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#31
11-21-2010, 04:45 PM
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The CSA (Confederate States of America) constitution might have been good (well, it was almost a word for word copy of the US one), it EXPRESSLY permitted Slavery. Go read it again. You might not been the one to call Phoenix a death squad, but others have, and they are the ones i was talking to. One again, you are nothing more than a Pot calling a Kettle black. The descriptions of Bruce is that he was not cold nor heartless. No one who is cold and heartless would do what he had done in the game background. That in of itself says alot about the man.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it. 
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#32
11-21-2010, 05:14 PM
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For me the charm of the game was that a small group of people got together in an effort to save humanity but they got there a little too late and now they struggle with the little they have so that they can survive and perhaps make a difference. You're very gung ho for having the US constitution as a central tenent of the Project and having the Project along the lines of some huge governmental organization with plenty of supplies and having the knowledge that they would wake up 150 years after the war, okay that's fine, we're all different and have different ideas about our games. I'm happy to argue game issues, canon or non-canon material or what's best for 'x' situation and I'm happy to accept that sometimes it might get a little heated because different people have different ideas but the real difference between you and I is that I prefer not to stoop to insulting someone just because they disagree with my personal beliefs.
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#33
11-21-2010, 05:46 PM
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I have not said it's a flotilla of passenger liners. Hell, the main books state that not even a FRACTION of the project has been activated. I've been writing about HOW the project was suppose to work AT THE TIME IT WAS SUPPOSE TO GO ACTIVE. Five to Ten years post-TEOTWAWKI. Not 150 years. If i was going for the project starting 150+ years after the event, there would be a hell of alot of things I'd be doing different. The whole point of the game was that your characters were part of something LARGER than themselves, and that they are out of their element when they wake up. They were suppose to work within the framework of the Project. But when they wake up they find out that there was a major clusterfuck that's occurred and they are waking up in a situation where it's JUST THEM operating all on their own. They don't have the resources they were suppose to have, and they have to do the job all themselves. My work is to show HOW the project was suppose to work. Do you really think ANYONE would have volunteered knowing they would wake up isolated without someone getting their backs? I know I might, but i'm crazy that way. I've always put others needs ahead of my own. Even after all i've been through, i still put others ahead of myself, and have opened my home up to strangers so they can have a place to live instead of the streets more than once. And yes the first time i did it, i got screwed, but i'm still doing it. you see things as just a lifeboat that set sail too late. if that was the case, even the team would be helpless and their mission hopeless. But of course the game books state that was not the case. Not even a fraction of the project and it's assets have been activated. The project IS a large thing, and once the Phoenix Team activated Prime Base they started to kick the project off. That was the entire purpose of that module. Even if the GM didn't activate Phoenix team or inculde it in his world. The PCs that discovered the base, were to get the entire project back on its feet.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#34
11-21-2010, 11:50 PM
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Quote:
Quote:
I'm happy to argue about the game with you and if we could meet in real life we could shout at each other, grind our teeth, pull out our hair and glare at each other then buy some food or drinks (or both) and realize we are both as interested in the game but just see it in different ways. However, continued name-calling makes that entirely too unlikely and makes this forum a whole lot less pleasant to inhabit.
