Timothy McVeigh

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Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

McVeigh appeared to be a quietly competent soldier: For background on McVeigh’s military service, see Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books, 2001), Chaps. 3–4; Brandon M. Stickney, All-American Monster: The Unauthorized Biography of Timothy McVeigh (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), Chap. 6; Jonathan Franklin, “Timothy McVeigh: Soldier,” Playboy, October 1995. Because Saddam Hussein had a history: Franklin, “Timothy McVeigh: Soldier,” p. 81. “Bad Company” would lead three other Bradleys: See Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, pp. 66–67. McVeigh was awarded four other medals: Michel and Herbeck, American Terrorist, p. 75.

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Whenever Clinton appeared on the screen: Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books, 2001), p. 180. “I’ll never see my dad again!”: Lana Padilla with Ron Delpit, By Blood Betrayed: My Life with Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1995), pp. 10–11. In a Walmart plastic bag: Jon Hersley, Larry Tongate, and Bob Burke, Simple Truths: The Real Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2004), pp. 183–85. CHAPTER 10: THE FINAL DAYS “I won’t need any”: Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: Regan Books, 2001), pp. 209–11.

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The prosecutors argued that any prejudice against McVeigh could be cured by a jury instruction from Matsch, but the judge argued that would not be enough. “Timothy McVeigh will be profoundly prejudiced by a joint trial of this case,” Matsch said in his opinion. “His lawyers cannot question Terry Nichols or cross-examine the FBI agents on what they say Terry Nichols said and they cannot control the cross-examination by Terry Nichols or follow up on any suggestions or inferences of guilt of Timothy McVeigh resulting from it.” The prosecutors were shocked—and shattered—by Matsch’s ruling. The reasons were mostly personal. The government’s lawyers had put their lives on hold to travel first to Oklahoma City and then to Denver to try the case.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

When a Koresh supporter dragged a large wooden cross toward a checkpoint nearby, federal agents blocked her way. She planted the cross in muddy ground beside the road and disappeared in the crowd. Later in March, a young Gulf War veteran joined a T-shirt Hill throng that ranged from several hundred to more than three thousand tourists in a day. Timothy McVeigh, a long-faced twenty-four-year-old with a buzzcut, was selling five-dollar bumper stickers reading, FEAR THE GOVT THAT FEARS YOUR GUN and A MAN WITH A GUN IS A CITIZEN, A MAN WITHOUT A GUN IS A SUBJECT. Hearing news reports about the siege, McVeigh had driven from Florida to support the Davidians.

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If that ever happened, the reborn prophet would walk past an elaborate memorial someone had placed in the grass just outside the perimeter fence: a small wooden cross adorned with colorful ribbons, a Dr Pepper bottle holding a chrysanthemum, Koresh’s 1988 mug shot, and a hand-lettered sign reading, THEY WILL NOT FIND DAVID’S BONES! HE IS ALIVE! Other followers took up the cause in their own ways. Timothy McVeigh had spent the middle of April at his friend Terry Nichols’s family farm in Michigan, planning a second trip to Waco to support Koresh and the Davidians. “There should be ten thousand people shouting at the FBI, ‘Go home! Go home!’” he said. Former sergeant McVeigh had been flat on his back in Nichols’s garage at noon on April 19.

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On April 19, 2000, he hurried toward a TV news crew outside the new church. “What happened here was wrong!” he bellowed. “They murdered all the children.” It was “proven,” Jones said, that the FBI had “machine-gunned men, women, and children as they tried to exit” the burning compound. What was more, it was “proven” that Timothy McVeigh was not responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing on Waco’s second anniversary. Bill Clinton was. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building “was an inside job—a false-flag operation” coordinated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Asked about the victims of the Oklahoma bombing, Jones said he felt “horribly sad” for the office workers and preschoolers who died that day.

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage by Jeff Guinn

Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Some shirts and bumper stickers touted militia groups, many of which seized on the events at Mount Carmel to claim the government illegally attacked gun owners acting well within their Second Amendment rights to bear arms. One of these peddlers was Timothy McVeigh, who would soon become infamous in his own right. FBI analyst Farris Rookstool remembers, “I drove out [to Mount Carmel], and saw this guy sitting on the hood of his car. He was selling bumper stickers, T-shirts, items that were very antigovernment. We know it was Timothy McVeigh, because someone from the SMU [Southern Methodist University] school paper took his picture and got his information. Two years later, McVeigh did what he did in Oklahoma City

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It fits everything we know about what David and his followers believed. Clive Doyle recalls Wayne Martin: Doyle, pp. 150–54. One muttered, “Holy shit!”: 106th Congress, 2nd Session, House Report 106-1037, “The Tragedy at Waco: New Evidence Examined,” Committee on Government Reform (December 28, 2000). Timothy McVeigh, watching on television: Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Tragedy at Oklahoma City, p. 161. People began appearing at different places on the roof: Major Case 80—WACMUR, Updated Event Log; Clive Doyle and David Thibodeau interviews. It was 12:34 p.m.: Wessinger, How the Millennium Comes Violently, p. 78.

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Kathy Schroeder, in custody at a Waco hospital, was told by a nurse to come and see what was happening on TV. She watched Mount Carmel burn, and says nearly thirty years later, “Those that died in fire attained a place in the future event [End Time]. They’re coming back. While the rest of my friends became Wave Sheaf and translated through fire, I was left behind.” Antigovernment militiaman Timothy McVeigh, watching on television from a farm in Michigan, gaped at the screen and blurted to like-minded friends sitting next to him, “What is this? What has America become?” * * * At 12:12 p.m., Byron Sage pleaded over the PA, “David, don’t put those people through this. Don’t lose control. Lead them to safety.

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People by Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter

Bernie Madoff, business climate, call centre, Columbine, delayed gratification, impulse control, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, Peoples Temple, Ponzi scheme, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh

These are the dangerous ones who seek like-minded “true believers,” as Eric Hoffer warned us in his landmark book on mass movements and totalitarian governments.2 They join the KKK, the skinheads, Aryan Nations, and any other extremist group that seeks to hate and do away with others because passionate hatred and fear give purpose and meaning to an otherwise unfulfilled life.3 Or they hook up with just one other like-minded paranoid personality for support in doing harm. This is what happened with the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers—the Tsarnaev brothers. Similarly, Timothy McVeigh joined forces with Terry Nichols, a fellow like-minded personality, to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma. And when they cannot find anyone with whom to commiserate, they act alone, like Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist who feared the influx of minorities in Norway, so he went out and massacred 77 souls, mostly children, in Norway in 2011.4 The paranoid personality spectrum, as you can see, is broad and ranges from irritating and obnoxious to extremely flammable and dangerous, but to one degree or another, these people share defining characteristics.

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Such is the mind of the paranoid personality—skewed, rigid, moralistic, or unyielding—where murder is justified to save the unborn. This personality tends to know a lot about very little, fixating on a narrow idea—a passage of the Bible, or a legal, social, or political issue that may be of little or no consequence to most of us. Timothy McVeigh focused on the militarization of police SWAT teams in the 1990s. He didn’t like their military-style tactics targeting reclusive Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho in 1992. For his beliefs and for his hatred of the federal government in general, he blew up the Alfred P.

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For many of these paranoid personalities, violence becomes the solution because nothing else will achieve their out-of-bounds aims or do so fast enough for them. So you get “magical thinking” that goes something like this: If I kill enough scientists, I’ll stop the advance of technology. —“Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who mailed 16 bombs, killing 3 and wounding 23 If I blow up a building, I’ll stop the FBI and do away with SWAT teams. —Timothy McVeigh, bomber of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 women and children and injuring hundreds If I set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, then abortions in America will cease to be performed. —Eric Rudolph, Olympic Park bomber, 1996, Atlanta If I kill enough Americans, the United States will leave the Middle East.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The wars in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Africa and South America in the 1990s revealed large numbers of individuals, armed gangs, arms dealers, human traffickers, drug lords, mafias and private security firms snatching the monopoly of violence from flailing states – precursors to the twenty-first century’s terrorists and ‘lone wolves’ who would erase the fading distinction between civilian and military. The easy availability of assault weapons in the United States was always likely to assist the privatization and socialization of violence. Timothy McVeigh’s murder on 19 April 1995 of 168 Americans in Oklahoma City now seems an early clue to the presently exploding netherworld of political rage, conspiracy theory and paranoia. Writing in a small-town newspaper in 1992, McVeigh, then a young veteran of the First Gulf War, chillingly foresaw our demagogic present: Racism on the rise?

