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The pope lobbies oil execs while Scott Pruitt is a drilling evangelist

On Saturday, Pope Francis addressed a flock of oil executives on his home turf in Rome. Representatives from major energy companies like ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell gathered at the Vatican to hear El Papa’s impassioned plea: “There is no time to lose,” he told them. “We received the earth as a garden-home from the Creator; let us not pass it on to future generations as a wilderness.”

The pope is obsessed with the environment. In 2015, he wrote an encyclical in which he warned of the disastrous effects of climate change and called for a transition to renewable energy. This weekend, the pope re-emphasized the urgency of the situation, calling it a “challenge of epochal proportions.”

But Francis doesn’t have a monopoly on faith-based environmental rhetoric. Scott Pruitt, the scandal-ridden chief administrator of the EPA, thinks humanity’s epochal challenge presents some epic opportunities.

“Is true environmentalism ‘do not touch’? It’s like having a beautiful apple orchard that could feed the world, but the environmentalists put up a fence around the apple orchard and say, ‘Do not touch the apple orchard because it may spoil the apple orchard,’” Pruitt said on a conservative talk show last August.

This perspective relies on the idea that Earth’s natural resources are there for us to take advantage of. In fact, God mandates it. Conservative Evangelicals use a biblical passage to justify this approach: “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” Pruitt uses this worldview to justify opening up land for drilling.

Pruitt’s brand of Evangelicalism clashes with the pope’s on climate, too. Ralph Drollinger, a clergyman and leader of a White House biblical study group that Pruitt often attends, has written that acknowledging humanity’s role in climate change is downright dangerous:

“To think that Man can alter the earth’s ecosystem — when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind — is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man.”

Obviously, the pope does not agree with this approach. He’s said as much in the past. Christians who look at that famous passage in Bible about God giving man dominion over Earth’s creatures and read “dominion” as “exploitation” do not have the “correct interpretation of the Bible as intended by the Church,” he wrote in his encyclical.

How could these two men, both ostensibly working from the same primary source, have come to such wildly different conclusions? The only explanation I can think of is that God has good and bad days, like the rest of us. On good days, He sends Pope Francis bolts of renewable energy-powered inspiration, and on bad days, He sends the head of the EPA on frantic searches for fancy lotions. Who can blame Him?

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It’s Crunch Time for the Republican Party

Mother Jones

How the world works, 2017 edition:

July 2016: Republicans are united in outrage when James Comey declines to recommend charges against crooked Hillary Clinton despite mountains of evidence that she is totally guilty.

Today: Republicans are united in disappointment at Comey’s decision to harm poor Hillary Clinton by breaching agency guidelines against commenting on investigations and interfering with an upcoming election. Thank God he’s finally been fired.

The official story about Comey’s firing goes something like this. On April 25, Rod Rosenstein was confirmed as deputy attorney general. It takes him less than two weeks to put together a memo arguing that: Comey was wrong to usurp the attorney general’s prosecutorial authority. He was wrong to hold a “derogatory” press conference about Clinton. He was wrong three months later to claim that keeping quiet about the Huma Abedin emails amounted to “concealing” them. He shouldn’t have said anything on October 28. Rosenstein concludes by saying that everyone from the janitor to the pope agrees that this was obviously egregious behavior on Comey’s part. Within hours, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommends Comey be fired and Trump immediately announces Comey’s termination. Comey hears about it on TV.

Needless to say, there is precisely nothing new in any of this. As Rosenstein says, these criticisms of Comey have been obvious from the start, and Trump could have used them as justification for firing Comey at any time. But he didn’t. Until now.

The difference between then and now, of course, is that then Comey was helping bury Hillary Clinton, and now Comey is investigating ties between Russia and Trump. So only now is it time for Comey to go.

So far, there are a tiny handful of Republicans who are “troubled” by Comey’s firing. Will they go any farther? Will any more Republicans join them? Or is everyone going to take one for the team and pretend that Comey really was fired because of how badly he treated Hillary Clinton?

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It’s Crunch Time for the Republican Party

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders has accepted an invitation to speak at the Vatican for a conference on social justice next week. The April 15 event, which will be hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, is scheduled to cover a number of the Democratic presidential hopeful’s signature campaign issues, including income inequality and the environment.

