From Slate:
The Children of Pahiatua
They were orphaned, lost, and alone. Yet a generation of World War II Polish child refugees found a new life and happiness in distant New Zealand.
By Anne Applebaum|Posted Friday, May 17, 2013, at 5:49 PM
... But in another sense there was a happy ending—one that we might usefully contemplate. In recent years, the gap in educational attainments of rich and poor Americans has grown wider, largely because of the enormous resources many of us pour into our children. Success, we have come to believe, depends on excellent schools, carefully organized leisure and, above all, on high-concentration, high-focus parenting.
The orphans of Pahiatua did not have any of these things. On the contrary, they had witnessed the deaths of parents and siblings, experienced terrible deprivation, and lost years of education before finding themselves in an alien country on the far side of the world. And yet they learned the language, they assimilated, they became doctors, lawyers, farmers, factory workers, teachers, and businessmen. Krystyna Tomaszyk—a Pahiatua child who became a pioneering social worker—told me over lunch that she was proud of their success. "We all had difficult childhoods. But none of us became criminals or vagabonds. We fit in."
There were reasons for that success. New Zealand boomed after the war: Logging and mining expanded, and work was easy to find. The Polish children had an unusually warm reception here at an unusual moment: Knowing where they had come from, people went out of their way to be kind.
But more than 70 years later, the now-elderly children of Pahiatua have an additional explanation. Zdzislaw Lepionka now believes that "the fact that we weree kept together, that we sang Polish songs and did scouting drills together— that was a kind of therapy."
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63 comments:
I love her bit about the achievement gap being caused by hyper parenting. I suppose, in the interests of social justice, I should stop taking my kids to the library!
"There were reasons for that success."
Hmmm...I can't think of any differences between the Poles and our current crop of Hispanics...what could explain their divergent paths in life?
I mean, it can't be that there are differences between the Polish people and the people of Central America -- can it?
Labor scarcity works for europeans? will wonders never cease.
As a tribe member, Applebaum is doing her sacred duty to support the immigration bill.
If calling those orphans Polish will help win over anti-amnesty Americans of Polish descent, then mission accomplished.
"Zdzislaw Lepionka now believes that "the fact that we were kept together, that we sang Polish songs and did scouting drills together— that was a kind of therapy.""
-
I have a great idea! Let white people to do that today: stay together in ethnically homogenous groups and give positive cultural expression to group identity. Especially white boys, who are doing so badly under the present regime of perpetual blame-and-shame.
Then white people might be able to perform better.
Imagine how great that would be. Then it might not be necessary to crowd us out, force-blend and replace us with presumably better people.
Do you think our masters would let us do that?
Were they Jewish "Poles" or children orphaned by the Soviet massacre of the Polish intelligentsia?
Either way their genes are working for them, big time.
Odd that Applebaum is pitching staying together in ethnic enclaves as the key.
Staying in Ethiopian Jewish ghettoes or Yemeni Jewish ghettoes hasn't done squat for Ethiopian or Yemeni Jews in Israel.
But then again the Ethiopians and Yemeni Jews do have to deal with White Jewish-skin privilege and White Jewish racism in Israel.
In defense of White Israeli Jews, however, many (if not most) will tell you it is because Yemenis and Ethiopians are lazy welfare leeches and dumb as a box of rocks.
I do appreciate the traditional Archie-Bunkerish Israeli honesty.
OT: Interesting - use the collapse of heterosexual marriage to derail gay marriage: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10067511/David-Cameron-facing-Commons-defeat-over-gay-marriage-plans.html
I would call this apples to oranges, but apples and oranges are both round edibles, so they have one similarity.
A trickle of law-abiding Poles in 1940s America vs. a million-strong flood of law-breaking mestizos in 2013 America. No point of similarity.
Only someone sitting behind a desk, dealing just with words and a Blackberry, could class these together. Just because the abstractions used are the same ("immigrants," "America"), somehow the realities are assumed to be the same. Words are reality, for lazy writers - particularly if they're on a payroll for writing.
we already know poles make good americans. they've been in the US for a century. we don't have to look to new zealand for answers on "the polish question".
we also don't have to look far for answers on the "the mexican question".
Oh, wait a minute.
These are immigrants to New Zealand, not America.
