s blood is affordable and abundant energy use.

Just as the Obama administration moved swiftly to acquire ownership of General Motors and Chrysler, to take over insurance giant AIG, control one sixth of the nation’s economy through the healthcare act, and is now seeking to expand the regulation of Wall Street, Cap-and-Trade will ensure the destruction of the nation as manufacturing flees to other parts of the world.

Beginning one year after enactment, homeowners will not be able to sell their homes without complying with onerous and unnecessary energy and water “efficiency” standards. These standards, moreover, will increase annually. Within five years, 90 percent of the residential market will be controlled by the government.

On April 19, the Environmental Protection Agency announced new guidelines for “Energy Star” homes requiring them to increase “efficiency” by 20 percent more than those built to the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code. Home ownership, already the largest expense for Americans, will be further increased by required upgrades.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, in a few years the average cost of energy use to every family of four will be $6,800 per year. No one will be exempt from energy taxes and you can expect the cost of a gallon of gasoline to rise beyond $4 to European levels.

In Europe, industrial carbon quotas have enriched the continent’s biggest energy users such as steel and cement makers. Their surplus carbon permits, often provided for free, are estimated to be worth more than $4 billion at current market rates by 2012. There is no scientific justification for them.

It will be the U.S. government that will determine who receives the initial free “carbon credits”, thus giving corporations that have supported Cap-and-Trade a huge advantage over those who do not. Not only will the government rake in billions from the taxes to be imposed, but utilities will raise their prices and pass it along to consumers.

There is no need whatever to reduce use of so-called “fossil fuels.” There is no need for the “efficiency” and “conservation” measures that will be imposed. If the government would permit access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas, none of this would be needed, but it will not.

The nation is under attack from within by a consortium of fanatical environmentalists and rent-seeking corporations and utilities seeking to profit from these government mandates and limits.

It is the perfect storm. It is treason.

Editor’s Note: Politico.com: (4/24/10) The planned Monday unveiling of a bipartisan climate bill was postponed after one of its three authors, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said that he couldn’t support the legislation if Democrats moved it to the backburner to focus first on immigration reform. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) announced the postponement Saturday evening, saying that “external issues have arisen that force us to postpone only temporarily.”

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Multi-Billion Dollar Global Warming Fraud ... by Alan Caruba

The Multi-Billion Dollar Global Warming Fraud
By Alan Caruba

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As the massive global warming fraud implodes, the one aspect of it that has not been explored in depth is the equally massive waste of billions of dollars spent by the United States and nations around the world, we were told, to avoid global warming.

Whole industries such as automobile manufacture had demands and limits put on them. Some states required utilities to buy “carbon credits” to offset their use of “fossil fuels.” The list of things attributed to global warming expanded to the point of total absurdity.

The codification of the fraud into law began with the Kyoto Protocol, an element of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change whose purpose was to fight a global warming that we now know was not happening.

The data to support the fraud came out of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that specialized in distorting climate data in every way possible to emphasize a normal warming cycle and then to minimize any indication of a new cooling cycle dating to around 1998 or earlier.

The IPCC data, released periodically in reports purporting to be the work of some 2,500 scientists from around the world, were actually based the handiwork of a few academic centers such as the Climate Research Center (CRU) at East Anglia University in England, Penn State University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and climate modeling from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Other participants in the fraud were NASA’s Goddard Institute and NOAA, both of whom produced claims, predictions, and questionable data to support “global warming.”

In the U.S. alone, I have heard figures in the area of $50 billion that have been spent on “climate change” over the course of administrations dating back to Clinton. In England, between 2006 and 2008, the government spent the equivalent of nearly $14 million (U.S.) on publicity stunts to convince Brits that global warming was real.

It is legitimate to ask if global warming has not in effect been a criminal enterprise.

The Kyoto Protocol required the nation states that signed onto it to commit to a reduction of four “greenhouse” gas, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, and two groups of gases, hydrofluorocarbons and perflourocarbons. These gases occur in minimal amounts in the Earth’s atmosphere which is composed primarily of 95% to 97% water vapor!

The cost of accepting this commitment is measured in several ways, not the least of which was the sale of “carbon credits” to utilities and to industrial enterprises that would permit them to function outside the limits imposed. The exchanges created for this purpose prospered but it increased the cost of providing electrical energy and the manufacture of all manner of products.

The limitations, however, did not apply to either China or India, both of which were exempted, as were undeveloped Third World nations.

The climate change fraud also affected major U.S. corporations, none of whom wanted to appear to be opposed to it. However, on Tuesday, February 16th, BP America, Conoco Phillips, and Caterpillar all announced they were dropping out of the Climate Action Partnership that advocated energy-rationing. Some of the millions squandered on various global warming and “environmental” projects and groups came from the bottom line of corporations across the nation.

At this point, any corporation that speaks of “climate change” in its advertising and other public statements is part of the global fraud that originated in the United Nations Environmental Program.

The carbon emissions limitations also served to justify huge public subsidies for U.S. producers of wind and solar energy, called “clean” energy. Several nations, such as Spain, Germany and Great Britain, invested heavily in these alternative energy sources only to discover that they were massively inefficient and unreliable.

At the same time, the global warming fraud in the United States limited the building of coal-fired plants to generate electricity when, in fact, coal provides 50% of the nation’s electricity needs. Combined with fears of nuclear energy dating back to the 1970s, the United States has essentially starved itself of the energy it needs.