Sanders’ appearance at Vatican City will come just days before the New York primary on April 19.

“I am delighted to have been invited by the Vatican to a meeting on restoring social justice and environmental sustainability to the world economy,” Sanders announced in a statement on Friday.

“Pope Francis has made clear that we must overcome ‘the globalization of indifference’ in order to reduce economic inequalities, stop financial corruption, and protect the natural environment. That is our challenge in the United States and in the world.”

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

Mother Jones

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A leading group of climate change skeptics is concerned that paganism is creeping into the Catholic Church. That was the message delivered by Gene Koprowski, director of marketing at the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, at a press conference in Philadelphia Thursday.

The event, which Heartland had billed as a challenge to Pope Francis’ “views on global warming and the nature of capitalism,” was recorded by the liberal group American Bridge. Talking Points Memo first reported on the video Friday. You can watch an excerpt above.

The pope, who is visiting the United States next week, has called on policymakers to take action to control climate change and has criticized the excesses of free market capitalism. According to Koprowski, when Heartland staffers first began reading news stories about the pope speaking out on climate, they were “shocked that the pope was buying into this left-wing political craze that is global warming.” So in April, Heartland sent a delegation of climate skeptics to Rome to offer a “prebuttal” to a Vatican climate summit in an attempt to change the pope’s mind.

“When the Vatican leapt into the controversy on climate science, we were initially under the impression that His Holiness was a victim of bad advice from bad advisers,” Koprowski said Thursday. “There were people from the UN who were population control advocates. There were people from other left-wing groups who were advising the pontiff.”

But Koprowski said that after the pope released his landmark encyclical calling for action on climate change, he began to suspect that “something more may be afoot.” Koprowski then invoked pagan rituals and “nature worship” that he said were “seeping into the Church” during the Middle Ages, adding: “I’m wondering, as a scholar, if pagan forms are returning to the Church this day.”

Koprowski concluded: “I would say, contrary to some of the criticism, that this is not communism that has entered the church. It’s, rather, paganism.”

Heartland and Koprowski did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Conservative Group Blasts the Pope: "Paganism" Has "Entered the Church"

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Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

Pope’s climate encyclical divides American opinion

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

A clear-cut majority of swing-state voters agreed in a recent Quinnipiac poll: Pope Francis was right to call on the world to do more to address climate change. There is, however, a deep divide along party lines – Democrats and Republicans split on the topic by a margin of more than 40 percent in every state polled.

Overall, 62 percent of voters polled in Colorado, 65 percent in Iowa, and 64 percent in Virginia said they supported the pope’s encyclical on climate change. It’s likely more than a coincidence that those percentages matched up almost identically with the percentage of voters that Quinnipiac found accept the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

But broken down by party, the gap was stark. In Colorado, for example, 93 percent of Democrats agreed with the pope’s climate message, but only 38 percent of Republicans.

Other polling by Gallup released this week shows that the pope’s favorability rating among Americans dropped from 76 percent in February 2014 to 59 percent this month. He said a lot of things during that time that could rub conservatives the wrong way, including embracing aspects of evolution. But his strongest campaign yet, which has come to the fore in recent months, is for action on climate change. It got the angrier aspects of the Republican base worked up; Rush Limbaugh labeled the encyclical a “Marxist climate rant.” Francis’ unfavorability rating increased from 9 percent in 2014 to 16 percent this month, according to Gallup.

The pope is not a politician, so he doesn’t really have to worry about polls. But in theory, his encyclical and other pro-climate-action stances by Christian groups have the power to make inroads with conservatives who are more likely to put the opinions of their faith leaders over those of both scientists and politicians. That, at least, is what many climate hawks have hoped — but the party split observed by the Quinnipiac folks raises questions about whether that will work.

The pope is coming to the U.S. in September to speak before Congress and tour the Northeast. That could put some Catholic climate deniers in a tricky spot, especially prominent Republican ones. Don’t bet on that visit mending the gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of his activism.

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Three Things I Don’t Care About

Mother Jones

There are lots of topics I don’t write about (or write very little about), and normally nobody notices. Or, if they do, they don’t know why I haven’t written about any particular one of them. Maybe it’s just uninteresting to me. Maybe I’ve gotten temporarily bored by it. Maybe I don’t know enough about it. Maybe I can’t think of anything interesting to say that hasn’t already been said. Could be lots of reasons.

