Of course, even if you have machine guns with armor piercing bullets, you are probably still out of luck if you try to fight them.
With civilian weapons? Forget about it.
A.223 bullet from my Mini 14 is just the same as a.223 from a U.S. Army-issue M16. Yes, I can't get the same rate of fire, but it's enough to put up a significant resistance. Like all security, it's not about perfection, it's about raising the cost of an attack.
Those who think firearms in civilian hands are irrelevant need to review the history of the civil rights movement - not the shiny happy official story of how MLK's nonviolent resistance was all that mattered, but the real deal involving the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and many other armed black men who stood up to intimidation and brutality with rifles in their hands to win equality under the law.
(Not to cut on MLK at all. But there's an obvious bias in the mainstream historical account.)
You also ought to consider how American private gun ownership dissuaded the Japanese from thoughts of invasion during WWII. There is a quote attributed to Admiral Yamamoto: "You cannot invade the mainland United States; there would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
and this reinforces my theory (well...not mine but I suscribe to it) that it is not the type of government (democray, comunism, socialism, etc) but the nature of human been what is wrong.
ZEN is Meditation. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation.
As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
"Having said that zen study is knowing yourself, the roshi went on: In America you have democracy, which means for you government of the people, by the people, and for the people. I in my turn am bringing democracy to Japan. You cannot have democracy until people know themselves. The Chinese said that government was unnecessary and they were right. When people know themselves and have their own strength, they do not need government. Otherwise they are just a mob and must be ruled..."
Zenarchy is an interesting read, written by one of the late 20th century's more...interesting...characters. Kerry Thornley was sometimes stark raving looney, and sometimes fscking brilliant. Zenarchy, IMHO, holds just to the brilliant side of the line.
(Well, discarding the small digression about transistorized mind control. We do know that the U.S. government has experimented with mind control, but it was drugs, not implants. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Thornley and Oswald may have been subject to such experimentation during their days at Atsugi Naval Air base - regardless of the truth of that, I'm willing to cut him some slack on the subject.)
You have the power to choose between more than two. It's called the primaries.
No. Primaries are part of the problem.
Officially, the US is not a two-party system, we are a no-party system. Political parties have no official role under the Constitution. The Democrats and Republicans are private organizations. If they - or the Boy Scouts or the ACLU or whomever - want to get together and put forth candidates, fine; but they ought not be allowed to use public resources to do so, and ought to have to play by the same ballot access rules as everybody else.
Primaries and other special treatment for parties are gross violations of the equal protection clause.
No primaries, no party affliations on ballots, no Congressional (or state legislative) rules that recognize party lines. Let's elect men and women, not parties. Add instant-runoff voting, and we could actually start to get decent candidates.
Do I expect to see this? Not anytime soon. We're going to have to fall even farther before real change is possible.
I'm not sure that WoW is actually a bad leadership training ground.
But the claim of those who so very badly want games to be "relevant" somehow is that it's an excellent leadership training ground.
According to the breathless prose of TFA, gamers "naturally think outside the box and possess a unique set of skills that have been developed and honed during hours of game play." Which is hooey: even a MMORPG is a box, and the truly unique skills of computer games are things like rocket jumps, which are not very useful in the real world.
(Of course, TFA also claims that "Strategy is more about vision and less about planning...more about being creative and intuitive and less about being rational and precise." And that the game America's Army "gives recruits a realistic insight into the business of modern warfare". The authors are clearly not in a close relationship with consensual objective reality.)
Is sitting on your butt interacting via a network a to fulfill arbitrary imaginary goals a better way to learn leadership than helping teach karate classes? Or running a poetry workshop? Or getting a bunch of people together for a charity event? Or even just spending an evening in a bar, listening to random people tell their stories and coming to understand their thoughts?
Games can be fun. You can even learn lessons from them with real-world applications - American political leaders would be well-advised to learn the fundamentals of Go, and come to understand the futility of throwing more resources into a doomed scenario.
