But perhaps more important than the impact within what was on its way to becoming Israel and Palestine was the example the PLO had set for the world.  Munich’s horrible violence hadn’t just been watched live in living rooms across the globe, in the months that followed it was re-aired countless times – helping the contagion of terror to catch on and encouraging imitators.^6.5 And so since inside four-years “a handful of Palestinian terrorists had overcome a quarter-century of neglect and obscurity” and “achieved what diplomats, statesmen, lobbyists and humanitarian workers had persistently tried and failed to do” the rest of the world was quick to take note.  Within a decade the number of discrete groups committing acts of terrorism either on the international stage or against foreign targets in their own nation had more than quadrupled.⁷ All of this change after just fifteen-hours of terror.

America’s first personal experience with this method began thirteen years later, in 1985, minutes after Robert Stethem’s shattered body gave up its final traces of warmth to the chilled macadam pressed against it.

Once the trucks carrying the hostages, all American males, from TWA Flight 847 had reached their destinations somewhere within Beirut’s suburbs the terrorists issued their demand: the hostages would only be freed when 776 Shiites held in Israeli jails were released. Because of the seeming tactical nature of this demand it would seem that it’s an act of Tactical Terror, however this is one of the cases that serves well to trace out the fact that Tactical Terror and Symbolic Terror in fact lay on the ends of a spectrum. The most important point in proving that this instance of terrorism is evenly balanced is that, although it’s easy to forget, at the time of the hijackings Hezbollah was still coalescing as a group.

Today it’s widely held that the 1983 bombings of the Marine barracks were carried out by Hezbollah, but this is an oversimplification. As it was mentioned earlier, training for the attacks was provided by both the Syrian and Iranian armies, as were the plastic explosives used in the attack. And the attack itself was ordered from Tehran. Hezbollah, as a discrete group as we now think of it, at the time did not yet exist as discretely as it does now. In fact, it took well over a decade for responsibility to be either claimed or ascribed to Hezbollah – for a very long while we weren’t sure who had carried out the attack, and no one claimed to have done it.

Elements that would eventually become a part of Hezbollah, but which in 1983 didn’t have a singular group identity, did execute the attack. But they didn’t act on their own and would’ve been incapable of carrying it out without the training and materiel supplied by the Syrian and Iranian armies. And so in 1985 Hezbollah was still struggling to define itself and gain support within Lebanon, necessitating an act of Symbolic Terror to help win adherents to flesh out the group’s ideological framework. The release of prisoners would’ve been a tactical victory, but that demand was more a moral justification for violence.

All that said, what this attack tells us most about isn’t the debate about whether it was more an act of Tactical or Symbolic Terror. It was, like all acts of terrorism, a bit of each – but more importantly it was a watershed event which totally shifted the media-driven calculus of context and perception which all acts of terror are perceived by. What the hostage situation following the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 changed lies outside this spectrum, and within the cameras, editing rooms, and eventually living rooms of America.

Within days of the hostages being taken, the three major American television networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – deployed a “small army of reporters, field producers, editors, camera crew and sound technicians” to the scene of the Breaking News. Beirut’s American population had grown over the course of just a few days by eighty-five, all employees of the three major networks. This sent a clear message to the American public, that “no other news of any significance was occurring anywhere else.”⁸

As the days went on, the networks justified the presence of their personnel in Beiruit by creating “news” to justify their continued heavy presence in Beirut. What emerged was a gross imbalance between soft human-interest stories mostly covering the hostages’ families back home, and coverage of real issues such as the Reagan administration’s efforts to reach a resolution.

Over the course of the seventeen-day crisis almost five-hundred discrete segments were aired by the three major networks, for an average of almost twenty-nine a day. Each evening during the seventeen-day crisis about two-thirds of every networks flagship news story focused on the hostage crisis, and regular programs were interrupted at least eighty times by news bulletins or special reports.⁹ In contrast, Munich lasted only fifteen-hours. And perhaps more indicative of the importance of this attack wasn’t just the sum total of the coverage, but the tone that coverage was taking.

