Category Archives: Freedom

In response to Steve Lacey

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This started out to be a comment to Steve’s post and his question, “What on earth is going on back home?”  It grew in size and scope to the point it needed to be its own post which I now offer to you.  It’s not the first time (here is a collection) I have touched on the subject and for certain it will not the last.

The number of days I have spent in the U.K. can be counted on one hand so I recognize my limitations on being an authority on the politics and mindset there. However, it is my opinion that the rush toward a police state in the U.K. is because of a mindset that developed slowly over the last 70 to 80 years. Read F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom for my best guess at to what is going on. Hayek published the book in 1944 and he was specifically warning the U.K. about the dangers of where they were headed. The basic problem as outlined by Hayek is that the people decided it was the job of government to take care of them. From socialized medicine to giving up their right to self defense it’s always the government who is responsible. Once that mindset is cemented into place and the government fails on any given task the “answer” is always more power to the government.

The really scary part is what comes next. As Hayek points out extreme power, however benign the original people to whom it is given, attracts “the wrong sort of people” and is repulsive to those who would be most responsible with it. Hence the more power the government is given the more you will find people in government that should not be given that power. The examples abound–Soviet Union, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. In the 20th century there were at least 60 million people killed by their own governments because of this sort of error in political philosophy. I hope the U.K. will not be a prime example of the 21 century.

One would think that after 60 million dead the lesson would have been learned but the evidence from the U.K. is that some people may still have to learn it for themselves.

Quote of the day–F.A. Hayek

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Now, it is somewhat difficult to think of Germany and Italy, or of Russia, not as different worlds but as products of a development of thought in which we have shared; it is, at least so far as our enemies are concerned, easier and more comforting to think that they are entirely different from us and that what happened there cannot happen here.  Yet the history of those countries in the years before the rise of the totalitarian system showed few features with which we are not familiar.

F.A. Hayek
The Road to Serfdom, Page 14
Published 1944
[This relates both to my previous post and next.–Joe]

Orwell’s was only off by a few years

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1984 versus 2014, what’s 30 years when you are writing about society nearly 40 years in the future?

From Bruce Schneier we get this news:

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

The network will incorporate thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.

By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate “reads” per day. These will include time, date and precise location, with camera sites monitored by global positioning satellites.

Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.

And that’s just the beginning.  Here’s the future:

The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys, which has taken more than 25 years to develop, is only the beginning of plans to monitor the movements of all British citizens. The Home Office Scientific Development Branch in Hertfordshire is already working on ways of automatically recognising human faces by computer, which many people would see as truly introducing the prospect of Orwellian street surveillance, where our every move is recorded and stored by machines.

It’s a slippery slope.  The government takes the guns away “to reduce crime” and when that doesn’t work, they conclude more government power over the people is needed and when that doesn’t work, they need still more power. They never give consideration that giving power back to the people could be a good idea.  As Lyle points out, only when government involved do people conclude that their failures mean we should give them more money.  It’s a classic When Prophecy Fails case.  It’s also an extreme failure of the Jews in the Attic Test.

This is extremely scary stuff.  I gives me shivers and just drains the energy from me.

Case dismissed against guy arrested for free speech

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I did a little follow up and found the end of the story I had reported on before (here and here):

I’m glad to announce that my attorney,
Walter Maksym, was able to convince the State’s Attorney to dismiss my
case on December 8th. So, it looks like it’s all over for now! It truly
is a wonderful relief to be done with the criminal charges.

He shouldn’t have been arrested for wearing a coat to begin with but having the case dismissed is the next best thing.

Whoo hooo!!! Party time in Canada!

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Three days ago I told you the Canadian Supreme Court was about to rule on the legality of swingers clubs.  The ruling is out now:

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Group sex between consenting adults is neither
prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled
on Wednesday, dismissing arguments that the sometimes raucous
activities of so-called “swingers” clubs were dangerous.

In a ruling that radically changes the way Canadian courts determine
what poses a threat to the population, the court threw out the
conviction of a Montreal man who ran a club where members could have
group sex in a private room behind locked doors.

“Consensual conduct behind code-locked doors can hardly be supposed
to jeopardize a society as vigorous and tolerant as Canadian society,”
said the opinion of the seven-to-two majority, written by Chief Justice
Beverley McLachlin.