But the idea the computer games are the best thing ever, some radical new path to skill and wisdom and understanding, is bunkum of the highest purity.
Whats any less "Big Brother" about a Democratic administration? Just because you're not in a war doesn't mean vast sums of the tax base are not subsidizing risk in private markets.
Que? I mentioned Congress, not a "Democratic administration". And "Big Brother" is a reference to the surveilllance state of 1984, you know? I agree that the goverment we have is of, by, and for the wealthy, and that Democrats are little, if any, better than Republicans. But that wasn't the topic under discussion.
I look at the whole war thing and say, "Well, you're a democracy, he was voted in,
it seems grossly wrong to me that Americans should want to just get the hell out of the place since it didn't turn out to be as fun or noble feeling as it initially sounded. America did very well with Germany and Japan
The problem isn't that it's not "fun", the problem is that our presence is doing more harm than good.
It's a very, very, very different situation that the occupations after WWII:
Germany and Japan were actual nations with their own long identity - there was no civil war after WWII. Iraq is an conglomeration built by British imperialism, and has never been a stable nation.
Germany had been a democracy; Japan had had a form of constitutional monarchy with an elected Diet, at least a drift of a movement toward some representational government. Not so in Iraq.
We had a decent reason for toppling the governments of Germany and Japan. American leaders lied to get us into Iraq.
We didn't blow our credibility with Germans and Japanese by torturing people.
We had the support and respect of other nations for our work in Germany and Japan.
In Japan, we worked with the Emperor. In Iraq, we hanged Saddam.
Before our occupation of Germany and Japan, they were nations ruined by war; the whole nations were starving, and we won a lot of hearts and minds with food. Before our illegal, brutal, and stupid invasion of Iraq, Iraqis were not prosperous, but had a working nation with food production and distribution and other basic services - which we broke.
There's a lot of work to be done in raq (or as we'll start to refer to it soon, "the area that used to be Iraq"), and the U.S. has a moral responsibility to fund it. But we've fucked up so very, very badly, made so many enemies, that even if competence miraculously returned to U.S. government (ha!), we couldn't do the work. We have to turn it over to the international community.
Clinton was the one who kept vetoing Congresses' budget.
And Bush has kept vetoing funding bills that contained troop withdrawal provisions. Congress should have stood firm and not given him one without such provisions.
Bush would say "troops daily are not getting the supplies they need to fight, because the Democrats shut down the government." And he would be more or less right, and he would win.
"Win" in what sense? If Congress stands firm and denies him funding for the war and for his little domestic Big Brother operations, he has no choice. Congress gets its way. America wins when we stop wasting our blood and treasure over there and we reign in the madness of King George; Iraq wins when the people get their way and the occupation ends.
(Does Iraq then fall apart? Probably. Blame for that lies with the British Empire who put together such an unstable structure in the first place. The nation of Iraq was doomed from the start; the best we can hope for now is to put the area under an international team of peacekeepers and let a partition work itself out with as little violence as possible.)
If by "win" you mean "score political points", if Congressional leaders are more worried about poll numbers than saving lives, fuck 'em. Fiat justitia, et ruat caelum. But I can think of two possible political responses:
"Mr. President, we've sent you bill after bill to fund our heroic troops, yadda yadda yadda, red white and blue apple pie. But you've vetoed each and every one. Mr. President, why do you hate our troops?"
"Mr. President, the Congress has stepped up to take responsibility. We erred when we believed your fabrications and authorized you to send troops to Iraq. Your job as commander in chief is to lead the troops in battle - but it's our job to decide which battles. You lied to get us to send troops into Iraq, then screwed the pooch and left it to us to clean up afterward. Fine. We are revoking your authorization. We will fund only military operations with the goal of bringing our heroic troops home after their quick victory over Saddam's forces, yadda yadda yadda, red white and blue apple pie. The American people will not give you a dollar for anything else. If you refuse, you will be stranding the troops over there without funding to fight. Only someone who hates the troops would veto this proposal to fund the operations to bring them home. You don't hate the troops, do you, Mr. President?"
