Micah 4

Truth resides in Heaven, which truth bears implications for our world below. What would the world be like if men obeyed that truth? Micah reveals a vision of Heaven manifested on earth. The imagery symbolizes what could be, a future which cannot be literal. Though we know mankind will never go this way, the imagery serves to describe something of how it is to walk with the Messiah while still here. We taste the power of God to set things right, and know it will someday be realized in some fashion. We belong to the truth, and it belongs to us, because we belong to Heaven.
Imagine a world where Zion was what it could have been, a place of genuine truth inhabited by people who understood the full implications of the Laws of God, who understood it was all symbolic of higher reality. It would feel as if Zion were the landmark of all humanity, drawing them like a magnet of desire for truth. The spiritual nation of Israel would be a living, breathing revelation of God’s ideals, by their very existence teaching His Word.
The real Presence of God among such people would make painfully obvious what is just to all mankind. Nations would recognize what was required for good living, and embrace it. There would no longer be any need to produce and keep weapons for defending against invasion. Instead, they could retool those weapons, devoting precious resources to peace and prosperity. Everyone will be secure as undisputed owner of the property he holds. Imagine how low taxation would be! This is what could have been had Israel caught the fire, the vision of what God wanted to offer them.
But we can be like this in our hearts already. We can walk in this lifestyle even now. We know the world will never honor Our God, but we can follow Him regardless. In Christ, He has drawn us from all nations, we who were broken and battered by sin and wrath. In our repentance we found Him and He has made us into a new nation, a New Israel living in the New Zion of the heart. The Lord Himself would rule from there as our Shepherd King, the Messiah.
It was a sad contrast to this Micah saw in his day. It was as if there were no king, so lawless was Judah. Their sins roared like an angry mob out of control, and God’s wrath brought pain worse than a woman in childbirth. Here, while everyone worries about Assyria, it will be Babylon who carries them off into exile. Surely He would eventually redeem them from there.
Because of Israel’s sin, the world beat a path to her doors, not to learn but to cry out in lust to rape the city. Still, their end is unspeakable destruction, while God will surely raise up this New Israel to plunder the nations. When she rises up to claim the souls for Messiah, no power on earth can resist. They do not realize how ripe they are for threshing. The precious souls of the redeemed will be presented as rich offerings to the Lord.
How sad it is when people read these words and demand a literal fulfillment, utterly missing the greatest opportunity in human history.

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The Earth Beneath Your Feet

Where can you go when the ground itself won’t hold still?
I know a young child, not yet school age but able to talk, after a fashion. That fashion frequently includes whining. The child is learning it from Mommy, who is also a big whiner. This nasty experience flowers most brightly in the presence of Mommy, and nearly disappears after just a few moments away from Mommy. All the more so does it disappear in the presence of sensible adults. You still see the frantic insecurity, but that can be handled by providing a sense of security, as reasonable adults do. It’s a lot of work, though.
For this child, the world is frightening, and the earth is not stable under her feet. That’s her perception. This child remains hideously vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation, a veritable walking victim with flashing lights to signal the fact, all screaming, “Please abuse me!” People will develop a fondness for cold prickles when they can’t get a regular supply of warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies are critical to human development, particularly during childhood. Rare is the human capable from birth of asserting themselves.
Thus, the task of civilization is teaching that assertiveness, even while restraining the fully justified thrashing on everyone around you who refuses to be civil. When your expectations are realistic, hopping across the undulating and shaking earth isn’t quite the problem it is for most people. You realize the only real possible anchor and stability is inside you.
Our Western culture does have a space in it for those born assertive, but thrives on precious few having that inheritance. We don’t value adulthood at all, so we have no use for a valid manhood, and can’t possibly hold onto a valid femininity. We have serious but bogus problems for a foundation, and upon this we build a million invalid corrections. We are still in the fantasy world and now that it’s all coming apart, we can’t cope.
And we won’t ever cope because, as a whole, we have accepted our invalid government’s insistence it has to be this way. Virtually every major social issue goes back to that damnable dependence, which simply does not have to be. In case you didn’t notice, everything done by the powerful and wealthy has been aimed at fostering this dependence in us. We are utterly powerless to resist the raping hand of anyone with a belly full of victimization. These who’ve had enough have no idea what would solve their sorrow, but they are taking what action seems open to them. They can’t fix a broken world, but seek to fix what seems within reach. For most who seek the fix things, it’s only temporary because the fix is only externally oriented.
The biggest mistake is assuming the ground is supposed to be stable.