…

“Criminal indecency or obscenity must rest on actual harm or a
significant risk of harm to individuals or society. The Crown failed to
establish this essential element of the offence. The Crown’s case must
therefore fail,” wrote McLachlin.

In indecency cases, Canadian courts have traditionally probed
whether the acts in question “breached the rules of conduct necessary
for the proper functioning of society”. The Supreme Court ruled that
from now on, judges should pay more attention to whether society would
be harmed.

The judges said that just because most Canadians might disapprove of
swingers’ clubs, this did not necessarily mean the establishments were
socially dangerous.

“Attitudes in themselves are not crimes, however deviant they may be
or disgusting they may appear,” the judges said, noting that no one had
been pressured to have sex or had paid for sex in either of the cases.

“The autonomy and liberty of members of the public was not affected
by unwanted confrontation with the sexual activity in question only
those already disposed to this sort of sexual activity were allowed to
participate and watch,” they said.

I won’t be going to Canada anytime soon even if Barb said I could
do some “field research”.  They may have figured out sex between
consenting adults isn’t a threat to society at large but they haven’t
figured out that someone that carries a handgun for person protection
and hasn’t ever committed any crime worse that going 10 or 15 MPH over
the speed limit isn’t a threat either.  But this is a step away
from the Nanny State.  I wish the fiscal conservatives in this
country would realize that being a Nanny State isn’t just about
refusing to let people spend their own money however they think is
best.  It’s also a Nanny State that tells individuals they can’t
fry their brains with recreational drugs, marry the person of their
choice, or play a group game of belly bump.

Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

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But screening will never be perfect. We can’t keep weapons out of prisons, a much more restrictive and controlled environment. How can we have a hope of keeping them off airplanes? The way to prevent airplane terrorism is not to spend additional resources keeping objects that could fall into the wrong hands off airplanes. The way to improve airplane security is to spend those resources keeping the wrong hands from boarding airplanes in the first place, and to make those hands ineffective if they do.

Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else — all that extra screening, those massive passenger profiling systems — is security theatre.

Bruce Schneier
The Sydney Morning Herald
November 30, 2005
[See also my essay on the research we should be doing.  Airport screening accomplishes only one thing.  It makes some people feel better.–Joe]

Quote of the day–President George W. Bush

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I see a global terrorist movement that exploits Islam in the service of radical political aims – a vision in which books are burned, and women are oppressed, and all dissent is crushed. Terrorist operatives conduct their campaign of murder with a set of declared and specific goals – to de-moralize free nations, to drive us out of the Middle East, to spread an empire of fear across that region, and to wage a perpetual war against America and our friends. These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield – and they seek to attack us wherever they can.

…

We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them. And we will defeat the terrorists by capturing and killing them abroad, removing their safe havens, and strengthening new allies like Iraq and Afghanistan in the fight we share.

 

President George W. Bush
President’s Address to the Nation
December 18, 2005

Security and freedom blogging

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I recently received an email telling me they liked my little detours into security.  I haven’t touch security recently for a number of reasons.  Primarily my research in that area has be temporarily thwarted by PNNL defying the Freedom of Information Act.  A FOIA request I made back in June which only required they make a duplicate of some of the files on a DVD and send it to me.  I told them who had possession of the DVD, the project name, and the markings on the DVD.  Very simple.  None of the material I requested was classified and although it was originally considered Official Use Only that restriction had been lifted before I left and the material used on a proposal for a a completely open project which we won a contract for.  They are in defiance of the law and my FOIA attorney is working on the problem but my involvement in security issues gets sidetracked by my anger over PNNL illegal activities.  Unfortunately FOIA is a law that doesn’t have any enforcement teeth.  It’s against the law from them to do what they are doing (or rather not doing) but there is no penalties for their illegal activity.  Sort of like making it against the law for you to steal but if you get caught nothing happens–you don’t have to give back what you stole and you don’t get punished for your crime.

