Although only about 12% of the American population is black, about half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black.  And 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 eight-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.⁴

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he’d only face a 4% chance of incarceration – a disparity that’s been steadily increasing since then. In Chicago’s home state there’re 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.⁵

Our prison system has created a nearly inescapable gyre of poverty and despair, as other than race the most unifying characteristic of our prison population might be that some 50% of American prisoners are both illiterate, and have a family member who’s also been incarcerated at some point.

If anything whites use drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks, and yet two-thirds of those imprisoned for drug possession are black, and the rate of black drug arrests is four-times the white rate.  Nearly half of all drug arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses, and during the ’90s arrests for simple marijuana possession accounted for almost 80% of the increase in drug arrests. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you’re black – they terrify you.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ’79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent. It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising. This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”⁶

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”⁷ Direct empirical research into incarceration’s economic effects weren’t done until recently, when a Pew Charitable Trusts research paper showed that prior to imprisonment two-thirds of male inmates were employed and half were their family’s primary source of income.  Additionally, upon release an ex-con’s annual earnings were reduced by 40%

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive. The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.⁸

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.⁹

The rest of the book goes on to illustrate how the accidental guerrilla syndrome rallied locals to the side of international jihadis everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to East Timor, and argues that the syndrome was responsible for mobilizing most of the violence against an outside American military presence. Locals who either want in on the action, or are afraid “the Crazies will kill them,”² reportedly make up nearly 90% of those fighting back against what’s been sold to them as a military operation undertaken by outsiders.

In the last few chapters of the book, Kilcullen addresses the potential for Europe to act as a stating area for terrorism and future accidental guerrillas, as well as the role there of micro-havens, “urban undergrounds, alienated ethnic groups, and slums where the writ of government does not always run and where police and security services’ situational awareness is low.”³

But oddly enough, the potential for accidental guerrillas to emerge in America is never explored.

Another nearly identical term for “microhavens” is State Shells. At the broadest level, State Shells are semi-autonomous polities hosted within a nation that are able to impose their own will and organizational structure on some segment of society beyond the reach of local government regulation.

Strictly speaking, State Shells are cohesive organizations which have “a monopoly on the means of violence; territoriality; taxation; and public bureaucracy”⁴ within their stomping-grounds. The depth and breadth of the will they are able to impose varies greatly from situation to situation, but generally State Shells establish a following in a society by filling gaps left open by the government.

The less able a government is to provide public works and order, from hospitals to schools to support for the needy, the bigger the opportunity a State Shell has to gain credibility and then power within a pocket of that state. Hezbollah, the PLO, the IRA, ETA, and the Shining Path, are a few of the more notorious State Shells.

A crucial common-denominator among all State Shells is economic independence from the host government – State Shells must be able to raise their own funds, either through their own taxes, outside support, or often via the illicit trade and smuggling of drugs and guns. Within America the drug trade forms a particular poignant example of this, as the hierarchy of gang commerce has come to mimic the corporate pyramid of power – with lots of low-level workers propping up a few kingpins.

Many of the world’s most recognizable terrorist groups are prime examples of State Shells filling the gaps created when a government – beset by political violence, incompetence, or upheaval – is unable to fully govern.

Or, in the modern American case a government may lose its grip on governance because of economic catastrophe, as California is one of the first but not the last state to openly discuss ending many forms of public welfare and support for the needy, and is already laying off cops and other public officials. This creates even wider gaps for gangs to fill, as in many urban black communities gangs already provide jobs in the form of drug dealing, and act as the de facto security force and arbiters of justice.

Within a State Shell there is no such thing as the rule of law, and the exercise of Godfather-esque impersonal power that is based not on a code of justice but individual whim is paramount over political representation or citizenship. Although they do provide public works, a State Shell’s overall effect is not a positive one on the society that hosts it, as they are by nature exploitative and predatory.⁶

Examples of this behavior span numerous continents and countless generations. But nowhere and never has it been so apt than among the minority populations of America’s innercities. Gangs serve as imperfect examples of State Shells, but examples all the same. If there’s anywhere a State Shell might find traction in America, it’s among our urban minority innercities. For generations our urban innercities have been haunted by gang life and the drug trade.