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Bland fanatics, sedulously polishing the image of a ‘liberal’ West against totalitarianism and Islam, have banished it to obscurity. This is usually done through a combination of reductionist history and ahistorical explanations, largely involving clinical psychology. Thus, politicians and journalists routinely describe the domestic terrorist as a deranged ‘lone wolf’, even when, as with Timothy McVeigh, and many other anti-government militants in the United States, he explicitly articulated a point of view – anti-governmentalism – that mirrors mainstream ideas and ideologies. McVeigh claimed to be defending the American constitution, and on the day of his atrocity in 1995 in Oklahoma City he wore a T-shirt bearing a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’

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It is true to say that the glory of man is his capacity for salvation; it is also true that his glory is his capacity for damnation. The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. T. S. Eliot (1930) The Lone Wolf and His Pack On the morning of 19 April 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder rental truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He had already lit two fuses, of five and two minutes each. Leaving the truck just below a day-care centre in the building he walked away as a large explosion behind him destroyed the north half of the building, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring 684 others.

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security by Daniel J. Solove

Albert Einstein, cloud computing, Columbine, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, invention of the telephone, Marshall McLuhan, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, security theater, the medium is the message, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, urban planning

Why was his crime deemed a national-security issue while the Columbine rampage wasn’t? The line between national-security and regular criminal activities is quite blurry. What about the Beltway snipers of 2002, who terrorized people in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia? What about Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people? Are these regular crimes? Or matters of national security? Is there a meaningful difference? How should national-security threats be distinguished from other crimes? One way is to focus on the number of potential victims, with matters of national security involving a larger number of casualties than ordinary crime.

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He received a Ph.D. in math from Michigan, and then became a professor at Berkeley. He later quit the professorship and moved to a cabin in the woods. He enjoyed reading history books, riding his bike, and gardening.13 “John” is Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks. “Matt” is Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. “Bill” is Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who mailed bombs to people for a period of nearly twenty years. These three individuals had very different backgrounds and beliefs. Atta had radicalized Islamic beliefs, McVeigh was an agnostic who believed the power of the U.S. government was running amok, and Kaczynski was an atheist who hated modern technology and industry.

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Posner, Not a Suicide Pact, supra, at 97. 11. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It (2005); Peter Finn, A Fanatic’s Quiet Path to Terror: Rage Was Born in Egypt, Nurtured in Germany, Inflicted on U.S., Wash. Post, Sept. 22, 2001, at A1. 12. Profile: Timothy McVeigh, BBC News, May 11, 2001, http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/1321244.stm (last visited Aug. 17, 2010). 13. John Schwartz & Serge F. Kovaleski, Bookish Recluse Lived Sparse Cabin Existence, Wash. Post, Apr. 4, 1996, at A1. 233 Notes to pages 188–200 14. See Fred H. Cate, Government Data Mining: The Need for a Legal Framework, 43 Harv.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

On June 17, 2019, they celebrated the anniversary of “Saint Roof’s” murders, and punctuated it with a kind of prayer litany of white-supremacist murder: Heil Hitler. Heil Bowers [Robert Bowers, who allegedly murdered eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018]. Sieg Heil. Heil Roof. Heil Breivik [Anders Breivik, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who murdered seventy-seven in a massive terror attack in 2011]. Heil McVeigh [Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber]. There was no one to de-escalate these men; it was a private group, one that existed for them to egg one another on, to venerate mass murderers and perhaps one day to emulate them. And over and over again, they posted my selfies, a photo of my feet, an old Google result about my dismal performance on the game show Jeopardy!

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The Turner Diaries would go on to inspire a white-supremacist terrorist gang called the Order, directly named after the group in the book, to rob banks and armored cars, and ultimately shoot to death Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Colorado in 1984. Most famously, the book was the ideological lodestar of mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people, including children. The FBI has labeled it the “Bible of the racist right.” If so, a devotee of the Turner Diaries subsequently produced the movement’s catechism. David Lane, a member of the terror cell the Order, wrote a tract while imprisoned for Berg’s murder that came to be known as the “white genocide manifesto”—echoing alarms about white “racial suicide” dating back to the era of eugenics.

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For diehard white supremacists, feminism—with its birth control, its careerist women, and its ethos of sexual choice for women—represents an existential threat to the future of the white race. As the white-supremacist murderer Brenton Tarrant expressed in his manifesto prior to shooting over fifty Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand: “It’s the birthrates.” The Turner Diaries, the 1978 novel by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce that served as a direct inspiration for Timothy McVeigh and other white-supremacist terrorists, lays out this antipathy to feminism succinctly: “‘Women’s lib’ was a form of mass psychosis,” Pierce wrote. “Women affected by it denied their femininity and insisted that they were ‘people,’ not ‘women.’ This aberration was promoted and encouraged by the System as a means of dividing our race against itself.”

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson

Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, disinformation, friendly fire, Jon Ronson, Livingstone, I presume, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the market place, Timothy McVeigh

Whatever, six days into Randy Weaver’s trial, fifty-three adults, including David Koresh, and twenty-three children were burnt to death at Mount Carmel in Waco. The remains of the Weaver cabin became a place of pilgrimage for this new army of believers in the secret rulers of the world. One of the pilgrims was Timothy McVeigh who visited Randy Weaver’s cabin, alone, some months before blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and killing 168 people. McVeigh considered the Murrah Building to be local New World Order headquarters. ONE OUT OF EIGHT AMERICANS HAS HARD-CORE ANTI-SEMITIC FEELINGS This quarter-page advertisement occupied the front page of the New York Times a few weeks after I visited Jack McLamb.

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But then many Klanspeople began to desert him for more outspoken neo-Nazi leaders – leaders of rival Klan groups and organizations such as White Aryan Resistance – fearsome men who cared nothing about negative connotations. And some Klansmen were going it alone: they called it Leaderless Resistance. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a one-time member of Thom’s Klan who became disenchanted with the image makeover and decided to go it alone. The truth was many Klanspeople felt that without hatred there was no point in even having a Ku Klux Klan. Hate, they contended, was a pivotal Klan activity. Furthermore, across America, Klan membership had fallen to an all-time low.

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The Iraqi government announced in November 2000 that the vote-rigging scandal that convulsed the American elections in Florida was all part of the great Bilderberg Jewish conspiracy to get their man, Al Gore, into power. Other conspiracy theorists contended that this could not be true because George W. Bush was himself a regular attendee at Bohemian Grove and must, therefore, also be part of the conspiracy. I thought about Timothy McVeigh visiting the remains of Randy Weaver’s cabin and rummaging through the family’s scattered belongings, like an archaeologist, or a pilgrim, shortly before blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City – a building he considered to be the local headquarters of the global elite. I realized just how central these conspiracy theories were to the practice of terrorism in the Western world.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

And a year later right there in Oklahoma City, a couple of miles from where the state legislature had declared its opposition to a liberty-quashing New World Order, that young bumper-sticker salesman from Waco detonated a truck bomb that destroyed the city’s main federal office building and killed 168 people. One response was to consider Timothy McVeigh a hero, a John Brown for his time; the more common public conclusion of his fellow travelers was to imagine he’d been a patsy of the government, which had surely staged the bombing in order to justify a crackdown on patriots.*2 — FULL-TILT EXPLAIN-IT-ALL CONSPIRACISM was being mainstreamed in America.

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.*4 * * * *1 Including those attended by the current U.S. secretary for housing and urban development. “I mean, Seventh-day Adventist,” President Trump said suspiciously of Ben Carson’s religion when they were rivals for the 2016 nomination. “I don’t know about, I just don’t know.” *2 Not long before he became famous, Timothy McVeigh traveled to gawk at the air force’s so-called Area 51 in Nevada, the place UFO conspiracists believe the government keeps extraterrestrials and their downed spacecraft, and on death row he watched the movie Contact. *3 1991 Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey. *4 Cheryl Costa and Linda Miller Costa, UFO Sightings Desk Reference (2017). 39 Mad as Hell, the New Voice of the People IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, six weeks before the 9/11 attacks, a twenty-seven-year-old national radio host warned his listeners to wake up, imploring and beseeching them.

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Coming of age in the early 1990s, just as Communism ended and the era of Behold a Pale Horse and X-Files began, he was a natural omniconspiracist, a native fusion paranoiac. Long before Breitbart.com existed or Trump entered politics, Jones was ignoring the standard ideological lines to forge a confederacy of paranoids. JFK was “the last true president of the United States,” and Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy—just like Timothy McVeigh. “The Establishment,” he has said, “they want to make it…right-wing versus left-wing.” Glenn Beck, for instance, “spins it in a neocon-ish way that reinforces the controlled, left-right paradigm that divides people.” Jones does consider the center-left more dangerous than the center-right—“the Democratic Party,” he told Farrakhan in 2016, has “got black people in their web murdering your people and they love it.”

