The Afterlife of Budd Hopkins

Posted on June 26, 2018 by Trish and Rob

In the world of UFOlogy, Budd Hopkins was a big deal, an investigator, who rather than focusing on sightings of crafts, zeroed in on the abduction phenomenon in his books. In doing so, he opened himself to criticism from not only mainstream science and media, but also ufologists who rejected the abduction scenario. We met Hopkins once at a UFO convention and drove him to the home of an abductee, where he regressed her and she re-lived her experience.

Budd, who was also an artist, died in August of 2011 and we wrote about him here following his death. In the hours that we spent with him, we observed a man with a large, dominant personality, one who focused on his work with the woman and was convinced she was a true alien abductee. That may be so, but there was an elephant in that house that Budd didn’t seem to recognize.

The woman’s husband, a large man with a mane of gray hair and a full beard, wore a prominant gold Satan pendant around his neck. His black shirt was open at the top and the pendant was visible. He told Trish and I, when we inquired, that he was a former Baptist minister who had switched sides. We don’t know what role, if any, that played in the abduction scenario, but it wasn’t anything that Budd considered relevant, if he was even aware of it.

I bring up this oddity because I recently read something surprising about Budd’s attitude about life after death, and also that he supposedly has made at least one return visit since his departure.

The information comes from journalist/author Leslie Kean, who has written a phenomenal book, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Kean also is the author of fascinating UFO book that focused on interviews with generals, pilots, and government officials. At some point, she interviewed Hopkins and they became  friends.

Kean writes that after she found out that Budd was seriously ill, she brought him a few books that offered evidence of life after death. When she next saw him, he told her he wasn’t interested in reading the books because he didn’t believe in an afterlife. When you’re dead, you’re dead. That brush-off surprised Kean who knew Budd as an avid reader with an expansive  curiosity.

Sometime after his death, Kean had a reading with a medium named Laura Jackson, who had been highly recommended. It was Kean’s first reading, and it was undertaken as part of the research for her book. In preparing for the reading, she had focused on Budd and her late brother. However, she didn’t tell that to the medium, who conducted the reading by phone and didn’t know anything about Kean, only that her first name was Leslie.

Kean found the reading astonishing. After a few minutes of tuning in, Laura told her that an “eager male” was “bursting through,” and was very excited to talk to her. Laura accurately described him as 12 to 15 years older than her, that he’d died two to three years earlier, and she wasn’t married to him. She came close to his name. She said, “I see a big B—a B-name, it’s short like Bub or Bubba.” She said it was a nickname, that there was another name. (Budd actually was his middle name.) Laura later corrected the name to “Buddy” and said there was an ‘E’ related to his name. (His first name was Elliot.)

She also accurately picked up that Budd died of cancer, that Kean was with him when he died, that he had one daughter, that his third marriage was a big mistake, that he died in late August, that his lungs had filled with fluid. (He died Aug. 24.) He also wished her happy birthday, and indeed it was Kean’s birthday.

Beyond those accurate comments, Kean was startled early on when Laura relayed this message: He says, “You were right. You were right!” Laura added: “I feel like it’s like you were right about the other side; you were right about this.” Kean said she knew immediately what it meant, and Laura confirmed it.

Kean also was surprised that Budd’s “big ego” personality came through. He dominated the reading and wanted all the time for himself. Laura said: “He acted as if  ‘This is all about me.’”  Indeed, Kean remembers Budd as having “a big, shining, sometimes overpowering personality.” Kean was amazed and said it was as if Budd, the person, was present.

Interestingly, though, not a word about UFOs!

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Uranus in Taurus

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Trish and Rob

This photo, of a street performer in Cartagena Colombia, typifies for me the Uranus transit through Taurus.

On May 15, the planet Uranus entered Taurus after 7 years in Aries. In astrology, Uranus rules the sign of Aquarius and, archetypically, represents sudden, unforeseen events, genius, electronics, psychic insights. This photo typifies Uranus – the seemingly impossible right in front of you.