Neither gang life nor the drug trade manifested spontaneously out of the black community. They only emerged after racially biased drug laws caused blacks, who make up 14% of our drug-users but over half of those imprisoned for drug-use, to find their lives dictated by a life behind walls we all built but refuse to see.

Nearly any way you look at it, our current economic crisis is impacting our poor black communities much more acutely than our poor white ones. The most obvious indicator is the still skyrocketing unemployment rate, which for young black males is now twice as high as their young white counterparts. But simple unemployment doesn’t capture the full scope of economic distress.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ’79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent.

It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

California is going to explode. And it’s not just because of the $18.6 billion dollars in cuts that Arnold is going to have to make, which is going to include eliminating entire welfare programs.

The budget crisis, unemployment, all of that is going to the last of your average Californian’s worries before the summer’s out. Probably the last of many of our worries, as what begins in California will inevitably spread to many of our doorsteps. Getting to that point though, that requires a little bit of explaining.

In one of the opening scenes of the coming-of-age cinematic classic Dazed and Confused, the history teacher yells after her class on the last day of school that over the summer during the holiday weekend “when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha,” they shouldn’t forget “what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, rich white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

There’s a lot of truth to that sentiment, although it’s not something anyone studies much in high school – where we focus on the social and philosophical elements of the American Revolution and, for the most part, ignore its underlying economic element. But if those rich white men had been taxed more fairly, the Revolution might never have occurred. Something you’re reminded of every time you see the cheeky slogan on a DC license plate.
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Jared Cohen is the rather remarkable State Department employee responsible for Twitter delaying its regularly scheduled maintenance shutdown during the Iranian uprising in the summer of 2009 so that communications and updates could continue unabated, he’s the author of the insightful book Children of Jihad that charts how young people everywhere in the Middle East from Iran to Israel have much more in common than they realize, plus he’s a Stanford grad and Rhodes Scholar.

In the above talk he outlines how technology is shaping and changing the way everything from militant attacks in Afghanistan to anti-authoritarian uprisings in Iran to grassroots resistance against FARC are organized and executed.

It’s a tremendously interesting talk that’ll change how you look at the evolving sometimes hidden role social media is carving out for itself among young people and societies across the globe.

– learn more about Tremble the Devil –

It’s generally a bad idea to leave the keys to your getaway car inside of the carbomb you’ve just rigged with fireworks, three propane tanks, a couple 5-gallon jugs of gasoline, and 100 pounds of explosive fertilizer.

Makes it kind of hard to get home.

Wait wait, make that non-explosive fertilizer actually – because you’re too stupid to bother googling what kinds of fertilizer actually blow up.   Plus, what makes it even harder to get home is also locking your house keys inside of the same carbomb.  And it’s probably an ever worse idea to release a YouTube video claiming responsibility for the attack before it even happens… especially when your attack hinges on a bunch of fireworks left in a bucket igniting a bunch of explosive material that’s not even exposed to the air.

But that was the modus operandi for Faisal Shahzad, just one in a long line of really, really stupid terrorists.

For reasons that’ll soon grow obvious, after the successful execution of an FBI sting against a group of ex-cons who’d converted to radical Islam in prison last summer, one of the media’s favorite quotes has been that at least one of the men is “intellectually challenged.”

If it wasn’t for weed, we might still have Ghandi, Abe Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, and JFK with us today.

You might even say that their deaths never would have happened if some old dead Muslims hadn’t been baked out of their minds. Nowadays when you get high you’re pretty much only a threat to someone’s life if they happen to be a Dorito, but back in the day getting higher than a giraffe’s ass was an inescapable prerequisite for joining what’s become the world’s most notorious fraternity of killers.

And the term “fraternity” isn’t used loosely here, as about any SAE pledge-master would be put to shame by the initiation ceremony of the original Assassins – but more about that shortly.

The term Assassin actually loosely translates to “pot-head.” Labeled Hashshasheen in their native Arabic, literally “those who smoke that dank-ass Mediterranian hash,” the Crusaders who first encountered them decided this was a bit too much of a mouthful so over the years the term was anglicized to the more familiar “assassin.” As it turns out, smoking the sticky-icky was an integral part of becoming an Assassin.

