She left some major weasel room: What does "serious" mean? She didn't say 100,000 children were on ventilators, just that "many" were. So I'm surprised Glenn Kessler went the whole 4 Pinocchios on her.
Let's read:
That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”
Kessler notes the special importance of accuracy for Supreme Court Justices. This isn't a place to show special respect. And her number was "absurdly high." So, "She earns Four Pinocchios."
By the way, Kessler also absolves Justice Gorsuch off the accusation that he got a number absurdly wrong. The official court transcript has him saying: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” Kessler listened to the audio verifies that Gorsuch said, “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” Wow. Correct the transcript, people. Or is correcting the transcript a dangerous, endless exercise?
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79 comments:
"So I'm surprised Glenn Kessler went the whole 4 Pinocchios on her."
The orders have gone out: stop the panic (if they can). Covid is no longer useful to Biden.
Justice Sotomayor is a living example of the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln (though not officially):
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
Or to mis-quote the late great coach, Denny Green: "She is who we thought she was."
She's the worst sort of hire. A person promoted based on race, ethnicity, and/or gender and the resulting years of her on the court will be a wasted slot for justice and the law of the Constitution.
Do her law clerks write her entire opinions? We know Scalia wrote his own.
Ann, when you were a federal court law clerk did you write the opinions?
The case I appealed to the NE Supreme Court was written by a law clerk and was riddled with typos in addition to being wrong.
Better decisions forthcoming from the wise latina, who in the richness of her life experiences . . . is just plain smarter than a white man.
Wow, the wise Latina got called out..."Liar, liar, pants on fire."
Omicron is also NOT deadly.
Close to zero deaths "related to" omicron
Even fewer "due to" omicron
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Justice Sotomayor is definitely NOT a wasted slot. She does exactly the job she was hired to do, which is to be an automatic vote for whatever the left wants.
The task of the Court, in this instance, is to determine if an agency of the government has lawfully issued an order. The justices have no business arguing about epidemiology, a subject about which none of them knows anything useful. But that doesn't stop Sotomayor, who wishes to show her ignorance on a broad array of subjects.
Supreme Court Justices should not be relying on facts not in the record, whether true or false.
Obviously it's worse when they are wrong, but even when accurate, a justice, or any judge for that matter, should limit their factual musings to items in the record. Both Sotomayer and Gorsuch were wrong (and I think Kagan too) for bringing up all sorts of freelance facts on their own.
I doubt she deserves 4 Pinocchios. I doubt she picked the wrong number on purpose. She's just ignorant.
It is kind of amazing, though, since COVID is the one topic where every American knows way more than you would ever have imagined.
Surprised and gratified.
My wife has just informed me that the most read story at the WaPo right now involves three cats and a Vitamix box.
Still, the current seven-day average (Dec. 30-Jan. 5) is 797, which is a sharp increase from the week before (441) and represents the peak seven-day average for children, the CDC said. So Sotomayor is not wrong to suggest the rate of pediatric admissions is cause for concern. On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported a sharp rise in pediatric cases, with many of the children unvaccinated. (Some children are hospitalized for other reasons and then test positive for covid through screenings at the hospital.)
Talk about burying the lede! I think its "most," but yeah. If if the Wise Latina was not full of shit, those numbers don't mean what you think they do. Many (I'll bet money its vast majority) are admitted for other causes and catch COVID because they are in the hospital, not the other way around.
Justice Sotomayer is very thoughtful. She is full of thoughts.
Quoting noted statesman George Costanza: "It's not a lie if you believe it".
This past week has been an unmitigated disaster for the Regime.
Completely unnoticed by the media was the absolutely disastrous December jobs report.
The Regime will most likely not make it through the year.
"The Regime will most likely not make it through the year."
The Regime has plenty of backup placeholders. It doesn't much matter if the next one up is better or worse.