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

But in 2006, that narrative was gathering dust, and so the incident was treated as a minor local story and ignored. Terrorism is obviously a major narrative today, as it has been for some time, but a decade ago it was quite different. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing made terrorism the story of men like the bomber, Timothy McVeigh, a white, paranoid, antigovernment radical. Following that storyline, journalists churned out countless articles about tiny groups of cranky gun enthusiasts who grandly styled themselves “militias.” There wasn’t much evidence that the militias were a serious threat to public safety, but McVeigh had briefly belonged to one, so reporters flocked to cover their every word and deed.

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The September 11 attacks scrapped this storyline and replaced it with the story of Islamist terrorism that is still going strong today—which is why, when a suicide bomber detonated himself outside a packed stadium at the University of Oklahoma on October 1, 2005, the media scarcely reported the incident. The bomber, Joel Henry Hinrichs III, wasn’t Muslim. He was a disturbed white guy with a thing for explosives whose initial plan was apparently to detonate a bomb identical to that used by Timothy McVeigh. If he had carried out his attack at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1990s, it would have been major news around the world, but in 2005 it didn’t fit the narrative so it, too, was treated as a minor local story and ignored. This happened again in April 2007, when six white men belonging to the “Alabama Free Militia” were arrested in Collinsville, Alabama.

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It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario: A fanatical cult with a burning desire to inflict mass slaughter has heaps of money, international connections, excellent equipment and laboratories, scientists trained at top-flight universities, and years of near-total freedom to pursue its operations. And yet Aum’s seventeen attacks with chemical or biological weapons took far fewer lives than the 168 people who died in Oklahoma City when Timothy McVeigh detonated a single bomb made of fertilizer and motor-racing fuel. “Aum’s experience suggests—however counter-intuitively or contrary to popular belief—the significant technological difficulties faced by any non-state entity in attempting to weaponize and disseminate chemical and biological weapons effectively,” concluded the Gilmore Committee.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1994, which killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh, the man who drove the truck bomb into the building, nurtured a fanatical hatred of the federal government. He was also a man who was fascinated by the idea of a “conspiracy between the United Nations and the United States to limit individual freedom and, ultimately, take over the world.”9 Until the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the Oklahoma bombing was the worst ever terrorist atrocity on American soil. The 9/11 bombers, in a strange way, represented the mirror image of the fears of the Oklahoma terrorist. While Timothy McVeigh was angered by the notion that a world government might be imposed on the United States, al-Qaeda saw an all-powerful United States imposing its will on the rest of the world.

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Quoted in Legrain, Open World, 25. 6. Cited in William Greider, Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (New York: Rodale, 2009), 70. 7. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002), 4. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: ReganBooks, 2001), 59. 10. Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 9. 17. POWER: CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVES 1. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70:1 (Winter 1990/91). 2.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

I turn and run, and the kids quit crying and I feel very guilty.’’41 When the smoke cleared, and the rescue workers went home, 168 people were dead, including nineteen children and one rescue worker. The bomb was in a rented Ryder truck, loaded with 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, and nitromethane, a highly volatile motor-racing fuel.42 Just ninety minutes after the explosion, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer pulled over twenty-seven-year-old Timothy McVeigh for driving without a license plate. Shortly before McVeigh was to be released on the minor offense, he was identified as the bombing suspect by law enforcement authorities and charged with the crime. With the announcement of the arrest, the country had to face the fact of terrorism within, as well as from abroad; from citizens, and not just from foreigners.

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The abiding question remained: Why? McVeigh was a military veteran, and had no prior record of arrest. In dramatic testimony in his subsequent trial, McVeigh’s sister, Jennifer, calmly told jurors about her brother’s rage against the government for the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.43 Timothy McVeigh decided to extract retribution on those he felt responsible— the Murrah Federal Building held numerous federal agency offices, including Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). In planning his revenge on the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy, McVeigh enlisted the help of his friend, Terry Nichols, to help him pull off his plan.

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The site was given over to a reflecting pool book ended by two large symbolic ‘‘doorways,’’ with a field full of bronze and stone chairs—one for each person lost, including children, and arranged based on what floor they were on when the bomb exploded. On a corner adjacent to the memorial a sculpture was erected by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, one of the first brick-and-mortar churches in the city. It too was almost totally destroyed by the blast. Timothy McVeigh was a disgruntled American who wanted revenge on those he resented. He was not alone. On April 3, 1996, a family member gave a tip to the FBI that ended the longest and costliest manhunt for a serial killer in U.S. history.47 After seventeen years of anonymity, the ‘‘Unabomber’’ was exposed The Postmodern Nineties 179 by his younger brother.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine, David Brooks, gun show loophole, Kickstarter, McMansion, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Timothy McVeigh, white flight

He was the last person known to speak to Davidian leader David Koresh. He watched the compound burn. Speculation raged about the FBI’s role in the blaze. The controversy nearly ended Attorney General Janet Reno’s career. Waco radicalized the anti-government militia movement, made April 19 into a symbol of perverse authority. Timothy McVeigh sought vengeance by bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. His explosion killed 168 people, the largest terrorist attack in American history to that point. 8. Maximum Human Density It’s a safe bet that Eric and Dylan watched the carnage of Waco and Oklahoma City on television, with the rest of the country.

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Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote.

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“A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people. Eric miscalculated again. It was about drinking this time. He and Dylan talked a friend’s mom into buying lots of liquor. She took requests.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

If Lonina came to regret this short burst of celebrity, it is now perpetuated in algorithmic form. Google searches for her name now return pornography websites offering pages titled ‘Marina Lonina Periscope Porn’ and ‘Marina Lonina Rape Video’. This dark side of celebrity is not in itself new. Josef Fritzel, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahmer are among the murderers and rapists who have become overnight celebrities, receiving dozens or hundreds of love letters in prison.43 What is new is that, as celebrity is rewritten by algorithm, all can participate in the darkness. VII. Celebrity has always been an efficient means of focusing attention; the best attention hack money can buy.

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Rob Crilly, ‘Teenager accused of live-streaming rape got “caught up in the likes”’, Daily Telegraph, 18 April 2016; Tyler Kingkade, ‘Why Would Anyone Film A Rape And Not Try To Stop It?’, Huffington Post, 21 April 2016. 42. According to the prosecutor, Lonina told police . . . Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, ‘Don’t Stop Filming’, Season One, Episode Six, Netflix, 2017. 43. Josef Fritzel, Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh and Jeffrey Dahmer . . . The erotic interest in Lonina was preceded by the fascination with Amanda Knox, who had stood trial for the murder of Meredith Kercher. In the UK, Channel 5’s flagship daytime programme, The Wright Stuff, hosted a debate entitled, ‘Foxy Knoxy: Would Ya?’ 44. Daniel Boorstin called celebrity the condition of being well known . . .

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

All of this is the merchant's decision and the merchant's doing, and none of it is related to intra-group trust. If a storeowner installs a camera behind his cash register, it's not societal pressure; if a city installs cameras on every street corner, it is. And if the police use all the individually installed cameras in the area to track a suspect—as was done with Timothy McVeigh's van—then it's societal pressure. If society decides to subsidize in-store cameras, that's also societal pressure. If I carry a gun for self-defense, it's not societal pressure; if we as a society collectively arm our policemen, it is. You could argue there is no societal dilemma involved in the hotel's towel-security decision.

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Chayes (2008), “A Statistical Model of Criminal Behavior,” Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences, 18 (Supplement):1249–67. Beth Pearsall (2010), “Predictive Policing: The Future of Law Enforcement?” NIJ Journal, 266:16–9. Nancy Murray (2011), “Profiling in the Age of Total Information Awareness,” Race & Class, 51:3–24. Timothy McVeigh's van Associated Press (28 Sep 2009), “Attorney: Oklahoma City Bombing Tapes Appear Edited,” Oklahoman. reduce car theft Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt (1998), “Measuring Positive Externalities from Unobservable Victim Precaution: An Empirical Analysis of Lojack,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113:43–77.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

The militia movement was vast and fairly diverse, but most groups had views about government, guns, and property that were well to the right of the rest of the country. Very few espoused violence, but the new attention on the few that did, along with anger from the National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America, and the rants of right-wing personalities like Liddy, inspired more reactionary opposition from the left. Then, on April 19, 1994, Timothy McVeigh set off a fertilizer bomb outside the Arthur Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 164 people. McVeigh claimed that he bombed the building in retaliation for the events at Waco. McVeigh’s act gave fresh fuel to the ATF’s defenders—not so much to defend the agency, but to attack its critics.

