Planetary death sentence?

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Apr 23

RE: Climate tension: UN chief chides Biden, other world leaders. AP story, published in the Hamilton Spectator 21 Apr 23.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres regurgitates arrant nonsense when he says that expanded oil and gas drilling amount to a “death sentence” for the planet.  No serious scientist says this.  The scientific portion of the IPCC AR6 report doesn’t say this.  Guterres spouts political nonsense that originated in the 1980s.

What does a death sentence for the planet even mean?  We know from physics that the earth will continue orbiting the sun regardless of its atmospheric conditions, and whether or not there is life on this planet.  So, the planet earth will be fine.  As for life on earth, the greatest explosion of life on earth occurred 500 million years ago when atmospheric CO2 was 6,000 ppm.  Over its long history, the earth has already done the experiment, and we know what happens.

The destruction of the fossil fuel business became a goal of the environmentalist movement in the 1980s.  Between 1989 and 1996, funding for global warming research expanded 15 fold.  In the early 1990s, nobody called themselves a “climate scientist;” but with so rapid expansion of funding of “climate research” research grants were given to study the effects of climate change on cockroach reproduction!  Anybody who came out against climate nonsense had their funding cut off, and journals which published such articles saw their editorial staff fired and replaced.  Al Gore got rich.

To preserve his reputation, no serious scientist is going to say what Guterres is saying; but to eat, and since his next research grant depends upon the good will of a bureaucrat or some environmentalist group, he’s not going to loudly deny it either.

Plenty of forecasts of doom have come and gone, but eventually, the false cry of “wolf” is going to become apparent to even the densest newspaper editor.  I expect that by 2028, the reckoning will come, and the climate cult will explode.

That $13 billion give-away to Volkswagen is a complete waste of money.  Even if you believe the climate change nonsense, China, India, and Russia do not.

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They’re lucky to be here

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Apr 23

RE: Islamophobia widespread in Canada, Senate committee study.  CP story by Fakiha Baig.  The Hamilton Spectator 20 Apr 23.

Little contributes to Islamophobia in Canada more than Islamic ingratitude of Canada.  Let’s compare the fate of Black Muslim women in a Muslim country, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Afghanistan to their miserable existence in Canada.

In these Muslim countries, in addition to being subjected to morality police enforcing Islamic morality laws, a Black Muslim woman would be subject to the misogynist rules of Islam, and be held in contempt for being Black; and subject, therefore, also to enslavement.  In Canada, the treatment of Black Islamic women ranges from sympathy, through indifference, to hostility; but hostility as compared to what?  White men of certain political persuasions get treated with fierce hostility.

Only in Western civilization can a Black Muslim woman complain publicly about her plight and be taken seriously.

An examination of the people mentioned in the story indicates anti-Western self-dealing.  The writer is Fakiha Baig, and the committee chair is Salma Ataullahjan, not exactly Anglo names.

If a Black Muslim woman wants to avoid anti-Islamic reactions, she should ditch the tribal dress and the hijab.  Blend in.  Look like you’re trying to be Western.  Shoving your difference into people’s faces doesn’t always produce a friendly reaction.  And bellyaching about Western society wins a Muslim few points in Canada.

Nobody’s asking a Black Muslim woman to give up her religious beliefs, but she ought to consider the alternatives before she criticizes her host society.

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That’s not what it’s for

Vincent J. Curtis

19 Apr 23

RE: Special military unit needed to help with climate emergencies.  Op-ed by Trevor Greene, a Canadian journalist, wounded Afghan veteran, and author.  The Hamilton Spectator 19 Apr 23.

Some ideas are so dumb they never seem to die.  One of these is that the Canadian Armed Forces should be dedicated to purposes other than fighting wars.  The call for the CAF to stand up a unit especially dedicated to fighting climate emergencies such as wildfires, floods, and massive storms wouldn’t see the light of day but for the cachet of “climate change.”  The same argument could be made on its merits and without invoking climate change as a remote, far-fetched justification.

