possession of brown sugar and envelopes illegal ?
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Sun Oct 14 08:50:54 PDT 2001
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.
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