This is the best summary of the religion/politics issue I have ever read:
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a spirited debate on the place of religion in politics. But the candidates are confusing two arguments. The first, which conservatives are winning, is defending the legitimacy of religion in the public square. The second, which conservatives are bound to lose, is proclaiming the privileged status of religion in political life.
A certain kind of liberal argues that having a religious underpinning for any public policy is disqualifying because it is an imposition of religion on others. Thus, if your opposition to embryonic stem cell research comes from a religious belief in the ensoulment of life at conception, you’re somehow violating the separation of church and state by making other people bend to your religion.
…
But a certain kind of conservative is not content to argue that a religious underpinning for a policy is not disqualifying. He insists that it is uniquely qualifying, indeed, that it confers some special status.
Tom posted this at 12:39 PM HKT on Friday, December 14th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Faith, Kraut-hammered
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Dr. K on Bush and the embryonic stem cell debate:
“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough.”
— James A. Thomson
A decade ago, Thomson was the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells. Last week, he (and Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka) announced one of the great scientific breakthroughs since the discovery of DNA: an embryo-free way to produce genetically matched stem cells.
Even a scientist who cares not a whit about the morality of embryo destruction will adopt this technique because it is so simple and powerful. The embryonic stem cell debate is over.
Which allows a bit of reflection on the storm that has raged ever since the August 2001 announcement of President Bush’s stem cell policy. The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president — so vilified for a moral stance — been so thoroughly vindicated.
Why? Precisely because he took a moral stance. Precisely because, to borrow Thomson’s phrase, Bush was made “a little bit uncomfortable” by the implications of embryonic experimentation. Precisely because he therefore decided that some moral line had to be drawn.
In doing so, he invited unrelenting demagoguery by an unholy trinity of Democratic politicians, research scientists and patient advocates who insisted that anyone who would put any restriction on the destruction of human embryos could be acting only for reasons of cynical politics rooted in dogmatic religiosity — a “moral ayatollah,” as Sen. Tom Harkin so scornfully put it.
Bush got it right. Not because he necessarily drew the line in the right place. I have long argued that a better line might have been drawn — between using doomed and discarded fertility-clinic embryos created originally for reproduction (permitted) and using embryos created solely to be disassembled for their parts, as in research cloning (prohibited). But what Bush got right was to insist, in the face of enormous popular and scientific opposition, on drawing a line at all, on requiring that scientific imperative be balanced by moral considerations.
History will look at Bush’s 2001 speech and be surprised how balanced and measured it was, how much respect it gave to the other side. Read it. Here was a presidential policy pronouncement that so finely and fairly drew out the case for both sides that until the final few minutes of his speech, you had no idea where the policy would end up.
So here’s part of Bush’s speech from 2001:
As I thought through this issue, I kept returning to two fundamental questions: First, are these frozen embryos human life, and therefore, something precious to be protected? And second, if they’re going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn’t they be used for a greater good, for research that has the potential to save and improve other lives?
I’ve asked those questions and others of scientists, scholars, bioethicists, religious leaders, doctors, researchers, members of Congress, my Cabinet, and my friends. I have read heartfelt letters from many Americans. I have given this issue a great deal of thought, prayer and considerable reflection. And I have found widespread disagreement.
On the first issue, are these embryos human life — well, one researcher told me he believes this five-day-old cluster of cells is not an embryo, not yet an individual, but a pre-embryo. He argued that it has the potential for life, but it is not a life because it cannot develop on its own.
An ethicist dismissed that as a callous attempt at rationalization. Make no mistake, he told me, that cluster of cells is the same way you and I, and all the rest of us, started our lives. One goes with a heavy heart if we use these, he said, because we are dealing with the seeds of the next generation.
And to the other crucial question, if these are going to be destroyed anyway, why not use them for good purpose — I also found different answers. Many argue these embryos are byproducts of a process that helps create life, and we should allow couples to donate them to science so they can be used for good purpose instead of wasting their potential. Others will argue there’s no such thing as excess life, and the fact that a living being is going to die does not justify experimenting on it or exploiting it as a natural resource.