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They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable.” Of course, just as it was possible to think David Koresh was a madman and be appalled by the federal government’s siege at Waco, it was also possible to believe the ATF deserved sharp criticism for its handling of both Ruby Ridge and Waco and be appalled at Timothy McVeigh’s retaliatory murder of 164 innocent people. But McVeigh’s actions seemed to cement partisian battle lines for years to come, at least when it came to ATF abuses. The final event to nudge the right to question the militarization of police—at least at the federal level—was the raid to wrest five-year-old Cuban refugee Elián González from the home of his relatives in Miami.39 In November 1999, González had fled to Florida on a boat with his mother and her boyfriend.

Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror by Meghnad Desai

Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, global village, illegal immigration, income per capita, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Yom Kippur War

.฀ Henry฀ David฀ Thoreau฀ is฀perhaps฀the฀most฀famous฀American฀anarchist.฀There฀has฀been฀an฀ individualist฀ anti-state฀ tradition฀ in฀ American฀ thinking฀ since฀ the฀ origin฀of฀the฀Republic.   ฀  Sometimes฀ the฀ anarchist฀ tradition฀ in฀ America฀ takes฀ a฀ violent฀ turn,฀as฀in฀the฀case฀of฀Timothy฀McVeigh,฀who฀destroyed฀an฀Oklahoma฀federal฀building฀in฀April฀.฀He฀said฀he฀was฀defending฀the฀ Constitution.฀There฀is฀a฀scattered฀anarchist฀right-wing฀movement฀ in฀America฀which฀suspects฀either฀that฀the฀federal฀government฀has฀ betrayed฀ the฀ Constitution฀ by฀ taking฀ too฀ much฀ power฀ to฀ itself฀ or฀ that฀it฀has฀sold฀out฀American฀sovereignty฀to฀the฀United฀Nations,฀ which฀now฀rules฀over฀the฀country฀and฀therefore฀must฀be฀destroyed.฀ During฀ the฀ s฀ and฀ s฀ there฀ was฀ a฀ movement฀ to฀ impeach฀ the฀ Supreme฀ Court฀ Chief฀ Justice฀ Earl฀ Warren,฀ as฀ well฀ as฀ groups฀ such฀as฀the฀Minutemen฀who฀were฀armed฀and฀prepared฀for฀insurrection.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

The United States and the established democracies of Western Europe in the twenty-first century do not resemble in any significant way the unstable Weimar Republic that was overthrown by Hitler and replaced by a militaristic, genocidal, totalitarian state. Even so, there are genuine neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in the West, including the American mass murderers Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, and Patrick Crusius. Police and intelligence agencies in the US and Europe should do their best to identify genuine potential domestic and foreign terrorists and prevent them from doing harm. Liberal democracy in the West today is not endangered by Russian machinations or resurgent fascism.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Biologists and physicians have a name for what happens when white blood cells scorn the organism they were made to serve, tearing loose the bonds of commensal life, attacking healthy tissue and bringing on a general collapse. The condition is a type of cancer called leukemia. When disdain of authority becomes bilious hatred, the result may be not a helpful dissenter but a calamitous traitor, such as Timothy McVeigh. In his published letters, the convicted Oklahoma City bomber repeatedly exulted in his own “exceptional” intelligence and insight, expressing not only wrath over purported government schemes but also delighted pride in being among the only ones to “see through their propaganda and lies.” McVeighʼs need to feel special was so profound, and his contempt for his fellow citizens so deep, that he cut himself off from every bit of feedback or criticism—anything that might have helped him notice the horrible error sloshing through his endorphin-soaked brain—the error of rationalizing a foul criminal act, the murder of 162 innocent neighbors and children.

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It should be noted that the analogy with a human immune system is inherently limited. For instance, in our own bodies, T-cells are ruthlessly winnowed by the thymus gland (hence the T) in order to ensure that these vigorous antagonist agents do not attack the self. Should we emulate such a culling mechanism, in order to prevent the harm done by “cancerous” cells, like Timothy McVeigh? Of course not! That would undermine the whole notion of error correction through criticism. And yet, might the same function of a social “thymus” be accomplished somehow through education and mental health? By instilling a loose sense of participation, community, and humor, while at the same time leaving undampened the eagerly individualistic drives that make for vigorous social critics?

Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11: The Pursuit of Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 by Seth G. Jones

airport security, battle of ideas, defense in depth, drone strike, Google Earth, index card, it's over 9,000, Khyber Pass, medical residency, Murray Gell-Mann, operational security, RAND corporation, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, WikiLeaks

While these groups could be dangerous, the absence of a direct connection to al Qa’ida or one of its affiliates made them dilettantes. “You wouldn’t believe how much cannon fodder I had,” Abu Zubaydah had remarked after he was captured. For every competent operative Zubaydah had identified, there were dozens more who were mostly useless.99 A select few homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in May 1995, had the military training to perpetrate a significant attack. At best, the 2006 and 2007 plots would have killed a handful of Americans and scared many more—no small feats, to be sure. But they were never going to be the spectacular, mass-casualty attacks al Qa’ida was hoping for.

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He had systematically risen up the FBI’s hierarchy to head counterterrorism and counterintelligence, thanks in part to his extraordinary competence, hard work, and blunt approach. It was fitting, then, for Cummings to retire on May 1, 2010, the day of Shahzad’s attempted attack. The timing couldn’t have been better. “We’re winning,” Cummings said to himself. “Even Timothy McVeigh could put a serious bomb together. But al Qa’ida was clearly on the wane. Shahzad’s bomb was a piece of crap.”73 WE GOT HIM BY LATE 2010, Ayman al-Zawahiri was under excruciating stress. Life as a fugitive in Pakistan had taken a heavy toll on his health and psychological well-being. His moods swung between cagey optimism about the war and morbid fatalism.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

However, careful readers who are also symbolism devotees would have noticed that the date in 1861 when the Baltimore mob clashed with the Massachusetts soldiers was April 19 — Patriot’s Day — the anniversary of Lexington and Concord, when the first shots were fired in the Revolutionary War. It is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he was wearing a T-shirt. On the back of the T-shirt, perhaps as a nod commemorating Patriot’s Day, was the famous quote from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande, clean water, discovery of penicillin, facts on the ground, medical malpractice, moral hazard, Oklahoma City bombing, private military company, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

I was a senior official in the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and in the administration, and in that role I defended the president's stance in support of capital punishment. I have no illusions that the death penalty deters anyone from murder. I also have great concern about the ability of our justice system to avoid putting someone innocent to death. However, I believe there are some human beings who do such evil as to deserve to die. I am not troubled that Timothy McVeigh was executed for the 168 people he killed in the Oklahoma City bombing or that John Wayne Gacy was for committing thirty-three murders. Still, I hadn't thought much about exactly how the executions are done. And I have always instinctively regarded involvement in executions by physicians and nurses as wrong.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In April 2010, hot on the heels of an outbreak of threats against members of Congress, came word that an Oklahoma Tea Party group was planning to form an armed militia to help defend the state against the perceived encroachment of the federal government—this in a state where, fifteen years earlier, Timothy McVeigh’s rage had turned deadly.133 The FBI was investigating an antigovernment extremist group that was sending letters to America’s governors demanding they resign or be “removed.”134 This followed the arrests of members of the Hutaree group, a radical Christian militia organization in Michigan that was plotting to kill police officers.135 When Tea Party members gathered for tax-day protests across the country, we were treated to a fresh wave of debate about whether these groups are fueled by anger, fear, racism, or class divisions.136 There was also talk about how much responsibility media outlets and certain political figures bear for inciting Tea Party crowds with violent rhetoric.

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

As if the point had not been made with sufficient emphasis, LaPierre added: “Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today.” The NRA’s rhetoric seemed even more out of bounds after April 19, 1995. On that day Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government militant, used a truck bomb to blow up a federal office building in downtown Oklahoma City. The facility housed regional branches of the FBI and the BATF. McVeigh killed 168 people, including many children in the facility’s day-care center; he injured more than 800. Former President George H.

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

After the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 (at the time, the deadliest attack on American government property since Pearl Harbor), the government became more vigilant about monitoring the activities of white power groups. Nonetheless, it still took the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime close to six months after the Oklahoma City bombing to hold a hearing on militias. No other committee took up the issue. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was seen more as a lone wolf terrorist than as someone who had been influenced by a white power movement. Although some white supremacist groups were stripped of their resources, their members simply scattered to other small groups, formed new organizations, and became increasingly active on newly emerging social media.12 They did not go away.

Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren C. Steffy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shock, peak oil, Piper Alpha, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh

The Grandcamp had been a Liberty ship, serving in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, it was given to the French to help in efforts to rebuild Europe. Part of that rebuilding process included supplying Europe with vast amounts of ammonium nitrate, a powerful fertilizer. It’s also a powerful explosive. The terrorist Timothy McVeigh used it in 1995 to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Longshoremen loaded more than 50,000 of the 100-pound bags into the belly of the Grandcamp, fuel to help Europe replant, to help feed a war-ravaged continent. A few of the bags I M M I N E N T H A Z A R D seemed warm to the touch, but the longshoremen continued with their work.

Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics by Glenn Greenwald

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh

In 2006, the event was attended by virtually the entire leadership of the Republican Party: Vice President Dick Cheney, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, then–2008 presidential hopeful Senator George Allen, then–Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Newt Gingrich. In addition to those luminaries, Ann Coulter was invited to be a featured speaker despite (or because of) her history of repeatedly urging the murder of her domestic political opponents and government officials by methods ranging from terrorist attacks (“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”) to assassinating Supreme Court Justices (“We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens’s crème brûlée”) to skull-bashing (“I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days to talk to liberals”). None of those violence-advocating comments ever prevent the most prominent Republican groups from inviting her to speak, nor do they prevent the most prominent Republican politicians from appearing next to her without ever condemning her remarks.

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, classic study, Columbine, David Brooks, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Ferguson, Missouri, Great Leap Forward, impulse control, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Paul Erdős, period drama, Peter Singer: altruism, public intellectual, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra

Many, including myself, have argued that novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bleak House prompted significant social change by guiding readers to feel the suffering of fictional characters. But we tend to forget that other novels push us in different ways. Joshua Landy provides some examples: For every Uncle Tom’s Cabin there is a Birth of a Nation. For every Bleak House there is an Atlas Shrugged. For every Color Purple there is a Turner Diaries, that white supremacist novel Timothy McVeigh left in his truck on the way to bombing the Oklahoma building. Every single one of these fictions plays on its readers’ empathy: not just high-minded writers like Dickens, who invite us to sympathize with Little Dorrit, but also writers of Westerns, who present poor helpless colonizers attacked by awful violent Native Americans; Ayn Rand, whose resplendent “job-creators” are constantly being bothered by the pesky spongers who merely do the real work; and so on and so on.

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

The team’s efforts to get Nav to sit down for a voluntary interview in the UK had gone nowhere, and the CFTC lacked the legal powers to access his communications. A breakthrough came in June 2014, with the arrival of a new head of enforcement. Aitan Goelman was a spiky former prosecutor from the Southern District of New York who made his name as a member of the team that prosecuted Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. After hearing about the case in Kansas City, Goelman suggested they see if the Justice Department was interested in coming on board. The CFTC had recently partnered with the DOJ on the Libor scandal, a sprawling, multiyear investigation into interest-rate rigging across Wall Street, and Goelman was aware just how useful the criminal authorities’ powers could be.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

The United States has been involved in damning and demonstrably true plots on its own soil (like the FBI’s plot to discredit Martin Luther King Jr.) and abroad (like the Reagan administration’s plot to illegally sell weapons to Iran in order to support counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua). In light of these revelations, suspicion might seem justifiable, even reasonable, to many Americans. I’m no exception here. For instance, I am militant in my unproven belief that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was aided by sympathetic, uncharged members of the white power movement. Given an hour and a strong drink, I will talk your ear off about this, possibly while drawing maps and diagrams on the nearest surface. My belief probably means I can be classified as a conspiracy theorist. Prologue 5 But conspiratorial belief is not without consequence.

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke, Robert Knake

air gap, barriers to entry, complexity theory, data acquisition, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, Golden arches theory, Herman Kahn, information security, Just-in-time delivery, launch on warning, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, packet switching, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, undersea cable, Y2K, zero day

“Indeed,” they continue, “the cyber enhancements that the military is banking on for its conventional forces may be chinks in America’s armor.” So by the mid-1990s journalists were seeing that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies were excited about the possibility of creating cyber war capabilities, but doing so would create a double-edged sword, one that could be used against us. MARCHING INTO THE MARSH Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols woke a lot of people up in 1995. Their inhumane attack in Oklahoma City, killing children at a day care center and civil servants at their desks, really got to Bill Clinton. He delivered an especially moving eulogy near the site of the attack. When he came back to the White House, I met with him, along with other White House staff.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

What will change is the calculus around when to use them. That will become an ever more expensive and riskier proposition. In spite of all the advances to come in the Fourth Age, there are two destructive forms of violence that won’t end any time soon. The first is that there will always be people like Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and the Tsarnaev brothers. We will always have people like the 9/11 bombers. Far away are the days when there exists no one evil enough or crazy enough to want to inflict mass destruction on strangers. I have no easy answer for this, and the reality is that these individuals’ ability to inflict ever more destruction will increase.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

I received my FBI credentials and swore to support and defend the Constitution three years after the first World Trade Center attack killed six people and injured thousands. Two years after jihadists had tried to topple one World Trade Center building into the other, anti–US government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols parked a Ryder truck full of explosives under a day care in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others. A year after that, Eric Robert Rudolph left a green US military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by masonry nails near a concert at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

An older generation of mainly white male workers in the US, for example, are incensed at what they consider to be the rising power of minorities, immigrants, gays and feminists, aided and abetted by arrogant intellectual (‘coastal) élites and greedy and ungodly Wall Street bankers who are generally perceived (wrongly) to be Jewish. Radical right-wing and armed militia movements of the sort that nurtured Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma bombing fame have revived since Obama’s election. They would plainly not join some grand anti-capitalist struggle (even though they are expressing antagonisms to bankers, corporations and élites and hatred for the Federal Reserve). They bear witness to a struggle on the part of those who feel alienated and dispossessed to repossess the country that they love by any means.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

She looked at the clock on her dashboard and switched to AM radio for news. The host was talking about the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which had killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured more than 500 others. She turned up the volume. No matter how many times she heard the bomber’s name—Timothy McVeigh—she couldn’t bring together what she heard with what she knew about McVeigh from high school. Back home in western New York, Theresia and McVeigh had worked together at Burger King. They both had run track in high school, been huge Buffalo Bills fans, and graduated in 1986. McVeigh wore camouflage and loved guns.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It’s our cultural predisposition to violence. We pummel each other, maul each other, stab each other and shoot each other because it’s our cultural imperative to do so.16 When culture is seen as an entity with beliefs and desires, the beliefs and desires of actual people are unimportant. After Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people, the journalist Alfie Kohn ridiculed Americans who “yammer about individual responsibility” and attributed the bombing to American individualism: “We have a cultural addiction to competition in this country. We’re taught in classrooms and playing fields that other people are obstacles to our own success.”17 A related explanation for the bombing put the blame on American symbols, such as the arrow-clutching eagle on the national seal, and state mottoes, including “Live Free or Die” (New Hampshire) and “With the sword, we seek peace, but under liberty” (Massachusetts).18 A popular recent theory attributes American violence to a toxic and peculiarly American conception of maleness inculcated in childhood.

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James Bond, for example—who actually has a license to kill—is British, and martial arts films are popular in many industrialized Asian countries. In any case, only a bookworm who has never actually seen an American movie or television program could believe that they glorify murderous fanatics like Timothy McVeigh or teenagers who randomly shoot classmates in high school cafeterias. Masculine heroes in the mass media are highly moralistic: they fight bad guys. Among conservative politicians and liberal health professionals alike it is an article of faith that violence in the media is a major cause of American violent crime.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

It must recognize that change is afoot, and not merely one that will only be to America’s benefit. [THIRTEEN] OPEN-SOURCE WARFARE: COLLEGE KIDS, TERRORISTS, AND OTHER NEW USERS OF ROBOTS AT WAR If I can imagine it, what would a totally dedicated, well-educated individual do, especially if they have a Timothy McVeigh personality? — GREG BEAR In the summer of 2005, Sam Bell set out to buy a military-grade robotic drone. As a subsequent article about his experience described, “It was an unusual shopping expedition for a private citizen, much less a 22-year-old only a few months removed from his political science and philosophy studies at Swarthmore College.