In the first place, there is no climate change.  What we observe lies within the ambit of normal extremes of weather; you just need a memory long enough to recall the last time a similar disaster occurred.  Secondly, the CAF already maintains certain disaster relieving units, such as air-sea rescue squadrons.  Thirdly, the CAF is already flexible enough to respond to disasters, such as the Quebec ice storm of 1998.  The problem lies in how much expressive preparedness is required for civilian disasters, and why does the money have to come from the defense budget?  People ought to be looking to their local government first, not to distant Ottawa for immediate help.

Lastly, you don’t want a Federal government with the power to intervene with soldiers in a provincial matter unasked, and when Ottawa thinks it knows better and can act faster than the provincial government.  The opportunity for constitutional mischief is obvious, and what if the locals refuse to cooperate with CIMIC?  Soldiers answer to their chain of command, that is, from Ottawa, and don’t take orders and instruction from civilians.

Bad idea, often refuted, and without justification.

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I published a paper about 20 years ago entitled, “Human Security and the Canadian Armed Forces.”  It’s still kicking around the internet, and covers the brilliant idea that the CAF should be used for purposes other than war.

 

Leadership, Part 1

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Oct 22

The changes to dress regulation sparked a lot of discussion concerning leadership and change.  I’ve seen some of new-age philosophy and mysticism invoked to justify this or that opinion concerning leading change and leading the latest generation of young, and not-so-young, Canadians in the times ahead.

What is leadership?  Leadership is the art of influencing human behavior so as to accomplish the mission in the manner desired by the leader.  Leadership is distinct from management, in that management is a science (not an art) of the employment of men and material in the economical and effective accomplishment of the mission.

It seems worthwhile, and is often profitable, to review how we got to this pass.  What has the CAF said about leadership in the past so that it can be compared to what is said now?  So, pretend this is 1973, not 2023, and let’s take a trip down memory lane on the CAF’s historical view of leadership.

After Word War 2, the Canadian Army (as it then was, a separate service) set about to organize and systematize its approach to leadership development.  The work, which occurred in 1964-65, was undertaken by the Directorate of Training and the Directorate of Personnel Selection, and resulted in the CFP 131 series of publications.  Right out of the gate, these pams observe that theoretical instruction alone is insufficient to produce leaders; much learning had to be done by doing.  In practice, junior leaders had to be delegated real authority and accept responsibility on the job.

The work on CFP 131 went surprisingly deep.  It began with the recognition that the people receiving this instruction were raised in the traditions of western civilization.  It went into the philosophies of John Locke (1632-1704) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Each philosophy was evaluated for its contributions to leadership theory.  Locke’s was praised for being common sensical, undogmatic, practical, that it assumed all men were equal at birth, of the importance of education, that it avoided emphasis on will and emotion, and that happiness was the chief end of man.  Locke’s influence on North American culture was strong, meaning a Lockean approach to problems resonated in the intellectual plane with the likely members of the army.

Kant’s philosophy was considered valid for the study of military leadership because it stressed the importance of will and emotion; that it aimed more at a heroic ‘ethic’ than happiness as the end of man.  It saw the volunteer as motivated by will and emotion and a heroic ethic.  Kant’s philosophy was regarded as important for its stress on a moral imperative, idealism, for its emphasis on the human intellect, for its belief in the importance of the individual, for its ethic of duty, striving, sacrifice, and the exertion of the will, but was criticized because it was rationalistic and dogmatic in its assertion of “truth.”

These two philosophical traditions could be combined harmoniously in a leader, who must not only give orders within a Lockean tradition, but encourage, persuade, and inspire in the Kantian tradition, with its emphasis on intellect, duty, striving, and sacrifice.

Out of these two philosophical approaches, the army study found that a leader was self-activated and dynamic, motivated by an ethic of duty, and had a high personal moral standard.  He identified objectives, initiated action, set things in motion, and accepted responsibility for the outcome.

(I can almost feel the hackles rising for my use of the word ‘man’ instead of a more general noun.  But this is 1973, remember?  In those days, when Centurions still roamed the plains, there wasn’t a single woman in an infantry battalion, save maybe in the BOR.)