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#35
11-22-2010, 12:34 AM
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I have read all of the books, i've been working on the Morrow Project Sourcebook that details how the Project was suppose to work in the 5 to 10 year timeframe that the project had been planned for. If it seems i've made the project large in my write-ups, it's because the scope of the mission of the project was so damn large. Finding a way to locate people with the right skills during the 5 to 10 year post-TEOTWAWKI Event, is why i came up with the "Camp-in-a-Box" as it's been called. A way that the project administrators could find people by getting them to register when arriving at the camp (Something FEMA has set up for their relocation camps). At no point have I stated that the Project is part of the Government, because it's a completely private civilian endeavor that does have connection to SOME people who are in the Executive Branch of the Government. With the time the Project had to get set up, of course someone associated with the Project is going to end up in a position in the Government to act as a way of keeping investigations being launched to FIND the project. Because face it, anything as large as the Project would draw attention if they aren't careful. Someone is prone to get a wild hair and tell someone in the government or some reporter. It's why there had to be something major for the people to be dedicated to, that they would look past money or anything else to stay in the project. For the UK, the ideal would be the Monarchy. For the US it's the Constitution. For the other regions/sectors of the Atlantis Project there would be something for each of the groups to focus upon. Something that can be rallied around to rebuild a nation upon. That building block is different for each group. No one can be used for every nation, or people. And you are acting like i can wave a wand and get the Atlantis Project published.... but I am sorry that can't do that, no one can. Tim & I talked about what's keeping 4th Edition from coming out. And it's not just a money issue. But it's a simple fact that they don't have the money right now to get it printed because of the way the damn economy is. And that's going to effect everything. I've got an appointment to speak with the owners of the game where I'm going to try to get them to go the PDF and Print-on-Demand route that will help with the costs.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#36
11-22-2010, 01:01 AM
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#37
11-22-2010, 01:13 AM
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Quote:
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#38
11-22-2010, 08:17 PM
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Here's my thoughts on why Bruce was a good guy and why I don't see the Project's end goal as just rebuilding the USA in the mold of the constitution.
Bruce was definitely one of the good guys, he cared enough about the entire human race that he set up a Project to preserve the human race from extinction in a nuclear war he knew was coming. If he had been uncaring, he could have just used the Project to save himself and his family & friends. If he'd been a real bastard, he would have just saved himself and his most trusted allies. He might be seen as callous or uncaring because it can be argued that he can travel to the future so he can obviously see what's going to happen so why doesn't he stop it? I think there's a few reasons that can be given for this. 1. He might not be able to stop it no matter what he tries, fate has been determined already and no man can change it. 2. He might be able to change things but believes he should not because that could alter too many things and just make the problem worse. He doesn't know the outcome unless he constantly travels back and forth from the future and if he does do that, he might just makes things more complicated and therefore much worse. 3. He realizes that the Project is not going to wake up 3-5 years after the war, instead they will wake up 150 years after. However, having seen this, he has also seen that 150 years later is when the Project will really be needed the most because the world hasn't recovered well enough in over 100 years. He has to accept some deaths and misfortunes because the Project is actually needed further into the future and not just 5 years after the war ends. However, if he tells people that this is what's going to happen, they will probably doubt they can pull it off, they'll believe that some of them will die in the process because technology isn't good enough to ensure they all survive. So he tells them they will wake up around 3-5 years after the war so they can save the USA so that they can save humanity. And they will, but they will do it when humanity is getting close to the point where they really, really need the help. (Personally I feel this is the most likely reason) The goal of the Project stated in the 3rd edition, is the continued survival of the human race beyond the point of destruction. With this in mind I do not see the rebuilding of the USA in whatever model of government as being the end goal of the Project. It's simply a stepping stone to the main goal which is the preservation of the human race. Why even try to rebuild the USA? Because an industrial nation has the best chance of supplying the needs of a civilization so that it can not just survive but also thrive and therefore be able to help other civilizations.The USA is arguably the best placed modern, industrialized nation to ensure the survival of the human race. Once it's back on it's feet, it can start to rebuild the rest of the world. Unfortunately, nations that are heavily industrialized are also the most vulnerable to calamity because for example, if the electricity