Led by the Old Man of the Mountain, who you can think of as some kind of terrible killer Arabic pot-smoking Santa Claus, the original Assassins were a Shiite sect headquartered in the Persian crags where they’d plot their attacks, swooping down into cities and royal courts to stab the hell out of whoever was opposing their will. After, of course, smoking copious amounts of dope. In this way the Assassins managed to consolidate an empire that was both vast and, presumably, very hazy.

To become an Assassin you first had to go through a trial that is fairly unique in history. A prospective initiate had to smoke hash until he blacked out. Seriously. The first step to becoming an assassin was to literally smoke yourself retarded.

Afterwards you’d awaken in a lush garden, filled with fountains and the most beautiful damsels in all the land, who would feed him every type of delicious morsel and subject you to sexual pleasures he might not even had known were possible. Odds are, to become an assassin you’d have to be cool with having a finger stuck somewhere uncomfortable. Possibly the back of a Volkswagen.

As the day went on you were given more and more pleasures, and more and more hash, until you passed out from the dope once again. A finger may still have been somewhere uncomfortable. When you woke up, the whole process began again, until finally an Assassin explains that what you’ve just experienced was but a tiny glimpse into the Paradise that awaited you if you would die for Allah as an Assassin.

Once you accepted their offer you would learn all the ways of the dagger (while high), how to mix poisons (while high), become a master of disguises (also while high), and how to pass for a member of any religion or culture in the region (while, of course, high). On your mission you must be focused on the kill alone, not your own escape, or where to find some munchies.

Assassins carried out hundreds of bleary-eyed killings as they spread their empire from Persia across the rest of the Middle East, and faded from notoriety only after their supply of marijuana finally ran dry.

But the best part…

Actually, they never ran out of dope, they were all brutally slaughtered by Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde in 1255.

One of them, probably while giggling and making Big Lebowski references, felt it necessary to assassinate one of Genghis’s sons because he wouldn’t let his Muslim sect – big shocker coming – pray as much as they wanted to.

So Genghis Khan sent word out that there was going to be a census, and every member of the Assassin sect made their way to the nearest city so that they’d be counted and get their piece of the pie, or pot-brownie or whatever.

But instead of being counted, the assembled Assassins were brutally slaughtered where they stood by the Golden Horde’s cavalry. The few who escaped were eventually tracked down and sent to the widow of Khan’s brother, so that she could torture them to death one-by-one in whatever manner she wished. So tap a little out for your most infamous forbearers the next time you pack a fatty in front of season two of The Chappelle Show.

Shockingly, the history of terrorism only gets more absurd in modern times.

4. Terrorists weaponize cars, kind of

Using automobiles as weapons has become the modern terrorist’s specialty. The very first carbombing was Hezbollah’s attack on the Marine barracks in Beiruit which killed 241 Marines in a blast that had the force of 12,000 pounds of TNT, but which actually came from just a few hundred pounds of plastic explosives packed into a cleverly disguised food-delivery truck.

Nothing about that attack seems funny at all, and the truck’s driver, Mr. Chubtarasha, is hailed by terrorists around the world for his heroics – for his steely courage as he drove into the maw of the imperialist American beast towards his certain fiery death.

But the reality is that Mr. Chubtarasha likely thought he was riding up a rainbow inside a giant Technicolor unicorn into a giant gumdrop full of tap-dancing Smurfs. Because before he got into his van he was fed a massive dose of hallucinogens hidden in, of all things – a cookie.

Chubtarasha wasn’t brave, he was tripping on a laced Oreo.

A decade later terrorist again successfully attacked America using cars, this time right at home in New York City. Ramzi Yousef came to New York in 1993, dressed in a silk suit he’d paid for with his wages as a Domino’s Pizza deliveryman (seriously), intent on killing as many Jews as he could.

And ultimately he decided on attacking the World Trade Center towers not because of their symbolic or tactical value, but because he’d heard from one of his buddies back home in Pakistan that lots and lots of Jews worked in them. Really, that was the driving factor behind his decision.

Where he could kill the most Jews. And since rumor had it that a lot of Jews worked there, the World Trade Center seemed as good a place as any.