Could it be? Yes, it is: Applebaum's analogy is even weaker than null.
The Poles who came to the UK during and after WW2 turned out pretty well, too. But then they were coming to a country with a strong existing culture to integrate to.
They won't have that now - in large parts of England there's no native culture to assimilate to, because there's no longer a critical mass of natives. Most of London is a foreign city.
Bbbut all these children were white?
What, are you a racist or something like Richwine? Shut up and don't ask any more questions. Sheesh, I can't believe these racists. Remind me to take your name so that you'll never work again.
Answer to Mexican immigration is obvious -
shoot the parents and ship the kiddies to New Zealand. They'll do wonderfully.
Steve, you've really outdone yourself this time!!. Hilarious!!
I'm sending this one to several of my more level-headed liberal friends with whom I share a playful, constant back-and-forth on political issues like these.
Yeah, what happened to a few Poles in New Zealand seventy years ago is really germane to millions of Hispanics in the U.S. today. If this is the best the pro-invasion people can do, they're really desperate.
Can someone explain to me what a "pioneering social worker"is?
Wait what? Polish children immigrating to New Zealand means that Mexican peasants are going to become Silicon Valley entrepeneurs?
Any port in a storm, I guess.
Applebaum is one of those neocons who thinks Roman Polanski shouldn't have to face justice and voted for Obama.
She is NOT our friend.
I've always thought that the admirable intellectual performance of post-war Eastern Europe made a slam dunk case against the nurture hypothesis. The stress, toxin exposure, nutritional deficits and educational interruptions faced by war children would have made the worst of American poverty look downright heavenly by comparison. It's not like today's single mothers on WIC have to prostitute themselves just to give their offspring a slice of ham twice a month.
-The Judean People's Front
At the present New Zealanders are wringing their hands because
the immigrant Samoan,Tongan and Cook Islanders are living in poverty while their children are going to school hungry. Many parents are unemployed,living in overcrowded state houses.Their unemployment rate is much higher than the rest of the population.Their children perform much more poorly than others as well. I don't see the problem ever improving.
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-taxes-senate-offshore-ireland-20130520,0,1215074.story
"A Senate investigation has found that Apple Inc. used offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying at least $44 billion in U.S. taxes over the past four years. Many of the tactics are common among large multinational corporations, and the investigation did not find Apple violated any laws."
But hey, Tim Cook is a homo and Apple supports 'socialist' Obama, so I guess it's all about 'equality' after all.
Massive tax money emigration is more amazing than massive third world immigration.
But no laws were violated. What is the point of 'rule of law' when laws don't mean nothing anymore?
Maybe Richwine is wrong to focus on IQ. Perhaps it would be better to address overall cultural inferiority.
As I noodled about on the computer avoiding real work this afternoon. I stumbled onto the comparative murder statistics of Juarez and El Paso. These are one city divided by the international border.
Most years lately Juarez is the "murder capitol of the world". Yet last year El Paso was "the safest city in America". I'm not sure I trust all these figures but that's a pretty big difference.
Juarez has a murder rate more than three times that of Detroit.
It makes immigration reform seem like a murder redistribution policy.
Albertosaurus
Richwine is wrong because of an example with Europeans?
Like many articles in the MSM, I am confused by what they mean.
I guess we need to import Polish orphans not Mexicans and moslems
OT: Steve, did you see this murder rate graph? The national murder rate is now at its lowest level in 100 years. I know you've argued against the abortion theory and I think you were agnostic about the lead theory. You've talked about ubiquitous security cameras and social media. There's also the incarceration theory. Any others? It's just so weird to see this area of improvement in the midst of general societal degeneration.
Details of Pacific Islanders progress can be found here
Anne Appelbaum is yet another dishonest neocon.
She's also another of those Zionists who believe that while her (real) country, Israel, has the right to retain its ethnic culture, none of the Anglosphere nations enjoy the same right.
She is, alas, typical of the breed and typical of what one must put up with in the present-day American media.
Completely off-topic but the NYT has a story about suburban poverty growing, while NYC gets richer.
So that's where Bloomberg sent the Black people.
