possession of brown sugar and envelopes illegal ?

[Tim May]

On Sunday, October 14, 2001, at 07:28 AM, Declan McCullagh wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 10:12:38PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> Maybe the high density living that we are so used to is incompatible 
>> with new
>> weapons. Maybe societal structures based on projectile-throwing 
>> weaponry are
>> passe. New weapons always changed rules, and it was called progress.
>
> I think that's an interesting argument, but you'll note that the Florida
> Anthrax case targeted a firm that was hardly in a "high density living"
> situation. Apparently it was a nondescript suburb.

I drove through that area (Delray Beach. Lantana, Boca Raton) when I was 
visiting my sister in South Florida in 1994.

One continuous urban area, from Homestead to Miami to Hollywood to Fort 
Lauderdale to Delray Beach to West Palm Beach. There's a corridor on 
both sides of I-95 that is dense-packed with condos, apartments, 
tilt-ups, trailer parks,  slums, estates, and a few farms. (When I was 
there, the "new frontier" was a former farming community called 
Plantation...being replaced by new developments.)

As for Morlock's thesis, I don't know that any strong conclusions can be 
drawn about "high density living...incompatible with new weapons."

Certainly _some_ of us have decided to live in less crowded areas. Or, 
more accurately, in areas that are:

-- not Schelling points for attack (that is, not high value targets for 
terrorists or for rioters)

-- areas that are moderately defensible

(My area is not as defensible as that of some folks I know, who live in 
Idaho or northern Arizona. But, as Declan knows, it's isolated enough 
that major problems in the Bay Area would take a long time to reach me. 
Especially if I "button down.")

Some cities seem to be high value targets, something we've talked about 
for a _long_ time. (Do a search on "soft targets" in this group.) But 
I'm not persuaded that the risks are greater now than they were during, 
say, the Cuban missile crisis--I was living as a kid in the Arlington 
suburb of D.C. then and I had an inkling of what the dangers were.


--Tim May, Occupied America
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety 
deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.