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The footage was so detailed that they were able to sight their mortars to target the soft-skinned tents in the base, rather than harder-to-damage buildings. THE PERILS OF A BAD HAIR DAY When we think of the terrorist risks that emanate from unmanned systems, robotics expert Robert Finkelstein advises that we shouldn’t just look at organizations like al-Qaeda. “They can make a lone actor like Timothy McVeigh even more scary.” He describes a scenario in which “a few amateurs could shut down Manhattan with relative ease.” (Given that my publisher is based in Manhattan, we decided to leave the details out of the book.) Washington Post technology reporter Joel Garreau similarly writes, “One bright but embittered loner or one dissident grad student intent on martyrdom could—in a decent biological lab for example—unleash more death than ever dreamed of in nuclear scenarios.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum

anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, Columbine, disinformation, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, it's over 9,000, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

(The FBI reportedly came to the latter conclusion long before the video was made public.6) Given that, it appears eminently safe to say that exceedingly few other people in the world were knowingly in on the plot, perhaps a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Consequently, if the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan was designed to kill the actual perpetrators, it was a fool's mission; a violent fool. If Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the terrible bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, had not been quickly caught, would the United States have bombed the state of Michigan or any of the other places he called home? No, they would have instituted a mammoth manhunt until they found him and punished him.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

Even in the smallest local police agencies, excitement over the post-9/11 national security mission was palpable. Idaho State Police sergeant Russell Wheatley, who manages the state’s intelligence fusion center, did not have any international problems to investigate. The closest he got was arresting violent white supremacist and survivalist groups. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were never far from his mind. But he was ready to join the bigger fight against global terrorism anytime. Sitting in his squad car one day, his enthusiasm bubbled over. “It kinda gives me a chill to think that something a state trooper does will someday evolve into something that has to do with national security.”

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

The immediate response of the soda plants was to scrub this soluble gas by sprinkling water down the inside of their chimneys and discharge the resultant hydrochloric acid straight into the nearest river, deftly sidestepping the legislation by turning air pollution into water pollution! * More than two tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer were packed by Timothy McVeigh into the back of a truck for the Oklahoma City bombing, and one of the world’s largest non-nuclear explosions occurred in 1947 when a fire caused a ship carrying more than 2,000 tons of the compound to detonate in the port of Texas City. * The parallel streets of Manhattan’s grid-like layout are aligned along a bearing of 30 degrees east of celestial north, and twice a year (in late May and mid-July, evenly flanking the summer solstice), this grid behaves like a city-size Stonehenge, with the sun setting right down the centerline of the canyon-like streets

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Stephen Braun, Douglas Farah

air freight, airport security, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, plutocrats, private military company, Timothy McVeigh

In March 1995, the bizarre attempt by Aum Shinrikyo cult members to release nerve gas in a Tokyo subway added biological and chemical attacks as a perceived threat in the terror arsenal—along with growing worries about loosely controlled nuclear materials. A month later, the Oklahoma City bombing by right-wing extremist Timothy McVeigh raised new fears of attacks on government buildings. Clinton responded with a classified June 1995 directive that identified terrorism as the most urgent national security issue, putting all agencies on notice to “deter, defeat, and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory.”

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

It was McConnell’s well-intentioned, but misguided, effort to forge a compromise between personal privacy and national security—and to do so openly, in the public eye. The next time the NSA created or discovered back doors into data, it would do so, as it had always done, under the cloak of secrecy. CHAPTER 3 * * * A CYBER PEARL HARBOR ON April 19, 1995, a small gang of militant anarchists, led by Timothy McVeigh, blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, injuring 600 more, and destroying or damaging 325 buildings across a sixteen-block radius, causing more than $600 million in damage. The shocking thing that emerged from the subsequent investigation was just how easily McVeigh and his associates had pulled off the bombing.

The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Even women—they’re stepping all over them.”10 Bandar described the anger of the prince, especially at the Israeli practice of destroying the houses of family members of terrorists: “We wonder how the American people would have accepted the President of the United States ordering all the McVeigh family houses to be destroyed or burning their farms,” he said, referring to the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.11 c17.qxd 6/25/03 8:25 AM Page 121 THE CASE FOR ISRAEL 121 Abdullah failed to mention that McVeigh’s family did not praise their son’s actions. Nor did they assist him and encourage him to become a martyr. Moreover, he was not part of an ongoing effort that continues to terrorize civilians.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

“Well …,” I said, thinking out loud about what I was going to tell the reporters waiting in the hallway outside Reid’s office. “Well, this could be good …,” I started. Reid threw back his head, laughing. Judge Merrick Garland is a wonderful human being with an impressive record. At the Justice Department, he had overseen the federal investigations into the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. His credentials as a jurist were unimpeachable, and he had been confirmed to his current job on the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit with Republican support. For eighteen years, he tutored children at a public school in a low-income neighborhood of Washington, DC.

America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom by Meghan McCain, Michael Black

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, Columbine, fear of failure, feminist movement, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, white picket fence

My best Muslim friend is a comedian with Elvis sideburns who does a videogame podcast; it’s hard for me to get too worked up about Islam in general when that’s the guy I most closely associate with the faith. At the same time, Americans tend to automatically dismiss homegrown, non-Muslim terrorists like Timothy McVeigh as nut jobs because all of us know so many people who look and act like him. Who hasn’t met the paranoid, angry white guy with the buzz cut muttering about black helicopters? Most of the time, that dude is a harmless crank. When he does end up doing the unthinkable, we shrug him off as crazy.

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown

Ascot racecourse, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, sensible shoes, Timothy McVeigh

He claimed that she had once told him the reason for her unpopularity: ‘It was inevitable; when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honour and all that is good while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.’ * In his final decade, Vidal’s aperçus became more and more crackpot. In different essays, he argued that Frank Sinatra was a charming man who had no connection with the Mafia; that there was a media conspiracy to demonise Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was simply an innocent young man with an exaggerated sense of justice; that there is ‘overwhelming’ evidence that the 1995 Oklahoma bombing was part of a plot by the US government to get President Clinton to sign an anti-terrorism act; that Anthony Hopkins is just ‘a solid, workmanlike English repertory actor’; that 90 per cent of all American paper currency contains drug residue; that Clinton was innocent of any sexual congress with Monica Lewinsky, who had been put up to it by the American tobacco industry; and that the Soviet Union had never been any danger to anyone.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the Clinton administration called together a dozen officials from across the government to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Since essential services such as health care and banking were moving online, the committee quickly turned its attention from physical threats, like Timothy McVeigh’s infamous Ryder truck, to computer-based ones. The group helped establish what became known as the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) in 1998. With representatives from the FBI, the Secret Service, intelligence agencies, and other federal departments, the NIPC was tasked with preventing and investigating computer intrusions.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

But while ubiquitous surveillance could succeed in the majority of those cases, primarily against less technically savvy attackers, it would fail against the most motivated, most skilled, and best-funded attackers. As technology improves, the number of conspirators and the amount of planning required to unleash havoc shrinks further, making surveillance-based detection even less effective. Think of Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb, and the handful of accomplices who helped him attack the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Maybe ubiquitous surveillance could have detected the plot in the planning and purchasing stages, but probably not. Targeted surveillance, based on old-fashioned follow-the-lead police work, might more effectively identify those who advocate violent overthrow of the US government and go about assembling bomb-making materials.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Defense & Arms Control Studies Program Seminar, 29 November. Meyer, Josh. 2006. “U.S. Faults Saudi Efforts on Terrorism.” Los Angeles Times 15 January: A1. Meyer, Stephen M. 1984. The Dynamics of Nuclear Proliferation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Michel, Lou, and Dan Herbeck. 2001. American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. New York: ReganBooks. Milhollin, Gary. 2002. “Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Commentary February: 45–49. Milward, Alan S. 1977. War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mlakar, Paul F. Sr., W. Gene Corley, Mete A. Sozen, and Charles H.

Merchants' War by Stross, Charles

British Empire, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, East Village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, operational security, packet switching, peak oil, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh

"That's- " he swallowed "-it may be true, but that's not how things work right now. Not since 9/11." "Then they're going to regret it." Her gaze was level. "You must warn your superiors of this-the political is personal. If the conservatives think your government is mistreating their prisoners, they'll take revenge, horrible revenge. Timothy McVeigh and Mohamed Atta were rank amateurs compared to these people, and Clan security probably can't prevent an atrocity from happening if you provoke them. You need to warn your bosses, Mr. Fleming. They're playing with fire: or would you like to see a suicide bomber invite himself to the next White House reception?"

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

He references the number 14 to indicate the fourteen-word slogan originally coined by white supremacist David Lane while imprisoned for his role in the 1984 murder of Jewish radio talk-show host Alan Berg: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane, for his part, explicitly extolled the writings of white supremacist William Pierce, who in turn inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people. Accusations of racism and white supremacism are thrown around so casually these days that the meaning of these terms has become diluted and ambiguous. So, for clarity, I will state the obvious by emphasizing that the writings of Tarrant, Lane, and Pierce all reflect attitudes that are completely racist and hateful, as such terms are properly used.