"The suburbs, which in 2000 accounted for 29 percent of the region’s poor people, a decade later were home to 33 percent of metropolitan New Yorkers living below the federal poverty level, according to an analysis of the latest census results." http://nyti.ms/10P53B8
Looks like Horgan from Scientific American is doign some more backpedalling. He has now posted a clarification clarification.
**Clarification clarification: The above clarification has left some readers puzzling over whether my whole post was a joke. The clarification is obviously (I thought) sarcastic, and the rest of the post is obviously (I thought) deadly earnest. So what do I really mean by a ban? Here’s one possibility. Institutional review boards (IRBs), which must approve research involving human subjects carried out by universities and other organizations, should reject proposed research that will promote racial theories of intelligence, because the harm of such research–which fosters racism even if not motivated by racism–far outweighs any alleged benefits. Employing IRBs would be fitting, since they were formed in part as a response to the one of the most notorious examples of racist research in history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972.
See, the racists are wrong!
Cennbeorc
I know! I know! We can overcome the Gap by singing Polish songs. Pass it on. I hope you like Polka. Isn't that somehow related to jazz?
Yeah, kind of like d'Alembert: illegitimate child of French aristocrats, left on the steps of a church as an infant, raised in an orphanage in 16th century France, yet became a towering figure in science.
Must have been the singing.
Gotta love her carefully crafted word slices and thought close-ups. Each one shreds The Narrative's insistence that race and ethnicity and character don't matter.
cipher
"we might usefully contemplate" - that's funny.
As the great-grandchild of Polish immigrants, I'll be the first to thank Steve for sharing this article . . . Boze, cos Polske
Quite right. In the spirit of reciprocity, the US should invite 750 Maoris and Australian aboriginals to come on in. Because we are the world, and a Papuan is the same as a Pole - only more vibrant and diverse! Make it 750,000 instead! Of course, we might have to breed some to make it possible, but that's cool cuz it's not eugenics.
"Krystyna Tomaszyk—a Pahiatua child who became a pioneering social worker..."
Any string of blather that includes "_____ justice" (criminal, social, food, labor, etc.) or "social _____" is a great indicator of BS. In the same way that "sustainability" and "climate change" indicate a BS, normative non-solution to a supposed problem. A "social worker" is nothing more than a socialist that toils to redistribute the wealth of productive people. That there are college degrees for this scam is indicative of how degraded our higher educational system has become.
skh.pcola
re: "I'm sending this one to several of my more level-headed liberal friends with whom I share a playful, constant back-and-forth on political issues like these." Camlost
You are lucky. All of my liberal friends and acquaintances including family members refuse my e-mails on political topics after a short while. Only one friend, an ex-judge, who is a flaming liberal continues to e-mail me back and forth but he discards any political e-mails of mine. I have known this guy since before kindergarden and we by some twist of fate went to school from the start through college at the same schools. He has not dropped me I presume because we have so much time invested in each other. He considers my political views insane and refuses politely to debate any of them.
How do you manage to get liberals to continue to dialogue with you? I need answers to this because I just love to do battle with liberals but can not seem to interest them in joining battle. I just seem to make them mad and make enemies.
Dan Kurt
"OT: Steve, did you see this murder rate graph? The national murder rate is now at its lowest level in 100 years. I know you've argued against the abortion theory and I think you were agnostic about the lead theory. You've talked about ubiquitous security cameras and social media. There's also the incarceration theory. Any others? It's just so weird to see this area of improvement in the midst of general societal degeneration. "
IQs going up also, race by race, the gaps are still there. The Flynn effect: in addition to lead I think there is the general spread of improve nutrition, and the knowledge that women should not drink alcohol during pregnancy. I've seen recently that IQ's been going up steadily since at least 1910. Obviously Newton
had a high IQ. So perhaps he had good nutrition, a low lead environment, and his mother didn't drink. Now these benefits are spread increasingly to all of humanity.
Robert Hume
"I hope you like Polka"
Weird fact - "Polka" music is actually Czech in origin, and not Polish at all. Poles dance the "Mazurek".
Gee some Western white Christian orphans of wartime comrades were given a home in an allied Western white Christian community . This of course was at a time when Anglosphere nations only took in migrants who would be clearly easily assimilated
What's this got to do with current concerns ?
Would that be Anne Applebaum, wife of the Polish minister of foreign affairs?
Yeah? Just checking.
