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Large sections of our Constitution and the basis of our Representative government were designed to keep poor people from voting themselves the land that the wealthy had already claimed... There really wasn't any reason to hide it since if you were literate you were probably rich.

A dangerous assumption to make.

In 1776, one book, written in complex language, sold over 120,000 copies in Colonial America.

First convert 120,000 into a fraction of the U.S. population in 1776: compared to the population at the time of 2.5 million, 120,000 is roughly 1 in 20, or 5%. Today's U.S. population is about 300 million --- of which 5% is 15 million.

Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.

Today's equivalent is 60 million copies.

Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?. ''Every Man Able to Read''

In the late colonial and early federal era, disputes over land ownership centered on the opening of the western frontiers to settlement and the abolition of feudal tenures. The Last Patroon

The Library of America's two volume "The Debate on the Constitution" can be found in most public libraries.

For Americans this is Shakespeare, and more. Not only is it wonderful writing, it is wonderful thinking. -- Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio

Why would it take thousands of blankets? The spread of smallpox was pretty well understood at the time and inoculating against it was also catching on after studies had shown at least an order of magnitude better survival rate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Not long after Washington seriously thought the British might be using smallpox to fight the revolutionaries and inoculated new troops. The evidence is scant but it was not unreasonable with how warfare was at the time and considering the enemy to be less then human. Another article, http://www.history.org/Foundat...

By "we", you must mean you are British. http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Spring04/warfare.cfm

Seems there is quite a bit of evidence that the British used biowarfare on Indians and on the US Army. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the US Army doing the same. The US Army had good reason not to fool with smallpox.

The British considered it effective because their army was relatively immune (smallpox was a common in childhood), whereas colonists and Indians usually weren't exposed and lacked immunity. So much so that George Washington had to implement an inoculation program to mitigate the effects of smallpox.

"When you think of it, with things like the Boston tea party and other disruption, I'm sure all the founding father's would be branded terrorists today."

Or as has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

So, if they had lost, they would have been hanged back then, which is essentially the same thing as being branded a terrorist at the time. So, history is written (or rewritten) by the victors:
http://www.weeklyramble.com/culture/history-is-written-by-the-victors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

Still, the fact is, Canada never revolted against the crown, and they still got independence eventually, and it seems like a great country in a lot of ways. It has universal health care, for example.

British also were willing to free North American slaves during the Revolutionary war:
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/autumn07/slaves.cfm

By the way, being able to print local currencies is one motivation for the US American Revolution that is rarely talked about:
http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/how-benjamin-franklin-made-new-england-prosperous/
"Franklin, who was one of the chief architects of the American independence, wrote it clearly: "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.""

Those taxes were to pay for the French-and-Indian war, whose costs ultimately proved ruinous to both the British and the French governments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War#Consequences

By revolting, the American colonists overall managed to shuck off that war-related tax burden (related to public debt incurred in the UK for empire and conquest) while still gaining the land benefits won in that war by the British from the French and Natives Americans.

Of course, some Native Americans might suggest that they have been fighting terrorism since 1492...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By

So, as long as King George was insulted and harassed and annoyed and bothered that people publically called and tried to convince others that he was a tyrant, then he would have just grounds for having these people prevented from saying so?

We don't have to guess.

After Bute's fall, [John] Wilkes decided to let The North Briton lapse, and for a time no issues appeared. But polite silence was not for him. On April 13 he wondered in the press, "The SCOTTISH minister has indeed retired. Is HIS influence at an end?" When he saw a draft of the king's speech to Parliament, he wrote his most vicious essay yet. The North Briton No. 45 appeared April 23, 1763. To modern eyes, it doesn't appear especially incendiaryâ"no more rough-and-tumble than most political pamphlets of the day. But Wilkes had crossed a line. It was a strict rule that the king was above reproach, and that only his ministers could be criticized. In No. 45 Wilkes began by playing this game, insisting, "The King's Speech has always been considered . . . as the Speech of the Minister." But with passages like this, Wilkes left little doubt that the king himself was the target:

[...]