With this as a philosophical understanding of the psychology of the individual, the study turned to the then modern works on leadership, and in particular to the works of Profession Ralph Stodgill of Ohio State University, who published a seminal book in 1948 on leadership.  Thus opened the Leader-Follower-Situation theory of leadership in the army.

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Lacking in analysis

Vincent J. Curtis

15 Apr 23

RE: McMaster hunger strikers and Mac Divest got it right. O-ed by James S. Quinn, Professor of Biology, McMaster University, and chair of Mac GreenInvest.

It is remarked of teachers that you can tell a teacher, but you can’t tell him much.  Such appears to be the case with Mac Professor of Biology James S. Quinn.  He writes that Mac hunger strikers and Mac Divest got it right because they agree with him, the head of Mac GreenInvest.  He’s been on the divest kick since 2014.

Quinn’s underlying assumption is that by adopting the heroic measures he recommends McMaster University can save the world from global warming.  Let that sink in.  China and India don’t figure into this thinking, making his entire position ludicrous.  Never mind that the panic is over a rise in CO2 concentration from 0.035% to 0.042% in the atmosphere.

Professor Quinn opens his piece with this statement, “No matter which way you cut it, the supply of, and demand for fossil fuels is at the root of climate change.”  Later, he uses the more honest ‘global warming’ in place of the non-falsifiable ‘climate change’.  Climate change replaced ‘global warming in the debate in 2005 after the pause in global warming made the proposition that rising CO2 levels would cause the atmosphere to warm embarrassing.  Hence the switch to the non-falsifiable.

He says that fossil fuel companies knew by the 1980s that their product causes global warming.  Well, they couldn’t know that because one can’t “know” what isn’t true.  He says that profiting from fossil fuel extraction is wrong, but doesn’t explain why.  His moral judgement goes unexamined and unexplained, and a Marxist would find profiting from any investment to be wrong.

The fact is, the globe isn’t warming, though an El Nino event is expected soon.  There is no correlation of CO2 levels with warming, or anything else weather related despite what you read.  And a scientist’s skepticism ought to be aroused if he learned of:

-          The fraud in the hockey stick graph, exposed by Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick;

-          The climategate emails;

-          All the failed forecasts, like the Arctic Ocean being ice-free in summer, and that California would never see snow again;

-          The years long pauses in global warming despite rising CO2 levels;

-          NOAA’s data tampering that has it cold when glaciers are retreating and hot when glaciers are advancing; and

-          Previous waves of scaremongering: the coming ice age of the 1970s, and the danger of the ozone hole over Antarctica (still open 36 years after the Montreal Protocol.)

The global warming hypothesis is a heresy of science, and is believed in by some with the full ardour of a heresy.  Moralistic investing of other people’s money that keeps them from making money is itself morally wrong.

When a biologist offers authoritative positions on investments, morals, and is completely wrong about global warming, you can judge for yourself the value of that “authority.”

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The disaster of ESG banking

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Apr 23

RE: RBC is No. 1 in funding of fossil fuels.  By Kevin Orland of Bloomberg. Published in the Hamilton Spectator 14 Apr 23

I suspect that the claim by an outfit calling itself “the Rainforest Action Network” is untrue when it says that the Royal Bank of Canada is number one in the world in “funding of fossil fuels.”  I suspect that there are banks in China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE with bigger fossil fuel portfolios than the RBC, but when social activism is at stake, truth doesn’t matter.

Let me deplore any violence against RBC employees and damage to property this ridiculous allegation may provoke, which it is intended to provoke.

Think of the poor people who put money into banks with high ESG scores, like Silicon Valley Bank, or Credit Suisse.  Those banks invested their depositors’ money in safe, secure U.S government bonds, which collapsed in value as interest rates rose.  The oil business is healthy; the companies are making big profits; their stocks are appreciating in value, they pay good dividends, and they pay their creditors.  That’s the sort of investment you want your bank to be making – if you want your money to be safe.