Uranus shakes  things up so we’re tossed out of our familiars ruts and routines, many of which no longer do much of anything for us. Once the old stuff has dropped out of our lives, there’s space for new people and experiences, new insights, new everything.

Taurus is an earth sign, solid, stable, dependable, stubborn. It’s not particularly comfortable in Uranus, where it will be until November 7. Then, because it’s moving retrograde, it slips back into Aries for a final rally. It turns direct again in the first week of January 2019 and finally, on March 6, 2019, it enters Taurus again and will be there until April 2026, when it enters Gemini.

So this window we have between May 15 and November 7 provides us with insights about what the longer transit beginning in March 2019 will look like. Globally, we’ve had volcanic eruptions in Hawaii, trump’s meeting with the North Korean dictator,  two Cat 4 hurricanes in the Pacific, kids being ripped away from their parents at the southern borders of the country, children detention centers, Paul Manafort’s $10 million bail being rescinded for witness tampering. And that’s just the highlights. Google news events between May 15 and today for a fuller global picture.

On a personal level, here’s how this transit has unfolded so far for me. It requires a little backstory. During Hurricane Irma last fall – September 10, 2017 – our house sustained some roof damage. Leaks in 4 rooms, dry walls saturated, ruined air conditioner. We didn’t realize the extent of the damage until the first heavy rain after Irma and in late September filed a claim with our homeowner’s insurance company. They issued a small check that didn’t even cover the cost of the new AC unit.

Then a friend told me about public adjusters – freelance insurance people who work on your behalf to obtain a fair claim. Given the repercussions of Irma, it was difficult to find such an adjuster because they were overwhelmed with clients. But  we finally did. In late November, after an intense inspection of our house and roof, he filed a claim on our behalf. His report is incredibly detailed and underscores how insurance companies issue small checks in the hopes of shutting you up. The insurance company had 90 days to respond.

The deadline came and went. Our adjuster allotted more time because of the holidays, but eventually threatened to sue the insurance company if they didn’t respond by May 1 by sending out an adjuster who does what our guy does, but for the insurance folks.  He had until May 15 to respond.

Interesting deadline date, right?

May 15: Uranus entered Taurus. The insurance company missed the deadline. I was ready to quit astrology. The adjuster explained the next step. It sounded complicated and drawn out, a journey through the labyrinth of the insurance world and its laws. Meanwhile, hurricane season would begin on June 1 and we still had a leaky roof. But on May 18, the adjuster emailed me that the insurance company had issued a check that was close to his estimate and explained the process after we got the check. Three days past that May 15 deadline, that transit of Uranus into Taurus, but hey, I was grateful.

The check was sent out by UPS from the law firm to the adjuster – and got lost. To me, this was like Uranus shouting, “MacGregors, here’s your unforeseen surprise – but now I’m going to snatch it away.”

What ensued were letters, emails, scrambles to find the check or reissue it. I targeted June 13, new moon in Gemini, as the day we would hear something. And this time, astrology came through. The adjuster delivered the check personally and said it was the original check, it had been found, and we were going to get our new roof.

When I looked at the date on that check, my faith in astrology was restored: it was dated May 15.

Then, on my birthday, I received a contract for a short story I’d sold to Ellery Queen Magazine.

The signs are looking positive personally.

But on a global scale, are we approaching a dictatorship? Interment camps have begun – for kids.

 

 

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Hello, Nazi Germany

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Take a close look at this photo. A young immigrant girl crying for her parents, from whom she was ripped away. Regardless of your political affiliations, if you are unmoved by this photo or some of the audio that has been released of these young children sobbing for their moms and dads, then you lack the very things that makes us human: compassion.

Since April, the trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrants crossing the border has resulted in thousands of children – some as young as a few months old – being separated from their parents. There are now 2,300 children (and probably more) who have been put in detention centers (an old Wal-Mart among them), tent cities, and foster homes all over the country. Their chances of being reunited with their parents are nil.