Of course, either would require principled and courageous leadership from the Democrats. Har de har har.
If the Democratic majority in either house of Congress says "We're not passing a spending bill until you straighten up and fly right", there is nothing for Bush to veto.
Democratic leaders in Congress could end the war in Iraq immediately if the had the gonads to do so.
People who actually organize, in advance, the violent sub-groups within these larger professional protest organizations sure as hell SHOULD be considered dangerous.
Absolutle. Those law enforcement agencies that organize agents provocateur sure as hell SHOULD be considered dangerous. (That includes the Canadians, too.) Far more dangerous than the occasional idiot who thinks throwing rocks through windows has something to do with anarchy.
Those in charge of Congress and the Senate seem to be pretty beholden to groups like MoveOn.org...
Troll, or delusional? Only his brain-care specialist knows for sure!
Unfortunately, with veto threats being thrown around, and partisan nonsense leading to the lack of a supermajority in the senate...there's not much that can be done.
Oh, horseshit. The Democrats could shut the government down, like the Republicans did over minor tax squabbles in the 1990s. They can - and should - say, "We will not pass any funding for the military, for foreign intelligence, or federal law enforcement, until we see reforms."
Under the Constitution, the Congress is the most powerful of the three branches of government. (Though Presidents have been trying to usurp that for a long time, and Bush has been the worst - it's time for Congress to issue an ass-whooping to him and to the office.) They could do a lot.
They don't want to, either because they agree with the criminal policies of the Bush administration, or because they think they're more likely to keep their cushy jobs if they take no action. In either case, fuck them.
I bet if there was a "burn them all" option on the ballot voter turnout would skyrocket.
Not quite "burn them all", but more and more I think the Athenians had a good idea: once a year, they could pick a prominent citizen and kick him (or her, I suppose, though I think they never ostracized a woman) out for a decade.
The more I think about that, the more I like it. A great check on the accumulation of power. We ought to hold ostracisms at the city, state, and federal levels.
I would even settle for a "politicial ostracism": we don't kick them out of the ciy or coutnry, but they're banned from running for office, or accepting any government position, or doing any lobbying or campaining for anyone else. Out of the process for ten years. Go home and get an honest job.
I doubt most kids in the last eighty years were allowed to visit neighbors or wander the neighborhood before they were fifteen
WTF? Where and when did you grow up that kids were kept in the house all the time?
I was certainly wandering the neighborhood long before I was fifteen. Spent a lot of time playing in the woods even. Went over friends houses. Rode my bike to the library, to the arcade, to the mall. This was only about twenty-five years ago.
GPL2 isn't fundamentally broken. That's why the GPL 3 is a mistake.
What is fundamentally broken is the patent system.
When GPLv1 was released in 1989, software patents were not a significant issue. When v2 was released in 1991, the "Liberty or Death" clause was added as a first attempt to deal with patent issues, but the patent problem got worse throughout the 1990s.
The copyright system is also fundamentally broken, since the introduction of the DMCA.
New threats to freedom require new defenses. Thus, GPLv3.
but have no objection to making stuff out of thin air (or, in this case, grabbing some random Charismatic's pet "theory" on how old the earth is) to poke holes in Christian theology.
Making reference to the Ussher chronology is neither making stuff up, nor grabbing some random Charismatic's theory. If you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a certain span from the lineage from Adam through to Solomon. If you can then use historical records to date Solomon, you get Adam picking apples around 4000 BCE - give or take a millennium or two, depending on which versions you go by.
Or, of course, one can hold that Genesis is no more literally true than Shinto or Cherokee or Egyptian or Taoist creation myths.
which postulates that the fall in crime rates in the US was attributable to the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court.
Interesting. If that were the case, then the impact should have been mostly restricted to states where abortion was illegal pre-Roe. (Sure, people do move, but it's a lot less likely that poor people are going to relocate to another state.) Is that seen?
that things are only classified to protect the ne'er-do-wells who wish to run roughshod over the Constitution (a wholly unsubstantiated claim, I might add).
