Frankly, waving your Glock at the local sherriff and daring him to come shoot you out of der MayBunker is not just free speech, it's, charitably, grandstanding. Making a threat on the life of a judge, or even begging for Washington to be nuked -- something you can't possibly do yourself -- is in the same catagory of "will someone rid me of this priest", or "but

Bob Hettinga wrote: that

would be wrong", or the Castro assination exhortations which inspired Oswald to kill JFK. In this country, it's all free speech, but that doesn't keep you from getting impaled, "accidentally" or otherwise, on the pointy end of the state, or public opinion, when you piss it off.

I think you are falling into the "map _is_ the territory" mistake here, Bob. Tim is just speaking his mind, lucidly and forcefully as usual. (The same way you do, which is why I enjoy reading both your posts so much, although your prose styles differ so greatly.) Tim isn't "waving your Glock at the local sherriff" -- he is talking about his actions if law enforcement decides to violate the Constitution personally upon him. Although it is certainly the case that all rights, at their boundaries, may be observed more in the breech, I don't think the situation is so bad _yet_ that Tim has to lay awake nights worrying about a no-knock. Tim, I guess I see you as someone who has spotted a bunch of thunderclouds on the horizon, so you have decided to stock up on raingear before the deluge. But, with a little luck and a lot of common sense on the part of the populace, neither Tim nor anyone else will have to go through that particular hell. As one additional datapoint, when our local "FAX Daily" (a daily FAXed paper) took a poll on GAK, 66% were against government access to keys (and "FAX Daily" is aimed at the general population). (I have this suspicion that California is more likely to develop "thunderclouds on the horizon" that don't turn into local storms, due to the greater concentration of Democratic Party members there -- Indiana, as a Republican state, certainly sees a lot of posturing about family values and such, but with Republican anti-government rhetoric, it is hard for Republicans to push too hard for the massive increases of government regulation that would be required to actually enforce family values by governmental fiat.) Tim, from what I understand of what he said, is just getting prepared if the worst comes. One of the functions of this list as I see it is just this sort of preparation, which can often stave off the actual worst. If those who would desire this sort of power over the population are made aware that the population won't stand for it, they are less likely to continue to seek that level of power. To close with a quote that I think (from my Midwest perception of the situation) describes best how the near-term will actually work out: "There's no way the federal government could oppress the citizens, because the populace is armed to the teeth, and the officials would just get their heads blown off." -- James Madison argues the pro-government position, Federalist Papers #46 ========================================================== Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics fisherm@indy.tce.com Indianapolis, IN "Their walls are built of cannon balls, their motto is 'Don't Tread on Me'"