As questionable as his decision making was, Yousef was proficient a assembling homemade bombs, and spent several weeks mixing batches fertilizer and nitric acid in his apartment before shuttling them in his rusted-out 1978 Chevy Nova into a self-storage shed in Jersey City. Yousef was lucky not to have one of these unstable batches blow his face off, but that’s not the ridiculous part of this attack.

After spending two months and thousands of dollars planning his attack and building his bomb, Yousef was ready to find a driver and van for his attack.

It’s unclear why Yousef didn’t just drive the van himself, but that probably has something to do with being hospitalized after crashing his ’78 Nova shortly after arriving in NYC and not exactly trusting himself behind the wheel.

You might think Yousef would take some time to carefully hand-select his driver and meticulously search to find the rental agency that would allow for the most anonymity, but that’s not how it went down. Yousef spent the night before the attack flipping through the local Yellow Pages making dozens and dozens of frantic phone calls. He was trying to find both a rental agency with a Ryder van that was big enough to hold the bomb, and someone willing to drive a van filled with thousands of pounds of fertilizer under the Twin Towers.

He figured it made sense to wait until the night before the attack to do this, and yet was still called a terrorist “mastermind.”

Despite this impetuousness, Yousef managed to avoid the even absurd blunders made by the terrorist group that carried out the Bali nightclub bombings, the Jemaah Islamiyah.

One member of the group had died on the way to an earlier attack when one of his buddies, meaning to call his cell phone to wish him luck, dialed the wrong number and instead called the phone attached to the trigger of the bomb.  And on the night of the Bali bombing, when the terrorist selected to drive the explosives-laden Mitsubishi van got into the driver’s seat on the night of the attack, he told his buddies there was a problem.

The van had a manual transmission, and he had no idea how to drive stick.

But the best part…

Is how Yousef got caught. Before the dust had even settled Yousef was already on board a plane to Karachi, but he left the men who helped him build the bomb behind. One of them, Mohammed Salamehm was pretty broke, and after the attack he decided to try and get the $400 rental deposit for the van back.

He showed up at the Ryder agency the next day demanding his money back, and was of course turned away – for some reason, the rental agency hadn’t gotten their van back and was used to dealing with angry people with funny accents who weren’t too good with cars. Salamehm returned the next day, bluffed again, and was again turned away.

But he didn’t let this stop him.

Still broke, he returned again for a third time, still angry, and this time found the FBI waiting for him. The VIN number from the van’s bumper had survived the blast, and he was taken into custody and thoroughly interrogated. Mohammed knew enough to give the authorities the leads they’d use to track Yousef down in the Philippines.

Yousef failed to topple the World Trade Center towers or kill any Jews. His bomb was equivalent to 1,500 pounds of dynamite, but it only killed a dozen construction workers. But years later different terrorists would return to New York and successfully topple the Twin Towers, and yet even that terrible day isn’t without its ridiculousness.

3. The final hours before 9/11

In the years since it occurred, 9/11 has been portrayed as the most devious and well-executed terrorist plot the world has ever seen. And the men who carried it out have been placed in the highest pantheon of heroes by Islamic extremists and the lowest pits of hell by just about everyone else.

But placing them in either of these places misses the reality of who they were. The nineteen hijackers were many things, but most importantly of all – they were a bunch of dingleberries.

Far from being highly-skilled operatives they were a bunch of jack-offs who, despite living in America with no cover and intending to carry out the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history, still managed to ring up a whole rack of speeding tickets and other moving violations.

You might think they’d be disciplined enough to stay under the law-enforcement’s radar, but you’d be wrong.

And yet maybe the most ridiculous part about 9/11, is what the hijackers were doing the night before the attack. Calling them jack-offs earlier was in no way meant metaphorically.

The night before the attack they selected a few select films from their hotels’ on-demand library. Despite imagining themselves as agents of purity and justice, on a holy mission of retribution from God himself, they still felt it was a good idea to rent a porn flick. Maybe this particular film involved goats or two dudes sword-fighting – or both. And maybe not, all we do know is that they did in fact rent a porno.

And, we can infer from the fact that the average hotel-rented porn flick is on for about five minutes, they sat around rubbing one out a sacreligiuos last time.