Anyway… sidetracked by my anger again…

Alphecca posted this about Bush authorizing eavesdropping on American citizens and wondered why a lot of the people on the libertarian/conservative side of the Blogosphere quiet or indifferent about it.  I haven’t read any news reports that indicated anything of real news.  From my readings (try The Puzzle Palace) and a few hints from other sources the NSA has been doing this for years if not decades.  You shouldn’t act as if your electronic traffic is anymore private than if you were to have a conversation on a crowded elevator.  Encrypting your traffic might make it as private as a conversation on a city street.  I try to encrypt a fair portion of my email and encourage others to do the same.  Most of my web browsing travels, at least part way, via encrypted channels.  This is not because anything in the email or my browsing would be a problem for me if it were decrypted but because it raises the cost for the people doing the surveillance.  The more people that do that the more likely they are to concentrate their limited resources on the people that are high probability threats to our national security.  I talked about this at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2000 (do a search for “Huffman” on that page).  If I had the time I would work on some other projects that would further consume resources and release them to the public.  Basically, as others have pointed out, you can’t legislate restrictions on the government and expect them to obey the law.  Government entities rarely obey the law (see here, here, here, here, and the first paragraph of this post for example) if it’s inconvenient for them to do so.  Remember the famous Henry Kissinger quote?  Of course this is the real reason for the 2nd Amendment–a last ditch resort for prevention of tyranny.  But there are other things we can do to help that are much lower cost to us and exact at least a moderate cost from the agents of tyranny.  Encrypting your electronic traffic is one of those things.  It costs them far, far more computing resources to decrypt it that it does for you to encrypt it.

I spent some time catching up on my security reading and came across this on Bruce Schneier’s blog:

According to the three-page document, to preserve the openness that characterizes today’s Internet, “consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.” Read the last seven words again.

What the FCC is now saying is that people cannot use encryption technology unless law enforcement has the back-door keys to it.  Of course they have to know encryption is being used before they can stop you from using it or demand you give them the keys to the back-door.  I covered that in my GRPC talk and I already distributed a tool to circumvent them to hundreds of people.  What I haven’t done is tell all those hundreds of people about the hidden feature set in the tool–just the ones that paid money for the product.

I should work on some of my other tools.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and I need to pay my share of that price.  When the next tool is up and running I’ll talk about it more.  In the mean time check out PGP and Thawte.  The cost to you is low and the cost to “them” is high.

Top court checks out sex club ‘swingers’

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From the Ottawa Sun:

The Supreme Court of Canada is set to rule on whether
spouse-swapping in public venues should be a criminal act. The
ground-breaking case, which could set new standards for decency in
Canadian society, stems from two Montreal “swingers” clubs charged with
keeping a bawdy house.

One defendant, James Kouri, ran the Coeur a Corps bar, where couples
could hook up by paying a $6 cover charge. Every half hour, a
translucent black curtain automatically closed around the dance floor
while people took part in, or watched, sex acts.

Kouri was convicted of keeping a common bawdy house and sentenced to
pay fines of $500 on the first count and $5,000 on the second. He won
acquittal from Quebec’s top court, but the other club owner, Jean-Paul
Labaye, lost his appeal.

Although there are similar prosecutions happening in the
U.S. it’s frequently a socialist (when you think about it you realize
religion is frequently very socialist) mindset that drives this sort of
prosecution.  The people are just cattle to be
herded/controlled.  They don’t have the brains to make decisions
for themselves.  It’s for the “greater good” that people are
forbidden dominion over their own bodies.

Quote of the day–Toyotomi Hideyoshit

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The people of the various provinces are forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government.

Toyotomi Hideyoshit
Shogun
August 29, 1558
Japan
[I admire his honest and forthrightness.  If only present day politicians would be so when they demand we turn over our personal protection tools.–Joe]

Ellensburg decision posted

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Fish Or Man has it posted on his blog now.  It’s a worthwhile read.  I’m pretty pleased with it.  Thank you so much Jason.  I know this was a great burden to bear.  We all owe you a big thanks.

This is what happens in places without guns–Case II

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In the U.K. where they are ‘more civilized’ than we are in the States no one really needs a gun, right?  Wrong:

Four teenagers were “worse than a pack of wild dogs” when they beat a man to death outside his Chinese takeaway, a court was told yesterday.

Michael Chen, 41, was kicked, punched and stamped upon during the attack in a shopping precinct in Wigan.

His assailants struck him on the head so hard with a stake it sounded like a cricket bat striking a ball.

The gang left him dying in the arms of his girlfriend. His life support system was turned off the next day.

Yesterday the teenagers were jailed for up to 10 years at Manchester Crown Court. None showed any reaction as they were taken from the dock.

…

Passing sentence, Mr Justice Royce told them: “You acted far worse than a pack of wild dogs. The sheer savagery and brutality of the attack… aggravates the offence. It is the sort of street violence that should not be tolerated in any civilised society.”