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Wildfire Season in Oklahoma

In this second year of severe drought and exceptionally high temperatures, the wildfires are back again.
We have one to our north, not so very far from my biking area along the North Canadian River. Current information indicates this one was arson, set in an area south of Luther, apparently with the intent to burn out the town. Doing a pretty good job of it, too. As I write this, over 25 homes are gone, and that’s not a big town. This one is no threat to us unless the wind somehow turns around in the opposite direction. Highly improbable.
Some strangeness attaches to the story of arson. The tale we get is a witness saw a fellow tossing burning newspaper out the window or his vehicle into the grass and trees along the road. The witness was distraught making the emergency call and trying to get folks to evacuate. At some point, a couple of news agencies said the fire was not intentionally set, that they had found the vehicle and driver. Then the latest story is they decided that was not the right vehicle and driver. Part of what makes it spooky is who is involved with the investigation, and his connections with unsavory elements. However this turns out, I rather doubt we’ll ever know the truth.
Several miles to our south is another wildfire, spreading from a trash fire out near an unincorporated area known as Slaughterville. We saw the smoke from this midday, and it was a massive column already. Now it’s covering multiple square miles and spreading completely out of control. The are is highly rural with precious few through-roads to get into the spot fires which are breaking out constantly. Lots of trees and dry tall grass, and high winds. One advantage is the very large reservoir (Lake Thunderbird) just north which the bucket choppers can use to dump water on the fire. The other advantage is a very broad divided highway on the north side, just below the dam on that lake.
However, fires have jumped bigger obstacles in the past. This one is not a direct threat to us, but that could change if the wind shifts just a little bit. It’s past my bedtime and I’m watching the news to see if this thing turns out really bad for us. This post is likely to see updates below.
Update 1: Early morning reports (6-7 AM) indicate the fire to our north in Luther is contained within a perimeter. The fire officials say they believe they can hold that line, but it’s a huge area. They are offering only sketchy reports for the fire to our south in Slaughterville. That suggests they don’t have it contained and aren’t sure themselves where it has spread. Then again, it also suggests far fewer structures are at risk compared to the better covered arson in Luther.
Update 2: The Luther fire is contained and almost out. Reports say four dozen structures were lost. The Slaughterville fire is contained, but a loss accounting is still under way. There were fires near Geary, Stillwater, Tulsa and in Creek County, as well. Today there is one in Shawnee (35 miles east of here) near the Catholic college, St. Gregory. We are currently safe.
Update 3: Lots of little fires breaking out all over the state. Most of them are near tiny little towns, but these are remote enough to make response very slow and hard to shift limited resources. I’ve lost count, but I believe it’s about seven significant blazes across the state this evening. Anything further updates will be started in a new post.

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Truth Will Always Be Otherworldly

It is not possible to get at the truth of this world from within this world.
Not even on a small scale can we pretend to have found the objective truth of anything in this plane of existence. If we could gather all the facts humans can know, we would still be short of critical elements of the story. It requires this sort of cynicism to avoid getting too wrapped up worrying over things you cannot control.
There are millions of examples, but the recent passing of Gore Vidal occasions something of his well worth rereading: The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh. This is not celebrating the greatness of Vidal, but we should miss his cynical accuracy on so many things he addressed. If anything, he was never cynical enough.
His article points out we can not ever know what really happened with Murrah Building Bombing because the government refused to investigate with even a smidgen of competence. It wasn’t a search for truth, but an insistence on telling a particular story and literally killing people who dared to argue with it. So the story here is not what McVeigh did, because that rests hidden under outright government lies even for what little they did learn, but the story is what the government did with this event.
It was the same with Waco, and it has been the same since far, far too long ago. As a Military Policeman, I can’t count how many times the same crap was forced down my own throat on cases in which I was intimately involved as both witness and investigator. I know what I know, and I cannot remember when my honest account was ever used honestly by the system. No, not once, and this was on a host of piddly nonsense cases which made not a bit of difference in anyone’s life. The system is full of such idiocy.
But I carry very little credibility in this world compared to people like Gore Vidal. In this, he was an ally, not a friend. The best we can ever hope for is another viewpoint worthy of consideration, because no one will ever really know everything pertinent. His was refreshingly honest in a world drowning in propaganda.
It was worth reading afresh Vidal’s assessment of McVeigh, just to be reminded of what a hideous beast hovers over us more closely with each passing day.

