#Water freedom system review
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The Power of the Water Freedom System and Breaking Free from Water Scarcity
░▒▓ Watch The Full Video CLICK HERE ▓▒░
The water crisis tightens its grip on our planet, leaving landscapes parched and communities desperate. Droughts intensify, reservoirs recede, and the threat of water wars hangs heavy. In this arid reality, the dream of water freedom – access to clean, abundant water, independent of external circumstances – seems like a distant mirage.
But a beacon of hope emerges from the parched plains: the Water Freedom System. This ingenious innovation, born from a farmer's struggle against relentless drought, harnesses the very air around us, utilizing air-water harvesting technology to generate life-giving water. No longer are individuals tethered to unreliable water sources or burdened by exorbitant water bills. The Water Freedom System empowers individuals and communities to break free from the shackles of water scarcity and unlock a future of water security and water opportunity.
This innovative system offers a glimpse of a future where water scarcity doesn't dictate our fate, but where water freedom empowers us to thrive.
Unveiling the Water Freedom System
The Water Freedom System transcends mere machinery; it's a defiant roar against the deafening silence of water scarcity. But how does this seemingly magical contraption weave clean water from the very fabric of air? Prepare to be enthralled, water warrior, as we delve into the Water Opportunity Framework, the ingenious heart that powers this revolutionary system.
The Looming Thirst: Unveiling the Urgent Truth of Water Scarcity
Our planet, a vibrant cradle of life, harbors an unsettling paradox. Though 71% of its surface shimmers with the illusion of abundance, only a meager 3% is fresh, readily available for our very survival. This stark imbalance fuels a terrifying reality: water scarcity, a specter that haunts communities worldwide. This water crisis, far from being a distant threat, demands immediate attention, for it imperils the very foundation of our existence.
Crafting Your Personal Oasis: Building the Water Freedom System
Fear not, fellow water warrior! Building your Water Freedom System is no herculean feat. Imagine it as constructing your own miniature weather station, one that conjures clean water from the very air you breathe. The process is surprisingly straightforward, empowering you to cultivate your own personal oasis and defy the limitations of water scarcity.
Claim Your Water Destiny: Embracing Water Freedom
Throw off the shackles of unreliable sources and extortionate bills! The Water Freedom System empowers you to become the architect of your own clean water future, severing the chains of water scarcity. Imagine the tranquility, the self-reliance, the liberation of living life on your own terms, forever unburdened by the specter of thirst. This ingenious system grants you the extraordinary power to harvest water from the very air, transforming your home into a haven of water security and endless possibility.
Beyond the Oasis: Ripple Effects of Water Freedom
The Water Freedom System transcends the boundaries of a personal solution. It's a catalyst for positive change, sending ripples of socioeconomic benefits far beyond the reach of your individual oasis. Imagine empowering communities, fostering water security for regions grappling with drought, and alleviating the burden of water scarcity for countless lives. But the impact extends beyond the realm of commerce. This innovative technology has the potential to unlock a future brimming with hope, collaboration, and a renewed appreciation for our most precious resource.
Closing the Tap on Thirst: A Future Brimming with Water Freedom
The parched grip of water scarcity may seem inescapable, but the Water Freedom System offers a revolutionary escape route. We've delved into its scientific principles, its construction process, and its potential to not only quench your personal thirst but ignite a ripple effect of socioeconomic benefits.
However, the key to true water security lies not solely in technology, but in embracing a spirit of innovation. The Water Freedom System is a powerful example, but the wellspring of possibilities extends far beyond this single device. Let's rise as water warriors, united in exploration, adaptation, and collaboration. Together, we can discover water opportunities unique to our communities, fostering a future brimming with hope and a newfound respect for this most precious resource.
░▒▓ Watch The Full Video CLICK HERE ▓▒░
#Water freedom system review#Water freedom system#Water freedom#Water scarcity#Clean water#Drought#Water security#Air-Water harvesting#Water crisis#Water source#Water opportunity#grass#palm trees
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REVIEWS OF THE WATER FREEDOM SYSTEM — IS CHRIS BURNS’ PROGRAM EFFECTIVE?in a shambles of a project
Reviews on the Water Freedom System — How effective is Chris Burns’ Water Freedom System? Will this tutorial assist you in producing your own water? Is it genuine and simple to follow? Is it worthwhile to purchase? To learn the truth about this program, read my full review.
Click here to see the official website.
What is the Water Freedom System, exactly?
The Water Freedom System is a step-by-step program that teaches you how to construct your own personal oasis right now. This training will teach you how to withstand any long-term drought, even if it lasts a century.
The methods in this tutorial, which are particularly created for those who only have one hand, can help you accomplish it in a way that gives you total peace of mind.
It has an effect on you For as long as you live, you will have access to clean, pure water. For pennies on the dollar, the Water Freedom System provides an automatic supply of the freshest, highest-quality pure water you’ve ever tasted.
The simple technology, which can be used by any family anywhere in the globe, creates safe, clean, and wonderful drinking water from thin air, even in the desert.
For the last year, this system has been in use. Over 11000 individuals have utilized the same method to overcome devastating events including hurricanes, snowstorms, and floods.
Click here to get a special discount on the Water Freedom System.
How Effective Is the Water Freedom System For You?
The Water Freedom System is capable of providing up to 60 gallons of water each day.
NASA has made it through a centuries-long drought. This method demonstrates how to quickly set up an automatic supply of high-quality clean water.
The Water Freedom System is a remarkable technology that allows you to have an unlimited supply of immaculate, clean, and undisturbed water. The Water Freedom System is a step-by-step tutorial that will show you how to build your own oasis in the event of a water shortage.
This tutorial will show you how to endure a century-long drought in the most effective way possible. This ingenious technology works as a portable generator, extracting water from the air in a matter of days.
Chris Burns devised this ingenious mechanism as a portable water generator that extracts water from the atmosphere. It aids in the production of drinking water in a variety of conflict zones, even in the hottest and driest conditions.
The Water Freedom System is a gadget that was created based on the simple theory of condensation and has several effective drinking water transformations.
Furthermore, this ingenious idea removes the need to purchase costly bottled water. This one-of-a-kind system may create up to 60 gallons of pure drinking water per day. There’s no reason to be concerned about harmful substances.
Because it removes the need to buy expensive bottled water or the difficulty of building a new well, the Water Freedom Technology is a simple, revolutionary system.
The water is cleaned, and a single system may create up to 60 gallons of pure freshwater every day, with no unpleasant chemicals to worry about.
The fundamentals are so simple, and if they’re followed, they’ll work wonders.
Correctly, even if you live in the desert, you may have an almost infinite water supply.
To get the best deal on the Water Freedom System, go to this link.
What Can You Learn From a Water Freedom System?
This article will teach you how to construct the ideal system that will provide you with up to 20 gallons of the cleanest water each day.
Even if you’re not good at making things and have difficulties connecting in a DVD player, the system was simple to operate.
You’ll be surprised at how little resources you’ll need to create the Water Freedom System.
The Water Freedom System is a simple reference to manual procedures for providing clean, safe drinking water.
In any situation, you can get fresh water for your family, and you may download files to your computer, tablet, or smartphone!
You may learn how a simple process extracts moisture from thin air, filters it, and transforms it into an endless supply of pure drinking water.
With the Water Freedom System, you’ll see how simple it is to put it together for less than $270 in total expenditures in less than an hour.
For pennies on the dollar, you’ll have an automatic supply of the freshest, cleanest water you’ve ever tasted, which will turn into liquid gold in any catastrophic event.
The Water Freedom System is extremely light and portable, making it one of the greatest “emergency” water sources available.
aspire to
You can relax and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with having liters of filtered water available on demand, even in an emergency, and you won’t have to worry about running out of storage space. Plus a lot more!
Now is the best time to get the Water Freedom System at a discounted price!
Is it Possible to Afford a Water Freedom System?
Anyone, regardless of age, may afford the Water Freedom System. The Water Freedom System is now available for a one-time payment of $39.69. By assisting you in constructing safe drinking water, the Water Freedom System provides you with long-term advantages.
This gadget is constructed without the use of heavy machinery, so all you’ll need is a screwdriver to put it together. The cost of this online step-by-step instruction is presently $ 39.69.
There are no hidden costs, subscription fees, or other charges.
When you purchase the guide, you will not be charged any further costs. When you buy the Water Freedom System, you get unlimited lifetime email support to help you assemble your device and answer any issues you might have.
When you buy the Water Freedom System, you’re covered by a return policy that includes a 60-day money-back guarantee, which is detailed on the Water Freedom System’s official website.
Benefits of the Water Freedom System include:
The Water Freedom System provides you with a plethora of advantages, including the following:
The Water Freedom System is a straightforward, step-by-step instruction manual.
This program will drastically improve your life.
The Water Freedom System demonstrates how to quickly establish an automatic supply of the purest water.
It provides you with the highest quality water you’ve ever had.
For a few pence, I’ve had a taste of it.
The Water Freedom System creates water that is safe, clean, and delicious to drink.
This system has the capacity to produce up to 60 gallons of water each day.
It ensures that you have unrestricted access to pure, undisturbed water.
Anyone may construct a Water Freedom System.
The assembly of this system is really straightforward.
The Water Freedom System demonstrates how to construct the gadget in an imaginative manner.
This device can purify up to 20 gallons of water each day.
Anyone could use the system since it was so simple.
The Water Freedom System provides you with safe, clean water to drink.
Cons of the Water Freedom System:
All you have to do is follow the step-by-step instructions exactly. If a step in this plan is skipped, the consequence is in a shambles of a project
There isn’t any offline functionality. This life-saving book is only available for purchase online.
The key to success is consistency. It all depends on how serious you are about your commitment.
To get the best price on the Water Freedom System Book, go to this link.
Final Thoughts on Water Freedom Systems
In conclusion, I strongly advise you to choose the Water Freedom System! This step-by-step tutorial will teach you how to construct your own personal paradise in your house.
It will assist you in producing clean, pure water for as long as you live. It entirely protects you from any tragedy, allowing you to be really self-sufficient with an almost endless water supply in less than 30 minutes! Everyone’s eyes will be opened by the Water Freedom System.
Have faith in me! There is one.
There is nothing to lose or risk in this situation. I’m so convinced that if you use my Water Freedom System, you’ll be ecstatic with the results! You have the option to request a refund if you are unhappy with the results. So, what do you have to lose?
Start using the Water Freedom System right away! Please hurry!! Before the offer expires! Today, you can have a limitless supply of water!
Water Freedom System PDF may be downloaded from the company’s official website by clicking here.
FAQs:
What Happens If The Water Freedom System Doesn’t Work For Me?
With billions of individuals on the earth, there will be those for whom this will not work. Even most prescription medicines fall under this category. So, if you’re in the minority on this and it doesn’t work for you,
Remember that you are protected by a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Bonuses for the Water Freedom System?
To build your water supply unit, the Water Freedom System allows you limitless access to videos, PDFs, and schematics. Along with these components, you will also receive four additional guides. Are:
The Ultimate Guide to Greenhouses
Home Defense Against Paranoia
Surviving AfterMath in a Blackout
The Bartering Handbook is a comprehensive guide on bartering.
Is Investing in a Water Freedom System a Good Idea?
Where it is straightforward, the Water Freedom System is a smart investment or not! This program ensures that you have access to clean, pure water for as long as you live, giving you piece of mind that you are totally protected in the event of a calamity.
In less than 30 minutes, you’ll be totally self-sufficient with an almost limitless water supply. Learn More…….
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In this informative video, Kaaren Thompson from Karma Dog Speak shares her experience with the Halo 3 Collar, a groundbreaking innovation in the world of pet technology. As a seasoned user of the Halo Collar, Kaaren provides a comprehensive Halo Collar review, shedding light on the collar's impressive features and enhancements.
Kaaren introduces us to Cosmo, her furry companion adorned with the cutting-edge Halo 3 Collar since its release on September 1st. This collar has been a game-changer in Kaaren's extensive journey as a Halo dog owner.
The Halo 3 introduces exciting new elements, including a range of vibrant colors like Orchid, Sunburst, gray, and white. With a new magnetic charging port, this collar is not only stylish but also waterproof, allowing dogs like Cosmo to enjoy a dip without compromising functionality. The collar's GPS satellite technology has seen incredible improvements, offering a global connection via AI, Bluetooth, cellular, and Wi-Fi. This means your pet can roam freely, regardless of your location, and stay connected to the network.
One remarkable feature Kaaren highlights is the Halo Collar's beacon functionality, serving as both a keep-away and stay-in zone. This innovative capability provides pet owners like Kaaren with the ability to create boundaries indoors and outdoors, ensuring safety and training.
Kaaren shares personal anecdotes, including instances where the Halo Collar played a crucial role in bringing back an escaped dog, demonstrating the collar's effectiveness in real-life situations. The collar's remote feature allows Kaaren to call back her dogs with a simple signal, promoting positive dog training and providing freedom for dogs in various environments.
Beyond the technology, Kaaren emphasizes the positive impact the Halo 3 Collar has had on her relationship with her dogs, providing a unique sense of freedom and safety. The collar's waterproof design and magnetic charging port add to its durability, making it an ideal choice for outdoor dog activities.
The Halo Collar isn't just a tracking device; it's also a reliable dog activity tracker, ensuring that your furry friend stays healthy and active. With a focus on dog safety, this collar combines technology and practicality to offer pet owners peace of mind.
Whether your dog is a water enthusiast or an escape artist, the Halo Collar proves to be a reliable companion. Kaaren encourages viewers to consider this best outdoor dog collar for its flexibility, global connectivity, and the peace of mind it brings to pet owners. Remember to follow Kaaren on her social media channels for more insights, and if you found this video helpful, feel free to like, subscribe, and join the conversation.
🐶UNRIVALED FEATURES!🐶
CHECK OUT THE GAME-CHANGING FEATS OF THE NEW HALO COLLAR 3:
✅ New PrecisionGPS(™) Technology
✅ New Active GPS Antenna
✅ 24-hour Battery Life
✅ Auto-connect to Any Cellular Network Worldwide
✅ New Perfect Fit System
✅ Magnetic Charging Port
✅ New Colors: Orchid and Sunburst
NEW COLORS
Halo Collar 3 is available in 4 vibrant colors:
✅GRAY
✅BLACK
✅ORCHID🆕
✅SUNBURST🆕
CHAPTERS:
00:00: Halo Collar Overview
02:55: Halo Collar Features
04:06: Virtual GPS Boundaries and Active Tracking
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by Phyllis Chesler
Both Butler and Gessen seem to revere Jewish vulnerability, statelessness and martyrdom. Are they also Nazis in drag?
The two conformists see Jewish vulnerability to persecution as far more “ethical” than the Jews’ ability to defend themselves from persecution and genocide. According to Prof. Corinne Blackmer in her brave book Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBTQ Intellectuals and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism:
“Butler implicitly argues that Jews were better off suffering rather than perpetrating state-sponsored persecution. … Two possible lessons or conclusions can be drawn from the fact that Jews experienced considerable state-sponsored violence, persecution and discrimination in the galut [exile], culminating not only in the Holocaust but also the forced removal of nearly one million Mizrachi Jews from their ancestral homes in the Middle East before or during the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948. One, supported by Butler and other BDS advocates, states that precisely because Jews suffered extreme state-sponsored violence, they should endeavor to avoid state-building, although this formulation leaves unanswered precisely under what political system Jews should (peacefully?) reside.”
In her piece in The London Review of Books, Butler does “condemn without qualification the violence committed by Hamas. This was a terrifying and revolting massacre. This was my primary reaction, and it endures.”
However, she then goes on to “contextualize” this statement by trotting out all manner of false allegations against Israel: “We should develop some understanding of why groups like Hamas gained strength in light of the broken promises of Oslo and the ‘state of death, both slow and sudden’ that describes the lived existence of many Palestinians living under occupation, whether the constant surveillance and threat of administrative detention without due process or the intensifying siege that denies Gazans medication, food and water.”
Butler appears to be either ignorant of or deliberately concealing several important facts: Israel left Gaza in 2005. Hamas—an Iranian-funded Islamist terror group—controls, indoctrinates, tortures, torments and impoverishes Gazans. Hamas has taken the lion’s share of the aid meant for Gaza civilians and diverted it into their own bank accounts abroad and into building their terror tunnels and weaponry. No Arab country has been willing to offer Gazans refuge, even temporarily. Egypt has walled off Gaza from the Sinai. Hamas has increasingly forced women to wear veils, marry into polygamous families and risk being honor-killed if they “shame” their families.
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Holiday Break Productivity
As a lady born in the year of the "Horse" 🐎, it is a natural characteristic of ours to always do something productive, even during breaks. This holiday break should have been a rest or game day for me, but instead I practiced my drawing skill and continued reading "Ikigai," which I hadn't opened in weeks.
I've been practicing different "emotions or feelings" in chibi, as I haven't drawn chibis in a while.
I used to sketch "anime" rather than chibis or illustration back in elementary because I was a big fan of ✨ 90s anime ✨ like Fushigi Yuugi, Ghost Fighter, Ranma 1/2, Flame of Recca, Hell Teacher Nūbē, Oh my Goddess!, Sakura CardCaptor, Boys Be, Gatekeepers, Slam Dunk, HunterxHunter, Sailor Moon, and many more.
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of my sketches today because I used to draw on notebooks or pad papers - I remember back in primary school, my classmates would pay me PHP 5.00 - 20.00 💰💰💰 (yup! business-minded since I was a kid 🤣) to draw their favorite anime which technically honed my skill in creating anime art and marketing/sales, but as I grew older, I outgrown drawing animes and now I prefer to draw still life or illustrations/chibis since I love anything kawaii and sketching beautiful landscape or places.
Book Review: Ikigai (Chapter 1 to 3)
I promised myself to finish this book by May 🎯; please don't get me wrong, on why I'm still not done reading this book its because I didn't have a time for reading this past few weeks due to my workload (my job), but this holiday I made sure to allocate 3-4 hours just to read this book and discovered that...
Ikigai is one of my favorite book out of my 7 new self-development books and I am now currently on Chapter 4: How to turn work and free time into space of growth - very timely to what I need nowadays, isn't it? 😀
To give you an idea why I love this book so far, one of the reason is that it tackles on how we determine our life's purpose and reasons to live more, like the centenarians in Okinawa, Japan. It also emphasize the importance of maintaining physical health by staying active even after we reach the age of 60, since sedentary lifestyle can lead to hypertension, imbalanced diet, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and even some cancers. Sleep plays an important role in how we can slow the aging process and build our immune system because "melatonin" is a powerful antioxidant in our bodies that contains an ingredient that protects us from cancer, Alzheimer's disease, aging, and other diseases.
This book also discussed "Logotherapy," a therapy developed by Victor Frankl that focuses on people's search for meaning in life. Unlike other therapies, logotherapy takes a spiritual approach. Frankl's logotherapy incorporates three philosophical and psychological concepts: freedom of will, will to meaning, and meaning in life.
Freedom of will asserts that we have the ability to chose and take action in response to both internal and external circumstances.
Will to meaning states that we have the freedom to follow our goal and purposes in life, which means this is our major motive for existing and doing, allowing us to bear pain and suffering.
Meaning in life is a subjective experience, but the meanings exist within us and waiting to be realized by us in any moment or in any situation.
One of the therapies that this book also tackles is the "Morita Therapy," a therapy based on the Buddhist perspective and developed by Dr. Shoma Morita, wherein the therapy focuses more on accepting the fluctuations of thoughts and feelings, embracing negative emotions, and learning how to blend with nature - if you ask me, it is quite similar to what we've learned from Grandmaster Lao Tzu (Taoism) which is
"Go with the flow, Be like water 🌊"
Sounds very profound, isn't it? 🤔
The first time I heard that, I was perplexed: how and why be like water? Then our Grandmaster taught us the value of being fluid, soft, and flexible in any situation, just like water, which takes shape wherever you put it and can adjust to any environmental changes.
Change is inevitable and if you resist it, problems will arise in your life and that's why our ancient philosophers taught us the importance of adaptability, because change is constant and not fixed; our lives are the result of constant change in our environment, feelings, emotions, interpersonal relationships, religion, and so on, and those who adapt easily win life, whereas others rot in the past, are unable to move on with their lives, and are depressed.
Like "Morita Therapy," embrace the imperfections in your life, welcome them with open arms, and acknowledge that the sentiments or emotions you're experiencing are valid. Simply accept how things are and then figure out how to mend them or overcome your own demons.
I'm about halfway through the book, but I'm looking forward to get more insights and teachings from Ikigai.
I definitely suggest this book to everyone who has ever felt empty on the inside, unable to discover their purpose in life, or simply lost.
Sincerely, Ayei 🌻
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Week 3 of writing workshop with @bettsfic & @books
Stories of a place:
The place I wrote about was Rokkō Island in Japan, and the surrounding area where I used to live.
I only used the common facts that anyone could find out.
1. The Rokkō Liner is an automated tram that transports people from the mainland to the manmade Rokkō Island.
2. Kobe was hit by a devastating earthquake in 1995.
3. Rokkō Island was made by taking the top off nearby mountains and compressing them to form new land in the ocean.
Tangled Up In Blue:
The tram snakes its way across a thin stretch of vibrant water, a thousand crystalline waves dance far below its metallic carapace. Inside, it carries precious cargo. The kind of cargo that thrums with the rush of blood and the spark of life, the kind that reads the morning paper and taps away at their cellphones. The tram is a noble beast, and it carries its task of transport out with no direction, no driver at its helm. It’s an entirely automated system, ferrying travellers from the densely packed mainland Sumiyoshi to the equally dense Rokkō Island. A commuter tram for many, as Rokkō Island houses few attractions and the heavy boom and bustle of harbours echo from its shores. This island is a freak of nature. It has been stitched together by the hands of mankind, mountains ripped from the earth and shoved into an orderly rectangular form. A picture perfect piece of the modern industrial world.
The tram, the Rokkō Liner, announces its destination to the passengers in singsong Japanese and again in a similarly musical yet somewhat mechanically clumsy English. Many, many foreigners, live and work on the island. Stacked into towerblocks and gated housing complexes, these expats make their livings in finance, shipping and translation. The early dawn illuminates a sea of suits, Japanese and foreign salarymen shuffling to work. Their faces are lined with stress and their company-issued tie clips shine in the newborn sunlight. One of them trips and falls, his briefcase letting loose a deluge of papers onto the pristine pavement below. He looks up at the sky, a tangle of telephone and electrical wires crisscrossing from granite apartment to granite apartment, and beyond that a vibrant cloudless blue. His suit is scuffed and he’s grazed his palm, but no one stops to help him up. So he’s left to shake himself off and pick himself up, as his spreadsheets and quarterly reports are pulled away by the soft morning breeze. He sighs and that too is snatched away by the wind. His boss isn’t gonna like this one bit.
His boss, the one who requested those quarterly reports to be on his desk by nine am at the latest, is sitting on the Liner reviewing a book his wife recommended to him, on Goodreads. He’s giving the thing, an American book called All The Pretty Horses, five stars. He’d sat down to read it one evening, with a glass of port in one hand and a cigarette in the other. After three refills of port and eleven more cigarettes he was done and, despite his insistence to the contrary, there were tears in his eyes. And tears freely flowed again when he conversed with his wife about the book over breakfast. Something about the book’s message of freedom and hope was inspiring, and made him hark back to the days of his youth. He was once a young revolutionary student who campaigned to end uniforms and for the school to stop getting funding from the nearby American airbase. He used to be a free spirit, used to wear a beret to school and sport Groucho Marx style glasses. Used to quote Karl Marx to teachers and Keats to fellow students. Used to organise film festivals, write in the local newspaper and mitigate street showdowns between young Yakuza members. And then he’d grown up. Life had caught up to him, forced him into a suit and pushed him through the sliding doors of a faceless office building. And he’d lost the joy in his life, crushed by timesheets and shipping mandates.
The review he was writing, on his wife’s account, was full of beautiful prose and cascading metaphors. He unleashed his creative streak, the one the grindstone of society had oppressed, and crafted an excellent essay-like review of McCarthy’s book. While writing this, his mind filled with such raw emotion, he let loose just one more tear. The teenager sitting across from him pretended not to notice him wipe it away with his shirtsleeve, which had been neatly ironed the day before by his wife.
The boss’s wife, an American-Japanese woman who’d grown up in Kobe, had first discovered Cormac McCarthy in a quaint little bookstore tucked away in the shadow of the Kobe Tower. The red light spilling from the tower reflected on the window display, dousing all its contents with an eerie blood-red glow. She’d taken shelter in there, as it was raining something awful and the karaoke bar she’d been at had closed early due to a leak in the roof. It was late at night, she was quite tipsy and in no mood for the noise and light of a train station, so she tapped on the window of this bookstore. It was closed, but light was spilling from a beaded curtain partitioning the shop from its backroom and her hurried and frantic tapping soon altered the owner. He was a man around her age, his eyes were ringed with the telltale dark circles of the sleepless. He wiped a stray eyelash away from his eye with one slender hand as the other fumbled for the door key. She wondered, somewhat drunkenly, if he was single.
He let her in, gave her a cup of green tea, and asked her, in excellent English, “What the hell are you doing dancing around in the street during a typhoon?”
She admitted to being a little drunk, and he gave her a blanket and a book, telling her to rest while he finished up his work for the night.
“Then what?” She enquired, but he clearly hadn’t heard her, as he’d slipped through the beaded curtain into the shop and was busying himself with the shelves.
Having no real other option, she took a sip of the piping hot tea and blearily glanced at the book.
The cover was well-loved, the spine supple and the edges fraying. Emblazoned on its front were the words: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
She took one more sip of tea, and began to read.
Eleven years and a long marriage later, she’d finally recommended the author to her husband. She knew he loved old Clint Eastwood films, and she knew something of his creative side, remembering him writing her elegant haikus when they’d just started dating. They’d been quite distant as of late, with her time mainly spent working from home and his in the office. She knew full well he didn’t do anything of substance, it was all delegation. His boss would tell him something, then he’d repeat it to his own employees, mimicking his boss’s angry demeanour best he could. The stress of his job had been making him snappish and standoffish, so she thought a literary diversion might be just what he needed. And she was right. He openly sobbed into his miso soup when they’d talked about the book at breakfast, the tears mixing with the broth and dissipating like rain into an ocean.
The ocean the tram was crossing was prone to violet outbursts. This was mainly due to the fact Japan sits in between four different tectonic plates, making it prone to earthquakes and tsunamis. One such earthquake had occurred in 1995 and had wreaked Kobe. Water had been forced out of the soil used to build Rokkō Island, causing pavements to crack open as water bubbled onto the surface. The rush of underground water brought with it geysers of sand that burst pavements, tearing down towering red construction cranes and shiny new bridges alike.