"Only classified to protect ne'er-do-wells"? No, I'm sure that some stuff is classified by people who think they're "protecting the country" or some such. Doesn't mean that giving the government a power to censor information, is a good idea. From MK-ULTRA to Abu Gharab, the evidence is quite clear that the U.S. government can't be trusted to do the right thing when it is not under scrutiny.
I suppose the feds should allow you and your brigade of freedom loving micro-managers to oversee all of its interactions, all of course for the cause of liberty. And who'd be watching you?
No, I'm not suggesting that I be allowed to oversee the feds' classification of information. I'm suggesting that the feds shouldn't be permitted to classify information in the first place. (Other than perhaps that relating directly to military maneuvers and deployments during time of declared legitimate war.) There is a good reason that no power to classify information is found in the Constitution. We all - you know, "we the people" - are supposed to oversee the actions of our government, and we can't do that when it hides its actions.
Does that entail some extra risk from "enemies" learning about us? Yes. Freedom ain't risk-free. But when we can prevent our government from doing stupid and brutal things, we're less likely to make enemies in the first place.
air travel is incredibly safe by nearly every measure that matters.
Air travel is safer than travelling by car, sure. But that says more about the hazards of taking to poorly designed roads packed with poorly trained and impatient drivers, than about the safety of air travel. It certainly doesn't imply that air travel is as safe as it can be, or that NASA (which has a history of underestimating risk) can exempt itself from FOIA requests because the "commercial welfare of the air carriers" might be affected.
it usually means "stuff that would be dangerous to allow some elements in the world to know."
The problem is, dangerous to whom?
It would be dangerous to those who wish to run roughshod over the Constitution to make their actions public, sure. Dangerous to the U.S.? No. The supposed power of the government to "classify" information, to forcibly censor discussion and debate by "we the people", is what is dangerous to democracy, dangerous to the citizens of the United States.
A completely undeserved reputation. His big plan in '91, for example, was to parachute the 82nd Airborne behind Iraqi lines, capture an Iraqi city and hold for ransom.
"Political mastermind" does not imply "excellent military tactitian".
Do you not think that the U.S. should be able to target people who illegally import goods to the U.S.?
To import goods into the U.S., you must be in the U.S., and therefore it's a reasonable claim that you are subject to its laws.
This is more like (though still different from) targeting people who are exporting goods to the U.S. If somebody in Japan sells you a gizmo on eBay, that is legal in Japan but banned in the U.S., that's your lookout.
Of course, that's pretending that law or reason had anything to do with governments. The reality is, if a government can convince someone to point a gun at you, it has jurisdiction over you.
How do you think the victims of bombings that took place outside the U.S. were able to sue Osama bin Laden in a U.S. court?
The plaintiffs are U.S. citizens, and the claim is that bin Laden has assets in the U.S. - a form of presence here.
There is nothing wrong with Coca-Cola buying Pepsi.com and redirecting it. Its a market...
No, that's not a market. A market is competition. Using domain names in the manner you describe is combative, not competive.
You link to RMS's "Right to Read"; you ought to read this:
Constructive competition is enough competition to motivate people to great efforts. A number of people are competing to be the first to have visited all the countries on Earth; some even spend fortunes trying to do this. But they do not bribe ship captains to strand their rivals on desert islands. They are content to let the best person win.
Competition becomes combat when the competitors begin trying to impede each other instead of advancing themselves - when "Let the best person win" gives way to "Let me win, best or not."
Messing with domain names the way you suggest isn't going to motivate either Coke or Pepsi to make their carbonated sugar water any less revolting, and could only cause customer confusion. ("Wait - did Pepsi buy out Coke? WTF?")
"X breeds Y" means that X creates Y, causes it to come into being. It suggests that
you can't have X without Y resulting, that X is responsible for or to blame for Y, so if we don't like Y we ought to get rid of X, to the degree possible. E.g., "Open cesspools breed disease."
