48 Comments
Dec 4, 2021Liked by Mathew Crawford

Very interesting. Thanks for that great reference to Reeder's work.

I started work at NASA-Goddard in 1980. At that time the climate modelers were working on a model that explained the triggering of ice ages ("global cooling"). Many of the modelers were contract personnel, hence their salaries had to come from research grants obtained by the principal investigator (PI). Others', civil servants' salaries, were paid out of annual appropriations enacted by Congress to cover the NASA budget. Already you can see how money figured in. In 1980, people seriously were fearing another ice age any minute. Then in that decade we entered a period of warming. Things started to look bad for the coming ice age.

In 1988, Washington DC had a miserable hot summer, worse than normal and that year Congress was unable to recess on schedule and many of the congressmen were held over in DC for the hot weather. People like James Hansen at Goddard Institute for Space Science (GISS) in NYC had been thinking maybe "global warming" was the actual threat, and managed to obtain a Congressional hearing on that topic that very summer. Hansen is on record gloating that he had the set point in the hearing room bumped a few degrees higher than normal, so that the congressmen could sit and sweat and fully experience "global warming". He made his point and the bandwagon henceforth was fueled by ample appropriations for research in global warming.

My own work was then in novel infrared sensors that could be used in imaging detector arrays. The big money, thanks to Hansen and others keeping everyone afraid we were all going to fry, was in earth viewing remote sensing. I had an instrument on STS-85 that successfully obtained infrared imagery of earth from Shuttle altitude. The funding for my part of that (some instrumental development, then part time another 9 years of image processing) was obtained by my PI from the flood of research dollars devoted to global warming. We focused on the infrared imagery of clouds, whose role in global warming was still uncertain. Our published papers always had ample reference to global climate as the reason for our interest and effort. We were on the funding bandwagon. (And our take was chicken feed compared to some. We did a lot of that work on a shoe string.) But I saw up close how it worked.

Since then, global warming has morphed into "climate change". That is so wonderfully vague. You just cannot fail to justify your research now. Warming? Ok, polar bears afloat. Bangladesh underwater. Deep ocean currents slowing down and causing the heating to run away and turn Earth into a half baked Venus. Increased heart damage in newborns. Cooling? Ok, crop failures, ice sheets obliterating NYS, etc. Whatever you want. But keep the panic enflamed and the dollars roll in to feed your grad students and pay your salary and give your University its cut for "administrative" costs.

Now it's medical panic. I see this as an even bigger bonanza, kept alive by all the racketeering you mention here. It all seems strangely familiar. This time the human race is being terrified and bullied into being test subjects in a giant experiment that enriches Pfizer and Moderna in the US. It's going to run its course but I wonder what will be left of us at that point. Will we be so mutated and crippled that we will end up maintained on meds from the same psychopaths that destroy us?

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Dec 4, 2021Liked by Mathew Crawford

and with this system in place rulers can shape any narrative they want:

Ayn Rand: "Do you wish to know when that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot." –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 385 (1957)

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What a brilliant quote. Are we there yet?

" you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming self-sacrifice –"

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Francisco D'Anconia lives!

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"But keep the panic enflamed and the dollars roll in to feed your grad students and pay your salary and give your University its cut for "administrative" costs." Folks outside government funding loop think it's a joke that crisis = cash in real terms. Fab comment ty.

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The IR technology we flew on the Shuttle ended up widely used in handheld uncooled IR cameras. So our work paid off in practical applications, not just parroting the climate party line. The array we flew had been given us by DARPA, developed by Honeywell for guided missiles. A sword beaten to a plowshare.

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I was following Dr. Ross McKitrick, a Canadian professor of economics.

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/

He has a paper on the folly of building a temperature model on the back of “bad assumptions”. It’s been peer reviewed .

Here is a non technical backgrounder link ..

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/at99.backgrounder.pdf

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Seriously good commentary. And bravo for exposing what we all know. Now that you have done this for cooling/warming/climate change, could someone else please do it for the overpopulation crapola that my generation still believes in (65 and over). Honestly, they are never going to believe otherwise.

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Even Bill Gates has admitted they were wrong about the overpopulation projections. Current projects are the pop will max out at around 11bn or so iirc and then go down from there because people are having fewer children.

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Great comment. Shared it to my kids, mostly my 10 yr old as she has daily climate change brainwashing classes and the save the environment be nice to animals part makes for a good hook. Like the covid scam she is wise to it but in many ways the climate change programming is sneakier with how it sucks in children, so I know I need to work harder there to expose the conflicts and leave her seeing it for herself. My teenager is the only child in her entire high school from the start to now that doesn’t wear a mask regardless of teachers abusing her of that right/choice so thankfully she is unscammable. We live in Scotland home of the meek, as I have sadly found out, so I have been scammed, I was brought up to believe it was “Scotland the brave!”. Maybe again in time.

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For the technically inclined you can also visit climateaudit.org

I can follow most of the discussions there but not always the technical content. For me the below discussion of climategate emails was eye opening with regard to climate hysteria and also how peer review really didn't mean peer review.

https://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf

After reading this how can we take them seriously? This isn't to say there isn't a responsibility to the earth because there is. It's just not an emergency and the hysterically brainwashed are simply useful idiots for a different purpose.

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Another excellent dissection.

As a scientist myself (theoretical physicist) I've lost count of the number of times I've had to scratch my head in bafflement over this last 20 months or so.

It's easy to run foul of stats and make simple, stupid mistakes (did it myself recently - ignored the warnings of that paradoxical Mr Simpson - I can be an idiot). But some of the ridiculous assertions we've had passed off as "science" have been spectacular - and I don't mean that in a good way.

It's like we threw away all our previous knowledge and experience (our a priori positions) and just went with a ton of crappy associational studies and extremely dubious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

I wrote a somewhat sarcastic piece on the radical transformation of our scientific understanding wrought by covid

https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-covid

There are obvious absurdities everywhere (safe when seated - deadly dangerous when you go for a pee) - but it's more serious when those absurdities are present in the scientific literature - it has the official academic "seal of approval".

For those swayed by the number of degrees someone has I would say that a rectal thermometer also has lots of degrees - and you know what you can do with one of those!

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Substack has been one of the best things to come out of this scam. The quality of the articles and then the depth of knowledge/experience in the comments make for a kind knowledge community almost 99% (much like the covid survival rate) free of the negativity of social media. There’s still different views but it’s more respectful/thoughtful. I’ve got 3 degrees and been called a “clown” on Facebook for 20 months. Thank you for your comment and your substack.

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great post

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Mr. Rigger, you have another fan here. Read it, loved it (it was epic!) and I am now reading all your stuff. Thank you. First time I've laughed in days.

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Really appreciate this; I am not a scientist but have somehow held on to my natural curiosity and belief in the ability of my mind to grasp new things if I ask lots of questions, try hard, and not mind looking stupid now and then. I've noticed that the main difference between myself and people who are willing to blindly trust The Science is that once they encounter that "This doesn't make sense to me" wall, they'd prefer to look smart, and right now-- in public-- aligning with The Science is like siding with The Official and Authorized Smart People. I appreciate you chipping away at their absurd statements in a way even a non-scientist like me can understand, if I put a little effort into it.

My latest (Officially Stupid?) question relates to the news reports on omicron which state that it is very good at evading natural immunity, that known cases in the U.S. seem to be either vaccinated or prior infected, and that we still believe the best protection is to get vaccinated.

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Where are the reports of omicron reinfections in the US? The South Africa study is quite reckless. There were almost no cases going on in October. The "relative" rates for reinfection go up every time case rates are low, because low case rates mean more false - positives (so it's harder to measure the difference in real rates accurately). That the authors suddenly attribute an existing pattern of (false) higher reinfection rates to omicron only starting in October is either crazy or very suspicious.

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Yes. Additionally the study didn’t know who was vaccinated or not. It’s a suppositional mess with most value derived from being headline fodder.