stops, nobody remembers how to make candles and there's not enough firewood for cooking and heating anymore and none of the factories work so there goes any new clothes or cars or fuel pumps, spare parts for the radios, medicines etc. etc. This is why the Project becomes so important. Bruce knows that the government couldn't get the USA back on it's feet, even 50 years later the people are still struggling and 150 years later they're so spread out and in such small numbers, there's no certainty the human race will be strong enough to survive any further problems (say like the Plague making a comeback). This is were the Project comes in. They have skills and resources that can strengthen local communities. They have the knowledge of what the world used to be like and how it can be like that again. They have the ability to reunite the scattered survivors of the USA and rebuild the nation. Once the USA is again a vibrant civilization able to furnish resources in excess of what it needs to survive, those surplus resources can be sent to other parts of the world to ensure that the human race lives on elsewhere thereby ensuring that should another calamity affect the human race, they won't all be wiped out because they are all in the one place, (all the eggs are not in the one basket so to speak). It's been mentioned that the game was designed during the Cold War and perhaps the Project was written up as fearing that the Soviets may still be in a position to cause grief for the US. I don't agree with this theory because I think Bruce would have been able to see if this was so in his trips to the future. I think Bruce realized that the best chance of saving humanity was to rebuild the USA, the best nation to be able to do this because of the reasons I mentioned above. The world definitely needs saving because after all, if the US could not get back on it's feet 150 years after the war, what chance does the rest of the world have? It's necessary to preserve enough people with the skills, knowledge and ideals from before the war so that 150 years later they can set about building up a society that has the skills and resources to save the human race from dying off. I think Bruce saw this as the real problem of the entire war, that the results were so devastating that even 150 years later the world still hadn't properly recovered. This is when the Project is really needed, not one or two or even 5-10 years after the war. The USA is the best nation to rebuild the world and save the human race and this is the most noble of goals. Rebuilding the USA in the mold of the constitution would certainly help but it can't be just the end goal, but it's a damned good way of reaching the real end goal, that is, to ensure the survival of the entire planet.
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#39
11-22-2010, 10:28 PM
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And that's why i said the MORROW PROJECT's goal was the rebuilding of the USA. The Constitution and it's framework is the building block that allowed the USA to become the great nation that it has been in the past, and can be in the future. THAT is why i said it would be used as something to rally around in the US.
The Atlantis Project was for the rest of the world. The overall goal was the salvation of the human race as you said. But it had to start somewhere. and the USA was it. And the Constitution created the American Dream that has inspired so many around the world. WHY NOT have it as the rally point for volunteers in the USA to do the reconstruction.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#40
11-23-2010, 03:17 AM
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The brutal reality is that the US is best positioned to rebuild itself as a nation, not because of it's system of government but because, just like Russia, it has a large population spread out over a large area. This allows a far greater chance that enough people survive so that rebuilding can start but also to start breeding the next generations. Russia is just as well disposed to rebuild itself as a nation having also been heavily industrialized and having it's population spread over a wide geographic area. However, the aim of the game is not about Russia.
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#41
11-23-2010, 09:03 PM
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If that was the case, the USSR wouldn't have collapsed in upon itself. Because in all honesty, they had even more resources than the USA has access to. And they collapsed upon themselves. It's not just the resources you have access too, but the people themselves. We've talked about this on the t2k boards, and the fact that the Soviets had so many generations of being forced to conform, to keep their heads down because of the communist system had been ingraned into the people. But as we're seeing now in Russia they are starting to come out of that. and their economy and society is started to blossom and bloom.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#42
11-26-2010, 11:16 PM
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As a side note, I agree the Project is there to explicitly "aid in the reconstruction of the US after a nuclear war", as stated relatively early in the Intro to TM 1-1. The "US" (as opposed to America or North America) is a discrete socio-political-cultural entity, and is a much more narrow definition than merely "civilisation" in general or "humanity". After all, even the most pessimistic (but realistic real world) estimates predicted civilisation's eventual recovery after a nuclear war, even without the Project so in the strictest sense the Project is superfluous. Therefore it's logical to assume that the Project was formed to promote a certain kind of civilisation, one embodied by the pre-war United States of America.