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

There is no Justice Department to investigate the Justice Department.” One of the people sentenced by the judge was Renos Avraam, who commented: “This nation is supposed to run under laws, not personal feelings. When you ignore the law you sow the seeds of terrorism.” This turned out to be a prophetic statement. Timothy McVeigh, who some years after the Waco tragedy was convicted of bombing the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which cost 168 lives, had visited the Waco site twice. Later, according to an FBI affidavit, McVeigh was “extremely agitated” about the government’s assault on Waco. Clinton’s “law and order” approach led him early in his first term to sign legislation cutting funds for state resource centers that supplied lawyers to indigent prisoners.

…

Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The New York Times reported that July that “hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed.” There was a certain irrationality to this new law, for it was passed in response to the blowing up of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, who was native born. The new government policy toward immigrants, far from fulfilling Clinton’s promise of “a new government for a new century,” was a throwback to the notorious Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 and the McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act of the 1950s. It was hardly in keeping with the grand claim inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

This is Boehm’s political transition and reverse dominance. If the original triggers of this foundation include bullies and tyrants, the current triggers include almost anything that is perceived as imposing illegitimate restraints on one’s liberty, including government (from the perspective of the American right). In 1993, when Timothy McVeigh was arrested a few hours after he blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, he was wearing a T-shirt that said Sic semper tyrannis. Less ominously, the populist anger of the Tea Party relies on this foundation, as shown in their unofficial flag, which says “Don’t tread on me” (see figure 7.4).

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

It would take far less time to answer, “What would remain the same?” No longer would we be electing people who will turn around and tax us to death, regulate us to death, or for that matter sent [sic] hired thugs to kill us when we oppose their wishes.78 Bell, predictably, became a divisive figure. Then–IRS inspector Jeff Gordon compared him to terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City in April 1995, killing 168 people. On the other end of the spectrum was John Young, an architect and cypherpunk who would found the first whistle-blowing portal in 1996: Cryptome. Young nominated Bell for a Chrysler Design Award for creating an “Information Design for Governmental Accountability.”79 Crypto anarchy, some successes notwithstanding, seemed to meander toward the fringe.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

“We know it’s a little more difficult financially here in Oklahoma City, but we think it’s great for the community and if we could break even we’d be thrilled.”6 For speaking his mind and acknowledging that the owners held out hope of moving the team after all, National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern slapped McClendon with a record $250,000 fine. Two years later, the team did move to Oklahoma City. McClendon wanted his company to be first-class and he wanted to help Oklahoma City gain its own recognition. The city had gone through its share of difficult times. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, a man brimming with anger at the U.S. government, set off a bomb so powerful that it destroyed Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, as well as destroying or damaging over three hundred buildings nearby, taking 168 lives, including nineteen children under the age of six. McClendon cared about Oklahoma City and was determined to help it reinvent itself as a cultured and world-class city.

America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism by Anatol Lieven

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, driverless car, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, income inequality, laissez-faire capitalism, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, moral panic, new economy, Norman Mailer, oil shock, open immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey, Y2K

Nor has this been wholly lacking in the United States, if one remembers the number of successful (and unsuccessful) American generals elected to high office or encouraged to aspire to it.116 But in the United States, such threats have in the end always been contained by the institutions of American democratic constitutionalism, thanks not only to the institutions themselves, but to the strength and uniformity of the democratic national political culture and ideology sustaining them. Although at their farther 117 AMERICA RIGHT OR WRONG fringes the forces of the American antithesis shade over into fascistic manias like that of the terrorist Timothy McVeigh and the various militia movements, the great majority are not opposed to the formal democratic aspects of the American Creed; on the contrary, they take enormous pride in them and regard them as the core of American grandeur. This national unanimity behind democracy has formed the essential component of what might be called America's self-correcting mechanism, the country's ability to undergo periods of popular hysteria, moral panic and nationalist extremism without allowing them to become a permanent feature of the national scene or to be institutionalized in dictatorship.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Now ask any Internet security professional how to take down the Internet, permanently. I’ve heard about half a dozen different ways, and I know I haven’t exhausted the possibilities. The knowledge is there; the systems are vulnerable. All it takes is someone with just the right combination of skill and morals. Sometimes it doesn’t even take that much skill. Timothy McVeigh did quite a number on the Oklahoma City federal building, even though his banausic use of explosives probably disgusted a professional like Loizeaux. Dr. Harold Shipman murdered possibly as many as 150 of his patients, using artless techniques like injecting them with morphine. At first glance cyberspace is no different from any other piece of our society’s infrastructure: fragile and vulnerable.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Naturally, global inequality by itself isn’t the direct cause of terrorist acts. Religious fundamentalism and individual psychopathology also play essential roles. Every country has its crazy angry individuals driven to kill other people; poor countries have no monopoly on them. The U.S. had its Timothy McVeigh who killed 168 people by a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, and its Theodore Kaczynski who mailed packages containing carefully designed bombs that killed three people and injured 23. Norway had its Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 people and injured 319, many of them children, with a bomb and a gun.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

War is an armed conflict between two or more states.”8 James Cole, a prominent government and private attorney who was later appointed Deputy Attorney General by President Obama, similarly insisted in a 2002 article that “for all the rhetoric about war, the Sept. 11 attacks were criminal acts of terrorism against a civilian population, much like the terrorist acts of Timothy McVeigh.”9 September 11 was a “devastating crime,” Cole continued, but one for which ordinary criminal law offered the most appropriate framework.10 Amnesty International took the same view.11 But others insisted with equal certainty on the correctness of the opposite proposition: insofar as the 9/11 attacks stemmed from overseas and caused death and destruction on a scale more commonly associated with armed conflict than with crime, they should be conceptualized as acts of war, triggering the law of armed conflict.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Air traffic controllers had to use cell phones and battery-powered radios to direct planes during the outage.9 No accidents occurred, but an air traffic control manager told CNN, “We dodged a bullet that day.”10 That same year, the specially convened Marsh Commission published a report examining the vulnerability of critical infrastructure systems to attack—both physical and digital. The commission had been charged with investigating the matter after Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and took out a number of key data and communication centers in the process. The commissioners warned of the increasing perils created from connecting critical systems for oil, gas, and electricity to the internet. “The capability to do harm … is growing at an alarming rate; and we have little defense against it,” they wrote.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

In an early sign of his influence and bankability, he raised $93,000 from Infowars listeners to rebuild the compound’s church. In 1995, Jones pushed bogus claims that the government plotted the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, whose true perpetrator, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, expressed rage at the Waco compound’s destruction.[5] Jones met his first wife, Kelly Nichols, on a sweltering day in downtown Austin in 1998. Jones was jumping up and down on a busy city street, wearing a fat-rumped bumble bee costume as an advertising stunt for KJFK. The future Kelly Jones had been a PETA activist, skilled at ginning up media attention.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

drive rather than fly: “Consequences for Road Traffic Fatalities of the Reduction in Flying Following September 11, 2001,” Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior, vol. 7, nos. 4–5 (July–September 2004), pp. 301–05. assigned to counterterrorism: Carl Ingram, “CHP May Get to Hire 270 Officers,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2004, p. B1. In the article, one police officer points out that Timothy McVeigh was caught on a “routine traffic stop.” Eerily enough, Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 participants, was ticketed once for speeding and once for driving without a license; the license he finally got was suspended when he failed to appear in court. raising speed limits: Elihu D.

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Two years earlier, terrorists with roots in the Middle East had set off an explosive device in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center, a failed effort to topple both towers that left six dead. Quickly, though, it emerged that the devastation in Oklahoma City was an act of domestic terror, conceived and executed by two native-born Americans—Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—and fueled by their deep rage toward the federal government. There had never been a deadlier terror attack in the United States. Across the country, Americans absorbed images from Oklahoma City with horror and numbness. A memorial service was scheduled for the next Sunday, April 23.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

So when an American citizen with Afghan parents shot up a Florida nightclub in 2016, killing 49, the horrors set off a different and stronger outrage than if a majority person had pulled the trigger: one directed at a whole group of people perceived by many to share responsibility for the offense. Meanwhile a white committing such an atrocity, like Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is more often seen as a deviant individual, personally accountable for what happened.42 Throughout the history of nations, one loathed group has replaced another in endless succession, their trustworthiness, indeed their merit and citizenship, called to question in a roller-coaster of perceptions.