Maybe they had blankets pulled up over themselves, and were surreptitiously stroking their little jihadist soldiers and hoping the kid in the next bunk wouldn’t catch on like a bunch of nervous fourth-graders at summer camp. Or maybe they were all pretty cool with what the six of them were all doing in their cramped hotel room.

But the best part…

Maybe because they were all a little bit too relaxed after the previous night’s festivities, the hijackers who flew out of Boston didn’t exactly stick to a strict operational schedule. You might think operatives who were, supposedly, well-trained and highly-motivated would be very sure to have a time-table that would account for every possibility and ensure that they’d make their flight.

But the reality is that part of 9/11 very nearly didn’t happen at all. The team who flew out of Boston’s Logan Airport nearly missed their flight, they made it to their gate with just six minutes to spare.

Six minutes. A fender-bender, a belligerent customer in the ticket line, dropping a really big deuce – any number of things could easily have caused them to miss their flight entirely.

If you want to keep believing that 9/11 was the work of devious and highly skilled killers, go right ahead.

You now just have to acknowledge the fact that they were devious and highly skilled killers who managed to get a whole slew of traffic tickets and almost missed their flight because they sat around jerking-off to a porno the night before their big operation.

2. Al-Qaeda is born, cross-eyed and club-footed

It’s probably pretty hard to fish the keys to your Toyota out of a public toilet of an African hospital right smack in the middle of the afternoon lunch rush. Even if you’re elbow deep in the thing, groping around in the water like you were tying to noodle catfish.

But that’s what Mohammed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali (whose name translates literally as: douchebag who blows up hundreds of Africans) found himself doing as the hospital he was in filled with the hundreds wounded by the truck bomb he’d just blown up on the street in front of the American Embassy in Nairobi. He panicked, threw his keys in the toilet – but then changed his mind and decided to try and fish them out.

It was supposed to be al-Qaeda’s opening salvo in their pre-declared war against America, but the terrorists hit a few hitches. They meant to get their truck-bomb inside the Embassy compound, except that as al-Owhali got out of the Toyota’s shotgun side and menacingly approached the Marines guarding its gates and reached into his jacket pocket for the pistol he was going to shoot the American imperialists with he stopped in his tracks and – yes, this becomes a steady theme the more terrorist attacks you learn about – realized there was a problem.

He wasn’t wearing his jacket. It was back in the truck, next to his buddy. And so al-Owhali did the next-best thing: he started ululating and threw the flash-bang grenades he had on him at the Marine guards behind the Embassy gate. Who ran away, probably laughing and wondering what in the shit was going on, since the magnesium and ammonium-perchlorate detonation of a flash-bang grenade is at most capable of stunning people in tightly-enclosed spaces.

Throwing them at Marines who are outdoors makes about as much sense as getting in a fight with GSP and only trying to slap him once it starts. The man fiercely pinches his own nipples to get himself jacked before winning the UFC middle-weight title fight.

Despite months of the “best” training terrorists could get at al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan and spending several years dedicating their lives to jihad, al-Owhali and his buddy were complete screw-ups when it came time to actually carry out an attack. Al-Owhali turned and ran like hell after leaving his gun in the truck, and his buddy blew up the bomb where it would do almost no damage to the Embassy and would kill only a dozen Americans.

The only reason the attack attracted so much attention was because the bomb in the truck was the only part of the attack that wasn’t completely botched, and did manage to kill a number of Africans.

It’s fairly surprising the bomb was as potent as it was, as terrorists have frequently proven themselves utterly incapable of constructing crude bombs, a process which frighteningly enough can be successfully done by a Mongoloid fourth-grader who has a chemistry set and enough Ritalin.

In fact, our buddy Yousef was finally caught when the bomb he was working on began to prematurely combust, setting his apartment ablaze and the Filipino Special Terrorism Task Force hot on his heals.

A task force not headed by Delta Force or SEAL Team Six, but by Aida Fariscal: a grandmother known for wearing bright-pink lipstick, rubber slippers, hoop earrings, and a flowered muumuu who chased him down in the early-morning Manila streets and tied his hands with clothesline (she left her cuffs in the office, hey – grandmothers have a lot on their minds) and hailed a rusted-out WWII-era jeep that’d been converted into makeshift taxi to get him back to the station. That she was even kind enough to pay for.