That said, here are three things I haven’t written about, and probably won’t:

Should we call Dylann Roof a terrorist? In the dim past, back when we used to blog earnestly about such things, I always argued that this was a silly distraction. You can call members of Al-Qaeda terrorists or extremists or militants or whatever. For Republicans, this eventually became some kind of weird litmus test designed to show that Democrats were appeasers, and it was ridiculous. Ditto today, coming from the Democratic side. Call Roof a terrorist if you want, or call him a madman or a racist psychopath. I don’t care.

The pope on climate change. I’m not Catholic. I’m not even Christian. Pope Francis seems like a relatively good guy as popes go, but I don’t care what he thinks about much of anything. I’m certainly not going to opportunistically start now just because he happens to be saying something I agree with.

Donald Trump. Oh please.

That’s it. We’ll soon be back to our regularly scheduled program of stuff I do write about.

IMPORTANT NOTE! I almost forget to add a caveat that’s critical in the blogosphere: this is just me. Everyone else should feel free to write about all these things. This post should not be taken as a personal condemnation of anyone who chooses to do so. First Amendment. De gustibus. Etc.

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Three Things I Don’t Care About

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Pope Francis’ Climate Change Encyclical Just Leaked. Here’s What It Says.

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Pope Francis will this week call for changes in lifestyles and energy consumption to avert the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem” before the end of this century, according to a leaked draft of a papal encyclical. In a document released by an Italian magazine on Monday, the pontiff will warn that failure to act would have “grave consequences for all of us.”

Francis also called for a new global political authority tasked with “tackling…the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions.” His appeal echoed that of his predecessor, pope Benedict XVI, who in a 2009 encyclical proposed a kind of super-UN to deal with the world’s economic problems and injustices.

According to the lengthy draft, which was obtained and published by L’Espresso magazine, the Argentinean pope will align himself with the environmental movement and its objectives. While accepting that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope will also state that climate change is mostly a man-made problem.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming, or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote in the draft. “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases…given off above all because of human activity.”

The pope will also single out those obstructing solutions. In an apparent reference to climate-change deniers, the draft states: “The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”

The leak has frustrated the Vatican’s elaborate rollout of the encyclical on Thursday. Its release had been planned to come before the pope’s trip to the US, where he is due to address the United Nations as well as a joint meeting of Congress.

Journalists were told they would be given an early copy on Thursday morning and that it would be released publicly at noon following a press conference. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who wrote an early draft of the encyclical, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a noted climate scientist in Germany, were expected to attend the press conference. On Monday evening, the Vatican asked journalists not to publish details of the draft, emphasizing that it was not the final text. A Vatican official said he believed the leak was an act of “sabotage against the pope.”

The draft is not a detailed scientific analysis of the global warming crisis. Instead, it is the pope’s reflection of humanity’s God-given responsibility as custodians of the Earth.

At the start of the draft essay, the pope wrote, the Earth “is protesting for the wrong that we are doing to her, because of the irresponsible use and abuse of the goods that God has placed on her. We have grown up thinking that we were her owners and dominators, authorized to loot her. The violence that exists in the human heart, wounded by sin, is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

He immediately makes clear, moreover, that unlike previous encyclicals, this one is directed to everyone, regardless of religion. “Faced with the global deterioration of the environment, I want to address every person who inhabits this planet,” the pope wrote. “In this encyclical, I especially propose to enter into discussion with everyone regarding our common home.”

According to the leaked document, the pope will praise the global ecological movement, which has “already traveled a long, rich road and has given rise to numerous groups of ordinary people that have inspired reflection.”

In a surprisingly specific and unambiguous passage, the draft rejects outright “carbon credits” as a solution to the problem. It says they “could give rise to a new form of speculation and would not help to reduce the overall emission of polluting gases.” On the contrary, the pope wrote, it could help “support the super-consumption of certain countries and sectors.”

The document is not Francis’s first foray into the climate debate. The pontiff, who was elected in 2013, has previously noted his disappointment with the failure to reach a global accord on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, chiding climate negotiators for having a “lack of courage” during the last major talks held in Lima, Peru.

