Monday, March 06, 2023



Nazism is alive and well in the Democratic party

My ears always perk up when I hear an ex-Democrat talk about why they left the party. Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who did just that, joined Fox News’ Jesse Watters last week to weigh in.

She told Watters that Democrats’ “philosophy of identity politics” is one of the main reasons she left the party.

“You’re seeing how their agenda of identity politics is directly undermining the traditional Democratic values that were expressed so beautifully and clearly by Dr. Martin Luther King. That we should judge each other not based on the color of our skin, but based on our character. “

Gabbard emphasized the point that they are proud of it, which she finds alarming. She’s not wrong.

She said, “They’re proud to be judging people, hiring people, selecting people based on race, which is really, let’s be clear how serious of a problem this is. It’s based on genetics, race, based on your blood, your genes, and where do we see that connection? Well, these are the very same geneticist core principles embodied by Nazism and Adolf Hitler. This should be something that is sickening and alarming to every single Democrat and every single American. We have seen where this philosophy can lead. … We need leaders who will select people based on their character.

“You look at the core values and core principles of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. What is it based on? It’s based on genetics. This is that philosophy of geneticism and discriminating against people based on their genes. And that’s the issue here, really, when you cut to the core of it.”

According to Gabbard, they select candidates based on “these immutable characteristics that we’re born with. This goes against, again, the very vision our founders had for us. It goes against traditional Democratic values and, most of all, the American people deserve to know that those in positions of power and leadership are putting their interest first regardless of race or gender or religion or politics or anything else. That’s the responsibility of our leaders and that’s what we, the American people, deserve.”

Identity politics was always part of the Democratic playbook. Affirmative action has been around for a long time. But it didn’t become an obsession until August 2019, when The New York Times unveiled its “1619 Project.” This was a deliberate rewrite of U.S. history which put slavery at the center of the American story.

The 1619 Project helped set the stage for the cultural upheaval that took place after the death of George Floyd in May 2020, during which terms such as “systemic racism,” “white supremacy” and “equity” became commonplace. Suddenly, wokeism, which has been bubbling beneath the surface for years, especially in academia, became mainstream.

These woke principles, which are rooted in Marxism, have now worked their way into every aspect of American society, including our government, the media, Hollywood, corporations and our public school system.

What’s especially ironic is that Democrats, starting with President Joe Biden, refer to MAGA Republicans as fascists when their own behavior is so transparently fascist. Just as it was with the Nazi Party in Hitler’s Germany, the gene-obsessed are on the left.

I applaud Gabbard for her insight and honesty. Democrats have put our country on a very perilous path which, left unchecked, will spell the end of America as we know it.

Conservative commentator Candace Owens appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss the sheer insanity of today’s Democratic Party. She called on Republicans to start pushing back aggressively and boldly because, “If they win this battle, there is nothing left.”

Sadly, she is right.

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Organizations that claim to represent minority groups are really working for the managerial elite

New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of the city’s public education system, was once 90% Jewish. By the time I entered Stuyvesant in 2013, it was 70% Asian. In the black-and-white photos that adorned the walls, rows of Steins and Cohens looked upon the newest crop of children from working-class immigrant families. Asians are ascendant in many once heavily Jewish domains: specialized high schools; elite colleges; medical schools. Like the American Jewish community, debates now rage within Asian American communities over whether we are “real minorities” or white-adjacent, and we even write Tablet articles about being the victims of violent hate crimes.

American Jews and Asian Americans share something else in common: Both have been sold out by activist organizations that are more interested in catering to the sensibilities of the wealthy elite that dominate the Democratic Party than in advocating for ordinary working-class constituents. Leading Jewish and Asian American organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) have demonstrated their real priorities in how they have responded to two of the biggest issues in their respective communities: a wave of violent hate crimes and discriminatory education policies.