There’s no use in punishing RBC for making good investments, because there are plenty of other banks around the world eager to invest money in profitable enterprises, and they aren’t subject to harassment by social activists who are taken in by the “climate crisis” hoax.  Even if it were true, China and India are going to seal out collective fates anyway.

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It’s not dirt he’s shoveling

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Apr 23

RE: Giving away someone else’s history and heritage.  Op-ed by Paul Racher.  The Hamilton Spectator, 14 Apr 23.  Racher describes himself as an archeologist who lives in Burlington, ON.

As an archeologist for 35 years, Paul Racher has shoveled a lot of dirt in his day.  But it isn’t dirt he’s shoveling in his opinion piece at reference.

He talks about indigenous heritage.  Well, which indigenous?  The Niagara area was known as the “land between the lakes” and was subject of the 1702 “Dish with One Spoon Wampum” treaty between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the Mohawks.  The Mississaugas sold this land, lock, stock, and barrel to the British Crown in three tranches: in 1781, in the Haldimand Purchase of 1785, and the rest of it in 1792.

The Mississaugas were found by the British to be the Indians “in possession” of the land at the time.  But prior to 1648 the land could be said to have belonged to the Huron Indians, who were massacred along with Jesuit Fr Jean de Brebeuf by the Mohawks near Midland, Ontario, that year.  The Mississaugas moved into the vacant territory.

Hence, there are no legitimate indigenous with whom to consult on archeological artifacts, which are all found on the surface because the Indians built no stone structures with foundations.  After his lengthy discourse on the qualification required to be an archeologist, why Racher would have us consult with non-experts on the preservation of finds that aren’t theirs either remains a mystery.

When the British discover new Roman ruins and artifacts in the Cotswolds, they don’t consult with Romans at random to determine how those discoveries should be handled; they don’t even consult with the city council of Rome; but that is roughly what Paul Racher is proposing we do with finds of indigenous arrowheads in Niagara, as if those finds wasn’t ours too.

Racher expresses romantic notion that we can safely place our futures into the gentle hands of who-knows-what indigenous, granting them a new power of veto over anything we do.  That is not democratic, and flies in the face of law and the lessons of history.  Even to establish “consultation” will require the indigenous to organize themselves into creating a body that can speak definitively on their behalf.  If we’re going to play the us versus them game, it’s not up to us to solicit the opinions of individual indigenous and take that as definitive.

I’ll close with a rebuttal of another, offensive, statement Racher made, “Your heritage sets the initial conditions for your identity.  It’s who you are before you are even ‘you.’”  The human mind, at birth, is a tabula rasa; a blank slate; it has no innate ideas, and hence it is impossible for a heritage to be “who you are before you are even you.”  The idea of an innate cultural heritage is a racist fantasy, but the concept finds utility when attacking the success and, ironically, the progress of Western civilization.  If ‘inherent cultural heritage’ were true, Western civilization would be impossible, as would cultural progress.

Paul Racher speaks contemptuously of “white settler Canadians,” and it makes you wonder why he remains one.  The question of where he would “return” to (never having been there) has likely never occurred to him.  And if he were to “return” to, say, Britain, wouldn’t that make him a “settler” there too?

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Banned chemicals found in toys

Vincent J. Curtis

12 Apr 23

RE: Banned chemicals found in kids’ toys.  News item by Kevin Jiang of the Toronto Star.  Published in the Hamilton Spectator 12 Apr 23.

How could banned chemicals be put into kids’ toys you ask?  Because the chemicals in question aren’t banned everywhere.  As chlorinated paraffins became progressively eliminated by government regulators, manufacturing of the products which need them moved to Asia.  Government regulators thought they were eliminating a threat, and all they did was eliminate jobs in North America.

Parents should not be alarmed by such reports.  There never was a definitive study that established a link between cancer and chlorinated paraffin.  Oh, there were lots of dark hints, and worrisome speculation starting in the 1970s, and by the 1980s, government regulators started banning chemicals on the basis of “precaution.”  Industry didn’t resist at first because there were alternatives, more expensive to be sure; but in a time of inflation it was easy to raise prices.