Sure i'm Not the First to say this; BUT Why couldn't they have held out for a WISE Latina?
listening to Justice Sotomayor, the inescapable conclusions are that she uses her forum in oral arguments to advance her political ideology and berate those with whom she disagrees. She is a bully and like all bullies, she substitutes lack of intellectual capacity with bluster and arrogance. Never enter a drinking contest that requires imbibing every time Sotomayor interrupts a respondent attempting to answer her question before a point is made precisely for the reason of not allowing it to be made.
But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with Covid as opposed to because of Covid,” Fauci continued, emphasis added. “And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for Covid. And they get counted as a Covid-hospitalized individual.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/12/31/fauci-kids-hospitalizations-n2601257
He actually said this on an msnbc show but t OK wn hall had the transcription
John LGBTQBNY Henry
So, in order for Justice Sotomayor not to be introducing COVID misinformation into the argument she'd have to think "serious condition" means those hospitalized plus who -- children sick at home in bed? And where, pray, would reliable data about the missing 95,000 have been garnered by the Justice?
Crimso said...
The orders have gone out: stop the panic (if they can). Covid is no longer useful to Biden.
Darn Straight! Covid is Over! Now it's:
OVID response must be handled at the state level
WHO says Covid will mutate like the flu and is likely here to stay
Covid Is No Longer a Pandemic in U.S., But Thanks to News and Sports Media, the Insanity Hasn’t Faded
And WHEN did it change? Just as Soon as Biden's Death Numbers outgrew Trump's
The first comment above, I think, describes what we are seeing- the Democrats are desperate now to put COVID in the rear-view mirror- they want to declare victory and move on to talking about something else- and Sotomayor simply made this harder to do by saying what she did in open court.
On being weasel worded: when one leaves ones elf room with weasel words, one is still lying by omission in a deliberate fashion, so 4 Pinnochios is the right rating here. The only alternative is to say Sotomayor is an ignorant idiot, which I think is probably the more likely reason for her statements' inaccuracy.
Think about this: at the highest levels of our government, we have a bumbling senile old fool as president, a vacuous cackling VP, and a blithering idiot as a supreme court justice.
gilbar said...
Sure i'm Not the First to say this; BUT Why couldn't they have held out for a WISE Latina?
Yeah, or even a deeply wise Latina.
And Gilbar is correct- the switchover came when unpatriotic Americans started pointing out more fellow Americans had died of COVID under Biden than under Trump, and had the temerity of pointing out that Biden explicitly any president with that many COVID deaths shouldn't be president. Petards everywhere these days.
The issue seems to be that SCOTUS justices can be totally isolated from the real world.
Clay Travis recalled a story from a Vanderbilt Law School professor who had clerked for Justice Souter. One day the clerks ordered pizza with pepperoni. Souter was shocked that pizza could be delivered. He also did not know what pepperoni was.
Maybe I didn’t pay close attention to SCOTUS hearings before but I was under the naive impression that the witnesses presented evidence to the justices. Hearing Sotomayor reading out her list of COVID misstatements was confusing. Was she reading a brief prepared by her clerks? Is that evidence? Is it argument? I don’t understand why she’s listing fake “facts” in the first place. Maybe one of the savvy lawyers here can advise the rest of us what that was we were hearing.
Why does Breyer get a pass? To me, stating that the vaccine will stop covid in it's tracks if far more egregious than the fake numbers they and their clerks get from watching too much MSNBC.
The saddest thing is nobody is talking about LAW and the case before them. This was more of a brainstorming session by CDC officials than it was a judicial proceeding.
We have the worst public officials in the history of the country. I hope we survive as a nation but I am growing less optimistic daily.
"Supreme Court Justices should not be relying on facts not in the record, whether true or false."
There's a difference between adjudicative facts, which is what you are talking about, and legislative facts.
This is a legal matter that I urge you to read about here (discussing the judicial notice of adjudicative facts).
The kind of factual information that forms a background to lawmaking is something different from the facts of the case! Judges have to use that material and they do it all the time!
The number of estimated flu deaths per flu season is between 11,000 and 64,000 (CDC. Flu deaths are so common that the CDC uses a model to estimate the total number rather than individual death statics.