"X feeds Y" means that if X already exists, it will grow because of Y. However, it does not suggest that the presense of Y causes X to appear. It does not imply that X is to blame for Y. For example, we might say "Alcohol feeds violence" - if you have a bunch of people who are happy drunks and give them a keg of beer, nobody gets hurt, so we can't say "Alcohol breeds (creates) violence." But if you take a group of people with a history of violence and get them drunk, look out.
Slashdot Mirror
A .223 bullet from my Mini 14 is just the same as a .223 from a U.S. Army-issue M16. Yes, I can't get the same rate of fire, but it's enough to put up a significant resistance. Like all security, it's not about perfection, it's about raising the cost of an attack.
Those who think firearms in civilian hands are irrelevant need to review the history of the civil rights movement - not the shiny happy official story of how MLK's nonviolent resistance was all that mattered, but the real deal involving the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and many other armed black men who stood up to intimidation and brutality with rifles in their hands to win equality under the law. (Not to cut on MLK at all. But there's an obvious bias in the mainstream historical account.)
You also ought to consider how American private gun ownership dissuaded the Japanese from thoughts of invasion during WWII. There is a quote attributed to Admiral Yamamoto: "You cannot invade the mainland United States; there would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
Try this on for size:
Zenarchy is an interesting read, written by one of the late 20th century's more...interesting...characters. Kerry Thornley was sometimes stark raving looney, and sometimes fscking brilliant. Zenarchy, IMHO, holds just to the brilliant side of the line.
(Well, discarding the small digression about transistorized mind control. We do know that the U.S. government has experimented with mind control, but it was drugs, not implants. Some conspiracy theorists believe that Thornley and Oswald may have been subject to such experimentation during their days at Atsugi Naval Air base - regardless of the truth of that, I'm willing to cut him some slack on the subject.)
No. Primaries are part of the problem.
Officially, the US is not a two-party system, we are a no-party system. Political parties have no official role under the Constitution. The Democrats and Republicans are private organizations. If they - or the Boy Scouts or the ACLU or whomever - want to get together and put forth candidates, fine; but they ought not be allowed to use public resources to do so, and ought to have to play by the same ballot access rules as everybody else.
Primaries and other special treatment for parties are gross violations of the equal protection clause.
No primaries, no party affliations on ballots, no Congressional (or state legislative) rules that recognize party lines. Let's elect men and women, not parties. Add instant-runoff voting, and we could actually start to get decent candidates.
Do I expect to see this? Not anytime soon. We're going to have to fall even farther before real change is possible.
But the claim of those who so very badly want games to be "relevant" somehow is that it's an excellent leadership training ground.
According to the breathless prose of TFA, gamers "naturally think outside the box and possess a unique set of skills that have been developed and honed during hours of game play." Which is hooey: even a MMORPG is a box, and the truly unique skills of computer games are things like rocket jumps, which are not very useful in the real world.
(Of course, TFA also claims that "Strategy is more about vision and less about planning ...more about being creative and intuitive and less about being rational and precise." And that the game America's Army "gives recruits a realistic insight into the business of modern warfare". The authors are clearly not in a close relationship with consensual objective reality.)
Is sitting on your butt interacting via a network a to fulfill arbitrary imaginary goals a better way to learn leadership than helping teach karate classes? Or running a poetry workshop? Or getting a bunch of people together for a charity event? Or even just spending an evening in a bar, listening to random people tell their stories and coming to understand their thoughts?
Games can be fun. You can even learn lessons from them with real-world applications - American political leaders would be well-advised to learn the fundamentals of Go, and come to understand the futility of throwing more resources into a doomed scenario.
But the idea the computer games are the best thing ever, some radical new path to skill and wisdom and understanding, is bunkum of the highest purity.
Que? I mentioned Congress, not a "Democratic administration". And "Big Brother" is a reference to the surveilllance state of 1984, you know? I agree that the goverment we have is of, by, and for the wealthy, and that Democrats are little, if any, better than Republicans. But that wasn't the topic under discussion.
Except for the minor fact that he wasn't.