“In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected,” wrote Armin Rosen in the summer of 2022. Virtually the same thing could have been said about Asians. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there emerged one grainy video after another of Asians on the streets of American cities being beaten, occasionally to death. The victims were typically senior citizens or women, and they usually lived in coastal metropolises with high Asian populations. One attack involved an elderly Asian woman being called an anti-Asian slur before being punched in the head 125 times.

As The Scroll pointed out last year, “the rise in hate crimes [in New York] targeting highly visible and vulnerable groups like religious Jews and Asians tracks to the increase in the overall level of violent crime and disorder in the city.” Many working-class members of minority groups have reacted by advocating for stricter criminal justice policies given crime disproportionately affects them. But the groups that claim to speak for these vulnerable working-class Jews and Asian Americans, such as the ADL and AAJC, don’t advocate for these policies because they’re afraid to risk alienating the donor class and progressive base of the Democratic Party—groups that have consistently called for “restorative justice” policies and to defund the police. The ADL and AAJC has chorused those calls, virtue-signaling instead of fighting for the interests of the communities they claim they represent.

Take, for instance, the main targets of the ADL’s activist campaigns. Despite the ADL’s own statistics showing that in 2019 more than 55% of the attacks on Jews in New York City were carried out by individuals affiliated with “black supremacist” ideologies like the Nation of Islam and Black Hebrew Israelites, the ADL, echoing New York City’s former mayor, Bill de Blasio, has focused on white supremacy—an important issue, but not the one most plaguing New York City or San Francisco’s Asian American or Jewish communities. When de Blasio wanted to signal that he was “doing something” about the explosion of violence against Jews, he appointed an ADL veteran, Deborah Lauter, to head a new Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes focused on finding a “holistic approach” to the problem.

Of course, Lauter’s office did nothing to stop the violence because New York’s court system appears unwilling to pursue hate crime convictions, which would signal the city’s seriousness about combating the issue. In one instance—the killing of a 62-year-old Asian woman who died from injuries sustained when she was beaten outside of her Queens home—the murder was not prosecuted as a hate crime “even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians,” as Armin Rosen put it. As the Crown Heights Jewish activist Devorah Halberstam explained to Rosen, the lack of hate crimes prosecutions is a systemic issue. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community … It’s the broader picture.” On the issue of the city systematically ignoring hate crimes, the ADL and AAJC have been silent.

With hate crimes increasing and hate crime charges nowhere in sight, what were these organizations busy advocating for? In the midst of this sustained wave of violence, Jewish and Asian advocacy groups were more preoccupied with chanting fashionable social justice slogans than with actually trying to prevent and punish hate crimes. In 2020, for instance, the AAJC tweeted “today we observe the National Day of Mourning in solidarity with all who have lost loved ones due to police violence or white supremacy.” This is not a good way of supporting those Asian American communities relying on police protection for their safety and sense of security. Also in 2020, the New York-based Asian American Federation (AAF) backed the creation of a special Asian Hate Crimes task force in the city. The group’s executive director, Jo-Ann Yoo, said the move was necessary “to help raise safety awareness in the pan-Asian community.” In a city that refuses to prosecute hate crimes, raising awareness is perhaps the best that can be hoped for.

If you were one of the people being beaten in the streets or walking them in fear, however, you would have wanted—indeed needed—more from these organizations. This gets at the fundamental problem: The people who run the advocacy NGOs do not view themselves as potential victims of such attacks. Orthodox Jews in New York City, whose attire makes them highly visible, are the prime targets of antisemitic violence. Most have little social capital outside of their neighborhoods, which are often side-by-side with other immigrant enclaves. Secular, progressive Jews who make careers in “social justice advocacy” tend to see the Orthodox community as a relic.

A similar dynamic applies to the relationship between the working-class Asian American immigrants who are the victims of hate crimes and their professional class spokespersons. Recent immigrants from Asian countries often lack English fluency and hold no social or cultural capital. Many struggle with America’s labyrinthine immigration system and are prime candidates for group-based lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, the NGOs that represent Asian Americans are staffed by the kinds of highly educated members of the managerial class who choose to go into the nonprofit sector. The more powerful these organizations become, the more they draw from a national network of affluent individuals and families that have the social and economic capital to let their children study arts and humanities at America’s top colleges.