Whenever I hear any of this news, I am sickened. This is how life was in the early days of Nazi Germany. In the event that you find that sentence ridiculous or extreme, I encourage you to read this article in slate.com. It’s harrowing.

From Slate: “In the days since U.S. border protection agents released video of immigrants being kept in cages, and the first detained children began arriving behind the barbed-wire fences of a new government camp at Tornillo, Texas, people across the country have been struggling over how to think about what the Trump administration is doing. Some, horrified by the images and a leaked recording of children plaintively crying for the mothers and fathers from whose arms they’d been torn, have drawn comparisons to concentration camps of the past—particularly the most notorious ones of all, those of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Conservative writers and pundits, of course, balk at the parallels. But from the beginning of trump’s tenure, we’ve been moving toward this moment. It started with the Muslim ban, then Charlottesville, then the glorification of dictators – Putin, Kim Jung un. And now this, using young immigrant children as political weapons because he wants funding for his stupid border wall.

Slate goes on: “When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he made no secret of his intentions to punish those he viewed as enemies, stamp out “undesirables,” and restore an imagined Teutonic greatness of the past. His government built its first concentration camp at Dachau just over a month after he became chancellor, to house political opponents of the new regime. Hitler knew the histories of Spain, Britain, and the United States. He had experienced the strategies of stripping citizenship from and forcibly imprisoning civilian populations during World War I. As he consolidated power, his staff ramped up pre-emptive arrests of anyone it deemed a target or threat, gaining confidence with every step.”

Many of these children are being kept in “cages.” According to Huffington Post, children at at least 3 detention centers report abuse. This whole cruel fiasco is a white Nationalist agenda and it’s beyond me how anyone can support this maniac and excuse such an  inhumane policy, as many so called evangelicals do.   This zero tolerance policy was planned, with the administration already ordering 20,000 more cots for these detainees back in April when the policy was implemented.

What they didn’t plan on was how the media has seized on this and how horrified most Americans are by what’s happening.

This isn’t a cultural war issue, like the Muslim ban or forcing NFL players to stand during the national anthem.Or about bad-mouthing blacks, Latinos, women.  It’s about children. And how ironic that the republican party, who claims to be the party of family values, remains largely mum.

This fiasco is trump’s Hurricane Katrina. And I hope to hell it unravels his presidency.

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Synchronicity & Mangos!

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Trish and Rob

Sometimes, small synchros can be just as startling as their larger siblings. They often deal with ordinary objects and seem to happen so effortlessly that if you aren’t paying attention, the synchro sails right past you.

This one is about mangos. It’s the season again and one of our trees is producing a bumper crop. Every day, we walk through the foliage in the backyard, looking for fallen mangos.   It’s like hunting for Easter eggs when you’re a kid. You spot something brightly colored under the ferns and there’s another fallen mango. The squirrels have gotten to some of them, but the fallen mangos are more intact this year than last.

So on Father’s Day, Rob took a bag of mangos to his yoga class and one of his students gave him a loaf of freshly baked bread. When she saw all the mangos, she wondered if she could make mango bread with them. Rob told her sure and said he’d send her a recipe for mango bread.

About an hour after he got home, our neighbor Annette came over with a loaf of freshly back mango bread she had made. “Happy Father’s Day, Rob. No one in my family likes mangos, so they won’t eat this. But I know you two love them.”

The bread was still warm.

What are the odds of getting two loaves of bread for Father’s Day and one of them is mango bread, the very thing he had talked to his yoga student about an hour earlier?

Both loaves, by the way, are scrumptious!

 

And happy solstice!

 

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The point we have reached in this country

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Trish and Rob

This is an audio that Pro Publica obtained from the inside of a child detention center in Texas. It’s heartbreaking. Children as young as a year are being separated from their parents at the border. This is a trump policy, not a democratic policy, and trump could end it immediately. But he wants funding for his border wall, so he uses these children as a political weapon.