The problem isn't that it's not "fun", the problem is that our presence is doing more harm than good.
It's a very, very, very different situation that the occupations after WWII:
There's a lot of work to be done in raq (or as we'll start to refer to it soon, "the area that used to be Iraq"), and the U.S. has a moral responsibility to fund it. But we've fucked up so very, very badly, made so many enemies, that even if competence miraculously returned to U.S. government (ha!), we couldn't do the work. We have to turn it over to the international community.
And Bush has kept vetoing funding bills that contained troop withdrawal provisions. Congress should have stood firm and not given him one without such provisions.
"Win" in what sense? If Congress stands firm and denies him funding for the war and for his little domestic Big Brother operations, he has no choice. Congress gets its way. America wins when we stop wasting our blood and treasure over there and we reign in the madness of King George; Iraq wins when the people get their way and the occupation ends.
(Does Iraq then fall apart? Probably. Blame for that lies with the British Empire who put together such an unstable structure in the first place. The nation of Iraq was doomed from the start; the best we can hope for now is to put the area under an international team of peacekeepers and let a partition work itself out with as little violence as possible.)
If by "win" you mean "score political points", if Congressional leaders are more worried about poll numbers than saving lives, fuck 'em. Fiat justitia, et ruat caelum. But I can think of two possible political responses:
Of course, either would require principled and courageous leadership from the Democrats. Har de har har.
You need to review your Schoolhouse Rock.
If the Democratic majority in either house of Congress says "We're not passing a spending bill until you straighten up and fly right", there is nothing for Bush to veto.
Democratic leaders in Congress could end the war in Iraq immediately if the had the gonads to do so.
Absolutle. Those law enforcement agencies that organize agents provocateur sure as hell SHOULD be considered dangerous. (That includes the Canadians, too.) Far more dangerous than the occasional idiot who thinks throwing rocks through windows has something to do with anarchy.
Troll, or delusional? Only his brain-care specialist knows for sure!
Oh, horseshit. The Democrats could shut the government down, like the Republicans did over minor tax squabbles in the 1990s. They can - and should - say, "We will not pass any funding for the military, for foreign intelligence, or federal law enforcement, until we see reforms."
And of course, they have the power to ITMFA.
Under the Constitution, the Congress is the most powerful of the three branches of government. (Though Presidents have been trying to usurp that for a long time, and Bush has been the worst - it's time for Congress to issue an ass-whooping to him and to the office.) They could do a lot.
They don't want to, either because they agree with the criminal policies of the Bush administration, or because they think they're more likely to keep their cushy jobs if they take no action. In either case, fuck them.
Not quite "burn them all", but more and more I think the Athenians had a good idea: once a year, they could pick a prominent citizen and kick him (or her, I suppose, though I think they never ostracized a woman) out for a decade.
The more I think about that, the more I like it. A great check on the accumulation of power. We ought to hold ostracisms at the city, state, and federal levels.
I would even settle for a "politicial ostracism": we don't kick them out of the ciy or coutnry, but they're banned from running for office, or accepting any government position, or doing any lobbying or campaining for anyone else. Out of the process for ten years. Go home and get an honest job.
WTF? Where and when did you grow up that kids were kept in the house all the time?
I was certainly wandering the neighborhood long before I was fifteen. Spent a lot of time playing in the woods even. Went over friends houses. Rode my bike to the library, to the arcade, to the mall. This was only about twenty-five years ago.
What is fundamentally broken is the patent system.
When GPLv1 was released in 1989, software patents were not a significant issue. When v2 was released in 1991, the "Liberty or Death" clause was added as a first attempt to deal with patent issues, but the patent problem got worse throughout the 1990s.
The copyright system is also fundamentally broken, since the introduction of the DMCA.
New threats to freedom require new defenses. Thus, GPLv3.
Sweet. Have you seen this Nixie tube wristwatch?
