kontiki wrote:

It's ridiculous. This is the United States of America for God's sake,
not the Soviet Union... or North Korea. What is it going to take to
make people realize that unless we take a stand for something we will
fall for anything.

The problem is that our liberties are being eroded away so slowly that
most people don't notice it. It's being done on a generational scale.
Each generation takes away a few more liberties. The change is so small
and incremental that no particular generation gets worked up enough to
stop it.

Or, put a better way, each generation grows up with certain
restrictions. They add a few more, but not enough to hurt. The next
generation grows up with the new restrictions, but never knew anything
different, so they aren't bothered by it. And the cycle repeats.

It's not a conspiracy, just a gradual complacency that grows over
generations. Reasonable sounding people propose new laws that sound
perfectly reasonable to the average person. (Of course we need to
outlaw assault rifles! No one could possibly need one of those for any
legal purpose. They're just instruments of murder! Outlawing them will
make you safer and it doesn't infringe on your rights at all because
you're a reasonable law abiding citizen. You would never need an
assault rifle!)

The whole ADIZ issue is exactly like the assault rifle ban. It's
something the sounds reasonable to people who don't take the time to
think about it. The assault rifle ban doesn't make anyone safer. Joe
Sixpack walking to his car from the baseball stadium isn't going to be
mugged and killed by an assault rifle: his attacker will use a knife or
cheap .22 or .38 caliber pistol. Likewise, the ADIZ isn't going to
prevent anyone from hijacking an airliner. It's not going to prevent
the hijacked plane from flying into the a building in downtown DC. At
best, it provides a false sense of security for a few people at the
inconvenience and expense of many more people. At worst, it's downright
dangerous as it is a large increase in the ATC load for the area. If
I'm flying from Leesburg to Gaithersburg on a severe clear day, why
should I have to bother Dulles Approach? They've got more important
things to do, like the thousands of passengers flying into and out of
Dulles.


-m
--
## Mark T. Dame
## VP, Product Development
## MFM Software, Inc. (http://www.mfm.com/)
"Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy and the hard jobs
possible."
-- Larry Wall