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Or which reinfections were HIV+. Fodder indeed, though it's surprisingly gone under the radar for the last few days. It's not like most MSM-watchers don't already believe natural immunity only lasts ~1 week to begin with.

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Just planting seeds, like the other report I saw yesterday breathlessly exclaiming that Omicron is having a large impact on those under five.

The purpose seems clear on the media’s part, to rebut natural immunity and pave the way for under five vaccinations. I would hope that even MSM watchers can’t help but be slightly suspicious at the convenient timing and focus of these reports.

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Though even Jassat said it's not cause for alarm yet, possibly being driven by lower and lower standards for admission - probably will be the same in the US in a few weeks. Fortunately this doesn't translate into mortality, but I still think any parent is crazy to let their kid spend the night in a hospital just for a fever + the runs.

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The Hawaii case was (reportedly) a reinfection. I believe one of the other cases was, too, perhaps in Maryland. These cases, like those among the vaccinated and unvaccinated/covid naive have all been reported mild. In the next breath, we are told that the mild cases among the vaccinated are proof that the vaccines work and we should get them.

Anyway, we have 2 things here-- #1 is your suspicion of reported reinfections, which certainly sounds justified, and #2 is that even if one takes them at their world, the conclusion they draw about vaccine efficacy is a non sequitur.

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Ah, thanks - found the Hawaii story.

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Dec 4, 2021Liked by Mathew Crawford

Familiar with Dr. Fleming? He put the "vax" efficacy at ca 1 per cent.

https://www.flemingmethod.com/event-2021

While the video is long, the PDF is concise.

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I saw him on rumble back I think in April. He's the reason I'm utterly adamant that these shots are worthless or worse. I shared that video of him sharing the JJ, Moderna and Pfizer test data with a number of people. One fellow told me Reddit discredited him by pointing out he's a convicted felon (Medicaid fraud). That seems to be the case but he is dead on accurate about this entire vaccine scam

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What's the difference between a convicted Medicaid felon and a medical professional in good standing?

The latter hasn't been convicted yet.

I can tell you right now every single medical professional does fraudulent billing. I did it myself for years at CVS pharmacy as did everyone there, and not out of greed but to do things by the book is simply impossible. The number of impossible rules they have is unbelievable (and medicare is much worse) . If I did it the right way a lot of people would have probably tried to kill me for withholding their medications.

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'Besides, if a combination of excellent typesetting and strangely unskeptical and unified pronouncement of "well run clinical trial" by the "science media" is all you need to trust a product injected into your body (or your child's), then I don't assume you'll have the independence of will to follow what comes next.'

This hurts. I feel seen.

To be fair I'm a bit downstream from the excellent typesetting and unified pronouncements. See those influenced people that influence the people I trust. That is it convinced the FDA, the CDC, who convinced the Doctors in my families, as well as the NYT, NPR, BBC, MSNB, CNN, and all other World Governments, the pro-Ivermectin is at least an adjunctive therapy Doctor I followed on Twitter (Dr. Osgood), our Pediatrician, and most importantly my Wife.

So my skepticism that didn't start until Delta chased us back into our bubble hasn't been able to muster enough conviction in me to overrule my much more successful wife, or my successful virologist father-in-law. At least it's given me an unhealthy obsession and painful cognitive dissonance. I like to think perhaps I'm growing and will come out of this more informed with better tools to be more critical.

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Dec 5, 2021Liked by Mathew Crawford

Okay, this is probably really stupid and evidence of that cognitive bias from evolved cognition that makes our species draw causal conclusions when two things happen sequentially, but hearing Tulsi Gabbard warn that Molnupiravir is mutagenic, and hearing that Omicron's mutations are not those an evolutionary biologist would necessarily predict, makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the testing of Molnupiravir and Omicron. Wikipedia announces this about the drug "The international nonproprietary name of the drug was inspired by that of Thor's hammer, Mjölnir" Probably just drawing connections where none exist based on my general sense that something is freaking rotten on Gaia.