At its core, this issue forces us to confront fundamental questions about the beginnings of life and the ends of science. It lies at a difficult moral intersection, juxtaposing the need to protect life in all its phases with the prospect of saving and improving life in all its stages.
Bush was right. On this issue, three cheers for the president.
I wonder if John Edwards will admit that he was wrong (from Dr. Krauthammer again):
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
As a doctor by training, I’ve known better than to believe the hype — and have tried in my own counseling of people with new spinal cord injuries to place the possibility of cure in abeyance. I advise instead to concentrate on making a life (and a very good life it can be) with the hand one is dealt. The greatest enemies of this advice have been the snake-oil salesmen promising a miracle around the corner. I never expected a candidate for vice president to be one of them.
Third, the implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.
Hubbard posted this at 1:47 PM HKT on Friday, November 30th, 2007 as George Bush Rules!, Kraut-hammered, Science!
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Dr. Krauthammer discusses the Scott Thomas Beauchamp mess, and concludes:
We already knew from all of America’s armed conflicts — including Iraq — what war can make men do. The only thing we learn from Scott Thomas Beauchamp is what literary ambition can make men say.
Read it all.
Hubbard posted this at 9:12 AM HKT on Friday, August 10th, 2007 as Iraq, Kraut-hammered
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Conor argues in his post over at Huff Post that the Obama Summit Gaffe is much ado about nothing.
Charles Krauthammer seems to disagree – I’m more inclined to side with Charlie on this one. Obama comes across like the fresh-faced, centrist, Washington outsider, but to me his comments often seem hopelessly naive.
I have a few friends who like to claim they aren’t ultra-liberal and yet they have bought into Obama hook, line and sinker. To me he’s just another inexperienced ultra-liberal with starry visions of how the world should work – instead of dealing with these power-mad dictators in a way that does work.
Jamie posted this at 1:29 PM HKT on Friday, July 27th, 2007 as Kraut-hammered
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Peggy Noonan, who normally wouldn’t notice if a Republican was turning into a werewolf, notices that Bush is splitting the conservative coalition:
What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker—”At this point the break became final.” That’s not what’s happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
Miss Noonan’s got the politics angle right. Charles Krauthammer delved into the policy, and here’s what he found:
Until now we’ve had a special category for highly skilled, world-renowned and indispensable talent. Great musicians, athletes and high-tech managers come in today under the EB-1 visa. This apparently is going to be abolished in the name of an idiotic egalitarianism.
I suspect this provision is a kind of apology for one of the few very good ideas in the bill — taking skill, education and English proficiency into account rather than just family ties, thus cutting back on a chain migration system in which a Yemeni laborer can bring over an entire clan while the engineers and teachers desperate to get here languish in the old country.
The price for this lurch into rationality appears to be the abolition of the VIP fast track, which constitutes less than 2 percent of total immigration and, from the point of view of the national interest, is the most valuable. This staggeringly stupid idea is reason alone to vote against the immigration bill.
So Bush has lost conservatives like Noonan and centrists like Krauthammer (he never really had liberals, of course). What’s on his mind? From Kim Strassel:
Say what you will about George W. Bush’s plans for immigration reform, you can’t accuse him of failing to understand what it is that inspires such emotion in this debate. Sitting among the optimistic yellows of the Oval Office, the president is quick to zero in on what has caused so many in his party to reject his efforts. “I think people worry that this round of immigration will create two Americas,” he says, simply. Or, in his further explanation: “E Pluribus Duum.”
I’ll translate that Latin as, “Out of many, D’oh!”
Hubbard posted this at 9:15 AM HKT on Friday, June 1st, 2007 as George Bush Sucks!, Kraut-hammered, The Melting Pot Boils Over
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We took notice of Obama’s most recent Obamanation a few days ago. Now Dr. K hammers him:
It is inevitable, I suppose, that advocates of one social policy or another will try to use the Virginia Tech massacre to their advantage. But it is simply dismaying that a serious presidential candidate should use it as the ideological frame for his set-piece issues.