The bookseller remembers that earthquake well. His shop had been flooded by a burst sewage pipe, and his parent’s house had collapsed in on itself, a supernova of rubble and debris. He had wandered through the wreckage days after the quake, trying to find anything that remained. Quite a bit of the ground floor walls still remained, jaggedly and abruptly ending at around shoulder height, giving way to a sky still grey from debris dust. His parent’s fridge still stood, remarkably, dented as it was. A lone survivor of the now mostly-unrecognisable kitchen. He swung open its door to find a mush of foodstuffs, mulched up berries, squished meat, crushed pasta, eggshells, juice cartons spilling their contents onto the rubble-strewn cracked wooden floor below. A line of orange juice ran through a contour in the wood and pooled at his shoe. He glanced at his reflection in its vivid bring surface, a colour pop in this grey world, a world still shaking from the events of the past few days.
He looked just the same as he had on that rainy night in the bookstore, only now his hair was being eaten by wisps of silver and his shaded eyes were adorned by wire framed glasses, these two effects combining to make him seem scholarly and intellectual, though doing nothing to aid his never-ending quest for long term companionship. His parents, who had luckily been on holiday in Hokkaido when the quake had struck, had tried to set him with so many women in the past but nothing had ever stuck. He’d gone on a few dates with a girl in university but when her grandfather died she had to move back to Kanazawa. Their relationship slowly fizzled out after that, the fire of passion dying through increasingly rarer and briefer love letters and phone calls. Since then he hadn’t really had much luck with love, even going to a love hotel, just out of sheer desperation, only to find that sex was something he utterly didn’t understand, even when doing it. It was the human element that he fell for.
Take, for example, that woman he’d met when he was working late at the bookshop. Her tipsy little smile as she sipped her tea and opened No Country on her lap. Then the awe and raw excitement that flitted across her face as she read further and further. He had spoke a few more times to her that night, to refill her tea, to answer some basic questions about himself and to ask her where she lived so he could phone her a taxi. Her replies had all been witty and polite, and he’d etched them into his mind, despite her actual appearance fading into the obscurity of his memory, long since tarnished with taxes and neighbours and train times and the pressures of adulthood.
The teen on the tram didn’t want the pressures of adulthood. If adulthood made you cry on your morning commute, like she had seen that salaryman do just moments ago, she wanted no part of it. She was heading onto Rokkō Island to meet her girlfriend for early morning coffee. Her stomach was filled with a buzzing static that built and rose to her throat, making it hard to swallow. Not only had she called into school to tell them a family emergency had come up, which she had never done before, but she’d also slipped from her bedroom window and tiptoed to the train station in the waning night, which she’d also never done before. She was now sitting on the first train out to Rokkō Island, a doughnut in the shape of a lion in her hand. She bit into its adorable face, the soft sugary flesh splitting with the force of her teeth, spraying forth a tsunami of cream filling onto her hand. Another doughnut, this one a plump porcelain-like Hello Kitty face, with a jammy centre, sat in a paper bag on the seat next to her. It was for her girlfriend. The static in her stomach surged at the thought of that. She had a girlfriend. They’d met playing netball, it was a sweltering summers day and the tarmac had felt like lava when her palms had smacked down onto it after she had tripped trying to defend the net. After the ball had rushed through behind her, the girl that had scored, a very pretty girl with shoulder-length brown hair and sparkling eyes, had reached down and helped her up. She was so surprised that this girl, who was far better at sports and probably far more popular than she was, had helped her, instead of hugging a teammate or somesuch celebration. She was even more surprised when that girl cornered her by the changing rooms and gave her a tiny slip of Snoopy-branded notepaper. Etched on it in elegant gel pen was a set of digits. And a heart. They’d spoken over the phone a lot since then, and met for a few whirlwind dates when either school was competing. But now, now they were meeting up not in school hours, bunking to go to a boba & coffee place together. She felt so alive, like someone had lifted up her soul from her body and she was floating freely among the candyfloss clouds that hung in sparse bunches over the horizon. But there was a worry, a deep and suffocating one, that sat squarely in her chest and didn’t budge. It was the anger of doubt, of wondering if she was unnatural, of fearing her parents wouldn’t understand, of having to keep it all a secret. She finished the doughnut and wrung her hands together, her nails digging into her palms, making deep white marks that drowned out the static inside her.
“Miss, are you okay?”
It came from the salaryman. He’d put his phone down and was looking at her with deep concern through his thick-rimmed glasses.
“Yeah, yeah I’m alright.” She managed to stutter, her hands shooting apart and onto her lap.
“That doughnut for someone?” He, rather redundantly, pointed at the bag with the smiling Mr Doughnut mascot on it.
“Urm, yeah, it’s for a friend.” She said, mostly to the gum on the underside of the salaryman’s seat.
“Well I hope they enjoy it,” He smiled at her, a kindly tired smile, “do you read much poetry?”
The question hit her like a freight train. A salaryman asking a teenager about poetry? She was astonished.
“No, no I don’t really, sorry.” She spurted out.
He leaned forward on his knees and with an exclamation of ‘yoisho’ lifted himself out of his chair and motioned to see if he could sit down next to her. She nodded, like a frightened rabbit.
“Well you should,” he said, sitting down, “it can free one’s mind of all sorts of heavy burdens. Can I read you a haiku?”
She was strangely at ease with this stranger, and so mumbled, “Yes, you may”.
He cleaned his throat and read, from memory;
“Even with insects-
Some can sing
Some can’t
It’s an Issa poem,” he said to her, “ and I think it relates to you somewhat. You seem different to others your age. And that’s fine, I was different once. I was a communist! Or I thought I was at least. And look at me now, huh? Another cog in the machine.”
The machine of the tram ground slowly to a halt and the lilting voice of the automated announcer proclaimed they’d reached Rokkō Island. The few passengers flooded out from the train and made their way out of the station. Passengers going from Rokkō to the mainland queued in orderly lines at the side of the tram doors, waiting for everyone to exit before stepping on. It was an intricate and well-executed dance of etiquette and unspoken rules. The salaryman picked up his briefcase, loosened his tie a bit, and walked off towards the shining sliding doors of his office building. The teen half-walked, half-tripped her way to the coffee shop, her brain was alight with hope and happiness, and all the static washed away on the wind.
The wind had carried the man’s papers far far away and so now he sat in his puffy, uncomfortable swivel chair, awaiting his boss’s arrival with a glum look on his face. His cubicle neighbour and best friend, a man with dyed blonde hair and perfect teeth, was consoling him.
“At least he’ll give you saké, he does that with everyone he fires right?” The guy grinned, leaning over the cubicles.
“I’d rather keep my job than have a bottle of saké, if I’m honest.” His mate glumly replied.
“Well bossman isn’t even here yet, maybe he’s been chopped up by the Yakuza, or run over by a car or-“
And in walked their boss, his tie loose around his neck and an odd spring in his step. He smiled, yes, smiled at them as he passed. When the door of his office was shut, the two men looked at eachother, then looked around at the puzzled looks on the faces of every employee in the room.
“What the hell just happened?”
“I think you’re not getting fired. Or maybe we all are.”
Music began to drift from behind the boss’s door. American music. Rather old.
Tangled Up In Blue by Bob Dylan.
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Obedience by Isabella Jordan
Promoting this for one of my favorite people in the world.
A short treat that she wrote and I helped plot way back in the day when I wasn't brave enough to write more than a grocery list honestly. Isy's amazing. 💕
Genres: Action Adventure, New Releases, Paranormal, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Sci-Fi
Themes: Alternative Universe, Magic, Sorcery, and Witchcraft, Multiple Partners, New Adult, Second Edition
A princess with a problem...
Meela must marry a prince from another planet in order to ensure the security of her people. Trouble is Meela's known to be a bit feisty, and sometimes that gets her into trouble. It's bad enough she has no say in who she'll marry. Worse still, the queen places an obedience curse on Meela to thwart her errant ways.
As a result of the curse, Meela finds herself in plenty of predicaments not exactly fit for a princess. But what's a princess to do when two gorgeous hunks come along and place sensual demands on her Meela's not sure she can -- or even wants to -- deny?
"Obedience is a fantastic story that gives a whole new meaning to hot flashes! This story is smoking hot and not to be missed."
-- Tammy, Fallen Angel Reviews
"This is a fun book that will keep the reader turning the pages from first to last..."
-- 4.5 Stars from Candy, eCataRomance Reviews
It's available at all the online places but you can get it for $2.39 at the publisher.
Excerpt
Obedience
Isabella Jordan
Second Edition
All rights reserved.
Copyright ©2024 Isabella Jordan
An Authorized Excerpt
Meela stared into the flowing red river before kneeling on the grassy bank to sulk. The red colored water rushing by her looked like blood. There were so many red rivers on the planet that they'd looked like veins on its surface to Meela when the star cruiser she'd traveled in approached it earlier.
