The media is not your friend.

“If anything good can come out of such a horrible event as today, maybe it will be a wake-up call that we have enemies that are out to destroy us...They never let up and in many ways they are more treacherous than they were before September 11th because they’ve metastasized, they’ve morphed and many of them are under the radar screen, and that’s why we have to be so aggressive.” -- Peter King on Fox News

Terrorists pose a vastly greater threat to your civil liberties than your person, but in this they work through intermediaries.

On Stupid Questions

Was thinking about all the things we don't know. This has got to be one of the hardest things to do because it's a lot. In fact, just how much is difficult to appreciate because it feels like we know so much. As a practical matter, if we've gone 200 thousand years without a single one if us knowing something, we probably have some really strong assumptions about it. We would feel these as the most obvious things in the universe, so patently true that we wouldn't even think it required explanation. I'm talking bedrock assumptions here, guys. Do you know what this means? It means that some of the stupidest questions could contain the greatest discoveries. Is the Earth flat? Were the animals always like that? What is air made of? Think about this the next time you hear a stupid question. Give it a moment before you blow it off and dismiss it to someone's ignorance, and check your assumptions. Maybe there is a discovery behind one.