Francis is likely to want to influence Republicans in Washington with his remarks. Most Republicans on Capitol Hill deny climate change is a man-made phenomenon and have staunchly opposed regulatory efforts by the Obama administration.

The encyclical will make for awkward reading among some Catholic Republicans, including John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House. While many Republicans have praised the pope, it will not be unprecedented for them to make a public break with the pontiff on the issue of global warming.

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Pope wants you to stop popping out babies — but don’t even think about using birth control

Pope wants you to stop popping out babies — but don’t even think about using birth control

By on 20 Jan 2015commentsShare

Yesterday, in a huge change of position for Ye Olde Catholic Churche, Pope “Swaggy F.” Francis spoke out against people reproducing “like rabbits.”

From BBC:

He replied with an unexpected turn of phrase: “Some people think that — excuse my expression here — that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits.”

“No. Parenthood is about being responsible. This is clear.”

Thanks, Papa! Abandoning the “be fruitful and multiply” and “every sperm is sacred” view of reproduction is a crucial step toward a more reasonable approach to population growth. And since addressing climate change also means ensuring that those disproportionately affected by it — women, minorities, people in developing countries — aren’t continuously trapped in cycles of poverty and suffering, we are especially pleased to see the Leviathan-esque Catholic church take a slow, creaky turn in the right direction.

However, an excellent way to two-fer-one your climate- and gender-equality goals is to give women access to contraception and reproductive healthcare. Around the world, an estimated 222 million women want but don’t have access to modern methods of birth control. So: Where does the Pope stand on birth control?

Still “firmly against,” per the BBC report. No surprises there, as his position is consistent with the rest of the Church: In the U.S., bishops are even trying to abolish sterilization procedures — the second-most popular form of birth control in the country, with 15.5 percent of reproductive-aged women choosing to get their tubes tied — from Catholic hospitals. With this and other forms of contraception off the table for practicing Catholics, that leaves so-called “natural” methods — or as I like to call it, the “Pull Out and Pray Plan.” These are not nearly as dependable as long-acting contraceptives or hormonal birth control.

To declare — after millennia of advocating for the exact opposite — that people stop popping out kids willy-nilly while simultaneously refusing to support modern contraception is the equivalent of asking someone to build a house with their hands tied behind their back. It makes absolutely zero sense. In the race to catch up to women of the 21st century, it looks like the Catholic Church got stuck somewhere around 1912.

Cool! At this rate, we’ll see you guys around 2400 — but all life on Earth may have sizzled away by then, so maybe we won’t see you at all.

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Pope Francis: No Catholic need to breed like ‘rabbits’

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Pope Francis: Climate Change Is Real and Humans Are Causing It

Mother Jones

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Pope Francis made headlines Thursday when he told reporters that he believes climate change is largely caused by humans. “I don’t know if it human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face,” said Francis, according to the Associated Press. “We have in a sense taken over nature.”

But how does the pope know that humans are responsible for most of the unprecedented warming that has occurred in recent years? How can he be sure it wasn’t caused by solar cycles? Or volcanoes? Or “global wobbling“? Here’s a hint: The AP mentions that some of Francis’ top aides have recently noted “that there is clear-cut scientific evidence that climate change is driven by human activity.”

That’s right. Unlike much of the US Congress, the pope seems seems to be relying on science to inform his opinions about climate change. And indeed, his remarks Thursday echoed the scientific consensus on the issue. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, recently declared it “extremely likely”—that is, at least 95 percent certain—that “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”

Still, all the science in the world won’t help much if we don’t actually do something to reign in the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the problem. And the pope is pushing for action. According to the AP, Francis criticized world leaders for failing to accomplish enough at a recent climate conference in Lima, Peru, and he called for them to be “more courageous” when they reconvene in Paris later this year.

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Pope Francis: Climate Change Is Real and Humans Are Causing It

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The Pope Thinks Climate Change Is a Major Threat. So Do American Catholics.

Mother Jones

Pope Francis, the leader the Catholic Church, is closing out 2014 in his typically headline-grabbing fashion. He used a traditional Christmas address to issue a scathing takedown of the political squabbling that infects Vatican bureaucracy, and he was also credited as a key backroom player in the thawing of US-Cuba relations.