Now that she was here, she wished that someone had told her to throw herself in the river. Her nurse had only told her to take a walk to calm her mind. It was a rare freedom for Meela. Probably her last.
Today was the day Meela had been preparing for her whole life. Later today she would be presented to the queen of this planet along with two other princesses from neighboring planets. The queen would then allow her sons to each choose the girl he wanted for his bride beginning with her oldest son, her heir.
It wasn't that Meela minded the arranged marriage. She was a princess after all and her duty was to her people. Her marriage to a Prince of Nelot, the strongest planet with the most powerful army in the system, would ensure the protection of her people. She'd been promised in marriage since her birth and all of her teachings were in preparation for fulfilling this obligation.
Meela accepted that.
But when she was sixteen, the Queen of Nelot, a sorceress she was to find out, paid a visit to Meela and her family on their home planet, Bano. She wanted to meet Meela, considering one day she would be the bride of one of her sons.
The queen was pleased with Meela. A little too pleased in fact. She explained to Meela's parents that their daughter was indeed beautiful, cultured and intelligent -- befitting a Princess of Nelot. But she felt those very virtues put Meela in danger from others and from herself until the wedding, so she placed an enchantment upon Meela. From that day forward, Meela would be obedient, would do whatever she was told, until her future husband arranged her release from the spell.
Her life had been misery ever since.
At first, Meela and her family didn't realize just what curse had been bestowed upon her. A few nights later Meela became angry at her father for not allowing her some privilege. She sat complaining in her rooms while her nurse brushed her hair. Finally her frustrated nurse told her to hold her tongue.
It had taken several hours for the entire family to discover that someone had to tell Meela to let go of her tongue before she could pry her fingers away.
It got worse. While her parents enjoyed their new power over Meela, the power to make her work at her studies longer and attend royal functions in their places, soon they learned there was a danger to the curse. Once, one of Meela's friends at court had dared her to kiss the handsome visiting ambassador from the planet Dalu. Unable to stop herself, she'd walked right up to the man and kissed him full on the mouth.
Her parents had been so alarmed by the turn of events that she was placed under the strictest watch until the time of her wedding. No more fun outings with her friends. No more boring royal functions even. Meela was only allowed to attend the most important celebrations on her planet, and then only for a short time with at least a dozen people watching her every movement. They might as well have locked her away in a prison.
Perhaps that is what the Queen of Nelot had intended when she'd placed the enchantment on her.
Years passed while the Princes of Nelot fought off one legion of intruders to their system after another, the stories of their glorious victories painting them as great warriors. By the time the Queen of Nelot sent for Meela for the bridal selection and subsequent wedding, she was twenty-seven, going out of her mind with boredom, and had taken to finding creative ways of watching the private activities of guests to the palace. It was as close as she had ever come to having sex after all.
And now that she was here on Nelot, ready to be selected by one of the queen's sons and do her duty for her parents and her people, she was pretty damned unhappy. Wasn't it enough of a sacrifice to have the person she'd spend her life with, share a bed with and have children for, chosen for her? Then to have the hateful curse of obedience placed on her, robbing her of her last years of freedom?
Meela no longer wanted to marry any son of the woman who had done this to her. Meela didn't even want to meet the princes.
"It's not fair," Meela grumbled at her reflection far below in the red water.
"What's not fair?"
That deep male voice alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone. With as much composure as she could muster, Meela turned her head slowly. She was unescorted, without any of her attendants who understood her enchantment, for the first time since she had kissed the ambassador at court. The pace of her heartbeat grew along with her anxiety.
"That I can't stay and enjoy this beautiful view," Meela said in her best royal voice with her practiced princess smile.
Yet she forgot all about how she was to speak or smile as she gazed at the two men standing before her, their dress indicating that they were common soldiers of the planet. They looked very much alike, both tall men with bodies of steel, the snug black uniforms they wore revealing that they were all hard, firm muscles.
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Although he was acclaimed as a travel writer, Jonathan Raban, who has died aged 80, disliked the term. He agreed with his fellow writer Bruce Chatwin, who famously turned down the Thomas Cook award, that the term was too limiting. He said he found it an “open form”, which was perfect for him because “I write between genres anyway”. When asked why, unlike Chatwin, he accepted the Cook award twice, he said: “I was hungry for prizes.”
He was also hungry to travel, to get away from his roots. The leaving of Britain formed a crucial part of much of his writing, even as he sailed around the island in Coasting (1986). The heart of his work was set on water; his writing mirrors the movement of the sea, its calm with turmoil always lurking beneath, taking you along with it, hiding and revealing. He mixes literary sources and knowledge with the people and places encountered on his journey; he’s less exotic than Chatwin, less caustic than Paul Theroux, but all of it comes in service to his real journey, within himself, escaping into travel. “Wherever I was, I felt like an outsider,” he said, and it is a feeling that permeates his writing, though he was drawn to America, a land of immigrants: the freedom of adjusting to this new world, and its contrasts with his old, became a major theme.
What he was escaping was the English world into which he was born, in Hempton, Norfolk. He was three when he first met his father, the Rev Canon J Peter CP Raban, an army captain returning from the second world war. He grew up in various parish postings, and his father came to represent “the Conservative party, the army, the church, the public school system in person”. It was his mother, Monica (nee Sandison), who “taught me to read, which was my one proficiency”.
He despised boarding school, to which he was sent at five, and eventually studied English at Hull University, where he organised a library committee in order to meet Philip Larkin, notoriously adept at avoiding students. They discussed novels and jazz, but never poetry. He married a fellow student, Bridget Johnson, in 1964. After graduating he taught English and American literature at Aberystwyth, then at East Anglia; he was captivated by American writers, particularly Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, and published a study of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
In 1969, he moved to London as a freelance writer, on the recommendation of Malcolm Bradbury, falling into the last hurrah of the Grub Street era, reviewing while living in the basement of the house shared by the poet Robert Lowell and the writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, after his marriage ended. His experience of Larkin and Lowell led to another book of literary criticism, The Society of the Poem. He joined the circle that emerged around the New Review magazine, in Soho’s Pillars of Hercules pub, and in 1974 published Soft City, a mix of personal memoir and London observation that became an early example of “psychogeography”.
His first travel book, Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979), took a modern orientalist view of the area reminiscent of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta and other classic travel writing on the Middle East. Old Glory (1981) was his first book set in the US, taking a skiff down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans. It recalls his study of Huckleberry Finn, blending the approaching age of Ronald Reagan into his inward experiences with America’s own eccentricities, and was a success on both sides of the Atlantic. Jan Morris called it “the best book of travel ever written by an Englishman about the United States”.
His first novel, Foreign Land (1985), follows an eccentric expat Englishman, George Grey, who leaves the Caribbean to return home, much to the consternation of his daughter, and sail a just-bought boat around Britain. Raban recapitulated the story himself in Coasting, in which he sails around the country, which, as the Falklands war erupts, seems an increasingly insular island nation. The book marks the perfecting of his classic English voice, that of the friendly faux-bumbler whose self-deprecation is itself a form of humble-brag, which has served British humour from Arthur Marshall to Bill Bryson; it made him a neutral sort of observer to Americans he met.
After publishing a memoir, For Love & Money: A Writing Life, he moved to the US, his journey across the Atlantic in a container ship told in Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1990), and, crucially, a poignant leaving scene that reflects the end of his second marriage, to the London art dealer Caroline Cuthbert.
He settled in Seattle, where in 1992 he married his third wife, Jean Lenihan; their daughter, Julia, was born in 1993. He continued travelling – Bad Land: An American Romance was set in Montana, dealing with the difficult dreams of immigrants to the beautiful but harsh Big Sky country. But his next book was perhaps his finest. Passage to Juneau (1996) is nominally another boat trip, on Alaska’s Inside Passage, a man leaving his wife and daughter for his travel. But midway through the trip, he returns to England, where his father is dying and his family has gathered. It is a travelogue of the writer’s mid-life implosion; he returns to finish his journey only to be greeted by his wife announcing she and his daughter are leaving him.
He remained in Seattle to concentrate on the joint care of his daughter. His 2003 novel, Waxwings, takes its butterfly title from Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the window pane.” Drawing on Bad Land, it is the story of an expat Hungarian-British man, in the dot.com boomtown that is Seattle, with an American wife, and an illegal Chinese immigrant worker who begins reconstructing his house. Raban was a distant relative of Evelyn Waugh, and the book recalls Waugh’s Men at Arms, where the social whirl does not stop for the newly launched war. My Holy War (2006), about the 9/11 attack and the US invasion of Iraq, was almost a companion piece.
In 2006 he published his third novel, Surveillance, in which a journalist tracks down a reclusive writer who has been kept hidden by his publisher lest he destroy the credibility of his Holocaust memoir. Its prime concern is the many-faceted ambiguity of liberty in the war on terror. “The world changed,” he said. “It didn’t change with 9/11. It changed with the Patriot Act, with the homeland security measures and the war on terror.”