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan, Daniel Freedman

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, call centre, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, independent contractor, PalmPilot, power law, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Witnesses reported that Abdu appeared to be the leader of the two other men. We also located the crane operators. They confirmed that they had rented a crane to two men for 10,000 rials. An FBI artist worked on creating sketches of the men. He was the same artist who had drawn the Wanted sketch of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. It was a tortuous process, as he didn’t speak Arabic and had to work through a translator. Despite the difficulty, the witnesses said that the final sketches were realistic likenesses. Days after we arrived in Yemen, one of my Yemeni friends told me confidentially that some pieces of the USS Cole, including parts of the protective fiberglass cover on the outer surface of the radar, had washed ashore.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Prior to September 11, the largest terror attack in a Western country* had been only about one-tenth as fatal, when in 1985 a Sikh extremist group hid a bomb in an Air India flight bound for Delhi from Montreal, killing 329 passengers. The destruction of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah federal building by the militant Timothy McVeigh in 1995, which killed 168, had been the largest attack on American soil. But September 11 was not an outlier. Although the particulars of the events that day were not discerned in advance—and although they may have been very hard to predict—we had some reason to think that an attack on the scale of September 11 was possible.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In the pre-9/11 days of Bill Clinton’s America, the planning commissioners weren’t worried about international terrorism and couldn’t have even comprehended the company that Blackwater would become. Instead, what concerned them was property values, noise ordinances, and the possibility that the types of militia groups that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had been linked to would come to their community for training. When Erik Prince appealed to the plan commissioners, his project was described as a “$2 million outdoor shooting range.”32 At the time, Prince estimated the facility could create up to thirty new jobs in the county and help to train its sheriff’s department.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

My project, frankly, is to replace his world.”12 THE DECENCY PATROL Meanwhile, Senator James Exon looked at this new online landscape, and all he saw was smut. The Nebraska Democrat had grown alarmed by the tales he’d heard of the pornography and criminality that filled the Internet’s dark corners, from X-rated websites to the online copy of the “mayhem manual” that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh had used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995. Indeed, Exon was right: porn was the early Internet’s biggest growth industry, “one of the largest recreational applications of users of computer networks,” reported one widely-read survey. BBSs and Usenet groups—the information superhighway of the 1980s that had grown like a weed as online access expanded in the early 1990s—were now saturated with pornography, as more bandwidth allowed users to download and share images and videos with ease.

Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

Held in response to a botched federal raid at Ruby Ridge, the attendees came up with a solution to stem such overreaches by government forces: form militias. Soon there were militias in Montana, Michigan, Indiana and Colorado, where three men were arrested in connection with a pipe bomb in 1997. Of course, militias really made news when Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. According to militia watchdogs, the movement waned after the bombing and subsequent Colorado arrests, although activity has resurfaced in the years since President Barack Obama took office.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

However, they interpolate that role and those relations with a sub-rosa network of connections that fulfill otherwise suppressed emotional needs and ties. 652 The phenomenon is not limited to youths, but is applicable more generally to the capacity of users to rely on their networked connections to escape or moderate some of the more constraining effects of their stable social connections. In the United States, a now iconic case--mostly described in terms of privacy--was that of U.S. Navy sailor Timothy McVeigh (not the Oklahoma bomber). McVeigh was discharged from the navy when his superiors found out that he was gay by accessing his AOL (America Online) account. The case was primarily considered in terms of McVeigh's e-mail account privacy. It settled for an undisclosed sum, and McVeigh retired from the navy with benefits.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

Here is Susan Sontag’s “posthumous irony” indeed, as medieval Europe recreated itself in the form of a charismatic man, a messiah, a messenger of God, the bearer of the perfect truth, who exercised sexual power over his female followers and persuaded them to bear his children in order to begin a “Davidian” line. In that grim inferno, children, their mothers, and other followers died. Even more died two years later when Timothy McVeigh, exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco, committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the symptoms in a developing psychosis, noted and described by psychiatrists, is “religiosity.” Have we really reached a stage in public affairs when it really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all the promptings of our precious rationality suggest that our future is not fixed?

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

As for terrorists, you might object that many of the political murderers, suicide bombers, and 9/11 terrorists were educated and moneyed rather than uneducated and desperate. That's true, but they still depended on a desperate society for support and toleration. Any society has its murderous fanatics; the U.S. produced its own Timothy McVeigh and its Harvard-educated Theodore Kaczinski. But well-nourished societies offering good job prospects, like the U.S., Finland, and South Korea, don't offer broad support to their fanatics. The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalization.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

As for terrorists, you might object that many of the political murderers, suicide bombers, and 9/11 terrorists were educated and moneyed rather than uneducated and desperate. That’s true, but they still depended on a desperate society for support and toleration. Any society has its murderous fanatics; the U.S. produced its own Timothy McVeigh and its Harvard-educated Theodore Kaczinski. But well-nourished societies offering good job prospects, like the U.S., Finland, and South Korea, don’t offer broad support to their fanatics. The problems of all these environmentally devastated, overpopulated, distant countries become our own problems because of globalization.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Later, perhaps because they attacked the world’s only superpower so ferociously, we gifted them with the title of “insurgents.” 144 Among the many thousands of Americans who were decorated for their role in the Kuwait liberation was a young gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle who received the Bronze Star and several other medals. Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier, then tried to join the U.S. Special Forces, but dropped out and left the army embittered on 31 December 1991. He was executed on 11 June 2001 for the 19 April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 167 Americans. 145 As so often, American “intelligence sources” had contributed to this mind-set.

…

Chapter Sixteen: Betrayal 646 “Rise to save the homeland”: See Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 25 February 1991, p. 4, “Iraqis Urged to Revolt, Save Country from Dictatorship, War.” 647 the Iraqis had tried to jam: See Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 4 January 1991, “Anti-Saddam Radio Believed Jammed.” 647 “the allies to liberate Iraq”: Interview with Haidar al-Assadi, Beirut, 3 May 1998. 649 Iraqi dead at up to 150,000: Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 1 March 1991. 649 had claimed that 26,000 Iraqis: Jumhouri-y Islami (Tehran), 19 February 1991, cited by Dilip Hiro in letter to The Independent, 8 February 1992. 649 When a Pentagon source: Newsday, 12 September 1991, cited by Hiro, as above. 650 dropped nearly as many tons: International Herald Tribune, 10 July 1996, quoting New York Times article by Tim Weiner, “Smart Arms in Gulf War Are Found Overrated.” 650 “35—almost one-quarter”: Associated Press report from Washington, 13 August 1991, “Gulf Friendly Fire Casualties Rise,” by Susanne M. Chafer. 650 The independent U.S. General Accounting Office: See International Herald Tribune, 10 July 1996, op. cit. 650 In fact, as Seymour Hersh: New Yorker, 26 September 1994, pp. 86–99, “Missile Wars,” by Seymour Hersh, esp. p. 92. (n.) 650 Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier: Reuters report in Irish Times, 3 June 1997. 652 All of this I duly reported: See Independent, 27 March 1991. (n.) 652 Other testimony to Kuwaiti persecution: See, for example, Libération, 20 March 1991, “La grande peur des Palestiniens du Kuweit,” by Jean Michel Thénard. 657 The refugees who now streamed: See Guardian, 14 March 1991, “Rebels ‘hanged from tank gun barrels’ by Saddam’s men,” by Sharif Imam-Jomeh (Reuters) and Nora Boustany (Washington Post). 658 “Better the Saddam Hussein”: Guardian, 13 March 1991, “Britain and U.S. part over Iraqi rebels,” by Hella Pick. 661 would be compared to the Soviet demands: See, for example, Independent , 28 March 1991, “Fiddling while Basra burns,” by Godfrey Hodgson. 663 “What’s the better option”: International Herald Tribune , 23 March 1991, quoting Washington Post report by Dan Balz and Al Kamen, “U.S.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Murad’s confession about a plan to hijack a civilian airliner and crash it into the CIA received little attention at the FBI because that plot was not part of the evidentiary case the bureau was building for courtroom prosecution. The FBI was distracted. Domestic terrorism overshadowed Islamist attacks during 1995. In April, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb outside the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and wounding hundreds more. The bombing galvanized the Clinton administration to focus on terrorism, but the long investigation drained FBI resources. The bureau never followed up with a detailed investigation of the airplane kamikaze plan.29 The CIA remained focused on Iranian and Shiite terrorist threats.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks were literally off the chart—way down in the tail of the power-law distribution into which terrorist attacks fall.181 According to the Global Terrorism Database of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (the major publicly available dataset on terrorist attacks), between 1970 and 2007 only one other terrorist attack in the entire world has killed as many as 500 people.182 In the United States, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killed 165, a shooting spree by two teenagers at Columbine High School in 1999 killed 17, and no other attack has killed as many as a dozen. Other than 9/11, the number of people killed by terrorists on American soil during these thirty-eight years was 340, and the number killed after 9/11—the date that inaugurated the so-called Age of Terror—was 11.