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Not for Long

I’m not Green; I don’t worship Mother Earth.
The earth is only the mother of my flesh, the part of me I keep having to kill every day. I’m not too attached to it.
That doesn’t keep me from caring about the environment. There is a tension in a genuine follower of Jesus which stretches out a hand to leave this world, but reaches out to heal as much suffering as possible with the other hand. I’m not going to trash this world, but I’m not going to worry overmuch about keeping it pure and unstained according to some blind vision such as is common to Greens.
It was prophesied this whole mess has an endpoint. It’s approaching, and no human can calculate the time. God knows, but His calculus is utterly beyond anything we would recognize. It’s His property. He can do what He wants with it, and none of us is in a position to question that. He won’t allow it to die until He’s finished with it. Reading between the lines of His Word, we sense He is proving a point to an audience we cannot comprehend, but we are the center ring in the circus. It’s not so much a question of when the earth is done, but when we are done, when He is done with us. Something about our existence here is the main issue.
Because I care about that issue, and I care about the lives of those who must share this world with me, and those who come after me, I do what I can to keep it tolerable. I write and share my understanding, but I also try to leave stuff in the most useful condition possible. Some of my polluting is the result of too many things I can’t control, choices I don’t have. In order to be faithful, there are certain things I have to do. Not in the sense of accomplishment, but in obedience. If it’s in my hands, I’ll use it for His glory. I’ll make mistakes, but my mission is to keep trying. So the balance point between trashing this trashy existence versus keeping it useful to others is trying to keep an honest accounting with God.
Yeah, it matters if we pollute, but there are limits to what we can do without sinning the other direction.

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More Open Than Closed

Perhaps you have heard the old hymn:

There’s a wideness, in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.

Too often we extend our private faith in ways God did not intend, and does not support.
It’s one thing to state your faith, clearly and directly. It’s another to offer none of the same mercy God offered you. In pursuit of “wise as serpents, harmless as doves” we don’t try to remake the world in our own image. Keeping yourself unstained by the sin of the world does not mean forcing your morality on others by means of state authority. Any attempt to use the leverage of the state makes us sinners automatically in all cases. If you must go that route, you first have to institute tribal government as the only proper context for God’s Laws.
This is where the distinction between Law and Grace, between this realm and the one above, is critical to understanding Christian conduct. We cannot extend the Laws of God, by our own hands, beyond the circle of volunteers who share our covenant. I can demand a certain amount of order within the reach of authority God has given me, but the ways of the state cannot work the righteousness of God. My authority ends with anyone’s whim to cooperate (except minor children).
It is art and spirit to draw the line. There are some things I simply cannot help you with, but the Spirit of the Lord requires a liberality there. I won’t help you do some things, but I’ll provide whatever information I have to offer all the world. So if I am a bakery chef, though I openly confess homosexuality is a sin in all cases, I’ll make your gay wedding cake, because it won’t defame Christ. It’s just a cake with figurines. I won’t rent you a room in my private home for your honeymoon, any more than I would for any other couple. When we do commerce with the world, we do commerce. There is no such thing as “Christian commerce” in that sense; all commerce is politics and politics has no bearing on anyone’s eternal destiny. Your demons won’t gain a foothold in my life simply because I sell you something I would sell to anyone else.
The boundary is covenant. I’ll make covenants very carefully, but business includes no such thing. There are places where such distinction is hard to discern, and conscience is everything, but I’d rather take the chance because grace and mercy are mightier than all the hosts of Hell. In spiritual terms, I can invade Hell with a water pistol and win every time, but Satan has no authority on my turf. If I walk in God’s justice within the limits of my God given authority, everything else is covered. It won’t stain my soul before the Lord. Indeed, it’s more likely the justice in my life will provoke your conscience. If I refuse to deal with you, how can I expect to speak truth to you? Christian commerce is simply using the system of this world to speak that truth.
Stop the silly boycotts and buycotts. We have to invade the world with grace if we expect His glory to shine.

