By now you’ve no doubt heard about the insanity in Austin yesterday (no, I wasn’t there – I was on a business trip in New York). But have you read the manifesto? The one he edited and republished 27 times?

Normally I wouldn’t reward an act of terror by broadcasting the ideas of the terrorist – but in this case, they merit study because they’re not quite crazy enough (in the context of what currently passes for national dialogue) to make you believe he’s just an isolated nutjob without any likeminded peers who might try something similar. Add in the number of Facebook groups saluting Stack, and the armed crowds advocating violent overthrow in the name of the Founding Fathers this past summer and you have to wonder – is terrorism in the name of patriotism becoming an increasingly acceptable approach for some of the politically-disenfranchised?  Or is this guy just another fringe loner like so many of the armed gunmen whose own tragic sprees have taken so many American lives in the past decade or so?

An interesting sidenote – why does the media refrain from calling him a suicide bomber? I understand the basic semantic argument (he didn’t actually have a bomb), but listening to first-hand accounts of the blaze ignited by his jet fuel, it’s hard to call it anything but a bomb. So why does the media hesitate to assign a term they so freely toss around when discussing Islamic fundamentalists in the middle east?

Finally, in case you were wondering what Austin’s resident conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, has to say about all this – his site, Prison Planet, is reporting that the FBI knew about the attack as early as Wednesday and dispatched officers from Dallas to be in place for the response. It’s a theory that will likely pick up a little steam on the internet, fueled by the (fortunately) very low fatalies-to-visible damage ratio.

More on this from your man in Austin as details emerge.