American Jews and Asian Americans have been sold out by activist organizations that are more interested in catering to the sensibilities of the wealthy elite that dominates the Democratic Party than in advocating for ordinary people.

The same thing is happening in America’s fights over access to education. High Asian enrollment at New York City’s specialized high schools like Stuyvesant has become a problem for the city’s progressive politicians. In 2020, the chancellor of the Department of Education under Mayor de Blasio, Richard Carranza, commented that “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools,” suggesting that Asians, like the pushy Jews of previous generations, had somehow gotten their spots unfairly. Never mind the open tests they took to get in, that a full three-quarters of Stuyvesant’s students are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and that Asians are, on average, the poorest racial group in New York City.

While there were local organizations fighting to preserve fair and colorblind access to schools like Stuyvesant, at the national level the major Asian and Jewish advocacy organizations have actively supported policies that are biased against their own constituents. Take the affirmative action case now before the Supreme Court, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. Progressive organizations have attempted to frame SFFA as a white-led effort, which erases the Jewish background of the lawyer spearheading the suit, Edward Blum, and the historical legacy of quotas limiting Jewish access to Harvard and other elite institutions.

As Jacob Scheer has written in Tablet, the leading American Jewish organizations once opposed affirmative action, as numerus clausus quotas were once used to keep qualified Jewish applicants out of elite institutions. The “big three” Jewish advocacy organizations (the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee) filed amicus briefs in Regents v. Bakke (1978) taking a firm stand against affirmative action policies. But now the leading Jewish organizations have changed their tune on affirmative action, and the ADL filed an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s admissions policies. Similarly, the AAJC has filed two amicus briefs supporting Harvard’s de facto anti-Asian discrimination.

The truth is that “our” organizations have become empty mouthpieces parroting affluent liberal talking points in the interest of getting more donations and mainstream media coverage.

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When hate speech is OK

When it emerged that a 2022 Sydney Festival dance production was being supported with a $20,000 grant from the Israeli embassy, more than two dozen performers boycotted the festival and demanded it be shut down for “normalising apartheid”.

When it was revealed that this month’s Adelaide Writers Week would feature authors who have published what reads like violent abuse towards supporters of Israel, mocked Jews over the Holocaust and expressed support for Vladimir Putin, the response from festival organisers and participants was of a different kind.

The show must go on.

In the past fortnight, Adelaide Writers Week has become a national flashpoint for those who believe that, far from being challenging spaces which invite the exchange of multiple ideas, arts festivals are now captive to fixed left-wing orthodoxies, including questioning whether the state of Israel has the right even to exist.

The furore invites broader questions. Are there limits to free speech? At what point does robust free speech descend into hate speech? Do the social media ramblings of a person count towards an assessment of their output and character?

Key Jewish-Australian organisation have been appalled by the conduct of Adelaide Writers Week and its director Louise Adler, the former chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, in crafting a line-up which they say gives a platform to bigots.

Adler is curating her first Adelaide Writers Week under a three-year deal, having taking the reins from previous director Jo Dyer, who ran unsuccessfully as a teal candidate for the SA seat of Boothby at last year’s federal election.

Critics of AWW say that not only is the festival stacked in favour of the Palestinian cause, it has rolled out the red carpet to people they regard as extremists.

Their anger is shared by Australian Ukrainians, who in the lead-up to the first anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion were dismayed to learn Adelaide was playing host to an author who believes the continuing war is the fault of the Ukrainian government and people.

The fallout so far has been significant – three authors have cancelled in protest, sponsors have threatened to pull funding, The Adelaide Advertiser has removed all its staff from the daily “Breakfast with Papers” program, and Premier Peter Malinauskas has been urged to intervene.

The two authors who sparked the dramas are Jerusalem-based Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd and Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa.

Aged just 24, El-Kurd is hailed by his supporters as one of the most important new voices in Palestinian literature, his 2021 debut collection Rifqa credited with “laying bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism”. He also works as the Palestine correspondent for The Nation and in 2021 was named, with his twin sister Muna, as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

El-Kurd’s grace as a poet is less evident in his tweeting, where he has described supporters of Israel as “sadistic barbaric neo-Nazi pigs” with an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”.

“I hope every one of them dies in the most torturous and slow ways,” he has tweeted. “I hope that they see their mothers suffering.”

He has ridiculed Jews for having to wear so much sunscreen – suggesting it proves they don’t belong in the Middle East – and made Holocaust references, including accusing Israel of “kristallnachting” the Palestinian people.

With this back catalogue of vitriol, it’s not surprising that the Anti-Defamation League and Executive Council of Australian Jewry have both written to the Adelaide Festival arguing that El-Kurd is not so much the Wordsworth of the West Bank but a peddler of anti-Semitic abuse.

His fellow author Abulhawa is also well regarded as a writer; her latest book Against the Loveless World lauded as a moving exploration of statelessness and resistance in the context of the Palestinian struggle.

But again, less elegant on Twitter, where she has written “It’s possible to be Jewish and a Nazi at the same time” and described Israel as “the only ‘nation’ that systematically kidnaps and tortures children daily”.

It is Abulhawa’s views on Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine that have caused the most blowback for AWW. In multiple tweets, Abulhawa has declared the war is Ukraine’s fault for trying to join NATO and parroted the Moscow line with a tweet which simply read: “Denazify Ukraine.”

She has described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “a depraved Zionist trying to ignite World War III” and said: “This man is no hero. He’s mad and far more dangerous than Putin.”

It was for this reason that three Ukrainian authors have withdrawn from the festival, all of them writing to Adler saying they would not share a platform with someone who peddled Russian propaganda in defence of genocide.

“I feel saddened that calls to be sensitive in relation to Ukrainians who have been attacked in this genocidal war and to not give a platform to voices that repeat Kremlin propaganda are not always heard,” author Olesya Khromeychuk wrote.

Fellow author Kateryna Babkina wrote to Adler: “I’m afraid I can’t participate in any kind of event that gives voice to the person considering Ukrainians should give up their right to decide what to do with their destiny and their independent country and just become a ‘neutral nation’ pleasing Russian ambitions in order not to be killed.”

The fallout from all this has been acute for the Adelaide Festival. Board members have been lobbied urging them to intervene; sponsors Minter Ellison, PwC and IT firm Capgemini have demanded their signage be removed as they weigh future support for the festival; Malinauskas vowed not to attend any sessions involving the offending authors, despite grudgingly honouring a pre-made commitment to speak at the opening of the event.

But Malinauskas, who has Lithuanian ancestry from his refugee grandfather, has made no secret of his concern at the presence of the pair on the AWW line-up.

“There is a distinction between provoking thought and facilitating the spreading of a message that simply does not accord with basic human values,” he said. “That is worthy of contemplation for Writers Week.”

Adler has now made several public statements saying authors at AWW have been reminded that hate speech or bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated.

But she is sticking to her guns with the line-up on free speech grounds, arguing that it is vital that different ideas be put forward and contested.

“I am interested in creating a context for courageous and brave spaces where we can have civil dialogue and discussion about ideas that we may not all agree on,” Adler said.

“If we all gather together just to agree with one another or with people who share our views, well some people might enjoy that, but I don’t think that’s the point of a literary festival.”

Adler’s detractors laugh at the assertion of diversity, with former federal Labor MP Jewish-Australian Michael Danby noting there are seven Palestinian authors and not one Israeli at the event.

A quick look at the AWW political line-up does little to bolster Adler’s claims to it being a freewheeling orgy of disagreement. From the world of politics, Liberal moderate Amanda Vanstone will be joined at AWW by Bob Carr, Wayne Swan, Bob Brown, Steve Bracks, Gareth Evans, Sarah Hanson-Young, Maxine McKew, along with ACTU secretary Sally McManus and teals founder and funder Simon Holmes a Court.

If this is diversity, it is a brand of diversity which extends all the way along the ideological spectrum from the rabidly left-wing to considerably left-wing to somewhat left-wing.

In defending the presence of El-Kurd and Abulhawa, Adler has tried to draw a distinction between their published works and their social media posts, as if the tweets can almost be expunged from the record.

“Twitter is more for succinct targeted polemic rather than nuanced discussion,” she told this newspaper.

It’s a defence which is rubbished by the third Ukrainian author to withdraw from the festival, Kharkiv-born Australian author Maria Tumarkin, who in a withering blogpost made it clear she regarded AWW as an intellectual indulgence while an actual war was going on.

“I’m a Ukrainian Jewish Australian, no hyphens or hyphens, I don’t care. My world (as I knew it) ended on February 24, 2022. I have no connection to any ‘interest groups’, ‘sponsorship money’, ‘Zionist lobby’, ‘pearl-clutching’ (snort!), ‘attempts to silence marginalised voices’, ‘propaganda’ propagation – what else have you got for me?

“I’d rather not be lectured on developing a higher tolerance for ‘confronting ideas’. All good on that front, thanks.

“In the last 12 months I’ve learned a lot and changed my mind a lot. Perhaps the most salient lesson is that anti-war can mean pro-genocide. It means pro-genocide right now in Ukraine.

“Statements in which Zelensky (who’s Jewish) is called a Nazi, fascist, someone responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and/or WWIII are not anti-Zelensky and/or pro-Putin. They are forms of genocide cheering (a step up from genocide apology). They do not exist in the space of discourse only and do not represent something that can be classified as merely a contentious political opinion. If only.

“And while we’re on the subject, I see no difference between Twitter feeds and books if tweets are pro-genocidal and knowingly so.”

Adler is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. As such, she invites a degree of awe with her bulletproof commitment to free speech principles. But she is clearly out of step with a great number of Jewish and Ukrainian people who regard this not as free speech but hate speech. And her promise of diverse speech is not backed up by the AWW program.

In the broader context of the cultural arc of these modern-day festivals, one wonders if he were alive today what kind of reception the Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi would receive were he scheduled to appear in Adelaide this week at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden.

Would If This is a Man be hailed for what it is, the definitive first-person chronicle of the high point of human evil, or a tendentious sob-story aimed at bolstering Israeli hegemony? The answer would probably be the latter, especially if the Israeli embassy dared sponsor Levi’s appearance.

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‘Sick of it’: Catholic women vent frustration over sex, power and abuse

Sometimes I regret being an academic with long experience in survey research. It means that much of what I read stinks of dishonesty. The survey reported below is a case in point. The originators of the survey say bluntly that "the survey does not claim to be representative of all Catholic women" yet you get no idea of that in the report below. You get the impression that what was found DID represent what Catholic women think.

But it is a basic axiom of survey research that to find out about a given population by survey research you have to draw the sample in such a way that it IS representative of the population you want to study, otherwise it could tell you all sorts of untrue things about the population concerned.

And sampling or the lack of it is not the only problem on this occasion. We read here that the questions in the survey were largely leading questions, not fair ones. So the survey tells us only what its authors wanted to hear. To be blunt about it, it is nothing more than Leftist propaganda. It tells us nothing truthful



The largest study of Catholic women in the church’s 2000-year history has found they are hungry for reform. They resent their lack of decision-making power, want to follow their consciences on sex and contraception, and think the church should be more inclusive of the diverse and the divorced.

Australian researchers led the global study, to be presented at the Vatican on International Women’s Day, which also found women want to be allowed to preach, dislike priests promoting political agendas, and are concerned about a lack of transparency in church governance.