…

Frightened by the youths gathering in the precinct, Mr Chen, his girlfriend, Eileen, and the restaurant’s chef armed themselves with a spade, a wooden stake and sticks.

But they were quickly outnumbered and cornered by about a dozen youths, including the four who would eventually conclude the attack.

They needed to arm themselves with rifles and/or shotguns not sticks.  Firearms, of course, are severely restricted in the U.K.  The U.K. politicians who committed the crime against humanity by taking guns away from the victims should have also been on trial and sentenced here.

The next step

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Now that Canada is planning a near complete ban on handguns (the police and maybe some target shooters will be allowed to keep them) what’s next?  We didn’t have wait long before finding out.  From the Hamilton Spectator (Ontario):

Think we’ve got too many gun-control laws in this country? I don’t think we have enough.

Not with the news that the man accused of shooting Laval police Constable Valerie Gignac on Wednesday morning may have had legal access to a hunting gun capable of taking down an elephant.

…

Wendy Cukier, a Ryerson University professor of information technology, and co-founder of the Coalition for Gun Control, agrees. “It reinforces our continued theme about the implementation of the law, and belies the notion that plain old hunting rifles are not a problem.

“Many don’t know they can pierce body armour and shoot bullets 2 km — after all, the Tories say, they are just tools!”

In fact, misinformation about gun crime is rife. Think police are shot by city gangs with handguns from the U.S.? The last police officer shot in Toronto was shot by a disturbed man with his legally owned shotgun, while four RCMP constables were shot dead in Mayerthorpe, Alta., last March by a man on a farm who reportedly had a military-style assault rifle, a hunting rifle and a pistol when he was found dead — despite a 10-year firearm prohibition against him.

Cukier should be a familiar name to readers here.  Do a search for “Cukier” on this blog for more info on her.

They are “priming the pump” for the obvious next step–banning firearms used for hunting.

Teaching girls is a capital offense

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I just thought some of the people opposed to the war against the Islamic extremists would want to know about this:

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) — Suspected Taliban guerrillas dragged a teacher from a classroom of teenagers in southern Afghanistan and killed him at the school gate after he ignored their orders to stop teaching girls, police said on Friday.

…

The fundamentalist Taliban banned education of girls during their rule before being overthrown by U.S.-led forces in 2001.

The guerrillas have carried out a series of attacks in the provinces on schools teaching girls since them, often burning them down at night.

{sarcasm}I suppose a case can be made for keeping women in their proper place.  We certainly have learned our lesson in this country–women got so uppity they demanded the right to vote and look at the mess that caused.{/sarcasm}

I don’t think the anti-war people in this country have a clue as to what we are up against.  This is a culture that not only wants to repress their own people but insists that we adhere to their religion tenets as well.  They gave us our choice, as their religion demands, “convert, submit, or fight.”  Trying to negotiate, insisting “war is always wrong” or “there is always another way” is willful ignorance or such a blind hatred of our freedoms (usually it’s capitalism) they are willing to side with these extremists who rather see us all dead than to suffer our enjoyment of freedom from their religion.  Read the transcripts of the demands by Osama bin Laden and those that are beheading innocent victims.  Then get a grip on reality and chose the only option we have–fight them with prisons, bullets, and explosives.

Quote of the day–R.J. Rushdoony

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The first and basic premise of paganism, socialism, and Molech worship is its claim that the state owns the child. The basic premise of the public schools is this claim of ownership, a fact some parents are encountering in the courts. It is the essence of paganism to claim first the lives of the children, then the properties of the people.

R.J. Rushdoony

Quote of the day–Senator Orrin Hatch

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What the subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear — and long lost — proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.

Senator Orrin Hatch
Chairman, Subcommittee on the Constitution,
Preface, The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Quote of the day–Cullen Hightower

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Our laws can be friendly to those who obey them, and too often useful to those who don’t.
    
Cullen Hightower
[Among the most useful laws to those that disobey them are the laws that attempt to ban or restrict goods or services.  The black market always finds a way whether it is something physical like booze, guns or recreational drugs or some service such as high interest loans (loan sharking), gambling or prostitution.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Adolf Hitler

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Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Adolf Hitler
[For my readers, see Dan’s comment, that don’t “feel” people living under restrictive gun laws are oppressed.–Joe]

This is what happens in places without guns–Case I

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If this had been in a gun friendly state in the U.S. these scumbags would be suffering from acute lead poisoning after about the second “unannounced visit” and the expected winners of the next Darwin awards.  Instead they invaded several homes before getting caught and will get another chance to invade homes after they get out.