The (US) CDC tracks incidence of disease in the US. Only. If we kindly assume the comparison between flu and COVID refers to the "global pandemic" then the correct statistic would be a global, world-wide, annual or perhaps seasonal measure. If we also assume the whole rest of the world has at LEAST as many incidences as the fraction of the world tracked by the CDC, then 100,000 or so doesn't seem far off.
How many Pinocchio's should we award for failure to clarify the context of world version national prevalence?
In this case the question is whether the administrative agency can make the law or whether it's for Congress and also HOW the agency makes its rule (whether it can use the emergency approach of skipping notice and comment). The question of whether there is an emergency and whether there is a grave danger in the workplace is tied up with the legal questions. This isn't like questions of fact that go to trial. If you say only the agency can decide if there's an emergency and a grave danger, then the government wins the case.
"Souter was shocked that pizza could be delivered. He also did not know what pepperoni was."
Or he had a dry sense of humor.
"Supreme Court Justices should not be relying on facts not in the record, whether true or false."
It's not right to say "facts in the record." There is evidence in the record, and also in the record is what the fact-finder has done with that evidence. It does not make sense to say there's a fact in the record. What is the location of a fact?
Don't trust Barrett. She'll try to split the baby, giving the government a "limited" opening. One they will immediate bulldoze.
People do put words in that form, but it's not an accurate way to speak.
Judicial notice is invoked pretty infrequently. The example of it I recall from law school is where a judge (in a case under the Mann Act, for example) might take judicial notice of the fact that to travel from New York to New Jersey is to travel interstate. It could also be used for things like the time of sunset on a particular day or what locality a given zip code corresponded to. Another example would be the fact of the court's own judgments or proceedings in another case.
"Judicial notice is invoked pretty infrequently."
You're thinking of judicial notice of adjudicative facts, but when it comes to legislative facts, it happens all the time and without any attention to it.
Nice to see some rare honesty from the hack-D press.
If they're going to weigh the current dangers of the virus, they should weigh the underreported harms of the vaccine. They are swimming in a sea of faulty, misleading metrics and don't know it.
Stick to the law.
SCOTUS has long taken judicial notice of general "OMG We're all gonna Die!" panic. See, e.g., Korematsu v US.
According to Kessler this morning, the transcript of what Gorsuch said was incorrect.
Quote:
"(We will not address remarks made by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, which some readers also thought were wrong. The official court transcript suggested he had made an inflated statement about the annual flu: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” The flu kills between 12,000 and 52,000 people in the United States a year, but the audio of the argument shows Gorsuch actually said that “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” So the transcript is incorrect.)"
I’d still like to know WTF she was reading. Brief? Argument? What?
I’d still like to know WTF she was reading. Brief? Argument? What?
WashPost, NYT, MS-NBC.
Crimso is spot to on. Since they have failed to stop the virus and their tactics of blaming trump when they have more deaths on their watch is starting to falter they want to downplay omicron severity while still screaming their heads off about bad cold cases, so they can close schools, businesses, etc. it is so much fun.
Justice Sotomayor, Vice President Harris, The Squad, Mayors in Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C. all Women of Color who are indicative of The Peter Principle. People who have attained a job, position that is above their ability. In these cases these women have been appointed or elected BECAUSE of what they are. It is obvious when observing their track record that they do not belong where they are. When standards are lowered to accommodate “social justice” or equity, this is what you get, incompetence and bad outcomes. Sorry, ladies. But I’m sure there are women of color who could do a good job in all of the above positions, but they don’t belong to the WOKE political group…so they don’t count and don’t have a chance. People get the leaders they deserve.
Yancey Ward, 9:09:
"and had the temerity of pointing out that Biden explicitly any president with that many COVID deaths shouldn't be president."
Ah, but he didn't say that. He said any president responsible for that many deaths shouldn't be president.
Trump was responsible for all COVID deaths under his administration. But Biden follows The Science and listens to all the right people. Therefore he's not responsible for the deaths under his administration. They happened in spite of him, not because of him.