The Reagan administration was eventually pushed by the American public to compel Israel to release 756 of the imprisoned Shiites, due in part to the tone of the media coverage. Combined with the soft human-interest stories that were creating news when there really was none was the tone of the commentary, which “repeatedly and unthinkingly equated the wanton kidnapping of entirely innocent airline passengers… with Shi’a militiamen and suspected terrorists detained by Israeli troops.”¹⁰

The bias of the major news networks became so wanton that a running joke among journalists was that NBC actually denoted “the Nabih Berri Company,” Nabih Berri being the leader of the militia whose men were being held by Israel. This biased tone was not just a mistake made by the major American media networks. It was, for the first time, the result of the concentrated and well-planned effort by the terrorists. The terrorists intentionally manufactured a “perverted form of show business”¹¹ through spin-doctors of the hostage takers, who met with the American journalists. These spin-doctors, many of whom graduated with media studies degrees from American colleges, wove a polished PR campaign that was consciously and successfully aimed at manipulating media coverage of the event.

Hijacking, the fate of Flight 847 demonstrated, didn’t have to be confined to airplanes. By hijacking the media the terrorists were able to bring a crisis into the living rooms of every Americans for the better part of a month. Terrorism as “a violent act that is conceived specifically to attract attention and then, through the publicity it generates, to communicate a message” was brought against America for the first time with TWA Flight 847.¹²

And unlike the media coverage of the Munich Olympic Games, which was in comparison rather fleeting and taken for granted by the PLO, the extended coverage of this hostage crisis was engineered and manufactured by the terrorists who carried it out to both target a specific audience and be drawn out as long as necessary. Munich showed that the modern mass media had the potential to be an invaluable tool to the terrorist, and Flight 847 proved that the terrorists could actively work to use this tool to carve out perceptions that would be carried to the world.

This wasn’t lost on Osama bin Ladin. He not only took the lessons from Munich and the hostage crisis that followed the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, he was – as the events following 9/11 bear out – their most attentive and inventive student.

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –

Traditional publishing never worked, it was an industry ruled by chance and blind luck. Its demise will be the best thing that’s ever happened to authors as the royalty system is rearranged and bureaucratic fat is removed from the system.

Roth did just fine as a writer before he began penning novels and getting advances, he taught and wrote small pieces on the side – getting an advance isn’t the issue, being paid at all is. Are a lack of advances the issue, or could that be theoretically compensated for by – oh, I don’t know – changing up the royalty system?

Let’s take a quick look at the royalty system, here’s how Wikipedia explains it: “Hardback royalties on the published price of trade books usually range from 10% to 12.5%, with 15% for more important authors. On paperback it is usually 7.5% to 10%, going up to 12.5% only in exceptional cases.”  How does this compare to the sale of e-books?  Well, on Amazon if authors price their books above $3, they take home 70% on every sale, roughly five-times as much money for every single sale.

So instead of eighty to ninety percent of the profits going to people other than the author, authors are now able to take home the vast majority of the profits generated by their work.

That’s what’s going to gut the literary industry – not writers themselves, the industry – the fact that the people who actually produce the art are going to be taking home the lion’s share of the profits, instead of the other way around.  The problem isn’t the emergence of e-books and print-on-demand publishing, it’s that the old system was broken.  A similar structure exists in the music industry, as the producer for Nirvana’s “In Utero” once colorfully explained:

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course.

In a nutshell, a $250,000 advance would soon turn into a grand total of $4,031.25 for each member of a band consisting of three musicians.   And yet the advent of online file-sharing and torrenting hasn’t made musicians obsolete.  Although the music on your local pop radio stations probably still sucks – you can now find awesomely talented obscure bands everywhere from Pandora to their own websites, where they often give away several tracks of their music for free.