Dockery mentioned the Phoenix team was primarily created in response to playtest groups that routinely went rogue. So being in-house troubleshooters was in response to a real problem. In my game, Phoenix also has a think-tank element, not just a hit-team. This think-tank would mainly be responsible for the "top level" thinking for the Project's strategic vision, but also send out Phoenix when necessary. Quote:
You may as well say the president of the White Star line was extremely adamant against the building of the Titanic because they KNEW it would sink. Or anyone be against anything that, in hindsight, was not a good idea. There is no indication whatsoever (I can find in Prime Base, at least) that Bruce was "extremely adamant" or even mildly opposed to building Prime Base. Just that he didn't want to be part of the staff (pg 10). On page 8 it says one rationale for building PB was that is was recognised such a facility was "essential". I could be missing something! I think there are much better ways of explaining Prime and various seeming problems with time travel. Reasons why it seemed a "good" idea at the time, and no one even did what, to us, seems like an elementary risk-assessment of a central control point. (For the sake of argument I take it that the most obvious explanation is correct: Morrow is an Esper/PSI that can somehow travel through time. As well, I've decided not to entertain any BEM, Evil Genius-thinking, where he allows the war to happen/Prime to fail/etc. on purpose, or that he's not some kind of charlatan.) Bear in mind, Morrow was a strong-willed individual with his own preconceptions. He was not perfect and he changed the timeline on the fly, more than once without knowing what the exact outcome would be. (If he did, he would not have needed to make more than one trip to check how the future was proceeding, and introduce radical fixes based on that trip.) Morrow gambled with the timeline, and lost because he found out the hard way he wasn't omniscient. Call it the Black Swan effect, the Butterfly effect, what have you. Timeline A: The original future that Morrow visits. No Project, outcome assumed bad for the US. For my own game, I assume this is because while the US abandoned Civil Defense the USSR never did, so the possible "end game" for this timeline might be Soviet global domination centuries after a preemptive nuclear war triggered in the last gasps of a failing Soviet Union. This future is certainly a horrifying prospect for a capitalist, not to mention patriot, like Morrow!. (The latter elements is purely my conjecture, of course, but fits into the core themes of TMP.) Timeline B: Morrow begins the Morrow Project, which presumably alters the timeline by its very existence. Morrow again visits the future to see how things are progressing. Obviously something is deeply amiss in Timeline B's future, because he seriously disrupts causality by bringing significant future tech back to the past (1979) before it's invented. By creating the Project in the past he does alter the future, but then again anyone with similar vision, willpower, drive and resources could still create the Project using the technology of the time (according to the game). Actually bringing significant technology from the future seriously violates causality and creates paradoxes that are not as easily reconciled. My own conjecture is the future he sees is even more bleak, with (say) a somehow deficient or hamstrung Project only succeeds rebuilding the US to a point where a stalemate is again reached, and a new Cold War is ignited leads to a WWIV where everyone (or almost everyone) dies and human civilsation is permanently extinguished (thus the Project is rebuilding "civilisation" in a wider context). Morrow introduces this "impossible" future equipment as fixes to problems he sees with the Project. One "1987 Update" fix was the adoption of Fusion power. The rationale that was alluded to Dockery was that without it, in playtests onboard nuclear reactors seemed too dangerous and other games otherwise devolved into a "search for fuel" (a la T2K). So its reasonable to assume this takes place in Timeline B, too, for the same reason, among other changes (more on these in a minute). Timeline C: The game timeline. Not only is the future timeline altered, it's been altered again specifically for the Project. More significantly, changes Morrow himself introduced now come into play, making the timeline far different from what he intended. This was a roundabout way of saying that far from being horrified by the introduction of a central command node and outmaneuvered by the COT or others, Morrow himself could be unintentionally responsible for Prime's failure. If, in Timeline B, one of the problems Morrow is there to discover is that a decentralised Project somehow splits into competing factions or even falls apart into warring groups, a strongly centralising command and control would be a logical step. Further, any parallel attempts by Morrow at manipulating world events (like, peacefully ending the Cold War in 1989) could have somehow backfired, causing a far worse and/or different war than he was expecting. Morrow is not omniscient. If