Pat,
A lot of El Paso's stats come from the fact that they're not counting the greater El Paso metro, just the actual El Paso, which drives down a lot of numbers. Those numbers also reflect what's reported, not so much what's happening. There's also the not so well known fact that El Paso is the nexus for federal law enforcement in the Southwest - you cannot throw a stone without hitting a badge, which helps give the city a very disproportionate police to civilian ratio. Finally, look at the stats for the small border towns along either sides of the border - that's where the action is happening. The municipal government of Columbus, NM seems to get replaced every two years after being arrested for corruption by the cartels. Say what you will, but the cartels know if they try their shit north of the line (for now!), they'll get smashed like the proverbial nail.
This post reminds me of this clip from "Miracle on 34th Street":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br2xtz47miU
Watch the movie "Once Were Warriors" for the most accurate depiction of what the Maori in modern New Zealand are like. I'd say they are much more like our Hispanics than any Polish immigrants would ever be.
Anonymous wrote " Because of Polish jokes, they think Poles are low IQ and this immigration success proves Richwine is wrong. But the so-called Polish jokes are really Goy jokes"
This is emphatically not true of Applebaum who is a notable slavophile and married to the foreign minister of Poland Radoslav Sikorski
and another (presumably) Anonymous wrote " Applebaum is one of those neocons who thinks Roman Polanski shouldn't have to face justice and voted for Obama.
She is NOT our friend. "
Free Polanski was not a popular neo-con position, on the contrary incarcerate Polanski was official editorial position of Nat Review, commentary etc and shared by iirc all writers in their stable. Free Polanski was espoused by the left , "Artists" are demi-gods contingent. Applebaums support for Polanski probably had more to do with supporting Polish government position which was pro-Polanski.
"Completely off-topic but the NYT has a story about suburban poverty growing, while NYC gets richer.
So that's where Bloomberg sent the Black people."
Our own leader "Rahm Emmauel" has been spreading the wealth and diversity to the surrounding suburbs. Of course the spreading of this diversity probably began with the Daley's when they realized that they were headed in the "Detroit direction". This is the way social cancer spreads.
Somehow our leaders came upon the realization that "Detroitification" can be stopped with the proper dispersion methods.
In the end itz all win win, as crime, schools etc become equalized in outcome.
"OT: Steve, did you see this murder rate graph? The national murder rate is now at its lowest level in 100 years. I know you've argued against the abortion theory and I think you were agnostic about the lead theory. You've talked about ubiquitous security cameras and social media. There's also the incarceration theory. Any others? It's just so weird to see this area of improvement in the midst of general societal degeneration"
I think there are four main factors:
1) Incarceration theory (as you mention)
2) Improving medical technology and emergency evac procedures that prevent many assaults from becoming homicides
3) Improved policing in major urban areas
4) Changing percentage of the population that is within the 15-35 year age range.
The last one is key. The murder stats are always shown per 100,000 inhabitants. The murder stats should be shown as per x citizens between the ages of 15-35. That I think would be more of an accurate measure, although you would still have to account for incarceration as well.
When we look at the high murder rates of the 1930's, for instance, we should consider that people generally died much younger, so the murders per 100,000 people are massively skewed in comparison to today.
Abortion may have had some effect on the lower crime rates, as there were fewer people born over the last 15-35 years than there would have been otherwise. But by that logic, we should just abort everyone, and eventually the murder rate would reach zero.
"I've always thought that the admirable intellectual performance of post-war Eastern Europe made a slam dunk case against the nurture hypothesis."
i agree, judean people's front. EE performance on the STEM front has been pretty OK in the 20th c. i see lots of people from my ultra-poor EE background winning intel science fair prizes, international STEM olympiad prizes, etc.
btw some EE countries are poorer than mexico in GDP/capita, etc., yet they enjoy 99% literacy rates (mexico's is more like 85%), produce inventors and scientists, etc. even the list of bulgarian inventions beats the hell out of the list of mexican inventions. especially humiliating considering that mexico's population is about the same as russia's!
--bbtp
To be fair, Applebaum makes no mention of Richwine or Mestizos. Why read into this any more than what it really is? This is a run of the mill human interest story.
https://current.box.com/s/oplvpkva72d6ev9h87vf
"Poles dance the "Mazurek"
Begun by (now gone) Ray Manzarek's Polish ancestors?