The old means of distribution was choking ingenuity and creativity while enriching the pockets of industry executives who had precisely zero to do with the actual creation of music.

Morrison’s final misconception is about the nature of the long tail:

“The recent enthusiasm for the long-tail market does, however, obscure a very basic economic fact: very few writers and independent publishers can survive in the long tail. Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year.”

Without pre-selection and mass marketing, Morrison argues, the market can’t possibly function.  But here’s the thing, the market has never functioned rationally – rational and effective systems aren’t hallmarked by the randomness and chance discussed earlier.

Which is the point the rest of Morrison’s article should have but didn’t make: all of the industries he lists – movies, music, porn, computer games, newspapers, video games, newspapers, photography, telecommunications, and the internet – are suffering financial crises of at the bureaucratic management level, which is being mistakenly viewed as a fight for the survival of the artists who actually populate them with art.

Musicians aren’t the ones who’ve been hurt by the evolving open marketplace, it’s the record stores who’ve gotten the shaft.  And the same pattern is already holding true with literature.

With the advent of e-books, authors no longer need the means of production that the publishing industry once had a monopoly on.  And so in the scheme of things, there’s no better time to try and make it as a writer.

People still love reading, so as sales of physical books flow out of brick-and-mortar book stores like rats from the proverbial sinking ship, they’re going to flow into both e-books and print-on-demand options offered by companies like CreateSpace and Lulu.  Maybe there’s no better indication that the publishing industry as we once knew it is good as dead than J.K. Rowling deciding to release the e-book version of all the Harry Potter books from her own personal website.

Obviously Rowling’s situation is worlds different from an author who’s first trying to break into the market, but they do share a common thread.

In a process that’s materially no different at all than being able to casually stroll through a bookstore, taking your time browsing through as many books as you’d like, all an author needs to do is post his work up online so people can read it on their monitors. And then if they want the convenience of being able to it with them – either on their e-reader or by ordering a print-on-demand copy – all they need to do is pay a small fee.

Consumers have never paid for access to books, they paid for the convenience of being able to take the words with them.

Again going back to the music industry, it turns out people who illegally pirated music weren’t just a little more likely to actually buy music, they were ten-times more likely to actually buy music.  And the model of making your writing as free and accessibly as possible has already worked once when it comes to writing.  In 2001 when The Alchemist author Paulo Coelho had been struggling for a few years to break into the Russian market, he decided to take this novel approach: he set up a site where anyone could download a PDF of the book for free.  And how’d that work out for him?

In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000… I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not.

Having your sales increase one-thousand fold seems like a pretty damn good business model.

Morrison fundamental lack of comprehension about what’s really going on might be best captured by one of his final points: “In every digital industry the attempt to combat piracy has led to a massive reduction in cover price: the slippery slope towards free digital content.”

The reduction in cover price isn’t a slippery slope towards free, it’s the culling of a bloated and archaic publishing industry whose time has now passed.   As the music industry and Paulo Coelho have proven, the more access potential customers have to art the more likely they are to actually spend money on it. Authors will now be able to glean more of the profits created by their work, instead of having to whore themselves out to an industry populated mostly by people who failed at producing what they’re now selling – quality art.

Writers are no longer subject to the whims and vagrancies of faceless executives, the only thing they need now is a little bit of determination and a willingness to hustle the streets a little bit, which is a whole lot better than the alternative of letting a corrupt and dead-behind-the-eyes industry pimp out their dreams.

(read the book free online – read the Reddit AMA)

British Prime Minister David Cameron is looking to make like an autocratic Arab dictator, and use the aftermath of the anarchistic violence that just swept across England’s streets as a reason to push through reforms curtailing internet speech and increasing online surveillance.  This follows closely on the heels of the United States passing it’s own bill drastically curtailing internet anonymity, as it forces ISPs to log massive amounts of user data.