Eventually, the chain length under consideration got so long that even the regulators couldn’t justify pushing a ban in the face of growing industrial resistance.  And so short chain chlorinated paraffins remain banned here out of precaution based on nothing but old fearmongering and speculation.  And Asia benefited, because that’s where the big manufacturers went when the regulatory climate here got too crazy and expensive.

Parents need not fear exposing their kids to cancer causing chemicals, because, for one thing, those chemicals are locked in the material and are not easily removed.

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As you can probably tell, I lived through this. I remember electricians telling me that they worked up to their elbows in PCBs before that chemical was banned.  PCB were commonly used in big electrical transformers back in the day.

Ethics Commissioner on trial too

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Apr 23

RE: Premier under ethics probe related to COVID-19 prosecution.  CP story by Dean Bennett

In a representative democracy, elected representatives are supposed to represent their constituents. - including constituents in trouble and in need of help.  Politicians are a special breed of people because they have to interact with the Hoi polloi, which includes the unsavory and people they don’t personally like.

Modern, exquisite tastes of what constitutes political ethics are themselves corrupting of both politics and ethics.  Accusing the opposition of behaving unethically is an effective political weapon at the moment because most people in the electorate aren’t that familiar with ethics in high politics and take the accusation as a serious matter.  The accusation might itself be unethical because the accusation of unethical behavior was levelled unethically for purely political reasons, like affecting the outcome of a forthcoming election.

Hence, I find the leaked conversation between Premier Danielle Smith and Pastor Artur Pawlowski, a well-known agitator and character in Calgary, to be entirely proper.  He’s a constituent, he’s in trouble, and Smith believes that prosecutions for violations of COVID-19 regulations are wrong and ought not to proceed.  And she’s the Premier. Pawlowski is an Albertan looking for a redress of grievance from his government.  Moreover, in her candid conversation Smith promised to do nothing illegal, that is not to act beyond the powers of a Premier.

So, where lies the unethical conduct?  Does it lie in taking the call from a constituent in legal trouble?  If the Ethics Commission does hold that, then representative democracy takes a terrible blow; for then only the clean are permitted to be listened to when asking for a redress of grievance from their government.  And in today’s politics, if you aren’t Left, you aren’t clean.

The Ethics Commissioner is as much on trial as Smith is, and could act unethically by releasing an exquisite opinion timed to affect the forthcoming election.

It’s judges who aren’t supposed to take phone calls from the accused; politicians in a representative democracy have to deal with everybody, however they come.

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Justin Trudeau, Mayor Jim Watson, and Premier Doug Ford all refused to meet with the Freedom Convoy representatives because they deemed them unclean.

Anything to get Trump

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Apr 23

RE: It’s time for Trump’s day in court.  Spectator editorial 10 Apr 23.

As with most things Trump, the Spectator gets it wrong, viciously wrong.  But, to the point of the editorial, the sooner Trump gets a day in court, the better.

Trump is accused of falsifying business records for the purpose of concealing a felony.  Now, to be guilty of concealing a felony, you’d think that the accused actually committed the felony in question.  But Alvin Bragg, the New York DA who brought the charges, won’t say what that felony is, stating that the law does not require it.  Well, the 6^th Amendment does require that an accused know what he’s being charged with, and by hiding what the underlying crime was, Trump was indicted in a New York courtroom without being informed of the charge against him.

This is the conundrum.  Trump hasn’t been charged, let alone convicted, of felonious campaign finance violations; and everyone who’s looked at that case, notably the FEC, declined to charge, including Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance.  Trump deserves his day in court, all right, to get the charges tossed.  It ought to have happened in a New York minute had the judge asked Bragg about the obvious deficiency in the charging documents.  But no; the U.S. justice system is utterly corrupt; and the stench of these charges will linger for a long time.

(If a jury found Trump not guilty, what would it be of – the felony or of concealing the felony?  This ambiguity is the problem with the charge, and why it needs to be tossed.)