Just because it has contradictions doesn't mean it can't be wrong in other ways too. :-)
Making reference to the Ussher chronology is neither making stuff up, nor grabbing some random Charismatic's theory. If you hold that the tale of Genesis is literally true, you get a certain span from the lineage from Adam through to Solomon. If you can then use historical records to date Solomon, you get Adam picking apples around 4000 BCE - give or take a millennium or two, depending on which versions you go by.
Or, of course, one can hold that Genesis is no more literally true than Shinto or Cherokee or Egyptian or Taoist creation myths.
Well, other than the bombs and the protestors and the fact that in most counties, you can't find someone to do it.
Interesting. If that were the case, then the impact should have been mostly restricted to states where abortion was illegal pre-Roe. (Sure, people do move, but it's a lot less likely that poor people are going to relocate to another state.) Is that seen?
"Only classified to protect ne'er-do-wells"? No, I'm sure that some stuff is classified by people who think they're "protecting the country" or some such. Doesn't mean that giving the government a power to censor information, is a good idea. From MK-ULTRA to Abu Gharab, the evidence is quite clear that the U.S. government can't be trusted to do the right thing when it is not under scrutiny.
No, I'm not suggesting that I be allowed to oversee the feds' classification of information. I'm suggesting that the feds shouldn't be permitted to classify information in the first place. (Other than perhaps that relating directly to military maneuvers and deployments during time of declared legitimate war.) There is a good reason that no power to classify information is found in the Constitution. We all - you know, "we the people" - are supposed to oversee the actions of our government, and we can't do that when it hides its actions.
Does that entail some extra risk from "enemies" learning about us? Yes. Freedom ain't risk-free. But when we can prevent our government from doing stupid and brutal things, we're less likely to make enemies in the first place.
No, I'll never be over Mucho Grande. Those wounds run awful deep.
Air travel is safer than travelling by car, sure. But that says more about the hazards of taking to poorly designed roads packed with poorly trained and impatient drivers, than about the safety of air travel. It certainly doesn't imply that air travel is as safe as it can be, or that NASA (which has a history of underestimating risk) can exempt itself from FOIA requests because the "commercial welfare of the air carriers" might be affected.
Shame on NASA, and shame on the airline industry.
The problem is, dangerous to whom?
It would be dangerous to those who wish to run roughshod over the Constitution to make their actions public, sure. Dangerous to the U.S.? No. The supposed power of the government to "classify" information, to forcibly censor discussion and debate by "we the people", is what is dangerous to democracy, dangerous to the citizens of the United States.
"Political mastermind" does not imply "excellent military tactitian".
To import goods into the U.S., you must be in the U.S., and therefore it's a reasonable claim that you are subject to its laws.
This is more like (though still different from) targeting people who are exporting goods to the U.S. If somebody in Japan sells you a gizmo on eBay, that is legal in Japan but banned in the U.S., that's your lookout.
Of course, that's pretending that law or reason had anything to do with governments. The reality is, if a government can convince someone to point a gun at you, it has jurisdiction over you.
The plaintiffs are U.S. citizens, and the claim is that bin Laden has assets in the U.S. - a form of presence here.
No, that's not a market. A market is competition. Using domain names in the manner you describe is combative, not competive.
You link to RMS's "Right to Read"; you ought to read this:
Messing with domain names the way you suggest isn't going to motivate either Coke or Pepsi to make their carbonated sugar water any less revolting, and could only cause customer confusion. ("Wait - did Pepsi buy out Coke? WTF?")
"X breeds Y" means that X creates Y, causes it to come into being. It suggests that you can't have X without Y resulting, that X is responsible for or to blame for Y, so if we don't like Y we ought to get rid of X, to the degree possible. E.g., "Open cesspools breed disease."
"X feeds Y" means that if X already exists, it will grow because of Y. However, it does not suggest that the presense of Y causes X to appear. It does not imply that X is to blame for Y. For example, we might say "Alcohol feeds violence" - if you have a bunch of people who are happy drunks and give them a keg of beer, nobody gets hurt, so we can't say "Alcohol breeds (creates) violence." But if you take a group of people with a history of violence and get them drunk, look out.