(I wish I could say that's a totally unfair caricature of what some of my acquaintances think, but as far as I can tell that's pretty much how they see it.)
Low hanging fruit. The falsehoods were so egregious and so public that slapping them down is a no brainer. Otherwise, it would bring into serious question the competence of Kessler's op-ed column from those that would otherwise not notice its partisanship and malfeasance. This allows him to retain sufficient credibility that he can continue to claim "mostly false" on completely true statements from Republican politicians while covering up the whoppers of the Democrats.
I have no credit to give. Kessler has proven over and over again to be a bad actor and the fact that he said something I agree with does not change the matter. He is a charlatan who cannot be trusted.
The falsehoods were so egregious and so public that slapping them down is a no brainer.
Except that the lawyer she said it to remain silent about it. He did not "respectfully" suggest that she was in error and then correct the record. Thankfully the media and people did what he failed to do. (The other justices didn't correct her either. But they know her, and might have just let it go as Sonia being Sonia.)
I guess, but doesn't this sort of thing just put off the day when the curtain is pulled back on the wizard and Kessler is unmasked, discredited, and ignored?
She's either dumber than a quinceañera piñata, or is letting her commie flag fly.
Maybe both, but probably the former.
'"So I'm surprised Glenn Kessler went the whole 4 Pinocchios on her."'
Would that be considered 'rough sex'?
I mean, that nose could get pretty long.
And four of them?
The possibilities are endless...
The only way for the Democrats to escape this trap, and to rescue the rest of us from the insanity being perpetrated, is to end the testing regime- end it completely- stop funding the PCR tests, stop funding the antigen tests.
Until that happens, nothing is going to change.
The "wise Latina" (Latinx?) is an idiot but that is not news.
Excellent point:
People aren't vaccinating against a virus but against unemployment, exclusions from public events, travel restrictions, and so on, which raises the question: is the virus or the government the greater danger?
https://twitter.com/jeffreyatucker/status/1480227494322225155
curious about the need to collect, conserve and protect and defend this virus in mask shaped containers for posterity.
what happens when the masks are thrown out after use?
This was probably a shot across her bow to warn her off from publicly saying things that are easily provable as wrong in the future.
Covid misinformation is a major problem for both the political left and the political right.
One of the problems that I had with President Trump was his habit of saying incorrect things that he obviously got from far-right internet sites.
Or he had a dry sense of humor.
Souter never struck me as having a sense of humor, but that could be a reasonable hypothesis.
Another hypothesis is that Souter is way out of touch due to his lifestyle and does not reflect the life of other SCOTUS justices.
Now the Wise Latina ...
The bigger story here is that the insanely lefty WP called out the Wide Latina for her own lefty insanity.
My wife has just informed me that the most read story at the WaPo right now involves three cats and a Vitamix box.
Three cats, two lesbians and a blender box. Will it become a major motion picture, or just another sitcom?
Blogger Michael K said...
The "wise Latina" (Latinx?) is an idiot but that is not news.
Don't be racist, Michael.
Ann, you quite rightly do not permit the so called N-word
You should prohibit this "L-Word" as well. It is racist, it is genocidal. It is, as the Kool Kidz say, "literally violence".
John LGBTQBNY Henry
My guess is that the total number of kids on ventilators is probably closer to 50 that 50,000. Ventilators were a early response to COVID-19, and that killed a lot of patients. So, the medical profession switched to using them as a last resort instead. Which is why we never ran out of them, but instead have a huge number now in storage. Combine that with the fact that the number of deaths of those tween 0 and 17 is negligible. The only kids dying from COVID-19 have serious comorbidities, such as morbid obesity. We are still talking hundreds of deaths, out of a population of tens of millions. And, it is likely that the vaccines are now killing more kids than the virus is. They weren’t of course, properly tested on kids under 18 (nor on pregnant women nor people with natural immunities).
As I recall, Souter was single and lived alone. That demographic ought to know about pizza delivery.
'One of the problems that I had with President Trump was his habit of saying incorrect things that he obviously got from far-right internet sites.'