Next on his list? Climate change.

Over the weekend, the Guardian reported that the pope will issue the first-ever comprehensive set of Vatican teachings on climate change, in the form of an encyclical—or “papal letter”—sent to churches worldwide. He will also personally lobby for climate action action in a series of high profile meetings ahead of the all-important UN global warming negotiations in Paris next year. From the Guardian:

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated…by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners. According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

A papal letter “is among the highest levels of teaching authority for a pope,” said Dan Misleh, executive director of the Catholic Climate Covenant. These edicts “always make news, because they are rare and comprehensive,” he added.

Singling out climate change is also significant. “It is the first time ever an encyclical letter has been written just on the environment,” Misleh said. “The faithful, including bishops, and all of us who adhere to the Catholic faith, are supposed to read it and examine our own consciences.”

Mobilizing believers to embrace climate action could be a very big deal, given the sheer number of people who identify as Catholic in the US—around 75 million—he said. “If we had just a fraction of those acting on climate change, it would be bigger than the networks of some of the biggest environmental groups in the US,” he said. “That could help change the way we live our lives, and impact our views on public policy.”

The impact would be felt beyond Catholicism too, said Mary Evelyn Tucker, director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. She called the forthcoming letter “one of the most important documents on the moral implications of what we are doing to our planet.” In particular, Tucker said, the document “will contain compelling teachings on environmental justice for the poor and those who are victims of climate disruption around the world.”

But would America’s Catholics welcome climate advocacy from the pope? Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute and the American Academy of Religion suggests that many would.

The survey asks a series of questions about the environment and religion in an attempt to discern how faith impacts our thinking on science, current events, and policy. The biggest takeaway when it was released in November was that nearly half of Americans say natural disasters are a sign of “the end times,” as described in the Bible. But there are other, more detailed findings about individual religions, too. The researchers break down the results by religious and racial group: White evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, black Protestants, white Catholics, Hispanic Catholics, Jewish Americans, other non-Christians, and “religiously unaffiliated.”

And indeed, most Catholics seem to agree with the pope that climate change poses a serious threat. Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

Nearly three-quarters of Hispanic Catholics surveyed agree that climate change constitutes a “crisis” or a “major problem.” The same is true for a majority (53 percent) of white Catholic respondents. Of the groups surveyed, Jews are the most concerned about climate change, with nearly 80 percent calling it a “crisis” or a “major problem.” On the other end of the spectrum, a majority (54 percent) of white evangelicals see climate change as only a minor problem, or not a problem at all.
Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of Catholics surveyed said climate change is the “most pressing” environmental issue we face. That’s more than white mainline Protestants and evangelicals, but less than black Protestants or those who are unaffiliated with a religion.
The pope’s climate message is likely to resonate with what’s happening already at a grassroots level in churches, as least in Hispanic communities, according to the survey. Seven-in-10 Hispanic Catholics say their clergy discus climate change often (22 percent) or sometimes (48 percent). Hispanic Catholics are also more likely than any other group surveyed to say their congregation has sponsored climate change-related activities, like group discussions or educational programs on the topic.
Interestingly, there’s wide agreement that acting now on climate change will matter economically. Majorities of all groups surveyed—including 69 percent of Hispanic Catholics and 63 percent of white Catholics—agree that dealing with global warming now will help prevent economic calamities in the future.

The pope’s climate plans follow a call by prominent Catholic bishops to end the use of fossil fuels and secure a global agreement to fight climate change. “As the church, we see and feel an obligation for us to protect creation and to challenge the misuse of nature,” declared one of the statement’s authors, Monsignor Salvador Piñeiro García-Calderón, the Archbishop of Ayacucho, during the recent climate conference in Lima, Peru. “We felt this joint statement had to come now because Lima is a milestone on the way to Paris, and Paris has to deliver a binding agreement.”

It’s also not the first time Pope Francis has advocated tough climate action. Ahead of the Lima meeting, the pontiff wrote a letter to Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s minister of the environment and the host of the meeting, to urge action. “The time to find global solutions is running out,” wrote the Pope. “We can find adequate solutions only if we act together and unanimously.”

Climate change, he added, will “affect all of humanity, especially the poorest and future generations. What’s more, it represents a serious ethical and moral responsibility.”

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