Who Lost the Debate?

~ Clarissa

I don’t know if Harris was given the questions in advance but these were extremely predictable questions. There were no surprises at all.

The important thing, though, is the litany of lies that Harris unleashed during the debate. No hoax was too ridiculous for her to unspool. This is what awaits us when she’s elected. Endless lies, hoaxes, and a denial of reality.

We all lost yesterday. We lost big.

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Published by Clarissa

86 thoughts on “Who Lost the Debate?”

  2. This is such bad loser behavior yet again from MAGA conservatives. Their candidate did not prepare and did not do well, so they need to retort to conspiracy theories to explain away a bad performance.

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    1. And it’s exactly what happened with every Trump fail, be it immigration, Fauci, BLM, etc. All we ever get are whiny excuses. No responsibility is ever taken. No sense of agency demonstrated.

      It isn’t even about the debate. The debate is a symptom of a larger problem. And that is why I’m not voting for Trump. Four more years of excuses – no, thanks.

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      1. “It isn’t even about the debate. The debate is a symptom of a larger problem. And that is why I’m not voting for Trump. Four more years of excuses – no, thanks.”

        The Democrats course corrected brilliantly by dropping Biden and choosing someone else. The real problem for the Republicans is they are still stuck with Trump, even after he lost them the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election. Like you said, no sense of agency or responsibility from this decrepit party.

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        1. Totally. If Harris is such an enormous threat, what can possibly justify a shoddy, disinterested approach to the entire presidential campaign? Is Trump campaigning or running a vanity tour?

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      2. I’m not voting for Trump. Four more years of excuses – no, thanks.

        And that’s totally fine, it’s what you are entitled to as a voter. But then you are indirectly voting for four more years of Kamala Harris. How is that going to go for you?

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        1. I know, I’ve been wavering for weeks over it. It would have been easier for me to vote for Biden, even with dementia and all. But Kamala, such a distasteful, vulgar, screechy, airheaded leftist.

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  3. What is your take on Trump repeating the fake story about Hattian immigrants in an Ohio town stealing cats and dogs to eat them? It is a bizarre story and multiple news outlets have checked with the town officials and no one has reported anything like that going on.

    Honestly, the more I think about that story, the more I wonder if it is the result of someone pulling an elaborate prank on Vance. He claims that voters have been calling his office with stories about cats and dogs being eaten, but probably they were just trying to trick him into saying something stupid that could easily be proven wrong.

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    1. Instead of coming in with numbers and specifics, Trump chose to say something vague about some idiot story that “was on TV.” Failing to make Harris look bad on immigration seemed impossible but he achieved that feat.

      Seriously, immigration? If you have nothing of substance to say on immigration – your signature issue – then what can we expect on any other subject?

      He couldn’t have even memorized some figures to look serious on the subject.

      As for the moronic cat story, everybody on the right who amplified it contributed to tanking the Trump campaign. People who aren’t terminally online had no idea what Trump was on about and he looked delusional.

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        1. “What is even the point of the story?”

          The US has a long history of people making up horrible stories about various immigrant groups to justify people hating those immigrant groups.

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          1. “US has a long history of people making up horrible stories about various immigrant groups”

            There was a case of an African migrant roasting a small animal said to be a cat on a sidewalk in Italy a few years ago….

            https://x.com/EvaVlaar/status/1833147660015968610

            But bringing anything like that up in the debate was stupid.

            He should have named citizens killed by illegal aliens let in by border czar Harris… but that would mean thinking about other people which Trump… isn’t so good at.

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            1. Exactly. He should have been prepared with names of the victims, names of the criminals, known numbers, why it’s impossible to get good stats. There are mountains of information. But no, preparing is beneath him.

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              1. And Kamala would have replied with the usual – immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than those born in the US, they live in fear of police and being deported, stories about white perps (opportunity to say most school shooters are white and how we need gun control), how white nationalism is the greatest threat etc etc (however false or incomplete).

                Meanwhile the cat/goose memes have led to “20,000 Haitians” trending all over social media, with interviews of residents and how that has affected them, so maybe some good will come of it in the end.