A Dublin man was tonight sentenced to nine years in jail for trying to force a young woman to have sex with her flatmate and then cutting her with a knife.

Stephen Phelan, 20, from Poddle Close in Kimmage was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault and assault causing harm to the woman by a jury in June.

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Phillip O’Sullivan also imposed concurrent sentences ranging from three to seven years for 17 other offences carried out on the same night.

On February 11 2003, Phelan and an accomplice began a spree of burglaries which led to the sexual assault, the stabbing of a student nine times and the crashing of a car into a Dublin Bus.

Judge O’Sullivan said Phelan had been involved in a series of violent incidents and outlined the impact on his victims: post traumatic stress disorder, the loss of power in an arm, permanent scar wounds and a fear of sleeping alone at night.

“No summary of mine can do justice to the trauma suffered by these people,” he said.

He imposed a five-year probation sentence on Phelan to commence on his release, after hearing from a psychiatrist who said he had serious reservations about him getting out into society again under the influence of drugs.

Phelan had been spending €1500-€1600 euro a day on crack cocaine and had been using robberies to fund his habit.

Detective Sergeant George McGeary said Phelan and his accomplice, who has since fled the jurisdiction, had broken into a house in Harold’s Cross, where four people were living, including the young woman.

They armed themselves with a screwdriver, a Stanley knife, a Swiss army knife, a dumb-bell and a hacksaw.

After searching the house for property and money, Phelan went into the bedroom of a 24-year-old tenant. She screamed when she saw him and shouted at her flatmate to get her trousers.

The court heard he came into the room and told her: “Give us what we want or we’ll cut you.”

He was unable to find her ATM card and told her to take off her clothes, where he believed she was concealing it.

Later in the burglary, he came back into her room and told her to lie down on the bed or he would cut her nipples.

She refused several times to take off her clothes but then Phelan came back, held a knife to her throat and told her to ’take off her f*****g clothes’.

Detective Sergeant McGeary told the court that she was crying while she took her trouser bottoms off.

He used his knife to cut off her underwear and then told her to have sex with one of her two male flatmates.

He refused, saying “She’s my friend” but was then cut twice on the upper arm in a X shape.

The young woman was then ordered into the bedroom of another flatmate, who had been forced to lie naked on the bed.

Phelan told them to have sex together and they kissed, pretending to have sex.

Phelan then cut the woman’s buttocks with a knife and also made a cut running from the top of her back to the base.

Detective Sergeant McGeary told the court that the flatmates had been terrified by Phelan’s threats.

Home invasions are rare where people’s rights to defend themselves are not infringed by oppressive governments.  And this is just a hint of some of the things that happen.

Heads up!

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I don’t know if this is something to be looking out for or if it’s
just some random event. But from watching my sitemeter I discovered the
following. The ATF (“Executive Office of the Asset Forfeiture” no
less!) just did a web search for the words {exploding targets}. 
Regardless of their intent I doubt that it will affect Boomershoot much
since we don’t sell them just provide the opportunity to shoot at
them.  But it might affect Tannerite
and others.  Or it could just be they wanted to purchase some for
their own amusement.  Further conjecture on my part would be
unwarranted.

Domain Name   atfonline.gov ?
(United States Government)
IP Address   199.196.144.#
(Executive Office of Asset Forfeiture)

199.196.144.17
ISP   Executive Office of Asset
Forfeiture
Location  
Continent  :  North America
Country  :  United
States  (Facts)
State  :  Virginia
City  :  Dulles
Lat/Long  :  39.0853, -77.6452 (Map)
Language   English (United
States)
en-us
Operating System   Microsoft Win2000
Browser   Internet Explorer 6.0
Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
Javascript   version 1.3
Monitor  

Resolution  :  1024 x 768
Color Depth  :  32 bits

Time of Visit   Dec 12 2005 11:28:00 am
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Visit Entry Page   http://blog.joehuffm…ploding
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Visit Exit Page   http://blog.joehuffm…merite
II Tests.aspx
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Visit Number   52,344