Politico columnist Ben Smith has brought attention to a speech that Barack Obama made in Milwaukee just hours after the massacre. It must be heard to be believed. After deploring and expressing grief about the shootings, he continues (my transcription): “I hope that it causes us to reflect a little bit more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms. . . . There’s also another kind of violence . . . it’s not necessarily physical violence.”
What kinds does he have in mind? First, “Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women [of Rutgers]. . . . For them to be degraded . . . that’s a form of violence. It may be quiet. It may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn.” Good to know that Don Imus’s “violence” does not quite rise to the level of Cho’s.
Second, outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing: “the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country.”
Obama then cites bad schools and bad neighborhoods as forms of violence, before finishing with, for good measure, Darfur — accusing America of conducting “foreign policy as if the children in Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there.” Is Obama, who proudly opposed overthrowing the premier mass murderer of our time, Saddam Hussein, suggesting an invasion of Sudan?
Who knows. This whole exercise in defining violence down to include shock-jock taunts and outsourcing would normally be mere intellectual slovenliness. Doing so in the shadow of the murder of 32 innocents still unburied is tasteless, bordering on the sacrilegious.
Watching Krauthammer take Obama apart is like watching Jackie Chan beat up Woody Allen.
Hubbard posted this at 9:28 AM HKT on Friday, April 20th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Kraut-hammered
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Not a good mood at all.
The capture and release of the British hostages illustrate once again the fatuousness of the “international community” and its great institutions. You want your people back? Go to the European Union and get stiffed. Go to the Security Council and get a statement that refuses even to “deplore” this act of piracy. (You settle for a humiliating expression of “grave concern.”) Then turn to the despised Americans. They’ll deal some cards and bail you out.
Ouch. Ouch to all.
Tom posted this at 12:49 PM HKT on Friday, April 6th, 2007 as Kraut-hammered
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Dr. K on carbon offsets:
Leo [Di Caprio] and Al [Gore] . . . portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening’s “carbon footprint” by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a “carbon broker,” who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.
In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent—in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity—Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.
Preach it, brother Krauthammer. Meanwhile, Mark Steyn explains how the hypocrisy gets worse:
Al buys his carbon offsets from Generation Investment Management LLP, which is “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 and with offices in London and Washington, D.C.,” that, for a fee, will invest your money in “high-quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns.” Generation is a tax-exempt U.S. 501(c)3. And who’s the chairman and founding partner? Al Gore.
So Al can buy his carbon offsets from himself. Better yet, he can buy them with the money he gets from his long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum. See how easy it is to be carbon-neutral? All you have do is own a gazillion stocks in Big Oil, start an eco-stockbroking firm to make eco-friendly investments, use a small portion of your oil company’s profits to buy some tax-deductible carbon offsets from your own investment firm, and you too can save the planet while making money and leaving a carbon footprint roughly the size of Godzilla’s at the start of the movie when they’re all standing around in the little toe wondering what the strange depression in the landscape is.
Doesn’t 95 theses nailed to the door of the church of global warming have a nice ring to it?
Hubbard posted this at 10:37 AM HKT on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 as Kraut-hammered, Science!
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Michelle Cottle wrote a silly piece attempting to diagnose Cheney with mental illness. That TNR published partly explains why it’s struggling. A lowlight from Heart of Darkness:
Still, the cognitive erosion associated with cardiovascular problems (like cognitive erosion in general) only worsens with age. And, at 66, the vice president is a bona-fide senior citizen with a three-decade history of serious heart disease. So, the next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don’t automatically assume that he’s a bad man. Recall, if you will, a nasty barb hurled at him back in 2005 by Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel: “I would like to believe he’s sick rather than just mean and evil.” Partisan snark aside, Rangel may have inadvertently hit upon the heart of the problem.