I saw the movie "Looper" last week. I, like millions of others, am a sucker for a time travel story.
That's because I have come to realize that I am stuck in time. That wasn't true before. Gibbon says that second century Rome was best time to have been alive. My guess is that in Rome under the Antonines they did not realize that they were living in the remote past. How could they? They didn't know what they didn't know.
But today we've all seen enough Sci-Fi movies to better know just when we are. We seem to be near the end. Humans have had their day. They will exit the stage soon.
Consider understanding IQ and the phenomenon of Moore's Law.
When I was in school forty years ago we thought that quite soon IQ would be boosted by science. Chuck said that it was unfair. He had studied so hard to learn as much as he had, while in a few years the new IQ boosted students would just fly through all those challenging courses that had taken.
That of course didn't happen. But something unexpected did happen - the world we live in today. I have a mid level Android tablet. I'm considerably smarter than my tablet - but just wait.
Why did we never develop ways to increase our IQs? It should be possible. We know that brain size has increased in our evolution. Why have we never tried to build people with bigger brains?
I was in the Nixon's 'War on Cancer'. Why no 'War to Grow Our Brains'. The reason, of course, is that brain improvement is strongly resisted. For decades most of the intellectual energy surrounding intelligence has been spent in arguing with those who said there was no such thing. This blog topic is just another example. It is astounding that in this day and age, IQ tests are still controversial.
Intelligence is known to be polygenic. It's possible that that doesn't matter, but it probably does. It is commonly estimated that understanding, mapping and manipulating our genome to boost IQ will take at least twenty years. I don't know, but I do know that if we don't try and try hard starting right now, it will be too late.
Twenty years is about thirteen doublings of the CPU's power. Unless Moore's Law grinds to a halt very soon, in 2033 my tablet will be smarter than I am.
While we were engaged in this silly dispute over the reality of racial differences in human intelligence, non-human intelligence zoomed past us.
I might be wrong about all this, but just to be safe I'm trying to always be polite to my tablet. I want to be on its good side when the balance shifts.
Albertosaurus
@ Dan Kurt:
How do you manage to get liberals to continue to dialogue with you? I need answers to this because I just love to do battle with liberals but can not seem to interest them in joining battle. I just seem to make them mad and make enemies.
Lol, yes. It's hard to find a liberal that either has a sense of humor or the ability to tolerate divergent opinions without screeching or throwing around the "R" word.
I'm lucky to have some older liberal friends who actually turned liberal late in life. Makes for fun repartee.
Anonymous said:Because of Polish jokes, they think Poles are low IQ and this immigration success proves Richwine is wrong. But the so-called Polish jokes are really Goy jokes.
Anne Applebaum is married to a Polish gentile politician (Radosław Sikorski), and her sons are named Aleksander and Tadeusz. She's been accused of anti-Russian sentiment, but anti-Polish sentiment? Please. She may be a neoconservative, but I doubt she thinks of her half-Polish children as "dumb Goyim."
I know that some of you mouth breathers see the history of Eastern Europe (and the world) as nothing more than and endless replay Jew versus Goy, but the truth is much more complicated and vastly more interesting.
-The Judean People's Front
FYI in my previous post I didn't mean to imply that anti-Polish sentiment is non-existent within the Ashkenazi community. Traditional Jewish xenophobia is real but it tends to be exaggerated in these parts. Additionally, both sides of the historical Russian/Polish rivalry have had Jewish partisans. In fact, the Jews of the Pale were often suspected of pro-Polish sympathies by the Russians and Ukranians, Pro-Russian sympathies by the Poles, and so on. I personally like the Slavs in general and am glad that they aren't killing each other these days.
As far as the article goes, it shouldn't be a shocker that displaced Poles would do well in a western society. They are after all Europeans, and they tend to be bright, warm, and morally upright. on a related note, I'm not sure why so many Brits express dislike of the Polish, but maybe it is just a way to express frustration with immigration without facing accusations of racism.
-The Judean People's Front
"I'm not sure why so many Brits express dislike of the Polish, but maybe it is just a way to express frustration with immigration without facing accusations of racism."