Things like the bullshit about the FBI using information obtained from the Clinton campaign to justify a years-long investigation into ties with Russia that turned out to be (shocked!) nonsense?
Those kinds of things?
So, the question is, is Sotomayor so utterly clueless that she really doesn't know the most basic facts about the COVID disaster, or was she lying? It seems like lying about something so widely understood would be pointless and humiliating. But how could she have supposed that there were 100,000 kids hospitalized with COVID? She can't have read it anywhere, it hasn't been published. I am guessing that she felt it must be true, since it would provide a good argument for the course her politics incline her toward. She is not just unfit to be on the Court, she is unfit to vote.
loudogblog said...
"One of the problems that I had with President Trump was his habit of saying incorrect things that he obviously got from far-right internet sites."
I presume that you know those things are incorrect because the far-left media that are all you read say so.
Why would she offer any opinions?
She's showboating. Me!! Me!! Me!!
I knew that "wise Latina" comment was an over-estimate.
Ann Althouse said...
In this case the question is whether the administrative agency can make the law or whether it's for Congress and also HOW the agency makes its rule (whether it can use the emergency approach of skipping notice and comment). The question of whether there is an emergency and whether there is a grave danger in the workplace is tied up with the legal questions. This isn't like questions of fact that go to trial. If you say only the agency can decide if there's an emergency and a grave danger, then the government wins the case."
Setting aside whether or not OSHA has the authority or if even Congress has the authority to grant OSHA the authority what is the rational intent of mandating vaccination when the vaccine has been demonstably proven to not prevent transmission of the disease? Indeed there has not been a case made that there is an emergency in general or more specifically for the general population that is in the ages of employment.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
The overall burden of influenza (flu) for the 2018-2019 season was an estimated 29 million flu illnesses, 13 million flu-related medical visits, 380,000 flu-related hospitalizations, and 28,000 flu deaths (Table 1).
So "tens of thousands" would be correct.
Yancey Ward said...
And Gilbar is correct- the switchover came when unpatriotic Americans started pointing out more fellow Americans had died of COVID under Biden than under Trump, and had the temerity of pointing out that Biden explicitly any president with that many COVID deaths shouldn't be president. Petards everywhere these days.
I disagree. I believe the changeover has come about because of the VA and NJ election results. The Dems can not survive a 12 pt, or even 6 pt, shift to the GOP in Nov. The lockdowns, the economic failures, the pissed off parents because "virtual schooling" is so shitty, those are things the Dems can change, and they'd rather change those than the CRT and Trans policies.
So they're tryinging to avoid a crushing Nov 2022 election, not embarrassment over Biden* killing more Americans than Trump
Browndog said...
Why does Breyer get a pass? To me, stating that the vaccine will stop covid in it's tracks if far more egregious than the fake numbers they and their clerks get from watching too much MSNBC.
Breyer gets a pass because if the vaccine will not stop covid in its tracks then there's no legitimate grounds for a vaccine mandate, or vaccine passports.
The reality is that the "vaccines" don't work as vaccines
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
But if they admit that, they lose most of their power
Ann Althouse said...
In this case the question is whether the administrative agency can make the law or whether it's for Congress
And the only valid answer to that is it's Congress's job to make all laws. The only thing an executive branch agency can to is create regulations to enforce the law passed by Congress.
AS it's a huge jump and entirely unreasonable to claim that the law they're relying on actually give OSHA that power, and as the Democrats have admitted that there's no way Congress would pass those mandates as laws, it follows the Biden* Admin should lose on that count
and also HOW the agency makes its rule (whether it can use the emergency approach of skipping notice and comment). The question of whether there is an emergency and whether there is a grave danger in the workplace is tied up with the legal questions.
Biden announced he'd* be ordering a mandate in Sept. The various Federal Agencies waited over two months, well into November, before issuing the rules.
If they'd issued the rules at the time that Biden made the announcement, they could hav gone through the whole notice and comment period. So they're obviously gaming teh "emergency" rules, and should lose on that front.