Yup, that’s how a man then considered the world’s foremost terrorist mastermind was brought to justice. By a grandmother wearing a flowered muumuu.

But the best part…

The point of the Embassy attacks wasn’t to kill African bystanders, it was to destroy the Embassies and kill hundreds of Americans. Well, the US Embassy in Nairobi was largely undamaged by the blast and only a dozen Americans were killed, and the simultaneous attack on the Embassy at Dar es Salaam (which, in a cruel twist of history, really does translate to “House of Peace”) neither damaged the main Embassy building or killed any Americans.

The African Embassy bombings were, from anything close to approaching a rational perspective, complete gong shows. They were supposed to destroy both Embassies and kill hundreds of Americans. But what happened is they demolished a few walls, walls which were built in front of the Embassies to – get this – absorb a bomb blast, and killed only twelve Americans.

However they did mark the emergence of al-Qaeda from its womb, it was the organization’s first attack that provoked a substantial response against what it saw as the evil American imperialists on the world stage. But al-Qaeda came out like it’d been gestating in some terrible four-toothed hillbilly who liked to down bottles of Jack before engaging in her favorite hobby of throwing herself down the nearest rocky hillside and then repeatedly smacking herself in her pregnant belly with the empty bottle.

And yet this malformed retard seemed threatening enough to warrant a barrage over a dozen million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missiles, which succeeded in utterly flattening their target.

Sadly, this target turned out to be a factory that made pharmaceuticals, and possibly baby food. Which brings us to our final moment.

1. Every time someone flips out about it

One of our greatest Presidents once said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In the years that followed this saying proved to have a lot of merit to it.

Unless of course you were one of the tens of thousands of Japanese who died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundred of thousands of American soldiers who gave their lives in European trenches, or one of the six-million Jews who died in one of the dozens of Nazi concentration camps.

So, in hindsight, maybe FDR would’ve been better off saying “we have nothing to fear but fear itself, unless of course we’re at war – in which case you need to worry about getting shot, nuked, burned alive, gassed, crippled, enslaved, and otherwise dismembered, maimed, or killed. Yeah, worry about that stuff.

And, at its core, that’s what terrorism is always attempting to do.

Create a war, or failing that the fears that piggyback on war, when there really isn’t anything there. Acts of terrorism are meant to create the perception of war and the retaliation and hatred that ensues, when the reality is the guys carrying them out would be hard-pressed to construct a forty-eight piece Lego set without starting two fires and putting an eye out.

Terrorism relies on its targets overreacting, on us not really seeing their explosions for what they are. Terrorists don’t create terrorism, terrorists are a bunch pot-smoking jerk-offs who have to get lucky to not die in car accidents or blow themselves and each other up.

Being afraid of terrorists makes about as much sense as being afraid of a drunk blindfolded one-legged midget who’s hopping around throwing cabbages at your head.

Terrorists don’t create terrorism – we do.

Terrorism is the monster under our bed, the boogeyman in our closet, the one-night stand who swore she was on the pill who you used a condom with anyways but who you still left a fake number with because hey no reason not to play it safe right? As horrible and terrifying as acts of terrorism can seem, all it takes to neutralize them entirely is to take them in perspective, and just see them for what they almost always are.

The actions of attention-whores writ large. Really, really dumb attention-whores.

For terrorism’s entire crazy story, visit Tremble the Devil’s mainpage

Fear is the lifeblood of terrorism, and we all fear the unknown.  So there’s no better counter to terror than simply spreading understanding.

For the first time, an entire book on the history, origins, and future of terrorism is available for free online in an easy-to-navigate format. Tremble the Devil was written by a Harvard-educated counterterrorism analyst, it’s an accessible, fast-paced distillation of everything you need to know about the world’s most dangerous phenomenon. It combines compelling narratives with approachable academic explanations into an intriguing and salient book that reads like a novel – it’s The Looming Tower meets Freakonomics.

Spreading understanding is so important because people only freak out when they don’t understand what’s going on, the true nature of the threat. And so terrorism only works when we don’t realize that terrorists as individuals are – often as not – pretty freaking dim. That’s why the book is posted up online for free: in the hope that when the next attacks hit they’ll be a little less effective, because after reading the book you’ll understand terrorism a little bit better and freak out a little bit less.