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Stepping Up the Game

There is so much crap going on, it’s hard to keep track.
So this past few weeks I’ve stepped up my workouts. At a minimum, I figure my VA pension will go “POOF!” in the all too near future. That means however much disability I can overcome and pretend I don’t have is in my favor, since I’ll have to find some other way to make up the loss in income. Granted, VA pensions are more sacred than Social Security, but your sacred cow can be eaten by someone who worships a different god.
So I brought back some of the high tension exercises in the afternoon on walk days. At the same time, I added a jolt to the walking. Road marching is all about long strides pushing fast as you can go. Bending the elbows for a shortened arm-swing allows the feet to move faster, though it really wears on the arms. I’ve been carrying a big sports bottle in each hand, so it’s a bit of work. Still, I reduced my 6-mile time by ten minutes on the first try. I’ve also been riding a bit harder and cutting time off the biking, too.
So while I will never be the athlete I was in my youth, maybe I can be more athlete than most people my age. That’s because I have no idea what’s coming, in terms of specifics. You may recall I warned in a previous post you can’t really prepare for any one scenario because there is way too much competition going on among the plutocrats whose plan wins. There are hundreds of things shaping up at once, and when one or another is stopped, there’s plenty more you can’t stop because you had to work too hard on the things you did stop. There is no single plan, just a general effect which places everything totally in the hands of a tiny few.
I can’t advise you what to do. I can’t even advise me, just obey the powerful impulses which don’t come from my own mind and body, but some other place in my soul. I don’t think it’s unfair to extrapolate what I take as the command of God for me as a sign of things in general.
Whatever you feel compelled to do, crank it up.

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Recapitulation: Summary of God's Laws

From time to time, the conversation seems to lose track of fundamentals. People make all sorts of mistaken assumptions and we end up talking pasts each other. Let me restate a quick summary of what I mean by God’s Laws and His view of justice.
The Ten Commandments are an expression, set in a cultural matrix. They are not universal, but a historical manifestation of something universal. Jesus’ Two Commandments are very nearly universal in expression.

And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:35-40 NET)

