What we have here is an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education by the author of a book about Charles Whitman. Indeed, it is our mission in higher education to investigate and determine, as best we can, if there are "dots" to be connected. But during our inquiry we should not delude ourselves or ignore the obvious. The Whitman case taught me that sometimes our zeal to champion causes important to us or to explain the unexplainable and be "enlightened" blinds us to the obvious. ... sensational questions from irresponsible reporters ... As long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm -- because they want to and know how to do it.
How quickly people forget the message of Tom Friedman, just because the context is domestic instead of foreign. A collection from the archives, for your consideration: AQ Khan has signed a detailed confession ...
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ... your super-empowered man.
One day you wake up... and chaotic evil just doesn't seem like the right alignment for you any more.
Peking Duct Tape, and Web Logs as Weapons: There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open borders and a highly integrated global financial and Internet system, very small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World of Order. Individuals can become super-empowered.
In the long run, the "swarming" that really counts is the wide-scale mobilization of the global public.
To win, we must all become super-empowered individuals. Get happy, get angry, whatever; just get going.
The bloggers with agendas are, in fact, copycats, just with a different weapon. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state. So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but also what I call "super-empowered individuals." Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful -- but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.
A rant from Decius: ... we've got a problem, and probably an intractable one. TIA is a solution to the "problem" of super-empowered individuals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth for much the same reason that I don't like Bill Joy's book burning. It attempts to respond to the maturity of the individual by arming the state. There are two ways that feudal societies handled the development of books. One was to become republican. The other was to become totalitarian ... an attempt to regress the empowerment of individuals through more effective "safeguards" ... a way of band-aiding an obsolete system ... ... Fukuyama is wrong because we just empowered the individual again ... and we are going to have to through this process all over again. Some will wisely choose to find ways to ratchet down the concentration of formal power so that it comes in balance with reality, and some will choose to buttress the present status quo.
On losing credibility in an instant: "This is a discussion that we as a society need to have," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ... "We work so hard to protect this ... and yet ... undermining years of industry leadership in a single act."
The Legacy of the Texas Tower Sniper | 