His 2010 collection, Driving Home, is an eccentric mix of literary criticism, tales of great sea voyages, the state of the US in the 21st century and the mix of people he meets along the way, even as he remained in Seattle. A 2011 essay in the New York Times, The Getaway Car, detailed a drive down the Pacific coast to take Julia, now 18, to university at Stanford, outside San Francisco. Later that year, Raban suffered a massive stroke, which left one side of his body paralysed and confined him to a wheelchair. He continued writing, primarily for the New York Review of Books. It seemed an ironic fate for a writer who saw his journeys as “a means of escape, freedom and solitude, I could be happy … in a way I couldn’t be at home”. Yet he had always travelled through literature, and through his writing. And now he had a different sort of freedom in his daughter, which perhaps allowed him to address his own escape in his last book, to be published this autumn, a memoir titled Father and Son.
Julia survives him.
🔔 Jonathan Raban, writer, born 14 June 1942; died 17 January 2023
Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com
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Capitalism is ruining the internet. In lots of ways, but today’s grievance:
I just wanted to know if I’m the only trans boy who wants to wear a vaginal plug just around, and enjoy the fullness while just doing things in life. And I’m not, but I had to put up with legions of non-relevant search results and install the Reddit app (I hate Reddit), to end up on a sex toy seller’s page with a review sharing my interest and experience. And that sucks.
The internet, in its essence, is a communication tool connecting people. But that communication is getting more and more degraded as companies chop it up, turn it into a place where we are speculators rather than participants, marks to be sold to, chaff to be processed. “The internet is for porn,” was a silly mantra, but it was also kinda true. The internet had many, many places people had set up to share and talk about the things they found sexy. But more and more, puritanism and Finance are invading and restricting sharing and access. And it’s not even that things are behind paywalls, though that’s also a palpable presence. Credit card processors crack down on NSFW content, and start squeezing sites to restrict what they host to those processors’ stipulations.
And the arguments for why don’t hold water. None of it actually protects anyone, and vulnerable communities are put in more danger, as our very existence is up for “political debate”. Like, sorry, no, we as trans people deserve to be alive, and your restrictions on us receiving healthcare or even being acknowledged as existing around minors are fucking goulish. Disabilities make work/finding a job/keeping a job/financial stability in general difficult to even impossible, and are fucking expensive in the first place, and many disabled individuals turn to sex work. And there’s nothing about sex work that actually makes it more exploitative or demeaning than “regular” work. But demonizing it, making it harder for sex workers to find clients and communicate with one another to help keep each other safe puts them in so much more danger. The fear mongering and pearl clutching around trafficked individuals being coerced into sex work doesn’t help those trafficked victims, in fact it boxes them in and makes them less safe, grants them fewer paths to escape or protection from abuse, AND it presses those who weren’t coerced into tighter corners and worse situations. It gives more strength to pimps, and keeps the money, power, and freedom out of the hands of the people who need it.
And oh, “If I were in a bad Situation, I would simply Not Be a Sex Worker,” except, brainiac, there’s no fuckin social safety net. This garbage capitalist system is working exactly as designed, work or be homeless, work or don’t eat, work or don’t get the medicine you can’t live without, work or just fucking die. Sick? TOO BAD. Injured? TOO BAD. Chronic pain? TOO BAD. “Stop being weak, clearly you deserve to die, if you just can’t cut it.” That’s the message we all hear, loud and clear, every fucking day.
And none if it has to be this way! There is no reason for any of it. We have enough. We have plenty. Literal tons of food tossed into the ocean to keep prices up, while people literally starve. Homes kept absolutely fucking empty at an appalling scale while people live homeless. It’s disgusting, and it’s totally avoidable. All this scarcity is entirely manufactured. We have enough. We have more than enough. And it can be so much better. But we need to tear down the structures keeping us apart, keeping us weak, keeping us tired, and starving, and in fear. Because those structures of power are our enemy. Because whether we fight or are compliant , they’ll kill us either way.
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When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.
ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the most part, have yet to confront this reality.
This report synthesizes what is already known about ICE surveillance with new information from thousands of previously unseen and unanalyzed records, illustrating the on-the-ground impact of ICE surveillance through three case studies – ICE access to driver data, utility customer data and data collected about the families of unaccompanied children. The report builds on, and would not have been possible without, the powerful research, organizing and advocacy of immigrant rights organizations like CASA, the Immigrant Defense Project, Just Futures Law, Mijente, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Project South and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California (among many others), which have been leading the effort to expose and dissever ICE’s American dragnet.
👉🏿 https://www.americandragnet.org/
👉🏿 https://www.law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center/publications/american-dragnet-data-driven-deportation-in-the-21st-century/
👉🏿 https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/ice-has-assembled-surveillance-dragnet-facial-recognition-and-data-report-says/366822/
#politics#abolish ice#mass deportation#asylum seekers#mass surveillance#surveillance state#civil liberties#privacy rights#data mining#immigration
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Moon Knight Episode 1 Review
“Look at me... you’re not gonna die. Let me save us.” -- Marc Spector to Steven Grant 💖💖💖
Rewatching the show and seeing all of the little details and character beats they set up right at the very beginning and then steadily paid off throughout the show is such a joy! One of my fav things about the show has been how they managed to shift the tone and squeeze in multiple genres -- we start off with a mystery/horror vibe, transition to a fun adventure vibe, throw in some deep psychological character studies and heartbreak for a bit there, and cap it off with an action spectacle. The mystery/horror vibes were perfect to start off with in the pilot episode because they immediately presented us with a puzzle to solve and draw us in!
The choice to open with Steven Grant of the gift-shop as the POV character is what really makes this pilot work. It allows for the mystery tone to be established because poor Steven is just as confused as we are and has no idea what is happening to him. It gives us the thrill of discovering things at the same time that he does and gives us the opportunity to really internalize his character arc throughout the show because we’ve been with him every single step of the way as he navigated his journey towards becoming the hero that we see negotiate their freedom from Khonshu and fight his way through the mooks at the end of episode 6.
Most importantly though, the pilot makes us fall so deeply in love with Steven. It enables us to empathize with his struggles with what he thinks is sleep-walking, it makes us angry when Donna snaps at him, it makes us giggle when he poses in front of the mirror in a full suit+tie and calls himself a knob, it makes us wince in sympathy when we see how desperate he is for connection and how he’s only really able to talk to a golden statue and his one-finned goldfish and via voicemail to a mom who will never call him back, and it makes us sniffle when he realizes he missed his date at the steak house by a whole 2 days and dejectedly decides to order a well-done steak by himself instead. The writers and Oscar Isaac made Steven just such a completely real and endearing character that it makes it easy to buy into all the fantastical stuff surrounding him because Steven is here having a 120% authentic reaction to whatever nonsense is going on every single time.
I also loved what they did with Arthur Harrow in this pilot episode (even though I wasn’t ultimately satisfied with his arc as the villain of the whole story). His entrance opening the show by putting crushed glass into his shoes immediately made an impression and stuck with me. He had a quietly menacing and yet also completely sincere aura where you can tell he truly believes in what he and his followers are doing. It’s a masterful performance by Ethan Hawke.
The direction was also outstanding in this episode. My favourite shot from this entire episode was when that leaf landed on the water and showed that we were watching a reflection. I loved the copious shots of mirrors used as both foreshadowing for Steven being part of a system, and as a super effective method to ratchet up the creep factor when Steven’s reflections didn’t match his own. The smash cuts whenever Steven was physically overwhelmed and Marc had to step in were also well done and served to ramp up the mystery factor. The cupcake van chase was simply delightful and I love that once again Steven was totally sincere in his reactions being terrified and that his fight moves (understandably) include smushing cupcakes into his opponent’s face and throwing his gun at the car... and it was so fucking hilarious for us as an audience. In general this episode managed to hit and balance the different tones between drama, mystery, humour, horror very well.
When I first watched the pilot, my fav scene was the steak house scene and that definitely still ranks super high on the list, but the final scene of the episode when Marc finally reveals himself in the mirror and talks to Steven really hits differently now that we’ve seen the entire show. I loved how they showed Steven descending into complete panic and that his first reaction whenever he is overwhelmed is denial -- “no, no, you’re not real, none of this is real” -- because it serves as a poignant through-line to the same powerful denial coursing through baby Marc in episode 5 at the moment when his psyche first fractured to create Steven -- “it’s not my mom. it’s not her, it’s not my mom”. I also loved Marc trying to calm Steven down and telling him resolutely that he wasn’t going to let Steven die -- the glimmers of the love and protectiveness that is going to smack us across the face when he kneels in front of a frozen Steven in episode 6. These are character beats that we see again and again throughout the show and I really appreciate how carefully constructed Marc and Steven were right from the beginning.
And of course that final shot where we see the jackal trying to run the fuck away from Marc in his Moon Knight armor and being dragged back into an absolutely smashed restroom was fucking badass and an awesome hook to end the episode on!
