Senator (Feinstein) calls for The Anarchist Cookbook to be 'removed from the Internet'

[Trillo]

70. I've never seen this book, but just read the wikipedia page about it.

I wonder if I should download a copy now. It seems like it would be a good book to give all kids in compulsory education chemistry class, but more than likely, a few kids might decide to go further that what the teacher or most any other reasonable adult would allow.

In high school, I think it was 10th grade, maybe 11th, a science teacher had a pyrotechnic display on his desk, it WOWed many of us, particularly the boys. He started with a pile of a whitish powder which he lit on fire and it burned a fabulous shade of purple-maroon, and it burned for longer than you might imagine. He asserted it could be created with regular items found under any of our kitchen sinks at home, but he also refused to tell us what those were. The same teacher taught us it was okay to dissect an anesthetized and live frog, to literally cut out its heart.

In 2007, a 17-year-old was arrested in Britain and faced charges under Terrorism Law in the UK for possession of this book, among other things.[15] He was cleared of all charges in October 2008, after arguing that he was a prankster who just wanted to research fireworks and smoke bombs.[16]

Sort of rambling, I know, but do we really want kids in schools to know how to make a bomb? Sure, there's educational value there, but the market for legal bomb builders is presumably highly limited, and hopefully moreso over future years.

I'm not really sure what is best in this case. Censoring such a book surely seems to break the First Amendment, but that was broken by the religious churches when they started getting government money "to help the poor." Now we have the RFRA laws, and in California, the Sodomite Suppression Act. Yeah, "to help the poor." Uh huh.

I don't think Feinstein deserves the piling on that she has received in this thread over this issue, though she has never been a favorite of DUers.