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author

I think understanding the naming and relationships is a worthwhile endeavor, but only to a degree. As a commentor said the other day, we don't want to be herded into a corner putting yarns around tacks on a pushpin board. However, it's hard not to think...Ovid's Metamorphoses are playing out following a period of chaotic governance that ended in the First Reich. What is the WEC (run by the son of a Third Reicher) calling the next era? The Fourth Industrial Revolution? Educated people, good and evil, love their poetry and mythology.

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Dec 5, 2021Liked by Mathew Crawford

With idle tales this fills our empty ears;

The next reports what from the first he hears;

The rolling fictions grow in strength and size,

Each author adding to the former lies.

Here vain credulity, with new desires,

Leads us astray, and groundless joy inspires;

The dubious whispers, tumults fresh designed,

And chilling fears astound the anxious mind. Metamorphosis xii 61

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Great piece again. I love that there is a community that actively tries to unravel what is actually going on, not ignoring but actively engaging with the science that sits behind all the decision making.

That's the only way to go and it shows such a big contrast between the official science gods and those opposing its' ''GOD'' status. While they are trying to just create the feeling that all criticism is based on absurd attention seeking ex-scientists who either try to cause chaos or are nut jobs

I don't have the ability to actively criticize the science (except for the most obvious flaws) but I can on the other hand observe the discussion and who is being more transparent with their position and conclusions.

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Very good.

“Where this journey ends I do not know.

But I know this: we invented about the most complex product imaginable, tested it in a relative handful of people for a few months, a far shorter timetable than is typical for drug development. Now we are shoving it on every human we can reach – to prevent (or more accurately fail to prevent) an illness that is not particularly dangerous to most of them.“

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Here's some food for thought. The official narrative gets determined by money. The vaccine industry has now more money than any other industry. What do you think will be "the truth" as long as they exist?

In August 2019, just four months before Covid hysteria began, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation agreed to invest $55 million in the shares of BioNTech - a company which had never released any products.

A little over two years later, these shares are now worth $990 million.

In 2019 Bill Gates said “NEXT YEAR” vaccines would be “one of the best buys.”

How did he know 2020 would be one of the best years to buy into vaccines?

On April 2nd 2020 he said, “Normalcy would only return when the entire global population is vaccinated.”

"COVID-19" is allegedly a strain of the flu. One cannot spread the flu virus if you have no symptoms. This is common sense that all doctors are taught in introductory classes in medical school.

And yet "COVID-19" breaks all the rules of virology and causes every illness known to man, is spread asymptomatically, and is constantly changing and can never be stopped.

Why?

Because a hand-picked “expert” on my television told me so.

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"The vaccine industry has now more money than any other industry. "

I'm not sure that's really the case, but I suppose it depends how you define things. Anyway, I'd like to point out that this "industry" has very few and all very big players, all working together. It's a cartel.

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Well done and exactly the reason why we need more eyes on these studies and more research, re-analyses, and articles from independent scientists who are simply looking for the truth.

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Very curious paper, suggests that covid can be latent in the intestines. This would explain the explosion of covid cases immediately after vaccination, if the vaccines suppress immunity and the gut contains SARS-CoV-2. Also suggests that eliminating the virus with non-permanent vaccines is impossible: as the vaccines wane, you can get sick from latent virus. Geez...

"SARS-CoV-2 remained in intestinal tissue 6 months after nasopharyngeal clearance, suggesting latent infection. The second patient had a severe ischaemic colitis with perforation and SARS-CoV-2 was also identified in endothelial cells." -- https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12876-021-01905-3

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I cant think critically and logically after watching the Austen powers clip and I cant read the screen anymore b/c Im tearing up laughing so hard. I loved those movies... thanks for all this great analysis. Giving us sane people hope.

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You would think the disclosure of an ongoing "Replication Crisis" that affects basically every field of study would of put a damper on all that scientific arrogance, no?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Who am I kidding!? Damn the consequences!

FULL SPEED AHEAD!

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I'm going to commit "The Initial State: Priors and Biases" and whip that out the next time a jabber-wokey confronts me. Great stuff, Matthew.

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Jabber-wokey that takes the cake!