I have to end this episode review (and probably every episode review lbh) by giving a shoutout to Oscar Isaac’s amazing work. Like I said, this episode works because it’s so easy to love Steven, and a large part of why it’s so easy to love Steven is because of Oscar’s skill in making Steven so fucking lovable -- from the slouched shoulders and wide eyes and adorable smile, to his tiny waves when he meets new people, to the clear excitement on his face whenever he gets to talk about Egyptian history, to him almost breaking down in tears at the steak-house, to the abject terror whenever the bloody pigeon decides to be dramatic, to the physical comedy when he’s trying to give the scarab to Harrow -- there is never a false beat when watching his performance and he really elevates already interesting material to new highs by committing 100% to his characters!
#moon knight#steven grant#marc spector#oscar isaac#MCU#my reviews#meta#mine#the goldfish problem#I've watched this episode (and the whole show) so many times now that I thought I might as well write up my review#this was just a really solid pilot#onwards to episode 2 review!#moon knight meta
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Why Do You Require a Property Inspection When Buying A House?
The dream of owning a home is often considered the goal, and there's no doubt why. When you own a home, you enjoy the security, stability, and freedom of making it your own. The symbol signifies success, hard work, and achievement for many people. Buying a home can be stressful and overwhelming, especially for the first time. The location, size, and condition of the property and financing options are all factors to consider.
Property inspections in Wollongong are one of the most crucial steps in the home-buying process. When buying a property, hiring a qualified inspector who can identify potential issues and objectively evaluate its condition is vital. An inspection can reveal problems that may not be immediately apparent, such as structural damage, outdated electrical systems, or pest infestations. Conducting thorough property inspections in Wollongong before buying a home is crucial. Otherwise, you might end up with a property with hidden defects, leading to costly repairs and unexpected expenses in the future. Additionally, some lenders might mandate a property inspection before approving a mortgage, a crucial risk assessment component.
Which Property Inspections Should You Perform Before Purchasing?
When purchasing a property, it is essential to conduct multiple inspections, including building and pest inspections.
Building inspections assess the structural soundness of a property, identifying any potential issues or defects that may compromise its safety or value. Through building inspections, problems such as cracks in walls or foundations, water damage, faulty roofing or guttering, and structural defects that can endanger the occupants can be brought to light. It is essential to have building inspections conducted by qualified professionals who will provide a comprehensive report highlighting any issues and the necessary steps to address them.
Pest inspections are conducted to identify potential pest infestations in a property. Such reviews can uncover problems like termites, rodents, and other pests that can cause significant damage to the property over time. A thorough pest inspection evaluates the property's susceptibility to pest infestations and provides recommendations on mitigating these risks. Hiring licensed professionals with experience identifying and treating pest infestations for pest inspections is essential. They should provide a detailed report outlining any areas of concern and recommended treatments.
When Should You Have a Property Inspection?
Before finalizing your property purchase, conducting a professional property inspection is crucial. If you are buying at an auction, you must arrange for a property inspection before bidding.
Reasons To Have a Property Inspection
There are multiple reasons to get a property inspection done:
Determine any potential issues
A property inspection in Wollongong is crucial to identify potential problems with the property, especially those that may not be visible during a regular viewing.
Pest and property damage
Before purchasing a property, it is crucial to have it inspected by a building inspector both inside and outside. The inspector will thoroughly examine the roof, roof space, sub-floor areas, doors, windows, and frames for any signs of pest infestation or property damage. Identifying these issues before buying the property can save you significant money in repairs.
Evaluate the home's condition
Property inspection in Wollongong can determine a home's overall condition, identifying wear and tear, maintenance needs, and other issues affecting its value.
Evaluate safety issues
An inspection can identify safety hazards in the home, such as faulty wiring or gas leaks, that may endanger occupants.
Plan for future repairs and upkeep
Buyers benefit from inspection reports by avoiding unforeseen repairs and maintenance costs.
Peace of mind
A professional property inspection brings confidence to buyers and peace of mind to their purchase decision.
Conclusion
At Inspect Wollongong, we specialize in conducting pre-purchase and pre-sale building and timber pest inspections and pool safety inspections. Our team of qualified professionals can efficiently carry out your new build inspection. Even though new homes may seem problem-free, it is crucial to safeguard yourself from costly surprises. We provide quality assurance that includes exceptional service, comprehensive inspections, and professional advice that you can rely on.
Disclaimer: This is generic Information & post; content about the services can be changed from time to time as per your requirements and contract. The images we use in this context have been taken from the official website of Inspect Wollongong. To get the latest and updated information, contact us today or visit our website.
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Experience Freedom: The Ultimate Guide to Self-Drive Car Rental
The allure of the open road, the freedom to explore at your own pace, the thrill of discovery—these are just a few reasons why self-drive car rental has become increasingly popular among travelers worldwide. Whether you're embarking on a scenic road trip or navigating through the bustling streets of a new city, renting a car for self-drive offers unparalleled flexibility and convenience. In this guide, we'll delve into everything you need to know about Self drive car rental and how to make the most of your driving adventure.
The Benefits of Self-Drive Car Rental
Flexibility: With a self-drive rental, you're in control of your itinerary. No more adhering to rigid tour schedules or waiting for public transportation. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want.
Convenience: Forget about navigating unfamiliar public transit systems or haggling with taxi drivers. Your rental car is ready and waiting for you, allowing for seamless travel from point A to point B.
Privacy: Enjoy the privacy and comfort of your own vehicle, free from the constraints of shared transportation. Whether you're traveling solo, with a partner, or in a group, having your own space enhances the overall travel experience.
Exploration: Self-drive rentals open up a world of possibilities for exploration. Venture off the beaten path, discover hidden gems, and immerse yourself in local culture, all at your own pace.
Choosing the Right Self-Drive Car Rental
When selecting a self-drive car rental service, consider the following factors:
Fleet Variety: Look for a rental company that offers a diverse range of vehicles to suit your needs, whether you're seeking a compact car for city driving or an SUV for off-road adventures.
Booking Process: Opt for a rental service with a user-friendly booking platform that allows for easy reservation and payment. The process should be seamless and hassle-free.
Insurance Coverage: Ensure that the rental company provides comprehensive insurance coverage for the vehicle, including liability, collision, and theft protection. Review the terms and conditions carefully to understand your liabilities in case of an accident or damage.
24/7 Support: Choose a rental service that offers round-the-clock customer support, should you encounter any issues or emergencies during your rental period.
Transparent Pricing: Transparency is key when it comes to pricing. Be wary of hidden fees or ambiguous charges. Look for a rental company that provides upfront pricing with no surprises.
Top Self-Drive Car Rental Companies
Enterprise Rent-A-Car: With a wide selection of vehicles, convenient locations, and excellent customer service, Enterprise is a top choice for self-drive car rentals worldwide.
Avis: Avis offers a range of rental options, from economy cars to luxury vehicles, with competitive rates and convenient booking options.
Hertz: Known for its extensive global network and reliable service, Hertz provides quality vehicles and flexible rental terms for self-drive travelers.
Budget Car Rental: Budget offers affordable rates and a straightforward booking process, making it an excellent choice for budget-conscious travelers seeking self-drive rental options.
Tips for a Successful Self-Drive Adventure
Plan Your Route: Research your destination ahead of time and plan your driving route accordingly. Consider factors such as road conditions, traffic patterns, and points of interest along the way.
Stay Safe: Familiarize yourself with local traffic laws and driving customs. Always wear your seatbelt, obey speed limits, and avoid distracted driving.
Keep Essentials Handy: Pack essentials such as a map, GPS device or smartphone with navigation apps, water, snacks, and emergency supplies in your rental vehicle.
Inspect the Vehicle: Before driving off, thoroughly inspect the rental car for any pre-existing damage and report it to the rental company to avoid liability issues later on.
Enjoy the Journey: Most importantly, savor the freedom and adventure that comes with self-drive travel. Embrace the spontaneity, explore new destinations, and create lasting memories on the open road.
Conclusion
Self-drive car rental offers a liberating and unforgettable travel experience, allowing you to explore the world on your own terms. Whether you're embarking on a cross-country road trip or navigating through the streets of a bustling city, the freedom and flexibility of self-drive travel are sure to leave you with cherished memories and a newfound sense of adventure. So, buckle up, hit the road, and let the journey begin!
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The Ease Of Door-To-Door Airport Taxi From Cambridge To Stansted
Are you departing from Cambridge to Stansted Airport? Embrace the comfort and luxury of a door-to-door airport taxi from Cambridge to Stansted. Reliable airport transfers ensure a seamless experience.
Traveling by road is always exciting but with a professional taxi service. Public taxis may be expensive with hidden charges and not suitable if you are unfamiliar with the local routes. So, seeking the help of private taxis is the right approach.
All the vehicles offered by taxi services are well-maintained and cleaned. The drivers are vetted and licensed by the local authority. You are in the hands of trustworthy drivers that give you peace of mind.