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              3. Yeah, don’t make this into the story of every other wave of migration. I’ve just been perusing documents from my family line. My 3-greats grandparents came over from Ireland mid-19thC. Potato famine people. 3ggma was totally illiterate, and 3ggpa is a “laborer” on the first census in which they appear. In all those censuses, there are three cells on the form: country of birth, country your father was born in, country your mother was born in. In that first census, all those cells say “Germany”. In later censuses, they progressed to “Ire. English”, and in the final ones, not only had he progressed from laborer, to millworker, to superintendant of a woolen mill… his parents had progressed from German, to Irish-English, to just straight-up Irish. I mean, the family is peppered with maiden names like Kilpatrick and MacGonagle. These people were never German. But apparently being Irish was super unpopular when they came over. Their kids were all educated and literate. Their grandchildren were engineers– one of them built one of the first hydroelectric dams in Brazil, and his brother made a career in the then-infant telephone industry after serving in an engineering corp. in WWI. Literally building the infrastructure of the modern world. It’s the classic American Immigrant story:

                -Assimilate as quickly as possible by downplaying your culture/country of origin, keep your nose clean, make sure the kids stay out of trouble. No crime.

                -Earn a living doing menial jobs and work your way up to whatever level you can achieve, given the limitations of your education/ability/childhood nutrition status.

                -Get an education for your kids

                -Grandkids are proud Americans who make major contributions to their country.

                Somehow I don’t think the great Haitian migration is going to go that way. And maybe my folks wouldn’t have either, if they’d been hauled here by NGOs, subsidized, given a complete carte blanche on criminal activity, and never forced to assimilate. And that’s before you even get to the sticky question of inborn intelligence.

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      1. Now they are going “yes, but the reports about Haitians eating the geese from the local pond are true.” Well, nobody cares anymore because you chose to make it specifically about house pets and now the info about geese simply doesn’t land.

        The sheer stupidity, God. Like if these particular people didn’t eat the geese this would justify the absence of the border.

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      2. Erick Erickson is a certified retard. As if, absent the cat meme, the media would’ve written fair and balanced stories about the debate. If not this, they would’ve nitpicked at something else.

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  4. This was a great response. And I completely agree. If it takes a cat meme to bring attention to the fact that a small ohio town turned 1/3 haitian in the blink of an eye, so be it.

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    1. You’re such an idiot to think that having an American city grow (in whatever do graphic direction) is a problem. Do we complain that a New York borough is majority Jewish? Or that parts of the Midwest is Scandinavian? When you start on the part of brain-dead divisiveness, you get what you ask for.

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        2. The problem is that you’re so brain-dead that you don’t see that American demographic directions have favoured different countries/peoples at different times. From Jews to Polish to Somalians to Irish to Indians to Chinese, etc. The fact that you think there’s something wrong with it only when it relates to Haitians (or any demographic you just happen not to like) only exposes your own empty-headedness. Not anyone’s fault. Lol.

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          1. Man… the right, the right, the right. I get it, Anonymous. I mean, if one of my kids asked me, “Dad, what is the right?”, well, I’d probably start with Trump yelling, “They eat the dogs! They eat the cats!” And when they’re a bit older, I’d go with this letter to a gay couple in Connecticut:

            https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/09/republicans-terrorized-a-gay-couples-home-what-happened-next-surprised-the-couple/

            I’d probably conclude with a few broad yet pithy examples:

            “Trump was a normal president (and is a normal candidate) except for a few mean tweets.”

            “Climate change is a hoax ’cause scientists suck.”

            “Potential life means more than the everyday struggles of women.”

            “The drag queens and the trannies are recruiting!”

            “Herp derp durr, a Rainbow Flag in the street. Let’s leave some skid marks!”

            I feel you, Anonymous. It’s discouraging (and occasionally funny). And I’m with you about 85 to 90%.

            But… beneath the fear, ignorance, bromides, and Pout-Pout Fish-level complaints–way, way beneath–there are real problems. There is a reality of immigrants having trouble thriving on their own terms in America and thriving for the benefit of their new communities.

            And herein lies the key difference between left and right. The right will look at the data and say, “The problem is the Haitian people and/or the Black people. Let’s keep them away and dehumanize them as much as possible.”

            The left will say: “They’re people. Let’s help.”