According to a recently released study by the National Association of Utility Regulatory Commissioners, the U.S. gross domestic product would lose $2.36 trillion and American consumers will pay an additional $2.35 trillion for energy if the oil and gas on federal lands remain off-limits through 2030. This constitutes a form of energy and economic suicide!

A British newspaper, the Daily Mail in a recent interview with CRU Prof. Phil Jones, revealed he knew there had been no “statistically significant” warming for the past fifteen years. Little wonder Prof. Jones and the CRU refused to honor UK Freedom of Information requests for the data on which the IPCC claims were based. He and others who provided IPCC data are under investigation.

In essence, the IPCC reports were all fraudulent and all were used to advance the global warming fraud. That is why President Obama’s claim of “overwhelming evidence” of climate change, i.e., global warming is particularly troubling.It is essential to understand that the “Cap-and-Trade” legislation passed by the House and waiting for a vote in the Senate is based on the IPCC reports and the threat by the Environmental Protection Agency to begin regulating carbon dioxide emissions throughout the nation have no legitimate basis in science.

There are still billions at stake if global warming-related laws, projects such as wind farms or the requirement that ethanol be added to every gallon of gas purchased are permitted to proceed or continue. Global warming as an issue or basis for any law or expenditure of public funding no longer exists.

It’s long passed the time when the nation’s news media should stop referring to it as anything other than a fraud perpetrated on the people of the world.

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Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Massive Tax Hikes & New Taxes On The Way, America!

Massive Tax Hikes & New Taxes On The Way, America!

A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
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Oh, please tell me you did not buy the lies out of Washington that the government is going to tax the rich to pay for Socialized Medicine otherwise known as ObamaCare? Surely you didn't fall for that!

Heck, I seriously doubt there are enough rich people in the US to make a dent in what that Communist program called ObamaCare is going to cost the citizens of the US.

If I were among the rich of this country, I'd be staying up nights transferring my assets off shore and getting myself, my family, my business, and, anything the government could tax, out of their reach. What the current government of the US is doing to the wealthy Americans is flat out wrong. It is thievery by another name... taxes.

Americans are so ignorant of their history that it is inexcusable -- no worse! It is embarrassing! . Americans have forgotten this country fought a war for independence over, what else, TAXES! This country was founded as a result of a TAX REVOLT! What the current federal government is doing to the citizens of the US makes King George look like a shirker!

I hope those of you who voted for Obama are happy. You wanted change. Well, you got it. From a democracy to a socialist nation in less than a year. Hope? What hope? We are screwed for at least three more years. The bunch of clowns and fruitcakes running the Congress are pathetic socialists/communists/democrats lusting after power and nothing else.

Guess what they are about to do? No I don't mean Amnesty for the Illegal Aliens living among us... although that is certainly coming. I mean the load of taxes they are about to slap on the middle class of this country.

Do you know what a VAT tax is? Huh? It is a Value added Tax. Sometimes referred to as a "sales tax".

In an Article entitled: "Damn the Deficit: Full Speed Ahead on Health Care", Michael Barone said the following:

"The instrument they may have in mind is the value added tax, which operates as an invisible sales tax on goods and services. Back in May, Budget Director Peter Orszag's spokesman mentioned the VAT as a "credible idea" that he did not want to rule out. In June, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel suggested a VAT as "a point of discussion."

In September, John Podesta, head of the Obama transition team, spoke of how a VAT would "create a balance" with other economies, and White House adviser Paul Volcker cited a carbon tax and a VAT as ways to raise lots of revenue. In October, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "Somewhere along the way, a value-added tax plays into this." " You may read the entire article at:
SOURCE

A Value Added Tax is a tax on the estimated market value added to a product or material at each stage of its manufacture or distribution, ultimately passed on to the consumer. Please read that last phrase again. "Passed on to the consumer." Socialists/communists/progressives/democrats do no understand that businesses do not pay taxes. The government actually THINKS THEY DO! Those of us who have actually run businesses understand that a business passes the cost of taxes along to his customers in higher prices for the goods and/or services his business produces or offers.

The attraction of a VAT tax to our government is twofold. One: It will raise a lot of money for them to squander. Two: it is a hidden tax -- hidden from you, the consumer, the sucker. Prices on goods and services will sky rocket while, at the same time, sales of those products will fall through the floor. Soon afterwards business will begin shuttering plants and offices and the unemployment figures will spike upwards even more than then the real figures, I am convinced the government is not releasing. (10.2%? Come on, now. Figure closer to 13% maybe even higher.)

Taxes, taxes, and even more taxes are coming to the American middle class. If the ObamaCare bill passes, you are not going to believe how much that "free" healthcare is going to cost you! Some of us, like myself, with chronic diseases will pay for it with our lives.

We can stop some of the coming taxes by stopping ObamaCare in the Senate in the next few days.

Contact your Senators and your Representative, ASAP, and tell them, in no uncertain terms, that you want them to vote against ObamaCare and any, and all, new taxes. We have to cut off the money and starve this government into submission.

And be prepared, America. Our economic situation is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. When inflation sets in, sometime around mid-year 2010, your money and mine with be worth a whole lot less than it is today.

But, hey! America wanted "CHANGE!" Well, what do you think of the change now???

J. D. Longstreet

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