The Convenience Of Airport Taxi From Cambridge To Stansted-
Easy Booking and Peace of Mind-
Don’t struggle to find a public taxi with your luggage and things. Booking a taxi through online booking systems is now easy. Expert airport transfer from Cambridge to Stansted allows you to secure your airport transfer at your convenience, from the comfort of your abode. Embrace the peace of mind.
Timely Pickups and Reliable Drivers-
When you are departing, you have to catch your flight on time. Reliable taxi services understand this. Punctuality is their top priority and your driver arrives on time to pick you up at your doorstep. Locally trained drivers navigate the route efficiently which maximizes your relaxation time before your flight.
Door-to-Door Convenience-
A door-to-door transfer always stands out from the crowd. Don’t struggle with your heavy luggage when hailing cabs. Your professional driver will pick you up directly from your address and handle your luggage settlement. Don’t stress, just focus on your journey.
Comfort and Tailored to Your Needs-
Reputed taxi services offer a variety of vehicle options to choose from. You will have the freedom to pick a vehicle that can accommodate your preferences. This is the biggest plus point. With public taxis, you will have to book more than one for your group. Whether you need a saloon, an Estate or an MPV, they can match your expectations.
In addition, some reputed taxi services offer amenities like water bottles, newspapers, phone chargers, meet-and-greet options at the airport, etc. This is more than just a normal ride. It provides you with the greatest travel experience you have ever experienced.
Competitive Rates and Transparent Pricing-
Public taxis may add hidden charges or extra charges. Do not worry about it! Reputable taxi services offer transparent upfront pricing. You can ask for a fixed quote before booking your airport taxi. This will allow you to set your budget confidently. Rest assured that it suits your budget.
The Bottom Line-
Your airport transfer will be hassle-free and enjoyable with a reliable airport transfer from Cambridge to Stansted. Let your journey begin in comfort and end in style with them.
Looking for a door-to-door airport taxi from Cambridge to Stansted? Our satisfied customers speak for themselves. With numerous five-star reviews, we are the preferred choice from Cambridge to Stansted Airport. We pride ourselves on delivering outstanding customer service. Visit https://cambridge-airport.taxi/ today!
#airport taxi cambridge to gatwick#airport taxi cambridge to stansted#airport transfer cambridge to gatwick#airport transfer cambridge to stansted#cambridge taxi airport transfer#cambridge to heathrow taxi#cambridge airport taxi#airport transfers cambridge#gatwick to cambridge taxi#heathrow airport to cambridge taxi
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Project2025 #CorpMedia #Oligarchs #MegaBanks vs #Union #Occupy #NoDAPL #BLM #SDF #DACA #MeToo #Humanity #FeelTheBern
JinJiyanAzadi #BijiRojava Women Protection Unit Challenging Patriarchal Mentality in Sinjar [UPDATES]
“We are building a center for Yazidi women”, says Hezel. The 35-year-old member of the Women Protection Forces is responsible for the other women in the unit, and she overlooks the construction process…
RELATED UPDATE: Rojava revolution: reshaping masculinity
RELATED UPDATE: The Rojava Revolution: Oil, Water, and Liberation
RELATED UPDATE: New education system was central to the Kurds' Rojava Revolution in northern Syria – now it's under attack
RELATED UPDATE: Fighting with pens in Rojava’s “war of education”
RELATED UPDATE: One-day workshop, all welcome: Rojava Speaking Tour: An Alternative for a World in Crisis: The Rojava Revolution, Kurdish Freedom Movement and Prospects for South Africa’s Incomplete Liberation
RELATED UPDATE: Women’s cooperatives overcome water wars and climate drought in Rojava
RELATED UPDATE: Internationalist martyrs of the Rojava Revolution – IV: Keith Broomfield
RELATED UPDATE: The road to Lausanne and the division of Kurdistan – a weekly news review
FURTHER READING:
#Project2025#CorpMedia#Oligarchs#MegaBanks vs#Union#Occupy#NoDAPL#BLM#SDF#DACA#MeToo#Humanity#FeelTheBern#JinJiyanAzadi#BijiRojava
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Funnel Freedom Review: Streamlining Online Marketing And Lead GenerationMarketing
Marketing in the digital age requires innovative solutions that save time and resources, while still driving meaningful results. Funnel Freedom.io promises to be such a solution, offering a suite of tools designed to automate marketing efforts and enhance lead generation. In this review, we will explore the ease of use of the platform, its marketing automation capabilities, the efficacy of its methods for generating leads, and the overall value proposition, considering the 14-day free trial offered.
Simplicity and User-Friendliness - No Need for Expertise
One of the standout features of Funnel Freedom is its straightforward approach to online marketing. Aimed primarily at users who may lack technical expertise in building sales funnels or crafting elaborate marketing campaigns, the platform takes away much of the technical complexity.
I found that getting started with Funnel Freedom does not require the user to have experience with funnel building, email marketing, or creating video reviews. This is a significant advantage for newcomers and simplifies the learning curve dramatically. You're provided with a step-by-step process that is easy to follow, from setting up to launching your campaigns.
Automated Marketing Campaigns - Set It and Forget It
The core selling point of Funnel Freedom is its automated marketing software that allows users to give away a free course to attract potential leads. The system then promotes multiple products through pre-written emails, texts, and leverages existing YouTube reviews.
During my evaluation, I particularly appreciated the 'done-for-you' aspect of these campaigns, which eliminated the need to spend hours writing promotional content or creating engaging material. Instead, the platform's automation takes charge once you get it running.
Lead Generation - A Simplified Approach
The idea of using a free course as a lead magnet is a proven method for building an email list. Funnel Freedom capitalizes on this by making the process incredibly user-friendly. Instead of having to create your own course, the platform provides one for you, easing the burden of content creation.
In practice, this seemed like a double-edged sword. While it significantly lowers the barrier to entry for new marketers, there could be concerns about saturation and differentiation since many users could potentially be offering the same freebie. However, beginners looking to amass leads quickly might find this approach beneficial.
14-Day Free Trial - A Risk-Free Introduction
A pivotal part of the experience with Funnel Freedom is its 14-day free trial. This period allows users to test the waters without financial commitment, which is an attractive option for skeptics and those on the fence.
The no-contract, cancel-anytime policy instills confidence that the service backs its offer with user satisfaction. During my trial, I had the opportunity to assess the platform's effectiveness and could easily imagine this being a low-barrier way for many others to experience the service first-hand.
Final Thoughts
Based on my review of Funnel Freedom, it is clear that the service is tailored for users looking for a hands-off approach to lead generation and marketing automation. Its ease of use and 'done-for-you' systems lower the threshold for entry into online marketing, making it a potentially valuable tool for content creators who want to focus more on their products and less on the intricacies of online marketing campaigns.
However, those looking for more customization in their marketing strategies or wishing to create a unique presence in a competitive digital marketplace might find the platform too cookie-cutter in its approach.
In assessing its offer of a 14-day free trial, I would suggest potential users take advantage of this opportunity to truly gauge whether Funnel Freedom aligns with their marketing objectives and style before committing financially.
Rating: 4/5
Pros:
User-friendly system, no need for prior marketing knowledge.
Marketing automation frees up valuable time.
The free course is an effective lead magnet.
Risk-free trial offers insight into the platform's capabilities.
Cons:
Limited customization options might not suit all businesses.
Potential for market saturation with the free course.
Subscription cost might not be feasible for small businesses or individuals.
Final Verdict: Funnel Freedom is a solid option for those looking to streamline their online marketing efforts and focus on content creation. Its easy-to-use system, risk-free trial, and lead magnet course make it an attractive option. However, those seeking more unique or tailored marketing strategies may find the platform lacking in customization options. Overall, I would recommend giving the free trial a try and assessing its fit for your specific marketing goals and needs before committing to a subscription. So, it is always wise to do thorough research and assess the platform's capabilities before investing time and money into any online marketing tool or service.
Additionally, as with any automated system, it is important to regularly monitor and adjust your strategies to ensure they are still effective. While Funnel Freedom can save time and effort, it should not be viewed as a replacement for human oversight and decision-making.
Furthermore, the success of any marketing campaign also depends on factors such as target audience, market trends, and competition. Therefore, while Funnel Freedom may offer helpful tools and resources, it is ultimately up to the user to utilize them effectively and adapt to changing circumstances.
In conclusion, Funnel Freedom can be a valuable asset for businesses looking to improve their online marketing efforts and save time on content creation. However, as with any tool or platform, it should be thoroughly researched and assessed before committing to a subscription. Keeping an eye on industry trends and regularly adjusting strategies is also crucial for long-term success. So, it can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal, but ultimately it is up to the user to utilize it effectively and make informed decisions for their business's unique needs.
Remember, marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and experimenting with different tools and strategies is key to finding what works best for your business. Funnel Freedom can be a useful tool in this process, but it is important to also consider other factors and continuously adapt your approach. With the right combination of tools, resources, and informed decision-making, businesses can achieve great success in their online marketing efforts with Funnel Freedom by their side. So, take advantage of this powerful platform and see how it can help you reach your business goals. Keep learning, keep adapting, and keep growing with Funnel Freedom. Happy marketing!
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