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To me who lacks more than basic instructon in the natural sciences (social sciences and the humanities are my home turf) there is always a delicate dilemma concerning various claims by natural scientists:

How do I check their claims for truth?

Well, looking backwards through time, they were selfregulating until past the mid-eighteenhundreds or even early last century. And what a fluster-cluck that was, with radium laced toothpaste, heroin cough syrup, asbestos, and so on and so forth. Solution, fine in theory?

Governemental oversight. Impartial professionals checking the work of commercially employed scientists, that should work, right? Since they are governement employed, they lack other incentive than an objectively and impartially job done right, yes?

Well, no. Not because the idea is flawed as such, but because even governement must recruit from the same pool of talent a business. And that, even without lobbying and corruption and politicians being shaeholders and boardmembers (or is it the other way around?) means that everyone even if recruited from offerent backgrounds belong to the same communicating vessel.

How to solve this? You can't. The problem is a function of the process, not separate from it. At best, you can nudge the system by exposing it to competition. Unfortunately, capitalist corporate control of media removes that check. (And no, the socialist states weren't better in case you're too young to remember or never exeprienced socialism in practice.)

For the foreseeable future, we, as in western civilisation, are stuck in a rut of a economic-political system which can no longer change direction: it must be allowed to run its course to the end. As long as our leaders, be they elected, selected or part of the corporatist financial system called (laugh) "free market economy" had someone or something appointed The Enemy, that very fact held the game in check.

But since the mid-nineties, the spiel all over the West is that this is indeed a brave new world! Everyone is friend! Every culture, creed and race are really, actcherly one and the sam. Difference is only skin deep! The student of the ideas of history recognises this as the same madness of the intellectual (read: chattering parlour pinks) classes which strenoulsy in their naivitë woked to give the likes of Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin a free reign. "If we put up a hard front, we incite war" they would say. "Dialogue and trade and cultural exchange will unify the world" the cosmopolists of the day would say.

Well, no, because as with communism and pacifism and libertarianism, the idea only works if everyone simultaneously embraces it, honestly and fully.

And after that Hectoring diatribe I arrive at the start:

"The mistake was entering their labyrinth in the first place."

Well, yes, absolutely. Everyone who has worked with mentally ill persons knows that one. Never, ever, enter into the patients world view.

So how does that relate to the blogpost and this little essay it provoked?

Easy. Don't mistrust everything, that way lies madness. Trust but verify. Pfizer claims A, B and C. Allrighty, let's check. Aha, here is someone who sounds like an autority and their conclusion rhymes with my suspicion. Easy, cowboy. Trust, but verify. Watch the watchman who watches the watchmen, and let yourself be watched.

Clearest sign of a Big (or Noble) Lie is after all secrecy and that it cannot be checked.

peace out, or whatever the hip lingo of the day is,

Rikard, formely a teacher of the ideas of history (or was it the history of ideas, I forget)

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A quote from this article, "After years of working on the details, scientists had never produced a functioning mRNA therapy of any kind, with many experiments ending in disastrous mortal failure in animal models."

I would like to read one or several of these articles. I'm well aware that the industry buries studies that come to a non-profitable end. Still if you have links or titles of a few articles and don't mind listing them, I'd be appreciative of the efforts.

The angle I'm interested in is whether the "dose is the poison." I seem to remember reading or hearing that previous animal trials ended with dead animals and that the study directors concluded that the cationic lipid nanoparticle dosing was the culprit. Now, with a Moderna executive saying that the booster needs a double dose amount, things might end more badly than the apparent catastrophe at hand.

Before setting this information into the mental framework, I'd like to read source documents and scientific papers.

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I'm familiar with the fact that no one has ever produced a functioning coronavirus vaccine- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201210112147.htm

There might be something in here- "Part 1: Moderna Had a Long History of Failure. Then Along Came COVID" https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/moderna-history-failure-covid-vaccine/

"Moderna: A Company “In Need Of A Hail Mary”" https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/10/investigative-reports/moderna-a-company-in-need-of-a-hail-mary/

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Thank you, Joe, I'll read/watch.

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