Charles Krauthammer—an actual doctor with a psychiatric background—comments:
I know something about organically caused dementias. And I know pseudoscientific rubbish when I see it.
I was at first inclined to pass off Cottle’s piece as a weird put-on — when people become particularly deranged about this administration, it’s hard to tell — but her earnest and lengthy piling on of medical research about dementia and cardiovascular disease suggests that she is quite serious.
And supremely silly. Such silliness has a pedigree, mind you. It is in the great tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. Goldwater having become over the years the liberals’ favorite conservative (because of his libertarianism), nary a word is heard today about him being mentally ill or about that shameful election-year misuse of medical authority by the psychiatrists who responded to the poll. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.
If there’s a diagnosis to be made here, it is this: yet another case of the one other syndrome I have been credited with identifying, a condition that addles the brain of otherwise normal journalists and can strike without warning — Bush Derangement Syndrome, Cheney Variant.
In discussing people changing their minds, Krauthammer also lands a nice blow against one of our perpetual targets:
By that standard, Saul of Tarsus, Arthur Vandenberg, Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan — to pick at random from a thousand such cases of men undergoing a profound change of worldview — are psychiatric cases. Indeed, by that standard, Andrew Sullivan is stark raving mad. (Okay, perhaps not the best of counterexamples.)
Remind me not to get Krauthammer mad at me.
Hubbard posted this at 9:43 AM HKT on Friday, March 16th, 2007 as Kraut-hammered, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, What Ever Happened to Andrew Sullivan?
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Dr. K. summarizes the problems of Palestinians today well:
And what have the Palestinians done with this independence, this judenrein [emphasis in original] territory under the Palestinians’ own control? They have used their freedom to … launch rockets at civilians in nearby Israeli towns.
Why? Because the Palestinians prefer victimhood to statehood [emphasis added]. They have demonstrated that for 60 years, beginning with their rejection of the United Nations decision to establish a Palestinian state in 1947, because it would have also created a small Jewish state next door. They declared war instead.
It sounds like something Eric Hoffer once said:
There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day, we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life.
Victimhood is the Palestinian’s alibi.
Hubbard posted this at 11:01 AM HKT on Friday, June 16th, 2006 as Arafatistan, Kraut-hammered, Philosophy
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Charles Krauthammer manages an interesting feat in his column today. He criticizes—rightly, in my view—the excesses of gay marriage advocates, the Marriage Protection Amendment, and judicial activism. He also doesn’t take a firm position on gay marriage. Dr. K. implies that he’s against it:
Until the last few years, every civilization known to man has defined marriage as between people of opposite sex. To charge with “divisiveness” those who would do nothing more than resist a radical overturning of that norm is a sign of either gross partisanship or serious dimwittedness.
But he given his criticism of just about everybody in the whole sorry mess, I was unsure what his position is. So I turned to that wonder of technology and found this:
As for gay marriage, I’ve come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their relationship with a loved one that I’m not about to go to anyone’s barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by judicial fiat.
Call me agnostic.
I think Krauthammer’s position is a understandable, and far more decent than that of many people’s on both sides of the debate. I’m in favor of gay marriage; I think it directly affects me more than any of my co-bloggers. But I’m profoundly tired of the topic. Much has happened in the last few years, and I think almost everybody needs time to think through what’s going on, and where we’re going, and where we’d like to go. But time is what nobody wants to take; indeed, activists on both sides of the issue like picking away at it like a child picks at scabs.
Hubbard posted this at 6:05 AM HKT on Friday, June 9th, 2006 as Kraut-hammered, Kulturkampf, Philosophy
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Charles Krauthammer has an entire column on Francis Fukuyama seriously misquoting him. Of course, he’s Charles Krauthammer, so he makes it better than that; his attack on Fukuyama at the end–that Fukuyama’s critique boils down to griping without a worthwhile alternative–is important. It was the second point I meant to make a month or so ago whenever Fukuyama published his pre-book essay, and that Christopher Hitchens made much better than could I.
I’ve little patience for former pro-war types like Fukuyama–Tom Paine’s phrase “sunshine soldier” comes to mind–and I no longer think he should qualify as an “intellectual.” His “End of History” was influential for it’s day; I never read it until after 9/11, so needless to say I found it unpersuasive, but, I’d like to think, for reasons outside of it’s outdatedness. I’ve read a few other things by him, and I was always slightly distressed that he was considered something of a leading light for conservatives. It’s good that he’s now moved himself out of the movement (I think going ga-ga for the “soft power” routine puts you well out of the mainstream of conservative foreign policy thought). I just wish that instead of “Former neocon leader attacks the war,” the headline would have been, “Shoddy thinker still thinking shoddily.”
Apollo posted this at 12:35 AM HKT on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 as Conservatism, Iraq, Kraut-hammered
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As is normal, I can hardly find a word with which to disagree in Charles Krauthammer’s column today:
As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.
This line of argument makes gay activists furious. I can understand why they do not want to be in the same room as polygamists. But I’m not the one who put them there. Their argument does. Blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who had the courage to advocate gay marriage at a time when it was considered pretty crazy, has called this the “polygamy diversion,” arguing that homosexuality and polygamy are categorically different because polygamy is a mere “activity” while homosexuality is an intrinsic state that “occupies a deeper level of human consciousness.”
But this distinction between higher and lower orders of love is precisely what gay rights activists so vigorously protest when the general culture “privileges” (as they say in the English departments) heterosexual unions over homosexual ones. Was “Jules et Jim” (and Jeanne Moreau), the classic Truffaut film involving two dear friends in love with the same woman, about an “activity” or about the most intrinsic of human emotions?
To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?
And then:
As for gay marriage, I’ve come to a studied ambivalence. I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy. On the other hand, I have gay friends and feel the pain of their inability to have the same level of social approbation and confirmation of their relationship with a loved one that I’m not about to go to anyone’s barricade to deny them that. It is critical, however, that any such fundamental change in the very definition of marriage be enacted democratically and not (as in the disastrous case of abortion) by judicial fiat.
Call me agnostic. But don’t tell me that we can make one radical change in the one-man, one-woman rule and not be open to the claim of others that their reformation be given equal respect.
As with almost all culture war issues, both sides are driven by a very, very passionate few, but the rank and file (”let ‘em do what they want” on one side, “just doesn’t seem right” on the other) don’t care very much. There’s enough apathy, combined with America’s innate conservatism, to keep this from moving so long as judges steer clear. Of course, once judges start allowing same-sex marriage, the same apathy and conservatism will work to preserve the judicial fiat.
One thing that I think worth adding, though, is the difference between traditional polygamy and what we would get today, which is more properly referred to as polyamory. Polygamy literally means “many marriages;” it is not one man and three women in a group marriage, it is a man who is married to three women; the women have no relationship or rights with each other except through the man (and, as a general rule, sex among the women is discouraged). Gender equality being what it is, any modern legal polygamy would necessarily be different, probably a polyamorous marriage involving three or four or more people. While polygamy is a traditional practice in large swaths of the world, this sort of polyamorous group marriage is not. Sullivan’s point that polygamy is a practice is accurate; I don’t think it would be fair to say the same about polyamory, though. If we’re taking one group of people at their word about the nature of their love, we should give others the same benefit of the doubt.
Apollo posted this at 12:50 PM HKT on Friday, March 17th, 2006 as Kraut-hammered, Kulturkampf
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Take a standard policy; add a country that, while far from perfect, comes close to being an ally in the Arab world. Mix in hypocrisy and grandstanding and political stupidity to taste. Throw it all into the meatgrinder of politics. What you get is the Dubai Ports World mess. Read the rest of this entry »
Hubbard posted this at 7:44 AM HKT on Friday, February 24th, 2006 as Kraut-hammered, Uncategorized
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