            And both sides are problematic. The right problems seem more obvious, but the left has something of a history of rushing in to help where they don’t understand how to help. Or indeed, if the group in question wants “help.”

            So, two imperfect sides. I lean left, because as I’ve noted before, my personal bar for president stipulates no felons, sexual predators, frauds, or folks who tried to violently overthrow the American government. But the left has some dolt-heads, too.

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            1. I happen to agree with you here. I’m not blind to the excesses of the left. The problem with American politics is that we’re quick to point to the most extreme of our opponents, thereby losing the opportunity to solve the problem by coming to a compromise position right in the middle. Singling any immigrant community out is atrocious, as is Clarissa’s habit of thinking high IQ is a basis for immigration. America has never used any such thing to screen immigrants, and shouldn’t. In any case, IQ, whether low or high, is never the predictor of crime. The best criminals have high IQs enough to beat the system, so this tells us nothing. The Nazi Germans thought they were the “master race”. Hitler painted and played music. Stalin loved the opera. What have those contributed to civilization?

              So as soon as we move away from there, we can have a better conversation about a good immigration system that is fair, and helpful to all new entrants. No immigrant is “better” for the country than others. As long as the nation’s ideals are well established, taught, and reinforced, it won’t matter if your ancestor spoke Yiddish, French, German, or Somali. We all become American. Out of many, one.

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              1. Good immigration policy:

                1. limits the total number of immigrants per year, and per country of origin.
                2. vets the immigrants
                3. Is conditional on the ability to make a living in the US, or having sponsors who will take responsibility for you until you can.
                4. Does not concentrate large numbers of FOB immigrants in the same areas, which works against their ability to assimilate.

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              3. More word soup from Anonymous. My heart goes out to this poor person but it’s impossible to help somebody who is incapable of acknowledging their problem. But truly, the heart breaks seeing this.

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            2. Trump was not only a normal but a much better president than Obama and Bush. Vastly imperfect but better than those two losers. Biden was slightly better than Trump. (I’m not partisan).

              As for the skid marks, do you believe that people who leave skid marks on rainbow flags painted in the street should be arrested? I’m sincerely interested in what people actually think.

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              1. I followed the link to the article. I don’t think it’s possible that you don’t see the glaring problems with it, so I’ll refrain from pointing them out.

                I highly recommend this book on hate crime hoaxes: Hate Crime Hoax https://a.co/d/5zGF9EW

                The age of AI is coming. We can’t afford to believe every haphazard fabrication when the digital tools are becoming even stronger.

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              2. “…do you believe that people who leave skid marks on rainbow flags painted in the street should be arrested?”

                No, not arrested. They were young people who made a dumb decision, and some community service or a lesson in civics (such as, how do you lawfully protest a symbol on your street that you dislike?) would be more appropriate.

                As for the possible (probable?) hoax, I’ll investigate further.

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        1. Not even a thought regarding why the standard of living in Haiti is so different from that of Sweden or Israel crosses the poor person’s mind. Swedes, Haitians, Jews – they are all identical widgets that can be swapped with no consequences. As for the standard of living, criminality, achievement, none of it is caused by people. It’s only caused by landscape.

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              1. Read a study on it– Dutch I think– where they had actually gone and calculated the average per-immigrant financial ROI to the country by country of origin. Immigrants from Scandinavia and Japan were a net positive ROI. Immigrants from subsaharan Africa were deeply negative. This was based on tax revenues, arrests, subsidized services, etc. Results were stark, and very clear. I’m only following the data.

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              2. A much more interesting question is why you would waste your precious time on hanging around people you consider “dolt-headed”. You could be with people you like instead. Why not do that?

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              3. But Clarissa, wouldn’t you be bored with only sycophants around? Don’t you need people to insult?

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            2. It would also be better off if it forcibly imported 20k Germans, or 20k educated rich Americans. But that’s not how things work, is it? The only people you can get to move to a dying midwestern town are those for whom it would be an improvement.