Oddly, He quotes snippets from the Covenant of Moses, to show the universal principles were always there. In Matthew’s narrative, Jesus goes on to explain in the context of His day, and for the needs of His audience, how most people didn’t understand the meaning of “neighbor.” He does this by standing the whole thing on its head, reversing the roles most people would have expected, showing how a presumed enemy could easily be a neighbor by making the right choice. His religion, race and politics aren’t the issue, but how he extends God’s mercy into your life. You never know when you’ll encounter that, so you have to create in your soul a neutral space for every first encounter, and offer to be neighborly.
The fundamental issue is, here on this fallen earth, people are the most important resource. You do what you can to avoid externalizing the costs of your life onto others, but you expect a certain amount of common welfare seeking. Life after the Fall stinks, and things will never be really nice for everyone. You are required by God to avoid making it any worse, when possible. Instead, you are prepared to exert some effort helping ameliorate the sorrows. You do so with the calculus on what you have and can do, not some balancing act for which you cannot possibly see all factors.
But the starting point is acknowledging God first. Any criticism of human behavior starts there. Not only the behavior of others, but our own first. Jesus and His Apostles warned this is a variable, in the sense not everyone will do it. We who know Him cannot avoid it, but we realize the tension between holding the world accountable to His Lordship, even as we recognize in any given context we will have to proceed under the assumption they don’t accept that accountability. We hold that in tension and focus considerable energy on the second issue of common welfare. We do so because we take the first issue so seriously. We hold up that shining light, but realize few will reach for it, as they must do so voluntarily.
We still have to deal with a majority of humanity in an unredeemed context. The expansion of that common welfare should demand of us giving people a break now and then, regardless of what we may think they deserve, and whether they will even bother being grateful. That Sabbath Law was more about giving living things a rest and trusting God for the difference it might make in lost productivity. One day in seven is given as an absolute in that sense.
Honoring your parents is shorthand for a command to live in tribal harmony. This foreshadows my assertion no other form of government is just in God’s eyes. You might perceive injustice possible from a tribal patriarchy, but God says that’s better than any alternative we can dream up. The greatest social stability possible is in the ancient Hebrew feudalism. No one should have much say in your daily affairs who isn’t related by blood or covenant. This the shepherd government.
This government will keep order, and the bears the burden for deciding when something is a capital offense, a threat to the social order. But it’s not possible to define a system where it always works perfectly, so God offers the principle murder is wrong, while killing in itself is not. Moses went on to discuss in detail how this works out, but the underlying principle is still clearly stated in Noah’s Covenant. Again, you can’t externalize the sorrows of your life onto others. You don’t interfere with the family relations of others, and you don’t take what you want simply because you gotta have it. Sex is one of the harshest absolutes God expressed, and sexual fulfillment is not at all a human right. If you can’t be satisfied with what God delivers into your hands, you are wrong already. You won’t have proper standing to take faith and struggle for something better. Nor do you steal the truth, but adopt an open honesty about everything. Who wants to live where you can’t rely on anything people say? Yes, we have cultures where hyperbole is built into the language, but an attempt to deceive is wrong.
Expansions are endless, as endless as the variations of life itself. For example, the business of sabbaticals and credit Jubilees are more than a mere cultural expression, but fundamental to the earth and life itself. People need to stop periodically and reevaluate, give God time to speak about changes necessary as we age and things around us drift along. We can’t possibly all agree on the details, so we are bound by divine necessity to keep open negotiations with everyone. It’s about people, not rules. As commonly used, “rule by law” is an abomination to God. Somewhere in the details of every context, you have to expect a net loss of things you can measure and a net gain from the moral principles of the universe in terms of things you cannot measure. That is, be patient and let God do His work, and you’ll be better off in the end in the here and now. He promised what you lose will not be unbearable, and what you gain will be as good as it gets.
In the end, it all points to something much higher, ineffable, and infinitely more important. Honoring that Ultimate Reality by how you live here promises miracles now and later. If you lose that, you have nothing at all.

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Micah 3

A predator will eventually get his fill and rest, but the mouth of Hell opens onto a bottomless pit. Micah warns the leadership of the entire nation was more inspired by demonic powers than any spirit of justice. The fundamental theme: Everything the leadership does is colored by corruption. Every part of the ruling class is for sale.
The ruling class had a divine imperative to understand God’s justice. Everything they did was perverted, a twisted mockery of good and justice. To them, the people they ruled were so much cattle and sheep, existing only for the feeding of those who ruled. When the day of trouble comes, and the rulers cry to God, He won’t be able to hear them for the cacophony of their sins.
The prophets were no better, and would be more useful dead. So long as their bellies were full, everything was fine with God. Fail to cater to their whims and God is angry with the whole world. In other words, their spirits were already dead, incapable of hearing from the Lord. The only god giving them any message was the god of their own appetites. So when the day comes they were desperate to hear from God, there would be only silence for a message, and darkness for insight. If they rolled the dice, they would never get the same numbers twice.
Micah was as full as they were empty. He had boldness from a commitment to God’s justice, and could speak a word from God by reflex. No need for mumbo jumbo and divination to figure out what the single greatest problem was: Israel was in open defiance of the entire Covenant. So even Jerusalem itself was built from violence, blood mixed liberally in the mortar between the stones. It required a bribe just to walk down the street.
Meanwhile, they were just so sure nothing could happen to them because they lived in the city where God’s House stood. He had found the place too foul to stay around. Because of them, the city would be a heap of ruins, with a plowed field replacing the vast pavements. God would bring invaders to tear down His own House because it was unbearable to Him.