Theologian and sociologist of religion at the University of Newcastle Tracy McEwan co-authored the study, which surveyed 17,200 women from 14 countries.
Theologian and sociologist of religion at the University of Newcastle Tracy McEwan co-authored the study, which surveyed 17,200 women from 14 countries.CREDIT:FLAVIO BRANCALEONE

“There was this underlying sense of hurt, and certainly this feeling of being voiceless and ignored,” said co-author Tracy McEwan, a theologian and sociologist of religion at the University of Newcastle. “These are not women on the edge. These are women in the church. Being Catholic is important to them, and they are struggling.”

The study, which surveyed 17,200 women from 140 countries, comes as Pope Francis leads the church in a discussion about whether women should have a greater role in its governance and ceremonies. He has ruled out female priests, but the deaconate – someone who assists priests during mass and can preach the homily – is a possibility.

McEwan will present the findings to female ambassadors to the Holy See on Wednesday. They will include Australia’s representative, Chiara Porro, who helped organise the presentation. The first woman ever to be allowed to vote with the Vatican’s synod of bishops, Xaviere sister Nathalie Becquart, has also been briefed on the research.

The survey results show 84 per cent of women supported reform in the church, and two-thirds wanted radical reform. Almost three in 10 said there would be no place for them without it. There was significant concern about abuses of power and spiritual harm, particularly by male clerics. “I cling on to the church by my fingernails,” said one respondent.

Almost eight in 10 agreed women should be fully included at all levels of church leadership, and more than three-quarters agreed that women should be able to give the homily, a commentary on the gospel during services. Two-thirds said women should be eligible for the priesthood. “I’m ashamed of my church when I see only men in procession,” said one respondent.

More than four in five said LGBTQ people should be included in all activities, and just over half strongly agreed same-sex couples were entitled to a religious marriage. Seven in 10 said remarriage should be allowed after civil divorce, and three-quarters agreed that women should have freedom of conscience on their sexual and reproductive decisions.

Some respondents pointed out that they do much of the work in the church, but get no recognition or say. “If every woman in every parish stopped cleaning, cooking, dusting, typing, directing ... for just one week, every parish would have to close,” said one. “Yet, why do women have so little real power?”

Co-author Kathleen McPhillips, a sociologist at the University of Newcastle, said she was surprised at the enthusiasm with which women embraced the survey. “What it showed is they’re really sick of it,” she said. “They want to be there, but they’re sick of not being able to contribute. In their secular lives, they can do so much more.

“It’s still the largest religion in the world. It’s hugely important we understand it. The church itself hasn’t been interested in studying its own population.”

The results varied between countries. Australia was more conservative than the global average on some of the indicators; 74 per cent of women said they wanted reform, compared with the global average of 84. Appetite for change was strongest in the Catholic strongholds of Ireland and Spain, as well as Germany.

But the tension has been evident in the Australian church and boiled over at a historic plenary council meeting last year, at which bishops failed to pass two motions aimed at empowering women in the church. About 60 delegates staged a silent protest. The motions were re-worded and passed.

Younger women were also more conservative than older ones, with the 18- to 25-year-old age group least likely to want reform, according to the survey, and the over 70-year-olds most likely. The eldest women were also more likely to support same-sex marriage and the homily being preached by women.

But even among conservative women, there was concern about having their contribution respected. “They were articulating the idea that you want women to be a certain way, that’s OK, but give us our due, give us our voice,” said McEwan.

The church is a hierarchical patriarchy, but McEwan hopes the results will get through to those who will ultimately make the decisions. “I’m hoping that presenting this major report to the women ambassadors and to the more senior women in the Vatican will have an impact, and it will feed through,” she said.

Catholicism is the largest religion in Australia. They make up 20 per cent of the population (women make up slightly more than half), and Sydney is its most Catholic city. The church is the country’s largest non-government provider of health care, education and welfare, and employs almost two per cent of the nation’s workers.

Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher was contacted for comment, but a spokesman declined, saying he was in Rome.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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