There are about 3 million unemployed in the UK (Govt figures for "employed" include people on unpaid training schemes with no job at the end of them). There are 4.25 million foreign nationals in employment in the UK, plus an unknown number working "off the books". In every market town in England you'll hear Polish and other Eastern European languages every day. People don't hate them, they resent them being here when so many Brit youth can't get jobs.
Standing in the checkout queue I often think that Poland must be empty.
"To be fair, Applebaum makes no mention of Richwine or Mestizos. Why read into this any more than what it really is? This is a run of the mill human interest story."
Lolzzololzzooollz
Wonder what Ms. Apfelbaum and other "contemporary thinkers" think about the Prussian diaspora and eventual erasure.
Oh, I forgot ;)
When I was a kid, I was surprised to learn that my grandparents spoke some Polish on top of their native German. They had helped manage estates with Polish workers, and they admired them. Later I studied the Polish language myself and grew to appreciate it, if not speak it well ;) Some great authors!
One grows old...
murder rate is down due to:
1) just plain locking up the violent criminals and keeping them locked up basically forever. US has by far, by far, the largest prison population in the world. see: hofstra university shooting due to parole violation.
2) almost police state like police presence in cities where that would be effective to keep the murder rate down. see: NYPD daily violation of 4th amendment.
3) dramatic improvements in emergency room response to handgun wounds which turn murders into attempted murders. see: new orleans mother's day parade shooting.
the inversion of the demographic age pyramid, where you have less young people for every old person now than you had 40 years ago, is also a factor. but take away the police presence, let the marginal prisoners out of jail, and you'll quickly see the violent crime rate go back up.
mexico and puerto rico don't have those things, and are in the middle of the most violent periods in their histories.
of debatable effect is the proliferation of concealed carry, which began in the early 90s, coincident with the peak of violent crime, but probably only having a minor reductive effect. what is certain is that it has exploded and now there are more handguns than ever out there, yet shootings are down.
JPF: mouth breathers
Hunsdon: You mad, bro?
@ Pat/Albertosaurus -
It does matter that intelligence is likely polygenic. It will time to map the genes involved, and it will make using that information somewhat more difficult. Pre-implantation embryo selection can be applied with just the knowledge of the important loci, but only beneficial alleles already possessed by the parents can be selected for. Most people aren't that smart, so at how many loci are they likely to have the optimal alleles? Actually editing code at thousands of sites across the genome is a big deal. You can't just insert a giant "plasmid" containing copies of the genes with the optimal alleles into the cell. Among other potential problems with that strategy, there would be too many transcribable copies of the genes. An extra whole chromosome 21 of those causes Down's syndrome. It's not going to be a trivial problem to edit DNA code in situ at thousands of loci even in embryos with relatively few cells. In birthed humans with orders of magnitude more cells, it will be an even more difficult problem.
"If tall = alpha dominance, then tall guys will have to fight off budding alphas."
My experience is the complete opposite. I've run into my share of tall guys (over 6'2") who thought they could push people around with impunity. Every single one of these guys who tried it with me either backed down when confronted or lacked enough actual fight experience to dispense with a 5'10" guy like me. Big tall guys usually get by on their stature, therefore they rarely have to physically engage, so many do not develop brawling skills.
The toughest guys I've run into tend to be those of average height or just above and are on the lean side. Guys like the actor Scott Glenn in his prime. They have what is described in fitness circles as excellent muscle recruitment, and can deliver astonishingly powerful blows relative to their muscle mass.
I know once you get into the territory of athletics this doesn't hold up. A 6'8" defensive end or boxer could probably beat the crap out of everybody shorter than them in their periphery, and likely dominate in their field of endeavor.
Hunsdon: You mad, bro?
No. I just think that only a mouth breather with a cartoonish world view would attribute anti-Polish animus to a woman who married a Polish politico, speaks fluent Polish, and gave her sons Polish names. If Applebaum were a gentile who married an influential Likudnik, spoke fluent modern Hebrew, and bore sons named Ari and Moshe, anyone who accused her of anti-semitism would be roundly denounced in these parts as a delusional, paranoid idiot.
Many lesser posters here seem to think that a Jewish surname is such damning proof of malevolence that it outweighs substantial evidence to the contrary.
- The Judean People's Front
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