This is the point we’ve reached as a country.  Now some of these kids are going to be placed in tent cities. If you’re a parent, imagine what this feels like. Even if you don’t have kids, think about the parallels between this and Nazi Germany. What’s next? The internment of journalists, of anyone who criticizes trump? Disagrees with him?

As the protagonist in The Handmaid’s Tale said, “How did we get to this point?”

 

 

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AURUM is Golden

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Trish and Rob

In ancient times, scholars from India to Greece and Egypt described not only four elements comprising the physical world—earth, water, fire and air—but they also referred to a mysterious ‘fifth essence’ that was beyond the physical realm and linked us to the spirit world. In various cultures, the fifth essence was called akashi, aether, or the void. In fact, it was thought that all of creation, including humans, consisted of these five elements.

The fifth essence played a role in alchemy, the predecessor to the science of chemistry, that involves the transmutation of base metals into gold.There have been no shortage of confusing, coded formulas for doing so over the centuries, but alchemy also reaches into a realm beyond the everyday world. To succeed with the process requires the alchemist to undergo a spiritual transformation…through the fifth essence. The creation of gold ultimately becomes secondary to the transmutation of the alchemist who discovers the ‘philosopher’s stone’ and the elixer of life.

In my novel, FIFTH ESSENCE, a modern-day alchemist vanishes, as did his predecessor and the predecessor before that one—a renowned French alchemist named Fulcanelli. Meanwhile, a decades-old secret government project seeks the elixer and searches for the missing alchemists. The name of that project is Aurum, a Latin word that means golden.

Recently, I was making one final reading of the novel before it came out in print and near the end Aurum plays a major role. As I finished making minor corrections, I walked out into the kitchen, sat down, and there in front of me was Trish’s most recent issue of Mountain Astrologer. It was open to an article called, THE SOLAR BEACON, and the author to my surprise was named Aurum. Just one word, an apparent pseudonym.

The article included an odd editor’s note that said, in part, that the article was for entertainment and critical thinking. “The author is merely transmitting Neptune’s passage through Pisces by mixing fact with fiction and, as is happening everywhere these days, leaving it to the reader to decide which is which.” The note also included this head-scratcher: “Readers are advised that Aurum (astrologer and entertainer) does not exist.”

My mystery novel (about Aurum rather than by Aurum) is also meant for entertainment, and—I guess—critical thinking if you want to look into the history of alchemy. What I tried not to do was what writers of both alchemical and astrological texts are often notorious for accomplishing. That is, writing in a code that the reader must understand before making sense of what was being written. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded so that you don’t have to be an alchemist to understand what’s going on in my mystery and you can enjoy it without knowing much of anything about alchemy.

Paperback, $12.99, Kindle $4.99, at Amazon.

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Travelers

Posted on June 16, 2018 by Trish and Rob

 

The premise of Travelers, a Netflix series, is an intriguing time travel story. People from several centuries in the future, where the world is a climate change mess,   project their consciousness into individuals in the 21st century who are at the brink of death, and take over their bodies. In essence, the bodies of the 21st century individuals become hosts for these future travelers, who move into the personal lives of their hosts with all the emotional complications.

The group of Travelers the show focuses on are: the team’s leader, who assumes the life of an FBI agent; the team’s historian whose host is a college heroine addict; the team’s medic, an intellectually challenged woman; the team’s tactician, a single mom black woman whose partner is an abusive cop; and the team’s engineer, who assumes the life of a rebellious high school athlete. The characters are well drawn and developed.

Grant MacLaren, Traveler 3468, the FBI dude, is played by Eric McCormack, who seems to be made for this role. He has the charm of Mulder in the X-Files, a character as complex as the show itself as these travelers from the future become immersed in the lives of their hosts. But that’s part of what makes this show work so well (and we’re into the second season). These travelers are manipulated (guided, duped) by the Director, an AI in the distant future who chooses the 21st century hosts for its people.