Feel free to bookmark this page to come back to later since you don’t have the time to get through an entire book just now and you’d rather read a brief piece about current events, the most recent posts can be found below at the blog below or on the sidebar to the right. Here are some of the most popular posts:

because we destroyed ourselves – outlines the damage the War on Drugs has done to the African-American community by incarcerating a highly disproportionate number of black males, creating a cycle of economic and social fragmentation within our innercities.

innocents and innocence alike – draws parallels between acts of terrorism and asymmetric warfare by tying the emergence of modern terrorism to documents stolen from the home of America’s Special Forces.

the racism instinct – explains humanity’s bloodthirsty history as an inevitable result of the differing immunological compositions of our largest social groupings and the urge to pass on robust immune systems that are fit to their environments to our offspring.

it’s hard out here – traditional publishing never worked, it was an industry ruled by chance and blind luck. It’s 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.

the importance of being anonymous – free speech has always implicitly been anonymous speech, and at no time in our history has it been more under siege – especially within the internet, the last bastion of free and anonymous speech

A funny thing happens when two huge terrorism stories break.  Or, more accurately, when one splashes across the front of the Washington Post, while the the other one slips past your notice.  You tend to start thinking that the most likely way a terrorist will kill you isn’t, in fact, by shooting you in the face.

First, Tuesday’s Washington Post story on Al-Qaeda’s desire to use WMDs against America:

“…a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency’s hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda’s leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.”

So a retired intelligence official is alleging that a WMD attack from al-Qaeda is a genuine threat, based purely on the strength of his musing.  The report cites absolutely no evidence at all, and has no empirical support.  It’s simply speculation.

Let’s take a moment to consider its assertion though, in light of what we’ve learned from al-Qaeda’s most recent round of recruits.

Successfully deploying nuclear, chemical, or biologically weaponry is insanely delicate and difficult, military units trained to use or defuse that kind of weaponry are some of the most intelligent and well-trained.  WMDs are incredibly fragile, requiring careful handling and precise calibration to be deployed effectively.  Only the most intelligent enlistees are chosen for WMD training, a task that takes several months to complete.  Conversely, everyone in the military learns how to shoot a gun within the first few weeks.

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“This was a jihad: attack on infidel forces. That didn’t go as plan. Flat out truth,” Muhammad wrote in the letter.
The men who ascribe to Radical Islam do not see themselves as terrorists, they see themselves as soldiers.   And their training and conversation no longer happens in terrorist camps or in personal exchanges – as was the case with the 3/11 Madrid bombings, conversion and radicalization often occurs in the amorphous world of online media interactions.

Terrorism has always been and will always be the little brother of warfare. Its primary goal is to make the targeted society’s members feel like they’re at war. Terrorism is at its awful finest when no one knows if they might die next, when death comes at random to their doorstep – unannounced and shrouded in unpredictability.

That’s the point of the chaos. That’s why they want to make the world to seem like it’s burning.

And to sow this illusion of warfare, the men we label terrorists must themselves become soldiers. They prepare themselves for going to battle and likely death by saying goodbye, and letting go of their earthly possessions. They see themselves as fighting and dying in a war, often against an outside aggressor whose violence can only be responded to in kind.

The only time terrorism seems complicated or nuanced is when we bring our own moral framework into a situation where it doesn’t apply. The men who see themselves as soldiers, who we would call terrorists, don’t fit into our moral framework. So if you really want to understand terrorism, you have to leave your own moral framework and interpretations behind.

If you can do that, then you’re ready to continue on down the rabbit hole.

And you’re ready to learn about the role Gideon played as the godfather of all terrorists, and about how modern terrorism is simply another step down a path we’ve all been on since the beginning of history.

– learn more about Tremble the Devil –

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.” Direct empirical research into incarceration’s economic effects weren’t done until recently, when a Pew Charitable Trusts research paper showed that prior to imprisonment two-thirds of male inmates were employed and half were their family’s primary source of income. Additionally, upon release an ex-con’s annual earnings were reduced by 40%

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.

Even Eminem seemed to have little sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for. And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts. However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors. Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.