George III was furious, and ordered the arrest of the author of No. 45. The attorney general and the solicitor general were asked whether the paper warranted prosecution. April 27 they announced their opinionâ"it was seditious libel, designed to turn public opinion against the kingâ"and drew up a warrant for his arrest.

The king had a fair case (being likened to a prostitute, for example) and stronger laws than the restraining order example of the article. What's interesting is that Wilkes was able to turn this into victory through shrewd propaganda and legal maneuvering even to the point of serving a nominal prison sentence and getting reelected to Parliament when the vote (in his favor) was rejected three times in a row by the Powers that Be.

Bottom line is that even having a restraining order as some sort of catchall for suppressing free speech isn't enough to empower a tyranny.

No. The british legal system really were a bunch of corrupt fucking assholes.

They regularly used crap like this to make defendants appear guilty in courtrooms. Take a tour of historic courthouses in the "colonies" (what we Yanks call "New England" today) and you can see where in many cases there are still the marks on the floor from where the cages were originally screwed in over the defendant's station, where the poor soul would be made to stand up all day long during court proceedings, not even offered a chair to rest his feet while the corrupt Limey judge decided whether to hang him or toss him into prison for life.

Stories like this remind us that representative democracy (a form of government), isn't particularly tied to capitalism (an economic system). In fact, the pairing is counter-intuitive and occurred only relatively recently in history. Honestly, what self-respecting captain of industry believes they should share political power equally with the underclass! Even the authors of the Constitution lacked this vision; "in the eighteenth century, the right to cast a vote belonged largely to white, male property holders. Even John Adams, in 1776, opposed broadening the franchise." So, it is only something that has come about over time.

The type of government most similar to capitalism is not democracy but plutocracy, since that's what private companies are. It turns out that democracy and capitalism, though conflicted in some ways, are a very powerful combination. But if we neglect to uphold the separations between them, democracy will be lost.

Conjunctions and prepositions are capitalized if they are 5 letters or more, usually, IIRC. For example, "under" (preposition) and "after" (conjunction) are usually capitalized in a title.

BTW, newspapers have printed things like headlines in larger print or with other obvious typesetting differences for hundreds of years. If we didn't get rid of title case in all that time, we probably won't do it now just because of the web.

Besides, the purpose of title case has nothing to do with setting it off from the rest of the document and everything to do with making it easier to skim. If the less important words are in lowercase letters, you can visually see what you can skip without losing much meaning. Thus, it's just as useful (if done correctly) today on Slashdot as it was in the 1800s.

Since WWI, the US and western countries have had a habit of building up bad press against the people they don't like.

Since World War 1? Try a little earlier.

That's Jefferson Davis dancing with Benedict Arnold and Satan. Truth is, there have been political cartoons in America just like this one demonizing our enemies for as long as there has been political dissent (read: As long as there has been America). I just can't find any on Google that are actually readable. The difference of course being this news story is a 'news story' and a political cartoon is generally more of an opinion piece.

Military intelligence played a major role in fighting dating to well before the Revolutionary War. Spies, intercepting communications, and secret messages aren't new developments.

http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Summer04 /spies.cfm

In fact, the framers DID acknowledge this when they invested the power of gathering intelligence in the Commander in Chief.

According to a story in Modern Luddite , folks annoyed with the constant noise, danger, pollution and clutter of those damned horseless carriages are arming themselves with sugar for gas tanks, spike strips, and similar means of improving their lot in life.

Also, moving beyond the portable, folks annoyed with the whirring and buzzing, bright lights, heat and refrigeration of electrical devices in general are using wire cutters, shorting busbars, and plowing cars into power poles in an attempt to regain the peace, sanity, and universal happiness of a pre-electrical world.

Jerks like this should go live in Colonial Williamsburg. Let the rest of us get on with the 21st Century, where we can talk to our friends and business associates anytime with just the push of a button. Not that it's a Utopia or anything, but...well, yeah, in at least this one aspect it kind of is.