Travelers has that edgy and different backdrop – time travelers from the future, not time travelers going into the past – that sucks me in immediately. The technology they bring with them is impressive – quantum entanglement (the way they project consciousness from the future into the 21st century hosts), medical techniques they use to heal their own, the coms implanted in their necks that enable them to communicate with each other. And their loyalty to the Director, which may ultimately prove to be their undoing.

The show’s writers have really done their job with this series. They know their characters. They have a story arc that should carry them through at least 5 seasons, and hopefully more. Many of the episodes end with a cliff hanger that leaves me gasping for air. I haven’t felt like this since the first episode of X-Files many years ago.

There are occasional glitches, spots where some event or situation doesn’t make sense. But overall, I love this show. The writers have done a stellar job! And it has been renewed for a third season!

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Blade Runner: NOW & trump

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Trish and Rob

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQL9hRRYDIw

 

Blade Runner, 1982. The original version with Harrison Ford was set in 2019, just next year! At the time, it seemed visionary, edgy, and the theme, of course, was and is still current: the domination of corporations over every facet of our lives. Thank you, Philip K. Dick, who wrote the book on which the movie was based: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner 2049, the sequel, was too long and meandering. The optics were vastly improved, the idea was still intact, but the message, I think, was lost.

So let’s take USA, summer 2018, and call it Blade Runner: Now. Even though we aren’t chasing replicants, we’re pursuing answers about whether the trump campaign was colluding with foreign governments to win the 2016 election and obstructing justice. If Philip K. Dick were still alive, he probably would be writing for The Atlantic or The New York Times and trump would take to Twitter to try to discredit and humiliate him. But his attempts would backfire, this reporting would win Pulitzers,  the movie would be watched by hundreds of millions. Philip would keep writing and exploring the secrets of the most corrupt administration in history.

From Salon: “Donald Trump’s White House is on pace to becoming the most corrupt and scandal-ridden administration since at least Richard Nixon’s — and perhaps in the entire history of the country. Rather than “draining the swamp,” Trump has ushered in a new age of corruption in Washington that reminds one of the brazen and widespread corruption of the gilded age.”

At some point about a year into trump’s presidency, the press attitude toward him shifted from Oh, what a silly buffoon  to He’s a threat to democracy. He’s the guy whose morning tweets set the scandal and big distraction for the day – how it’s all a witch hunt, fake news, a disgrace, there was an FBI spy in the campaign…and on and on. And it’s not just the press who are finally calling out trump for the despot he is. James Comey does it in his book A Higher Loyalty. James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence and of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a career intelligence officer, also defines trump in the same way in his book, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.

 When Clapper was on Rachel Maddow’s show, he talked openly about how the Russians influenced the election for a trump win and wrote about it in his book. “Surprising even themselves, they (the Russians) swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.”

As a country, we’re headed into perilous territory, where this experiment called democracy is being tested at every twist and turn. Every day, someone on trump’s team is spinning, redefining laws and protcols. Rudy Gulliani, the newest addition to trump’s legal team, claims a sitting president can’t be indicted. Really? That would mean that if a sitting president committed murder, he would get a pass? That’s not democracy; it’s the world of dictators and authoritarian governments.

Every day, trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of self-righteous religious nut Mike Huckabee, stands before the White House press corp and TV cameras and lies through her pretty white teeth. Every day, the republican congress sits on their collective hands and turns their collective head away from facts and truth and do nothing to stop this slow erosion of the very institutions that exposed Richard Nixon and Watergate. Pundits talk about the infamous Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon administration and how we’re approaching a constitutional crisis now.

But the truth is uglier: I think we’re already at that crisis point. As the protagonist of the Handmaid’s Tale remarks, “How did we get here?”

We got here because most of us have never lived under an authoritarian government. We’ve enjoyed the 1st amendment, the freedom to speak our minds. We’ve lived freely with the bill of rights. The 4 in 10 Americans who still support trump don’t care about shady and possibly illegal payoffs to porn stars or how he and his admin may have colluded with a foreign government or obstructed justice. They don’t understand how his policies hurt them in terms of health care, tax cuts, trade, wages, employee rights. They don’t understand because they don’t pay attention.