What worries Democrats is that this sets the precedent for a city DA in Podunk, Idaho, to pull the same trick against them.

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Revolt of the pigmies

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Apr 23

RE: McMaster students acting on evidence the university is ignoring.  Op ed.  The Hamilton Spectator, 6 Apr 23.

How many academic pigmies does it take to write a letter?  Eight, apparently, and it must have involved a lot of coordination for eight allegedly independent thinkers to agree to expose jointly how little they actually know.

The eight pigmies connected to McMaster demonstrated how little they know about investing, engineering, the alleged climate crisis, and even basic philosophy.  Anyone who can say, “evidence-based knowledge” flunks Phil 101.  Even the use of “evidence based medical and health policy” is dodgy since what else would you base them on?  But these blunders won’t stop them from blatant moral preening as they hector the president of McMaster.

All they know about the climate crisis is what they read in the funny papers, like the Spectator.  There is a thought conformance campaign going on over climate that’s longer, more sustained, and more brutal than the recent experience we had with the COVID crisis, which we are only now slowly beginning to realize.  Suffice it to say, by 2028 the climate craziness is going to implode.  The science and the data aren’t there to support a climate “crisis” based on GHG emissions.

They condemned the lack of public consultation about installation of gas powered electrical generators on campus, as if Mac didn’t have a whole engineering faculty in house, to say nothing of consulting engineers available.  A public consultation is only an opportunity for the climate drag queens to preen themselves before an unawares public.

The purpose of investing is to make money.  The aim of the divestment crowd is for Mac not to make money.  That alone ought to be reason to dismiss the eight pigmies with amusement.

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The eight authors are: Paul Deker, Harvey Feit, Atif Kurbursi, Graeme MacQueen, Don McLean, Gary Purdy, Rama Singh, and Don Wells.  They are honorary degree recipient, faculty member, emeritus faculty, and former faculty of McMaster University.

An experiment in social organization

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Apr 23

The McMaster University  hunger strike, organized under the auspices of MacDivest, bears the hall marks of a Saul D. Alinsky style social protest.  The question is, was this inflammation all a kind of experiment by the students of Mac’s school of social work?

We will never know, because you can never admit to a con.  But the nexus of the cause, its sensationalization, the haranguing of the crowd, the hunger strike’s early capitulation, and Mac’s school of social work together seem to point at a lab experiment in the techniques of Alinsky style social activism, in which, in this case, the experiment wasn’t allowed to get out of hand.

People have a right to wonder if they weren’t being used for ulterior purposes.  Alinsky always had an ulterior motive in his work, which is why he dedicated his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” to Lucifer.

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Climate collusion at Mac School of Social Work.

Vincent J. Curtis

3 Apr 23

RE: University finds path to net-zero uneven. News item.  The Hamilton Spectator 3 Apr 23.

The story at reference mentions that MacDivest speaker, Cordelia McConnell, is a third year social work student.  In its March 23 issue, the Spectator ran an op-ed headlined “Student protest should cause Mac to reconsider divestment” by Ameil Joseph, associate professor in the school of social work at McMaster University.  I wonder if the two know each other, and I’ll bet they do.  Could there be a cultish pressure group within the school of social work concerning Mac’s alleged climate policies?  There certainly appears to be a lot of unacknowledged collusion on the subject.

Regardless, Ameil Joseph ought to have declared his interest in MacDivest before pretending to write as a disinterested observer in support of his students.  The Spectator ought to flag it.

Withal, MacDivest could very well be an experiment in social organization, oh so popular an activity of the Left.  Social workers, as a rule, haven’t the scientific background to evaluate seriously the nonsense of the climate cultists, but it doesn’t matter.  Climate is a Cause, and divestment of energy stocks is an aim of that Cause.  That the unexamined belief of MacDivest is that McMaster University can save the planet by its heroic efforts alone goes unnoticed.

But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is the Cause; and MacDivest could very well be merely a school experiment in social organization.  Saul D. Alinsky would be proud.

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