he were, there would never be any need to change things again by introducing fixes in 1979. The a logical rationale for why fatal errors were introduced to the Project is these were the result of fixes introduced to "solve" problems that have yet to happen, as is more-or-less established to be Morrow's operating method in TM 1-1 in the introduction. As to why Morrow didn't see the obvious flaw in a central command post that can be taken out to hamstring the Project, bear in mind had seen the future, and in the future where there's a Project (Timeline B) Prime was as safe as kittens. Further, as to why no underling pointed out this flaw, there is a real-life business phenomenon called the "reality distortion field" (RDF) or "Steve Jobs effect". "The RDF is said to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and makes them believe that the task at hand is possible."Now, Steve Jobs isn't even an Esper, he's just a baseline human, if not exactly ordinary. If he can do this without Esper abilities, so could Morrow (and not just to the COT). If you went to Morrow and said, "uh, sir, building a Prime Base like this is insanely risky for glaringly obvious reasons..." by the end of the meeting you'd probably end up gushing "...gee, I see it now, organising the entire Project around Prime Base like you say is not only the most logical way to do it, but I feel like an idiot for ever thinking otherwise!" If Morrow had some kind of low-level Esper ability he wasn't aware of that helped convince people even more on some subconscious level, it's scary to think what he could accomplish without meaning to. So... Prime Base might not be a plot against Morrow. It could instead actually be his fault. Not because he's evil or stupid, but because he's human and subject to hubris and a belief in his own infallibility. Tony
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#43
11-29-2010, 05:00 PM
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I'm not saying the Bruce didn't want a headquarters. He just didn't want an 'All the eggs in one basket' approach that Prime Base ended up being... having a centrally located command & control centre allows for just that ONE place being knocked out, taking the entire project out with one swift stroke.
That's what Bruce didn't want to have happen. Having Phoenix Team frozen in place in Prime Base allowed for Bruce to have 'an ace in the hole' when PB went down, knowing that when someone woke the team up... they'd get the project kick-started. And while the project doesn't get started in the 5 to 10 year original timeframe, it still get's started... just in a different world than they had expected to find.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#45
07-10-2011, 08:58 PM
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Here's a twist on canon information for you. An excerpt from an interview with Kevin Dockery.
Is the wandering Warlock officially Bruce Morrow ? Yes, he is one of a very few that can transport in and out of the future. Not the only one. So for every move Bruce makes there can be another traveler counteracting that action. http://home.earthlink.net/~kywess/doc_interv.html
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#46
08-24-2011, 09:32 PM
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Not to stir the now-cooled pot but... my version of the Morrow Project has nothing to do with the United States or the Constitution. I don't own all the books, only the main one, but I'm not interested in a game about rebuilding the United States of America. I'm running a game where the salvation of humankind is the number one motive.
I don't think Morrow was nice or mean. He was a survivalist. He simply wanted the human race to survive. For the game I'm working on, I've been putting together the guidelines for the Morrow Project. One of the things that has always struck me as very interesting from a gaming point of view is the amount the MP stresses on individual decision-making. Sure the MP has a structure and a goal but the usual PC group is Recon and all the canon and fanon I've read is about how they're chosen to be independent, assertive and screened to be able to make decisions on their own. This is a WIP but here are two of the tenets laid out: Quote:
1) It removes the need for political discourse like this. 2) It places the burden of making right/wrong decisions solely on the Team. 3) It provides far more opportunity for the Team to have deal with, bargain with and possibly ally with factions that may not be of similar mind. By keeping the overall goal in mind, the Team must act to ensure that mankind survives and this provides far more adventure fodder than the Liberty Brigade of the USA. IMO.
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#47
09-28-2011, 07:21 PM
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I can see using it as a core project of the logic. It will be difficult to say, "and any of our construction is based on our" constitutional amendment "form" or "We have a new post EOTWaWKT government plans to recruit hundreds of thousands of cribs and tens of thousands of followers."
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