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              1. Why do you need to +30% population in *any* town, ever, over such a short period of time? Results are totally predictable there: housing shortage, infrastructure failure, strain on essential services. And that is all before you get to the unique qualities of the culture being imported. If it were all Scandis, or Japanese, it’d *still* be a huge strain. But it’d be workable, over time. A temporary emergency that they’d squeeze through very uncomfortably, probably to the benefit of the city, if the surplus people didn’t just move away quickly. Importing from the third world is not comparable.

                Take something like refugee populations. Viets have done generally very well in the US. They were refugees, not economic migrants: meaning, they were a non-homogenous slice of the Viet population, biased toward people who had the intelligence, resources, initiative, and risk-taking propensity, to get out of VN often in very difficult circumstances. But– we got academics, shrimpers, farmers, soldiers, engineers, a broad swathe of people. In places where they established small communities, they did really well. The first gen ran nail salons, shrimp boats, seafood shops, restaurants. Their kids became doctors. The grandkids are fully assimilated Americans who are not so obsessed with status. In big cities where they were able to form a much larger sub-community that failed to assimilate… things didn’t go as well, they got into gangs and the drug trade. In my town they assimilated with middle-class America. In L.A. they assimilated with the underclass.

                When the immigrant group is nearly 100% uneducated, it’s now 25% of the local population, and they’re being heavily subsidized by organizations that have no accountability to the public, they won’t assimilate at all.

                There were very successful assimilation/sponsorship programs for third-world refugees back in the 80s. I know people who went through those, after fleeing Cambodia, and being sponsored out of a camp in Indonesia. They weren’t brought over in huge groups. It was individual family units, and the sponsoring organizations– churches, mostly– provided housing to get started, English classes, job assistance, material assistance with clothes furnishings, etc., and help navigating things like the naturalization process, getting kids registered for school, finding a doctor, all the things that are really hard when you’re FOB and not good at English. My parents volunteered for similar things through our local library, did ESL tutoring in their spare time, and helped people navigate the naturalization process, the DMV, and other difficult bureaucratic processes. It was a great experience and we are proud to have every one of those men and women as official US citizens now. These programs worked, and weren’t disruptive to the community. Everything going on in Springfield OH, right now, is the opposite of that.

                In OH we have a massive group overwhelming an existing community, aided by unaccountable NGOs that are getting federal funding to do it. These people are being provided with uninsured vehicles, and encouraged to drive illegally, they are being provided with housing funds that outcompete low-income people already living there, job listings that aren’t being advertised to the general public, and being shepherded through the process of signing up for welfare programs in such numbers that the people who normally need to access these services can’t even get into the office. They have not been screened in any way, and when inevitable crime happens, locals are told to shut up and be more welcoming.

                That’s not going to end well. Not for the migrants, not for the locals, and not for the country.

                But hey, if you already hate America, I guess anything that hurts it is a plus, right?

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        2. Pray tell us the difference, using the US immigration laws as the basis for your argument. What made Jews who were let in pre-WW2 more special than the Haitians let in after their earthquake in 2010?

          Please regale us with the brilliance of your xenophobia while Clarissa helps with the cheerleading.

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          1. Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQ as a group among all groups. Please consult the Nobel Prize winner list if in doubt. Also look at the stats of Ashkenazi Jews’ achievement in all branches of science.

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            1. Was Ashkenazim the basis of the Jewish immigration from Europe pre-WWII? See why you are dolt-headed? If opening the borders of the country for people in need of refuge and sanctuary bothers you so much, why start in 2010?

              I’m not surprised though. It’s the nature of immigrants to get in, and turn into ass-kissers so as to keep others from following. Won’t be surprised if Haitians (and other recent immigrants) become anti-immigrants too after a few generations.

              It’s just hard to see from a supposed academic, department head, and supposed high-IQ individual. Lol.

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              1. I’m sure you don’t realize it but this comment is an incomprehensible word soup.

                I’m very, very sorry for your limitations. I say it completely sincerely. I understand why you get so angry.

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            2. I’m amazed at the ‘magic dirt’ theory that libs favor. That america/europe has this magic dirt that transforms people the moment you step on western soil. Independent of the quality of human capital, independent of their culture, history, religion, or values.

              Like Clarissa said a few weeks ago, Haiti is where Haitians live.

              The most policed border in the world after the DMZ is the border between the dominican republic and Haiti. I guess dominicans must also be MAGA white supremacists.