Instead, they blame Obama, Clinton, the “liberal agenda.”

But trump  is the ultimate trickster and unless something shifts dramatically – and soon – then the joke is on us. We become a third world, autocratic country ruled by a cruel clown who bows to dictators like Putin and empowers corporations just as Philip K. Dick envisioned in the original Blade Runner.

But now I wonder if even Dick could have imagined Blade Runner: Now, starring the likes of trump and his gang.

 

 

 

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Singing or Slinging in Singapore

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Trish and Rob

It was on, it was off, it was on…off…and finally it’s actually happening. Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump are in Singapore for their summit this week. Just getting the Americans to meet Kim is a big win for him. It’s never happened and his family regime has been the most isolated and belligerent country in the world. Politically, in the U.S. it took someone like Trump to do it. If Obama had tried it, of course the Republicans would have called him weak and selling out the country, and no doubt worse. But these are strange times, very strange.

Trump wants to denuclearize North Korea, and Kim wants American troops out of the South. Most likely the results will be seen as a starting point in negotiations. The North Koreans are wary. After all, Trump in two years in the presidency has become known as a deal breaker, not a deal maker, as he advertised himself. We are out of the Trans-Pacific, the Paris Climate Accord, and Iran Deal. All bad deals, Trump says. We’ll see how he does.

I decided to write about the summit after seeing a related post in a FB synchronicity site by our friend, Philip Merry. Philip  is a psychologist who wrote his Phd thesis on synchronicity and was a fan of our book, The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity. It might not be a synchro, but it is certainly a curious fact that he lives in Singapore just two miles from the site of the summit. That is certainly reason to prompt a keen interest! Phillip was very much like to see this summit succeed and the North denuclearized.

To that end, he is asking all of us to take part in a 3-minute Heart Meditation for Peace Talk Success. Here it is:

1. Breathe deeply and take your breath to your heart.
2. Call to mind a scene in your life where you have experienced profound healing of differences and let this feeling resonate in your heart while still breathing deeply.
3. Bring to mind the faces of Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump and send your deep reconciling heart feeling to them – intending that their talks in Singapore are driven by profound love and care for the future of humanity.
4. Finish your meditation with the words “May heartfelt peace surround every word, feeling, thought and action that comes from Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump today”

Maybe I’m throwing cold water on this effort, but I have a difficult time bringing to mind the faces of those two. Kim runs a murderous regime and is a fanatic and Trump is hollowing out America’s liberal democratic tradition. I told Philip that his meditation was a tall order considering who these two men are.

Here is how he responded:

“Hi Rob, whatever the outcome – its about keeping faith with the notion that heart-felt intentions can change the world – am sure you believe (even a little) that we have the power to influence events? I know you do as i have been reading again only yesterday your “Sensing the Future”(wonderful book) – and if we can predict the future its not such a jump to believe that we can influence it.”

I replied that I agreed, but noted an ancient Chinese proverb: If the wrong person uses the right means, the right means will work in the wrong way.

Philip conceded my point, but added: “Thank god that heart energy connects with a higher quantum vibration.”

Of course, we should hope for the best results. Anything is better than nuclear war, even if Trump’s success would help him get re-elected. My guess is that when this summit ends, Kim was be hanging onto his nukes, and he will open a door to foreign investments, ie. McDonalds. I’m not sure that would be a great win for Trump, but he will call it a first step.

 

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Trump Spoof

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Trish and Rob

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlkJSK2xLBc

This video was made by a friend, as a satirical take on trump. Since his You Tube channel is new, he went to a company to buy likes/followers – the same thing people do for Instagram and Twitter. But the company told him to “keep his money.”  And within an hour, the video received nearly 400 thumbs down. It looks as if the company is a big trump supporter and enlisted  people to vote thumbs down on the video.

Interesting way to censor.

 

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