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The Lies of Luxury

Joy is inside you. If you don’t find peace and love within, you won’t find it at all.
Luxury is a lie. It has nothing to do with the actual amount, and there is no real standard at all. It’s all perception. So no matter how much we have, we will always want more. It’s not possible to fulfill the luxury demands of the world. There are systemic limits on production. The only real progress has been in terms of moving information, not actually doing much. (Are we not back to the Tower of Babel?) Sure, we can produce more stuff with less, but as soon as a certain minimum threshold of production is crossed, a certain satiety of demand sets in and the product must be made cheaper in order to move it. Thus, mass production guarantees you’ll end up with less because what you have is junk. If they don’t make it cheap and wear out quickly, you won’t come back for more. Then you have to work in the disposal factor, because recycling seldom works out as imagined.
The only people thinking in the broad aggregate are the predators. The people who understand all this best are the folks who would rob you at gunpoint if it wasn’t so much trouble. They devise schemes to take your wealth systemically. The current global recession-depression was planned, foisted upon us by people who knew it was coming. The majority in any such scheme will never have any idea where things are headed; they’ll believe the lies they are taught because they have no external point of reference. They don’t see beyond their own immediate world. So most of the frantic gaming of the lending system, developing derivatives (fancy mathematical calculus) which justified skimming the accounts, was carried out by folks who actually believed it was honest business, even if not popular. The bottom fringes of these useful idiots have already begun losing their jobs and the whole thing will continue to unravel, as does the entire system. And we as consumers with a bottomless demand are participants in this lie.
It’s based on the fiction of credit necessity. The whole thing was sold to mankind on the assumption you can work to build a fortune by borrowing and investing and making more stuff to sell. More is not better. You can most certainly grow a bigger and better economy without credit, but it would be slower and less destabilizing. There would be few sudden profits and precious little room for predators to operate.
How many verses would I have to quote here to underscore this: God says credit is evil. When under a covenant of laws you make a loan to your neighbor in need, you don’t expect to profit. You expect to maintain social stability, and willingly take a loss because people are more important than stuff. You tolerate a certain amount of cadging and begging because you realize that’s how it goes in this world. That sort of “loan” is not credit, strictly speaking. It is in my best interest to expend resources on my neighbors. The moral fabric of the universe absorbs the loss and repays me in ways I can’t calculate. The give and take of social stability and kindness is what life is about; it’s the whole purpose. It goes to the core reason for staying around on this plane of existence.
There is not a single war in human history which did not arise from greed and hatred. None. Somebody wasn’t willing to let their neighbor be. They weren’t willing to take what could be offered peacefully. While it may require a bit of complex analysis to satisfy some, it’s easy to prove America has been greedy and abusive when she should have minded her own business. It’s not how most Americans operate, but we allowed people to lie to us about it. That we allowed psychopaths to gain control of our governmental leverage is our own fault. We kept passing the buck on the painful necessity of giving to our neighbors and restraining our own misbehaving children. We’d rather watch the Olympics than think about what a massive evil we perpetrate on people who threaten us not at all, or not enough to justify the vast waste of productivity.
It takes a return to the ancient ways of contemplation and otherworldly consideration to become wise enough to realize we have exported bloodshed we should have absorbed here at home. Except, it doesn’t work that way, as we have killed more of our own in war than would have died if we had simply absorbed the thrusts of greed and hatred from others. There is only so much you can do before you are going too far, and God is not pleased. The foundation of sin is arguing with God about what He said is good and just in this life.
We have demanded far too much, and soon we shall lose what little we have. Again, we got here because we refused to accept God’s revelation on His terms. We have demanded things on our terms, and then allowed those terms to keep drifting farther and farther afield. We have moved so very far away from whatever blessings He offered, wrath is all we can have.
It’s too late for America, but not too late for Americans. Turn, turn within and seek His face, seek His justice. Whatever it is you really must have in this world starts within. If you are empty, nothing in this world can fill the void.

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