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              1. Unless anybody advances an alternative theory of why Haiti is what it is and Sweden is nothing like Haiti, we are left to conclude that the landscape causes it.

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              2. https://x.com/AndreaTantaros/status/1834298556355580081?t=IMNcEdsb9STX0QSgkRwb7w&s=19

                What I can’t figure out is how anybody is managing to tell the migrants who flee the gang violence from the gangsters doing the gang violence. Or how anybody can predict that their children won’t start gang violence in the US.

                The TPS was precisely the immigrant status enjoyed by Salvadoran migrants in LA who started MS-13 and Barrio 18. How does anybody know that the exact same thing that already happened won’t happen again?

                This was already tried. The results were catastrophic both for the US and El Salvador. The TPS migrant children tend to do extremely badly and end up creating gangs. It’s a fact of observable reality.

                What the flying poodle are we doing?

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            3. Isn’t that what you usually do when your illogic is exposed? No one is surprised here. Onto the next one, Ms. High IQ. lol

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            1. “they had to work to live”

              That’s why (so far) exploding immigration in Poland (relatively speaking) is in better shape than in some Western European countries.

              The social-saftety not is…. not much and certainly not attractive to outsiders and people are coming to work.

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      3. I’m getting tired of the intellectually challenged folks who think cities grow in graphic directions yet believe themselves entitled to snipe at people who are two standard deviations above them in IQ.

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    2. If somebody cared to mention this fact in a debate, for example, that would be very helpful. But nobody did. No numbers, no specifics.

      Unlike the libs, we don’t need fake news to serve as problems. We are addressing actual, real problems. But if we won’t articulate them and explain why they matter to normies, we’ll keep losing.

      Libs have to do the “JD Vance fucked a couch” and “fine people” hoaxes because they’ve got nothing else. We have reality on our side. But we also have a gigantic problem with describing that reality without sounding like loons.

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      1. Yea, the president who dines regularly with Nazis, and tolerated the tiki-torch idiots in Charlotsville is such a reliable president for the Jews — just because he’s Netanyahu’s bitch. Applause, Clarissa.

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            2. Because he’s a narcissist with no self-control and middle-school-level thinking. One needed to fool themselves into thinking he was someone else to be surprised.

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  5. Read this thread.

    How stupid do you have to be to even ask what makes africans/mena refugees different from jews? Like, you’re playing on terms that favor your opponents! That’s a stupid debate tactic you fucking idiot lol. It’s a more effective debate tactic for you to NOT ask about data and just accuse your opponents of being racist and xenophobic. I mean, that’s also stupid but it’s a better strategy when reality is not on your side.

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  6. Immigrants are doing so well in Sweden that the government banned the release of country of origin information in their crime stats.

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    1. This is only surprising to people with magic mentality who believe that moving people around physically completely erases their personalities, cultures, origins, upbringing, etc. This doesn’t happen even to inanimate devices but it somehow is supposed to happen to people.

      Party of science strikes again.

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      1. Did you watch the information in the link? If it is a hoax, it is incredibly elaborate, even Machiavellian, in scope. I do agree that the questions were expected, but the behavior of moderators were not, the supposed fact checking were actually largely incorrect.

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        1. We know that the media are biased against us. They are always biased. This is not new. So why is it such an impossibility that our candidate prepares accordingly. Why is it always such a surprise that they are biased? They’ve been biased in favor of the left since the 1930s. When will we stop complaining about bias and start acting with the knowledge that it exists?

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          1. I don’t know why the leaders of the West cannot handle the leftist nonsense. maybe too much compassion, not enough reason. Those in Hungary and Poland seem to be able to say no.

            But actually the media were not completely left or right during the 30’s, nobody really understood how to solve the Depression. Certainly there are photographs of famous supporters Orwell(British), Hemmingway(American), and Bethune (Canadian) of the left in Spain’s civil war, but the British King and Canada’s Prime Minister both seemed to support some of Hitler’s ideas.

            Sorry, but I meant to be a historian until feminism drove me to flee from the Humanities into the Math and Sciences…and yes, I foolishly did even attend a consiousness raising, briefly, very, very briefly ;-D

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