You left off the third, most important element: whether or not the proposed rule will actually ameliorate the claimed "grave danger in the workplace". And the answer to that is No
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
in the time of Delta and Omicron, the "Covid vaccines" that are being mandated do not cut the Covid infection rate. Someone who's had the shots is at least as much of a danger to you as someone who hasn't had the shots.
So, even if everything else about the mandates was legitimate (and nothing about them is legitimate), they don't fix the claimed problem, and therefore have no justification
Glenn Kessler truth o' meter is like a stuck clock, right twice a day. I guess the court is just fine with "work arounds" to skirt the obvious unconstitutionality of this. Now it's the matter of what tortured, mental gymnastics Robert's needs to do to keep this from being a sharp rebuke of a terrible idea.
I say SCOTUS will let it stand but require OSHA to open up its comment period for oh, I dunno, 72 hours and then let them do whatever they want to do, apparently. That's the quality of thinking I expect from the SCOTUS at this point.
The Democratic Party's singular focus is fostering racial hatred towards Whites (especially the Jewish type). Did Sotomayor miss an opportunity to re-enforce existing stereotypes? Why not 100,000 black and brown babies are being exploited by Jewish doctors?
Temujin @ 8:05 AM: "...She's the worst sort of hire. A person promoted based on race, ethnicity, and/or gender and the resulting years of her on the court will be a wasted slot for justice and the law of the Constitution."
May I suggest that it's even worse than that. Because not only does she fill the seat assigned to Wise Latinas and deprive it to her betters; but also everything she says will encourage people to adopt the generalization that Latinas generally are no wiser than she --a grave injustice to a great many people, and a perception that will travel far beyond the Supreme Court, and last long beyond her tenure.
"Aren't the Mediocre Entitled to a Little Representation?"
Deeply, deeply mediocre.
By the way, the 3rd leading cause of death in the US is medical error.
Greg quotes the US date on influenza: "https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
The overall burden of influenza (flu) for the 2018-2019 season was an estimated 29 million flu illnesses, 13 million flu-related medical visits, 380,000 flu-related hospitalizations, and 28,000 flu deaths (Table 1)."
That surprised me; from the perspective of the UK, it seemed a very low figure indeed. Looking more closely, it seems this is due to a narrow focus on influenza alone, for which the UK figures are commensurately lower. However, the UK Office for National Statistics also gives figures for influenza and pneumonia, which are much higher, about the same for the UK as the US figures for influenza, which must therefore be for influenza alone. See - https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/influenzadeathsin20182019and2020 . If we give Gorsuch a bit of latitude and assume his remark included deaths from pneumonia consequent on influenza, he's probably right.
The bundling of the two makes perfect sense as, for the old and infirm, influenza is a pathway to pneumonia. Furthermore, I don't know if the influenza figure relate to "died of" or "died within 28d of having been diagnosed with" and it is the latter approach that has inflated the UK Covid death figures.
@10:20
Trump was responsible for all COVID deaths under his administration. But Biden follows The Science and listens to all the right people. Therefore he's not responsible for the deaths under his administration. They happened in spite of him, not because of him.
I know tongue is firmly in cheek
But, President Trump never failed to follow medical recommendations. That was one of the things we pointed out in real time. List all the recommendations that President Trump refused to implement. Biden kept repeating the lie, and being tucked in his basement for days at time, not being out taking questions, the doddering old fool was never available to be challenged. That of course was a design feature, not a bug.
Exposes the raw silliness of putting lawyers in general, and Judges in particular on some level of wise all knowing sage.
Being a lawyer is not that hard. I have talked and worked with enough of them to know they are nothing but a cross section of the competent.
Scalia pointed out the Supreme Court was not the final say because they were always right. They were always right because they have final say.
We don't have 3 branches of govt. We have the administrative bureaucracy. I am not confident SCOTUS will do the right thing and vote unanimously to return power to congress. The only decision that carries out the tone and tenor of the Constitution.
Thank you Nicholas, that's a good point I hadn't thought of.
In my copious free time I'll see if I can hunt down US flu and pneumonia numbers
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