The history of the Isles cracking down on the dissemination of dissent goes back at least to 1644, when the English Parliament re-introduced government control of printing and publishers in response to John Milton’s essay arguing  against the Catholic Church’s strictures against divorce.  Milton’s response championed free-speech above all other liberal rights:  “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

But governments across Europe had been actively trying to prevent that for centuries, as at one time or another the roster of banned books included those written by Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Locke, Defoe, Rousseau, and Voltaire.  Limiting and controlling thought is nothing new to governments, and so it was this history of official censorship and censure that in 1776 led Thomas Paine to take an important precaution when he published the argument that caused the call for American independence to fully coalesce.

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(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

In one of The Dark Knight‘s pivotal scenes, Alfred descends into a strictly ordered and starkly lit Batcave as Bruce Wayne is doggedly patching himself up. After helping his employer with some stitching, Alfred realizes that Master Bruce doesn’t fully comprehend the dystopian miasma of violence that the Joker has brought upon Gotham City:

Alfred: A long time ago, I was in Burma, my friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never found anyone who traded with him. One day I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: Then why steal them?

Alfred: Because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

It’s a fantastic scene from a cinematic standpoint, but a problem occurs when you pull the Joker out of the movie as one crazy-ass allegory for chaos and death. And especially when you make the leap of trying to fit terrorism into the framework provided by the Joker, to use the the Joker as a rubric for terrorism.

No one better proves this than the Ft. Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

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(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

But if the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the destruction of the African-American family, why did the decline in married black women triple during the first decade of the War?

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up about half of those in prison for drug offenses.  (When you adjust for the fact that the Department of Justice simply throws prisoners who identify as mixed race half-black and half-white out of their data, the proportion is well over half.)  A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. And by 2006 America had, proportionally, almost six-times as many blacks locked up as South Africa did at the height of Apartheid.

Our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

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The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely to dislike the group.  On top of that, African-Americans are much more likely to feel like they have nothing to lose, the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison.  In many cities the foreclosure rate for black families is three times as high as the white rate, and nationwide unemployment is about twice as high.

An almost unfathomable number of African-Americans have passed through our penal system, coming out on the other side much more racist and disposed to violence than they were when they went in.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is three-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

And when the shootings begin, it won’t take much for the establishment to begin reprisals. The level of trust between the police presence in innercity America and it’s African-American inhabitants typically falls somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

Widespread arrests will be made to try and find the terrorists responsible for the violence, and when some of the men – most of them innocent – getting arrested resist and the police respond with force, the flames will be stoked further still.  Based on past precedent, the police probably won’t be the initial targets – Jewish community centers and American military installations likely will be – but once law enforcement officers begin their investigations and raids, inner-city ire will be shifted against their presence.

Especially when such incidents are recorded on camera, as Rodney King and others have already demonstrated.

Rodney King was just one man being smacked around by a few cops, and yet his arrest set inner-city Los Angeles ablaze. Imagine what will happen when dozens of such arrests are recorded and played back not only on the Evening News, but available for free download on YouTube and other internet sites. Another preview of the unrest this will stir was provided when the unarmed Oscar J. Grant III was shot in the back on New Years Day 2009, and the entire incident was recorded on a camera phone and downloaded online.

It’s not hard to imagine what the response will be when some of them inevitably result in the suspects’ deaths – an inevitable result when the police fear for their own lives because they think they’re arresting a devious and sinister terrorist who has already tasted blood.

It won’t take much.  In every major modern insurgency, only about 10% of the fighters have been hardcore ideologues who believe in whatever cause is being championed, while the other 90% of the fighting is done by locals who are simply protecting their own turf against an invasive outside power.  Utilizing martial language like “insurgency” may seem like a bit of a stretch when describing our inner-cities, but it shouldn’t:

The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to police presence in black communities as “The Occupation.”  In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.

And yet when you dig deeper you’ll find that the D.C. Sniper’s blueprint in and of itself wasn’t really novel, as the attacks it was modeled off go back further still – to the first time an imperial Western power attempted what was perceived as colonization of the Middle East…

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –