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 From Anaheim to the Windy City, America’s urban centers are steadily and relentlessly beginning to rotate into the gyre of violence and retribution that all too often serves to foment revolution and unrest. And with poverty levels surging to the highest levels since the ’60s, the era of America’s last widespread innercity riots, avoiding more violent demonstrations and protests seems increasingly unlikely.

Over the weekend in Anaheim, California an officer involved shooting devolved into an intensely troubling scene which saw police officers firing rubber bullets and beanbag rounds into an already dispersed crowd of civilians and a police dog attacking a mother and child. And then over the next few hours the situation devolved into further chaos:

Throughout the night, police in multiple marked and unmarked squad cars attempted to control an unruly crowd gathered near the shooting scene. Some cordoned off the intersection at East La Palma Avenue and Anna Drive with the same yellow crime-scene tape used by police where the shooting happened.

Some moved a Dumpster into the intersection and set its trash on fire on at least three separate occasions only to be met with multiple officers who kept responding to move it out of the way of traffic.

About 9:30 p.m., an Anaheim helicopter hovered above the crowd while police on the ground brandished batons and other weapons at the crowd, attempting to keep order.

And then the very next day another resident was shot to death by police. Manuel Diaz was unarmed as he fled from police on foot, once caught he was shot in the head. Witnesses claim that Diaz was put down only after he was secured in handcuffs, and although this allegation will be hard to prove one thing is clear from video of the encounter: police didn’t make any effort to preserve Diaz’s life after he’d been apprehended and shot.

These incidents sparked four consecutive nights of protests in Anaheim, with protesters swarming police headquarters demanding answers and an end to the injustice, before turning their ire elsewhere:

 As many as 1,000 demonstrators surged through downtown in the Southern California city Tuesday night, smashing windows on 20 businesses and setting trash fires. Police and patrol cars were pelted with rocks and bottles. Hundreds of police used batons, pepper balls and beanbag rounds.

The full story of exactly how events managed to spin so horribly out of control so quickly hasn’t yet been formed, and may never be – following the incident four separate individuals approached a CBS reporter and claimed that police officers had attempted to buy footage of the riots off their cell phones. This virulent tension, between police officers and the communities they’re meant to serve, is far from unique to Anaheim – within American innercities it’s much more often the rule than the exception:

And it doesn’t take police intervention to lead to violence.  This summer is shaping up to be the most lethal in recent Chicago history as gang violence roils out into public view, stirring up an unprecedented number of revenge shootings and civilian casualties. The situation has devolved so far that one Chicago police sergeant described the situation as “tribal warfare on the streets.”

In the second-to-last weekend of May, the Windy City’s bodycount was 4 dead and 28 wounded, ranging in ages from 7 years-old to 68.  Memorial Day weekend saw 11 killed and over 40 injured, a week later saw sustained violence: 9 dead and 46 wounded. Between Saturday night and Sunday night alone 20 people were shot.  The summer gun violence hasn’t calmed down at all: the weekend of June 17th saw 7 killed and nearly 40 injured by gun violence in Chicago, the next weekend pushed the total June bodycount to 20, and on the 4th of July alone 5 were killed and 21 wounded.

Although some shootings were obviously targeted, home invasions and apparent gang violence, a handful of them have troubling elements of randomness to them:

Two people died after someone produced a handgun and fired several shots into a crowd of people in the 700 block of West 50th Place about 11:15 p.m. Sunday, hitting five people, police said.

A white four-door car pulled up to a group of boys near the intersection of West 69th Street and South Artesian Avenue and someone inside opened fire.

So far 2012 is on pace to be the bloodiest summer ever in the Windy City, there have been far more murders in the city than U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, and the annual homicide rate is up 38% from last year. This interactive graphic helps captures the extend of the violence:

A little while back al-Qaeda’s American-born spokesman “Adam the American” released a video exhorting Muslims in America to wage the “death by a-thousand cuts” version of jihad.  Instead of looking to stage large dramatic attacks which would require months of preparation and planning, he implored would-be jihadis to simply buy guns and start shooting people:

Muslims in the West have to remember that they are perfectly placed to play an important and decisive part in the jihad against the Zionists and Crusaders, and to do major damage to the enemies of Islam waging war on their religion, sacred places, and brethren.  This is a golden opportunity.

“The way to show one’s appreciation and thanks for this blessing, is to rush to discharge one’s duty to his [community] and fight on its behalf with everything at his disposal.  And in the West you’ve got a lot at your disposal. Let’s take America as an example, American is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms…

So what are you waiting for?

And while there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the recent shooting deaths in Chicago have anything at all to do with waging a campaign of terror on behalf of al-Qaeda, the marked uptick in violence is a troubling indication that our innercities may implode totally on their own, without any outside influence at all. The greatest threat of violence in American isn’t from outsiders coming here to try and blow stuff up.

But why would our innercity Latino and African-American communities be the most likely sources of upheaval? For both communities, about three-times more of them live in prison cells than in college dorms. And with over half of those in federal prison serving time for a drug offense, it’s not difficult to pinpoint the primary source of this horrible pedagogical disparity.

As our military pours billions and billions of dollars into stopping threats from abroad, it’s important to keep in mind that the biggest threat to American security is right here at home: an implosion of our innercities brought about by the social and economic devastation wrought as the War on Drugs created a cycle of absence by imprisoning so many fathers and destroying the hope of entire communities for economic advancement:

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.”

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%

And on Tuesday night, southern Dallas saw tensions swell as “an unruly, armed crowd” gathered to protest the officer-involved shooting death of an unarmed man who was fleeing the scene of a bogus 911 call. Although things never went from tense to turbulent, the neighborhood seemed just one more bullet away from full-on conflict:

As the large crowd gathered on the street, and as police in riot gear swarmed in an effort to keep the peace, people on the street insisted that Harper had been shot in the back… dozens of police, some of them with riot shields and helmets or carrying large assault rifles, had cordoned off the intersection. On either end of Dixon, more police vehicles blocked cars from driving through the area. A crowd of what looked like several hundred people, including many women and children, were gathering in groups all up and down Dixon. 

Many of the people on the street after the shooting said they were friends and relatives of Harper’s. Many, too, were furious about the number of police shootings in Dallas this year: there have been 13 others so far, eight of them fatal. (To counter-balance those numbers, Brown noted last night that assaults on officers are up from last year.)

The scene outside Dallas well illustrates the distrust and tension behind so much of this nascent violence, as one man noted that within the SWAT team sent to contain the neighborhood “I see a lot of white folks and no black folks,” and that “I was up there standing up there over the body. And every one of them was laughing at the man, like they killed a deer or an animal.”

Here too the War on Drugs was at play, officers responding to the bogus 911 call were likely tricked by a rival gang’s ploy, and were well-aware they were storming a house known for selling weed. As the victim’s mom put it: “I lost my son over a bag of damn weed.”

At this point the only question worth asking may be: who’s next?

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Nidal Malik Hassan may not be alone. At least, not for long. In late June, NPR reported that the FBI has over 100 open investigations into members of the U.S. military who may have ties to Islamic extremists, roughly a dozen of them are considered serious:

The FBI and Department of Defense call these cases “insider threats.” They include not just active and reserve military personnel but also individuals who have access to military facilities such as contractors and close family members with dependent ID cards.

Officials would not provide details about the cases and the FBI would not confirm the numbers, but they did say that cases seen as serious could include, among others things, suspects who seem to be planning an attack or were in touch with “dangerous individuals” who were goading them to attack.

Whether any of these cases will amount to anything remains to be seen, but recruiting people with access to military materiel seems like a logical and potent approach, especially given the predilection of Afghan nationals working with our military overseas to stage attacks against American troops:

The attack on Sergeant Hissong’s company, on March 1 at Combat Outpost Sangesar, left two Americans dead along with two Afghan assailants, but it was not the first time that Afghan solders had attacked forces from the American-led coalition, nor would it be the last of what the military calls “green on blue” attacks. Already this year, 22 coalition service members have been killed by men in Afghan uniform, compared with 35 for all of last year, according to coalition officials.

The attacks, and the personal animosity that officials believe have driven most of them, are threatening the joint-training model that is one of the remaining imperatives of the Western mission in Afghanistan.

But to understand these two intertwined trends, we must go back a little ways – back to when al-Qaeda was little more than an ideology beginning to take shape within the minds of a few close friends. What’s become an international movement started out as just the spark of an idea, and not a particularly novel idea at that. Al-Qaeda was far from unprecedented in history, it was simply just another instance when an ideology’s adherents called for a return to what they saw as their belief’s fundamental roots.

The first formalized call to militant jihad and the birth of the fundamentalist salfi movement both came from one man, Ibn Taymiya, a Syrian scholar and historian who saw a return to the original Islam as the only way to stop the dismemberment of the Muslim world. In what would become a recurring theme for Islam, when its power was in decline movements that argued for a return to its original and purest precepts would begin to stir inside Islam and find sustenance.  Mind you, this was was back in the 1300s when the imminent threat was Mongol invasions, so the world was rather different.

But, then as now, plenty of Muslims saw the fate of the Muslim world as hanging in the balance.  And, as it so often seems to fundamentalists, there was only one way to save it: salfism.

Any fundamentalist who took the label salfi gained a label that refers to the original companions of the Prophet. The closest direct translation of someone described as salfi into English would be something along the lines of “Godfather” – which makes sense since they think they’re attempting to return to the original and traditional tenets of the faith. And, just like Don Corlione, they aren’t afraid to use violence to do it.

Several hundred years later, Ibn Taymiya would find his message updated for the twentieth century by Sayid Qutb, an Egyptian scholar whose time in America helped shape his perception of our culture as fundamentally broken, corrupt, and materialistic – about as distant from God as you could possibly get.  As a Fundamentalist Muslim he made arguments that dovetail nicely with the Fundamentalist Christians of today who argue that Americans have become detached from God and must return to Him or else our society will disintegrate.

They both spout messages of Us versus Them. Fundamentalist Muslims don’t necessarily hate Americans any more than our own Fundamentalist Christians hate us. Disdain is something different than hate. It’s rooted in a feeling of superiority over another, that somehow you are deeply more prepared for life with a richer and fuller understanding of the Why of it all. However, in the end, disdain often breeds the same ends as hate and can be used for the dehumanization that so often predicates violence.

Qutb’s message has not at all become outdated, in fact today he has more followers now than he ever did during his lifetime. In militant Islamic ideology as in hip-hop – being killed often elevates your work to heights it might never otherwise have reached, and your greatest success often comes after your violent end, your martyrdom. For example there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who was was just one among thousands of Muslims who read Qutb’s writings and agreed with his impressions of America. During KSM’s time studying in America he shunned any sign of Western decadence – from drinking to women to pork. Although, like a third-grader afraid of cooties, later in life he’d come around about women.

The legacy Qutb left for modern Islamic extremists, salfists as they usually like to think of themselves, is manifold. The most obvious and pervasive elements of it are framing the ideologies of disdain for the West and jihad in the name of true Islam with a panache and erudition that in all probability will never be outdone. Qutb didn’t seek to incite a violent hatred of America, our values, or our way of life. But he provided a vivid rationalization for violence against the West, a society he recorded as bereft of values or morals – a society whose culture was explicitly at odds with Islam. It was Qutb who first framed the idea that the world of Islam would inevitably and violently clash with the West.

At the core of Qutb’s fundamentalism was a call to return to shariah, which is often translated as Islamic law but literally means “street” or “path” – so a good way to think of it is as a Dao, or a Way. To accomplish this return, Qutb called for a vanguard of true believers who would form a base upon which revolution could foment.  And if you’ve followed current events at all recently, you’re probably well aware that “al-Qaeda” translates as “the base,” which in this case doesn’t carry the connotation of a home-base, but instead refers to the foundation of a ideology.

Sayid Qutb is very much the Godfather of modern Islamic extremism, both in terms of framing the decadence of the West and inspiring the ideal of violent Islamic militancy. A generation later bin Ladin would take Qutb’s message and reinterpret it, modernize it, and make it his own. Little of bin Ladin’s accomplishments have much to do with originality, all he’s done is simply repackage old appeals in a charismatic and modernized sales pitch.

It’s a concept that requires a fundamentalist view of Islam, a type of view that “in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control.”

And this idea, of taking control, was alive and well during al-Qaeda’s early origins.

As the fireball consumed Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, his final thoughts were the same as just about everyone’s.  Simple regret at life’s unknowns.  What would his legacy be? What would happen to the dreams he’d left behind? Who the hell had set-off the car-bomb that’d just killed him? Okay, maybe that last one was fairly unique.

But in its answer might also lie the answer to the last thought that raced through his mind: would the Near Enemy or the Far Enemy be the first to topple? As it turns out, dealing a blow against the Far Enemy would set events that would eventually lead to the Near Enemy’s fall  into motion.

Azzam had dedicated his life to the defense of his fellow Muslims, starting back in his homeland of Palestine where he’d seen countless loved ones killed by Israeli military action, and continuing to his time teaching at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah during the 1970s. Which is also where Osama bin Ladin had been getting his education, as the capital’s best school it allowed admission only if a highly selective exam was passed and was so bent on merit-based admission that it filtered out some of the Saudi King’s own sons. Granted there were a lot of them, but still.

In one of the world’s most openly nepotistic nations, this was no little stunt.

Such a school attracted not only the most qualified students, but the region’s most charismatic and dedicated teachers. One of these was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in early twentieth-century Egypt by Hassan al-Banna – the Thomas Aquinas of militant Islamic theology to Sayid Qutb’s C.S. Lewis. It’s believed that because of him, Osama stopped watching his favorite Western television shows and refused to wear Western clothes outside of school where he only wore them because it was required by mandate.

The Muslim Brotherhood has played a prismatic role in the Middle East, expounding a vast range of Islamic interpretations whose only common point is that they’ve always demanded their members follow a rigorous set of strictures. They were something between a rotary club and a charity, but never quite managed gain control of significant means of coercion without being summarily castrated by the state – at least until just recently in Egypt.

But they played a key role in the region at the time, especially in terms of defining Muslim identity. And in the 1970s, much as is the case now, one of the common rallying points of Arab identity was the situation in the Palestine. It had turned Sayid Qutb against American policy, Ramzi Yousef against the American people, and it would bring bin Ladin’s destiny terribly into collision with ours.

Osama’s mother noticed a distinct change in him after he met that member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead of sitting in front of the television and enjoying his favorite show – which, oddly enough, was Bonanza – he would sit in front of the television and watch the news out of the Occupied Territories. And weep.

Given president George W. Bush’s penchant for appealing to folksy western values, bin Ladin’s love for Bonanza, the second-longest running western series ever on American television which embodied the Texas cowboy ideal better than perhaps any other show, becomes more than a little ironic.

This early teenage passion for a noble cause wasn’t seen as terribly exceptional by his family, indeed it seems to be a phase that many teens the world go through. Realizing their lucky place in the world, and wanting to help others who are less fortunate. Bin Ladin, though, was particularly determined to live up to his new ideals, fasting twice a week in emulation of the Prophet, going to bed immediately after the evening prayer, waking up to his alarm at one in the morning every day to prayer alone in his room, wearing pants instead of shorts during soccer games, and showing his brother what five fingers say to the face when Osama suspected he’d been flirting with a maid.

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You probably missed the phenomenal article on China in the LA Times a while back, which came on the heels of more and more morose news of what’s looking less and less like a recovery of the American economy. Among other points, one of the more central themes the article focused on was that Chinese culture is not American culture:

The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

China is simply not like the West and never will be. There has been an underlying assumption that the process of modernization would inevitably lead to Westernization; yet modernization is not just shaped by markets, competition and technology but by history and culture. And Chinese history and culture are very different from that of any Western nation-state.

And so far as I can tell, no one protested this observation as bigoted or racist or even remotely controversial. It’s simply a cultural observation.

Chinese culture is not Western culture. It is, as they say, what it is.

Cultures instill different values, they have different norms, they lead to markedly different behaviors. As the article so aptly put it, our “failure to understand the Chinese has repeatedly undermined our ability to anticipate their behavior.” Western culture, it’s often said, is rooted in “Judeo-Christian” values. These values have become imbued in our legal systems and constitutional rights, over thousands of years religion has seeped into our sense of justice – of right and wrong.

This exact same argument of culture dissonance can be made when it comes to religion, between Christianity and Islam, although just about everyone seems terrified to bring up the obvious.

And yet almost ironically, the single biggest difference between Christianity and Islam is a simple temporal one. The paths these two great Western religions took barely even meander from the same course, one of the two just moved along much more slowly. This temporal dissonance, the fact that Christianity took hundreds of years to get to the same point that Islam reached in just a few generations, is central to understanding the differences in how the two great world religions are applied in a modern everyday context.

As much as most Christians would like to believe that their religion’s story ends with the Bible, it doesn’t. Christianity was just one of scores and scores of mystery cults in the ancient world until Constantine co-opted it and made it the official state religion in 312AD, up until that point Christians had been persecuted along with many others who were viewed as occultists.  After Constantine’s convenient conversion, Clovis followed suit due to similar imperial and martial motives.  And it was their violent and merciless conquests which cemented Christianity as the Western world’s primary religion – not the peaceful and gradual epistilatory modus that’s traced out in the New Testament.

Countless elements of Christian ritual are shamelessly borrowed from existing mystery cults: drinking communal blood and the Cult of Mithras, rebirth and Osiris, and the unavoidable dualistic Zorastrian influence of Good vs. Evil that we’ve since collectively decided to forget.

Once Christianity was the official religion of the most powerful empire in the West… lots and lots of non-Christians were summarily put to the sword.

At this point Christianity had a pretty firm foothold on the world stage. It’s worth taking a moment to notice that no specific element of biblical doctrine was used when Constantine decided it would be okay to kill anyone who wasn’t a Christian. And yet this was ultimately what spread the faith across the Western world. Peter didn’t singlehandedly spread Christianity as the end of the New Testament would have us believe. Christianity seeped across the world benignly at first, but it only gained prominence at the tip of a sword.

But since Christianity’s official doctrine doesn’t talk about killing people who don’t convert, you feel pretty safe saying “killing people who won’t convert is un-Christian.” Look at the history though, and you find that killing people who refuse to convert spread Christianity much more broadly and deeply than any peaceful means.

Even after Constantine and Clovis, Christianity wasn’t firmly entwined with Western culture until Charlemagne came along and continued with the “convert or die” approach. Following his birth in 742AD, he wiped our the remaining pagan and animist religions in Europe by killing untold thousands who refused Christ’s salvation. In the process he set the groundwork for the French and German empires, and arguably the entirety of Western civilization itself.

It’s kinda funny, neither him nor Constantine nor Clovis are really considered prominent Christian figures, even though without them there’s no reason to think Christianity ever would have made it past the status of mystery religion in the first place

Islam is roundly denounced because it was spread via military conquest, which leads to the argument that Islam condones violence. Muhammad was a military leader, he and his immediate successors killed lots and lots of people as they spread Islam across the globe. Whereas Jesus wasn’t a military leader, and none of his immediate religious successors ever killed a soul – as far as we can tell.

This differing level of first-generation violence may be largely due to the fact that Christianity took several hundred years to be institutionalized, while Islam was a cohesive institution from its very start. After Christianity was finally institutionalized by the Catholic Church and the Byzantine Empire at Nicaea, men who took up the cross such as Clovis and Charlemagne were responsible for plenty of carnage and death in Christ’s name. The names of the untold hundreds of thousands put to the blade by nominally Christian generals have been lost to history – but their deaths and their neighbors’ fearful conversion were no different from the converts won and deaths caused in Islam’s early spread.

In terms of pure volume and square millage Constantine, Clovis, and Charlemagne forcefully spread Christianity farther and deeper than anyone who came before them. However neither the Bible or any official Christian text really addresses this, and so it seems very far divorced from the faith itself.

It isn’t.

Christianity didn’t become fully rooted in Western culture until those men aided and abetted its spread – a spread just as violent and terrible as Islam’s early years.

So, fairly or not, Christians today tend to overlook the violent actions of those nominally Christian men and only allow the use of the lives depicted in the Bible during debates of how “early” Christianity was spread or what Christianity is “really” about. But in the history of all three great Western monotheistic religions, there is no escaping the tension between religious party and political power:

Like any social organization, the religious party is at first a natural rival to political power. The struggle is all the more intense when a religion is universalist in nature, as are Christianity and Islam. The universalist religions… naturally cohere as “ideological communities.” In other words, they include all those who accept their dogma and exclude all those who do not. Founded on a credo, such communities define and organize every aspect of the society to which their members belong. In their early phases, such organizations are mostly interested in religious or philosophical problems. As they grow in number and confidence, however, they extend their influence to other spheres of social organization and ultimately set their sights on definitive social control through political power.

Nearly everyone in the West holds that the story of how early Christianity spread ends where the Bible does, and believes that a comparison of how Jesus and Mohammad lived their lives and spread their faiths tells the entire story.

In the nine years after announcing the concept of jihad in 624AD Mohammad ordered at least twenty-seven military campaigns, personally commanding nine of them. In the Bible, there isn’t mention of Jesus so much as backhanding a mouthy disciple. But this shortsightedness is incredibly limiting, Christianity and Islam trace nearly identical paths of violent proliferation, the only difference is a temporal one – Christianity took many hundreds of years to cover the ground Islam only took a few generations to cover.

And yet while being martyred in early Islam is being killed while battling for the spread of faith, being martyred in early Christianity is being publicly murdered for the sake of imperial oppression and entertainment. Mohammad and his followers spread their faith on horseback, often lopping off the heads of those who opposed them. Jesus and his followers spread their faith on horseback, often getting their heads lopped off by those who opposed them.

Islam can and has been a peaceful religion for epochs at a time, and Christianity has been invoked in the name of violence just as much if not more than Islam when their total historical volumes are considered – but when it comes to martyrs there is a difference lurking in the origins of each religion. The very idea of martyrdom is much more plastic within Islam, and much more open to debate.

Membership has never been debated in Islam, from its conception either you follow the five doctrinal pillars or you aren’t a Muslim. Very simple. And although succession was debated, it was a matter of choosing between two successors to Mohammad and not of deciding what true Islamic faith meant as it was in the Christian faith, at least not to the same degree.

But since Christianity’s later spread by emperors is divorcable from it’s early origins, people feel like Christianity and Islam are utterly different.

They share the exact same story.

They both preach ideals of empathy, compassion, grace, and forgiveness, and yet neither were spread by kindly peaceful conversion but instead by violent domination and conquest. Christianity just took several hundred years longer than Islam to do it, so that part of its story is often ignored.

For the modern Muslim and the modern Christian though, there are immediate repercussions.

Even though, from a distance, it’s obvious that Christianity and Islam followed nearly the exact same path, the fact that Islam took a single generation to follow the path it took Christianity several hundred years to blaze does result in some behavioral differences. Because Islam’s birth and its conquest of the world occurred so close together, it’s much easier to excuse and condone violence using its traditions and texts.

The Crusades occurred when the West was struggling and Islam was thriving, now that the opposite is true it only makes sense that Muslims are looking to violence to protect their coreligionists and ensure their own society’s survival.

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When you are sworn into Federal Court, you are exhorted to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Each of these phrases carries a slightly different angle against any possible lie – not only are you swearing to speak no lies, but also to not hold any part of the truth back, and to not mix in lies among the truth you do tell.

And so by its own standards, the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has been openly and unabashedly lying about the racial divisions that remain within the American penal system for at least the past seven years.  It’s a lie so patently absurd that if our current President was incarcerated, the Department of Justice would pretend he wasn’t there, and whitewash his existence from their racial prisoner data entirely.

A report by The Sentencing Project used data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to come to the cheery conclusion that over the six-year period from 1999-2005, there was a 21.6% drop in the number of African-Americans serving state prison time for drug offenses, while the number of whites increased by 42.6%.

This assertion headlines every major newspaper article about the report, including articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They all highlight the “fact” that there’s been a 21.6% drop in blacks serving sentences for drug offenses.

Ignoring for a moment the extraordinary racial disparity in the enforcement of drug laws that existed prior to 1996, with blacks accounting for less than 15% of all drug users but over half of those in prison for drug offenses, when you take the time to examine these numbers you’ll see that by courtroom standards this “fact” is a lie.

Here’s the DoJ’s chart, which is quoted in The Sentencing Project‘s report:

The lie bubbles up to the surface when you do the actual calculations to determine the percentages. The numbers simply do not add up.

In 1999 the number of prisoners missing from the total is close to irrelevant: totaling up the number given for each race you get 247,500 instead of the 251,200 given in the chart – a difference of 3,700 or just 1.5%. So, not much of a hole – one that can be plugged with Asians and other ethnicities.

Much more troubling is what happens when you do the math on the 2005 numbers. Each race is stated to have a certain percentage of the total prison population: 28.5% White, 44.8% Black, and 20.2% Hispanic. And when you take the stated population of each group, and divide it into the stated total, those numbers mesh perfectly.

But there’s a problem. One that would cause you to fail a high school math test, bring the IRS knocking at your door, or cause a space shuttle to explode during liftoff.

When you add up the number given for each race in 2005, you only get 239,600 total prisoners – instead of the 253,300 total the chart gives you. So although 72,300 White prisoners divided into a total prison population of 253,300 does give you 28.5% – the total prison population is actually 236,900 – or 16,400 prisoners lower.

That’s a 5% difference still missing even besides the 1.5% also missing from 1999 – hardly negligible. And this is not the result of a rounding error or from a margin of error. Nor is it the result of the overall racial composition of the country changing. The 2000 census lists 75.1% of Americans as white and 12.3% as black, while the U.S. Census Bureau’s Community Survey for 2005-2007 put the numbers at 74.1% and 12.4% – the one-percent change in whites is by far the largest percentage shift, overall the racial breakdown stays basically constant.

It’s clear that the DoJ decided to simply remove mixed race, half-black half-white, prisoners from the system entirely because a footnote in the DoJ’s statistics opaquely fesses up to the whitewashing:

“Data analysis procedures adopted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 affected the categorization of persons identifying with two or more races… and had the result of a modest reduction in the number of persons identified as non-Hispanic white and black.“

There was not a 5% shift in America’s demographics from 1999 to 2005, what accounts for that 5% shift was how those who identified themselves as mixed race, half-black and half-white, were used in the prisoner calculations by the DoJ. Well, “used” isn’t even the best term – they were simply removed from the DoJ’s calculations and left off the chart.

And this change in how those who identified themselves as mixed race were counted and used in the calculations is what caused close to half the DoJ’s initially reported 21.6% shift in black prisoners – only about 12% of that change really happened. An error that results in roughly a 40% swing in the stated outcome is hard to swallow as simply bad math.

Looking at the DoJ’s chart, what happened to the percentage of black prisoners in 2004 after the prisoners identified as mixed black-and-white were left out of the calculations?

In 2003, all but 1.2% of the prison population is accounted for, a percentage explained by Asians and other ethnicities not being listed on the chart at all. And then, suddenly, the very next year, the exact year the DoJ changes the way it counts prisoners who identified themselves as mixed black-and-white, 7.7% of the total population pool is now missing.

2003 total: 64,800 + 133,100 + 50,100 = 248,000 prisoners accounted for
248,000 / 250,900 = 1.2% missing
2004 total: 65,900 + 112,500+ 51,800 = only 230,200 prisoners accounted for
230,200 / 249,400 = 7.7% missing

Between those two years, when it seems like the percentage of blacks plummets by 7.9%, 16,200 prisoners simply disappear. That’s 6.5% of the data left unaccounted for when you factor in the 1.2% of Asians and other ethnicities left off every year of the chart.

Using the same calculation the report uses to draw its conclusion that between 1999 and 2005 the percentage of black prisoners drops by 21.6% (dividing the total number of black prisoners from one year by the number of black prisoners the year before), in a single year the percentage of black prisoners seems to have plummeted by 18.2%. However this is simply because, as the above footnote states, in 2004 the DoJ changed the way it categorizes prisoners identifying themselves as of mixed race, both white-and-black.

Apparently it didn’t just “affect categorization,” in one year the DoJ just removed 6.5% of the data – some 16,200 prisoners – from their calculations entirely.

Maybe through simple bureaucratic incompetence but more likely through a concerted attempt to warp the numbers, people who identified themselves as mixed black-and-white were simply thrown out, and percentages were calculated from an incomplete number that was missing prisoners who identified themselves as mixed.

Because where it really gets damning, is when you put those prisoners back into the system.

For the sake of an argument that will be illustrated shortly, we can assume those thousands belong in the Black column, where they originally were up until 2004. And we’ll assume that unaccounted for ethnicities make up 1.2% of the total, the same percentage there was in 2004 when the DoJ quietly changed things up.

That would change the the total number of incarcerated blacks in 2005 from 113,500 to 126,900 , so instead of 44.8% of the total population they now really make up 50% of it. And that 50% is only down 7.6% from 1999 when they made up 57.6% of the population. Even beyond the way the data was heavily massaged, it’s staggering that according to DoJ numbers only 14% of regular drug users in 2005 were black and yet they consisted of 50% of those incarcerated for drug offenses.

So now using the statistic highlighted by the media, and instead examining the way the black prisoner population changed year to year – instead of an overall decrease in the Black population from 1999 to 2005 of 21.6% as the chart erroneously states, the adjusted decrease is instead 12.3%. That’s nearing half the stated level, a fairly large mistake.

A number that was highlighted as the most important statistic by every major media outlet that covered the report.

As the above quoted footnote explains, the method of reporting those who identified themselves as mixed-race wasn’t changed until 2004, so back in 1999 it’s unclear where exactly the 1.5% fit into the system. They may have been a sampling error, but it’s much more likely they were the Asians and other ethnicities.

And to answer the question of how can you justify lumping the prisoners identified as mixed race black-and-white missing from the total into the Black column – well, we have our first black president, and his mother could pass for June Cleaver. In America if you have one parent of African descent and one white parent, you are considered black by the media and by society at large.

Tiger Woods is the one exception to this, however as one of the most successful and the single richest athlete in the world he can pretty much call himself whatever the hell he wants. He simply decided he didn’t like being referred to as African-American, so he made up a word for his unique ethnicity that has yet to be applied to any other public figure.

Every other light-skinned black in the public eye calls themselves, and is referred to by the media and society at large as either “black” or “African-American” – the more politically correct but completely interchangeable word for black.

After Barack Obama’s election, this point has been all but closed to any sensible argument. Unless, of course, you want to try to change his Wikipedia page where Barack Obama is listed as the “first black president” of the Harvard Law Review, argue with his own words, or maybe take the issue up with Young Jeezy. Individuals will always been entitled to think of themselves however they like, but that won’t change the media-shaped perception society has of them.

Either way, by simply removing 6.5% of the data in 2004 and never adjusting the previous years of the chart to reflect the fact that prisoners identified as mixed black-and-white were no longer being counted in the Black column starting in 2004, the DoJ is in effect lying about the reality of what’s going on. Whether the DoJ intended to cook their books or not is irrelevant.

The whole truth is not coming out, a lie is being told, and the public is being misled about the role racism plays in the formation and implementation of America’s drug laws. A role that stretches back well beyond the years covered in that chart.

Which brings us to how those numbers became so warped in the first place…

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Much like pinatas, there are a plethora of reasons to legalize marijuana.  There’s the fact that it’s easier for American teens to buy than alcohol anyways, the fact that legalizing marijuana alone would raise nearly $20 billion in taxes and savings, the fact that its illegality helps directly fund the muderous multi-billion dollar international drug trade, the fact that scientifically it’s markedly less harmful than either alcohol or tobacco:

But if you’re at all interested in the issue, you’ve likely heard all of the above arguments before. After all, our drug laws have never really been about public safety, but instead “on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot.”  However, one argument you may not have heard applied to America’s ongoing War on Drugs is the the Iron Law of Prohibition:

The law says that the more you try to enforce prohibition (bigger budgets, larger penalties, etc.) the more potent and dangerous prohibited drugs become. This is based on the premise that when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced only in black markets in their most concentrated and powerful forms. If all alcohol beverages are prohibited, a bootlegger will be more profitable if he smuggles highly potent distilled liquors than if he smuggles the same volume of small beer. In addition, the black-market goods are more likely to be adulterated with unknown or dangerous substances. The government cannot regulate and inspect the production process, and harmed consumers have no recourse in law. When applied to rum-running, drug smuggling, and blockade running the more potent products become the sole focus of the suppliers.

The Iron Law is the reason bootleggers in the 1920s chose to smuggle barrels of whiskey across state borders instead of kegs of beer – much more bang for your buck, or more precisely your ounce.  And the very same way that the Prohibition of the 1920′s gave birth to our first wave of organized crime and black market profits, our modern War on Drugs has been fueling epidemics of crime and illicit profit since the seventies:

“Not only did the number of serious crimes increase, but crime became organized. Criminal groups organized around the steady source of income provided by laws against victimless crimes. In the process of providing goods and services those criminal organizations resort to real crimes in defense of sales territories, brand names, and labor contracts. That is true of extensive crime syndicates as well as street gangs.” 

Oops, that quote was actually describing alcohol Prohibition of the 1920′s – but it’s a perfectly apt description of the criminal realities created by the War on Drugs.  And not only has organized crime been given a dark hole to glean profits from, but legalizing marijuana would also indirectly help combat the virulent spread of HIV, since half of all drug arrests are marijuana-related and the War on Drugs has created a massive prison system which accelerates “the spread of the HIV pandemic by driving drug users underground, and away from healthcare, and into high risk environments like prison.” But the most obviously sign that the Iron Law is at work becomes viable when you examine the potency and popularity of the drugs being abused:

Opiate production has grown 380% in recent decades, and in the US, drugs have become more cheaper and more potent since the drug war started — despite the rising expenditure by the US government on the drug war.”

And it’s not just heroin. The Iron Law is also the reason other truly dangerous and concentrated drugs like crystal meth and oxycodone are becoming so prolific and prevalent – when illegality is an issue, drug dealers are going to be sure they’re moving the most valuable product, pound-for-pound.  In our modern American case, the Iron Law applies to drug dealers as a whole – if they’re going to sell illegal drugs, they’re going to focus on selling the more concentrated drugs that turn the largest profit, and so the use of harder more dangerous drugs explodes as soon as they’re introduced to the market .

Depending on where you are, a pound of weed will generally run you somewhere around $1,500, whereas a pound of crystal meth will put you back close to $15,000 in most states.  Pricing oxy is a bit trickier, but if “1,123 pills of oxycodone have a street value of around $48,000″ – assuming we’re dealing with the standard 30mg pill, then an even pound would be worth right around $64,5000. In pricing illegal narcotics, the Iron Law of Prohibition is quite clearly alive and well.

Now don’t get me wrong here, Breaking Bad is a terrific freaking show, but it’s about the only way crystal meth has made any sort of a positive cultural contribution – meth has been ripping the poorest and most desperate elements of our society apart at the seams for well-over a decade now.

Whereas marijuana isn’t actually physically addictive at all (it’s only psychologically addictive, which puts it in the same category as dangerous substances such as milk chocolate), meth addiction is one of the toughest physical addictions to kick – full withdrawal can take up to a year.  And while cocaine and heroine require the support of multi-billion dollar international cartels that stretch from Columbia to Afghanistan, you can crank out crystal meth in the nearest garage or trailer home.

Which is exactly what millions in America’s heartland have been doing, it rose to prominence as the USA’s top drug problem according to law enforcement in 2005, just about tripling the percentage of the second most problematic drug:

 The survey received responses from 500 county law enforcement agencies in 45 states. 58% of counties in the survey said that methamphetamine was their largest drug problem followed by cocaine (19%), marijuana (17%) and heroin (3%) as the most problematic drug for each county.

Stricter laws around the sale of Sudafed, a precursor for meth’s main ingredient, caused its usage to drop over the next few years before rebounding throughout the nation, especially the Midwest.  States from Michigan to Missouri have seen a sharp increase in crystal meth abuse since 2008.

Oxycodone, often referred to by its brand name “OxyContin,” has also been ravaging the American heartland since the turn of the century, although its users are often unintentional addicts who get hooked after first getting through a legitimate prescription:

According to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, there was a fourfold increase nationally in treatment admissions for prescription pain pill abuse during the past decade. The increase spans every age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, employment level and region.

“You could leave a bag of cocaine on the street and no one would touch it, but leave one OxyContin in the back of an armored car and they’ll blow it up to get at it.”

Incredibly physically addictive, in a sense oxy is much worse than meth in that it’s much deadlier. In the state of Kentucky alone the rate of overdose-related death tripled for women and doubled for men over the past decade. Often riding their way up from Florida along the I-75 ” Oxy Express,” the tiny pills  caused 11,000 American overdose deaths in 2007, triple the number of corpses it produced in 2000 and more than either heroin or cocaine.  In case it hasn’t been mentioned yet, marijuana overdoses have yet to kill a single American, ever.

When our original Prohibition finally ended, the national homicide rate dropped off dramatically, and the organized crime syndicates which had used illicit sales to fund their vast empires finally began to wither and die.  To battle its growing epidemics of crack and freebase cocaine, Uruguay recently unveiled plans to nationalize marijuana- effectively legalizing it and selling it through national dispensaries. And according to the Iron Law, doing the same here in America would help curtail our lethal growing epidemics of crystal meth and oxy abuse.

It’s easy to pretend that the War on Drugs isn’t affecting everyday life too much here in America, that is unless you’re in an innercity like Chicago which over the last three weekends saw 20 shooting deaths on top of 113 injuries, many of them gang-related and all of them tied to the disintegration of our innercity communities which began in tandem with the War on Drugs.

But American hasn’t seen anything close to the drug related violence that’s been our second prohibition’s dark passenger since its inception. Over 50,000 Mexicans have been murdered in the past six-years in acts of drug-related violence, during which time Mexico’s per-capita murder rate has doubled.

In the same way that alcohol Prohibition of the 1920′s created the classy fedora and Tommy Gun toting gangsters and wanton violence of that era, the modern War on Drugs created the modern gangsta’ – who may be lookin’ like a fool with his pants on the ground, but probably also has few other economic options in front of him.  And the stereotype of the black gangsta’ is now so strong, that just being brown means that in the past year you likely would’ve been stopped and frisked by the police whether or not you’re engaging in any illicit activities:

Last year, NYPD stopped nearly 700,000 people. Shockingly, 87 percent of those stopped were black or Latino. Of those stopped, more than half were also frisked.

During the ten years of the Bloomberg administration, police have performed 4,356,927 stops. Of African-American males between the ages 14 to 24, the number of stops last year was greater than their total population — meaning that if you’re a part of this demographic, the odds were that you were stopped more than once just this past year. 

Marijuana is far and away the least dangerous Schedule I controlled substance, its categorization there as a drug with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use is beyond asinine.  And all the science aside, Portugal’s decriminalization of all drugs was unarguably a success:

In the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.  “Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”

Jumping right in to all-out decriminalization of all drugs will probably remain politically unpalatable, but starting with legalizing marijuana could serve as an incredibly useful and viable case study.  Legalizing weed would provide a safe and regulated alternative to Americans who are looking to get high, provide billions of dollars of revenue, and it could save quite literally thousands of lives every year.

But odds are, until the disastrous socioeconomic realities caused directly by the War on Drugs become impossible to ignore for every wealthy middle-class American, we’ll continue to try and smoke, snort, or inject away the quiet desperation of so many of our lives, as hundreds of thousands are slaughtered south of our border and millions of our neighbors are judicially ushered behind bars that lock their families permanently out of the American Dream.

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10. After the bungled Glasgow International Airport attack, one of the terrorists was apprehended by a Scottish cabby who kicked a burning terrorist in the balls so hard he tore a tendon in his foot.

9. The Times Square Bomber, Faisal Shazhad, locked the keys to both his get-away car and his house inside the car-bomb he rigged.  The car bomb consisted of a bunch of fireworks stuck in a bucket, and a bunch of fertilizer.  Inert, non-explosive fertilizer that only served to muffle the blast.

8. While terrorist “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was hiding out in the Philippines, he kept a low profile by renting a freaking helicopter and making fly-overs of the building where the “cultural dancers” he wanted to date worked. They were impressed enough to allow him to take them on a date. He chose the local Wendy’s.

7. Terrorists in the cell caught by an FBI-NYPD sting in the Bronx were called “intellectually challenged” by their lawyer, said they were high when they were arrested, and claimed that the FBI entrapped them with fried chicken.

6. On 9/11, the terrorists who flew out of Logan – after having spent years preparing, months training, and tens of thousands of dollars on the attack – made it onto their flight with just six-minutes to spare.

5. Part of this close-call may have been due to being up late the night before.  Hotel records show the night before they carried out what they saw as a sanctified assault against the forces of Evil – they rented a porno together.

4. The aforementioned Glasgow International Airport attack was originally thwarted by another unusual hero.  The height of the airport’s doorway – the terrorists never bothered to check if it would allow clearance for the jeep they were driving, so they got stuck. Their bomb detonated anyways, lighting one of them on fire – the attack’s only serious injury (unless you count the cabby’s foot as well).

3. The terrorist in charge of the 1993 van-bombing of the World Trade Center waited until the night before the scheduled attack to find a Ryder van they could use, and someone willing to drive it beneath the Towers.  They were ultimately all tracked down after one of them returned to the rental agency to noisily insist that he should get their deposit back – three separate times.  The FBI was waiting for him the third time.

2. This 1993 World Trade Center cell was finally caught in Manila, where a policewoman – a grandmother wearing a flowered muumuu, hoop earrings, and rubber slippers – ran Abdul Murad down in the street, bound his hands with clothesline, and hailed a taxi to get him back to the station. Police were tipped off to his presence after he managed to light his apartment on fire.

1. A cell plotting a car-bombing in Southeast Asia were foiled when an issue arose with the guy they’d spent months recruiting and training to drive their car-bomb.  When he got into the vehicle the morning of the attack he explained there was a problem: he didn’t know how to drive stick.

Political Terrorism is a gyre that’s only set into motion when fear and panic cause the target to overreact with disproportionate violence, which draws sympathizers into the terrorist fold and creates justification for further attacks. If we don’t lose our shit – the terrorists lose.

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

UPDATE: The summer gun violence hasn’t calmed down at all: the weekend of June 17th saw 7 killed and nearly 40 injured by gun violence in Chicago, the next weekend pushed the total June bodycount to 20, and on the 4th of July alone 5 were killed and 21 wounded,

So far 2012 is on pace to be the bloodiest summer ever in the Windy City, there have been far more murders in the city than U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, and the annual homicide rate is up 38% from last year.

A little while back al-Qaeda’s American-born spokesman “Adam the American” released a video exhorting Muslims in America to wage the “death by a-thousand cuts” version of jihad.  Instead of looking to stage large dramatic attacks which would require months of preparation and planning, he implored would-be jihadis to simply buy guns and start shooting people:

Muslims in the West have to remember that they are perfectly placed to play an important and decisive part in the jihad against the Zionists and Crusaders, and to do major damage to the enemies of Islam waging war on their religion, sacred places, and brethren.  This is a golden opportunity.

“The way to show one’s appreciation and thanks for this blessing, is to rush to discharge one’s duty to his [community] and fight on its behalf with everything at his disposal.  And in the West you’ve got a lot at your disposal. Let’s take America as an example, American is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms…

So what are you waiting for?

And while there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the recent shooting deaths in Chicago have anything at all to do with waging a campaign of terror on behalf of al-Qaeda, the marked uptick in violence is a troubling indication that our innercities may implode totally on their own, without any outside influence at all.

In the second-to-last weekend of May, the Windy City’s bodycount was 4 dead and 28 wounded, ranging in ages from 7 years-old to 68.  Memorial Day weekend saw 11 killed and over 40 injured, a week later saw sustained violence: 9 dead and 46 wounded. Between Saturday night and Sunday night alone 20 people were shot.  Although some shootings were obviously targeted, home invasions and apparent gang violence, a handful of them have troubling elements of randomness to them:

Two people died after someone produced a handgun and fired several shots into a crowd of people in the 700 block of West 50th Place about 11:15 p.m. Sunday, hitting five people, police said.

A white four-door car pulled up to a group of boys near the intersection of West 69th Street and South Artesian Avenue and someone inside opened fire.

As our military pours billions and billions of dollars into stopping threats from abroad, it’s important to keep in mind that the biggest threat to American security may be right here at home: an implosion of our innercities brought about by the social and economic devestation wrought as the War on Drugs created a cycle of absence by imprisoning so many black fathers and destroying any hope for economic advancement:

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.”

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%

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10,000 years ago something funny began to happen within the human genome.  We didn’t know it at the time, but minute changes that would haunt every generation to come were slowly and imperceptibly unfolding inside each and every one of our ancestors.

Almost like flipping a switch, what had once been a steady rate of mutation  suddenly increased, and “the pace of change accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate.” These changes were driven at least in part by the development of agriculture, the domestication of both plants and animals.  Some human guts retained the ability to digest lactose as adults, others adapted to deal with a grain-heavy diet. Although agriculture wasn’t the only factor and there were certainly other forces at play, we do know, without question, that 10,000 years ago mutations in our genome began to accumulate at a pace never before seen in human prehistory.

Life as we’d known it would never be the same.

The proliferation of agriculture, both domesticating animals and growing crops, brought massive changes to early human societies. One impact was that that populations suddenly became much more dense, another was that humans began to interact much more frequently and closely with domesticated animals.  These two factors – population density and our cohabitation with the creatures that would become our beef, pork, and poultry – allowed contagious diseases to kick a firm foothold into human societies.

“Diseases such as malaria, smallpox and tuberculosis, among others, became more virulent,” and we’ve since traced the flu back to ducks, pigs, and geese as its original hosts.  Additionally, barnyard animals like cats, rats, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, and birds have all played roles in transmitting – in no particular order – anthrax, rabies, tapeworms, plague, chlamydia, and salmonella.

Empowered by their new mastery of their food supply our ancestors once again made their way out of Africa and into the surrounding regions, and this time they were able to establish permanent settlements well north of their previous wanderings.  Along the way, the most noticeable change of all occurred. Somewhere along the Black Seas coast, a baby popped out and looked up at its parents with blue eyes.  This novel mutation along the OCA2 gene has since propagated itself across human society, hand in hand with another subtler series of mutations.

As humans made their way out of Africa and into Eurasian and other norther latitudes, their pigmentation changed markedly and we began to differentiate into a racial spectrum:

This reduction in pigmentation had an obvious biological trigger: we’ve known for awhile that the fairer your skin, the more vitamin D you’ll produce when it’s hit with sunlight.

In the past few years new information has emerged, in turns out that “vitamin D is crucial to activating our immune defenses and that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells – will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.”  Without enough vitamin D in our bodies, our immune systems simply cannot function.  Labeling it a “vitamin” is actually a bit of a misnomer, it’s actually a hormone that functions as:

 ”…a potent antibiotic. Instead of directly killing bacteria and viruses, [vitamin D] increases the body’s production of a remarkable class of proteins, called antimicrobial peptides. The 200 known antimicrobial peptides directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including the influenza virus, and play a key role in keeping the lungs free of infection.”

Additionally it turns out vitamin D “seems important for preventing and even treating many types of cancer… Four separate studies found it helped protect against lymphoma and cancers of the prostate, [colon], lung and, ironically, the skin.”

And vitamin D isn’t just another hormone, in fact it’s tied in to our very humanity. Or at least our very simian-anity, as vitamin D’s vital role in primate immunology emerged within our genome over 60 million years ago, and carries a functionality that is unique to us and our furrier brethren - no other animal on earth except primates shares the DNA which ties vitamin D to antibacterial peptide synthesis. Besides just helping fight off infection, it prevents the autoimmune overreaction of the body fighting itself, and so it “may enable suppression of inflammation while potentiating innate immunity, thus maximizing the overall immune response to a pathogen and minimizing damage to the host.”

The conventionally accepted theory has been that children with lighter skin tended to survive more in northern latitudes because children with darker skin fell victim to rickets and other prenatal conditions that occur when pregnant mothers don’t get enough vitamin D. But both preventing and treating rickets requires only 400 IU’s of vitamin D a day.

And so when you consider that  “a fair skinned person, sitting on a New York beach in June for about 10-15 minutes… is producing the equivalent of 15,000-20,000 IU’s of Vitamin D” and that “African-Americans with very dark skin have an SPF of 15, and, thus, their ability to make vitamin D in their skin is reduced by as much as 99%” it becomes readily apparent that racial differentiation emerged to drastically ramp up vitamin D production to fight disease, not merely to prevent a mild deficiency.

Lighter skin didn’t develop just to prevent Rickets, but was in fact a vital adaptation to fight back against the growing array of diseases that were beginning to proliferate throughout early crowded agriculture communities.  And it wasn’t that agriculture removed vitamin D from the diets of early societies, because the amount of vitamin D in food is negligible - especially compared to the thousands and thousands of IU’s created by sunlight in fair-skinned individuals.  Unless you want to argue that giant 400-pound cod were roaming the African veld, any argument that centers around diet is spurious at best. Indeed,  “it is almost impossible to get your vitamin D needs met by food alone.”

If anything agriculture may have actually reduced the vitamin D levels of early societies, since a growing body of evidence is pointing towards the idea that much of the cereal that was grown would’ve been used to brew beer instead of bake bread: “the first thing [early societies] did with grain… was make it into beer.”

And even in the New World, analysis of the atomic variations of human skeletal remains indicate that Native Americans were probably brewing their maize into wine rather than baking with it. Much of the early pottery – now broken bits of jugs and amphora – may have in fact been used to store alcoholic beverages. Primitive brewing likely just started off as trying to mimic natural processes that created ethanol such as fermenting fruits and rainwater pooling with honey that animals were observed getting crunk off of, comparatively simple to imitate or invent by accident compared to baking.

But why beer instead of bread? It’s all about the calories, and public health.

Drinking weak alcoholic beverages would’ve actually been safer than drinking water since beer is generally sterile and even has antiseptic properties, and it’s certainly more healthful since beer contains a wide range of important micronutriets such as folic acid, silicon, and B vitamins. Brewing cereal into beer instead of baking it into bread would’ve been a primitive form of preservation as well, since without refrigeration bread starts to spoil inside a week, whereas the alcohol and yeasts in beer act as preservatives and greatly extend its shelf-life.

Social interaction is what gave birth to our first primate civilizations, so the importance of feasts and celebrations in early societies would’ve made beer a vital social lubricant – or to flip the metaphor on its head, the very glue that first began to hold civilization together. And so, since alcohol has the unique effect of blocking the synthesis of vitamin D, agriculture and beer consumption would’ve contributed to deficiencies and further increased the need to get more exposure to sunlight.

Native peoples at northern latitudes whose skin didn’t lighten as much stayed darker because agriculture never caused their societies to become crowded or involved with animals enough for disease to become a significant pressure.  After all, it was “the strength of selection as people became agriculturalists—a major ecological change—and a vast increase in the number of favorable mutations as agriculture led to increased population size” which, in turn, led to the mutations which lightened northern agriculturalists’ skin.

The racial groups we have now emerged as as a direct consequence of migrating into more northern latitudes, lightened skin gave dense agricultural communities the strengthened immune system they needed to fight off the lethal pathogens and parasites that became an increasing threat to crowded early human societies. And as Guns, Germs, and Steel outlined, as different racial groups domesticated and interacted with different animals, they developed communal immunities to discrete sets of diseases: 

“Disease-causing pathogens—viruses, bacteria and protists—have geographies, both in terms of where they can be found and how common they are within those regions. The consequent map of malaise and death affects many aspects of the human story”

Racial groups in Eurasian, Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia were each exposed to unique biological threats, depending on the region they inhabited and the animals they domesticated. Although there was some overlap, their exposures were still discrete enough so that when one community did come into contact with the other, widespread pandemics of the strangers’ diseases often occured.

Living shoulder-to-shoulder with each other and with their newly domesticated livestock, disease became a much bigger threat than it’d ever been to early hunter-gatherer communities. This immunological legacy is still with us, as different racial groups express different rates of a vast array of common diseases to this day.

So why is any of this a bad thing?

Within the past few years everyone from Cosmo to Nature has reported on the results of a surprising study: women can, it would seem, smell who they’re attracted to.  Bags containing t-shirts that various men had worn while exercising served as sweaty glass slippers, women were asked to rate the attractiveness of the scent contained in each bag - every white t-shirt was exactly the same except for the odor of the man who’d worn it.  Women rated each bag and went on their way, never to learn anything more about the prospective mates than what their used laundry smelled like.  And when researchers went to work trying to figure out why women made the choices they did, a surprising and consistent link was found: women are attracted to men whose major-histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes most complimented theirs:

Women’s preference for MHC-distinct mates makes perfect sense from a biological point of view. Ever since ancestral times, partners whose immune systems are different have produced offspring who are more disease-resistant. With more immune genes expressed, kids are buffered against a wider variety of pathogens and toxins.

MHC genes are the gatekeepers of our immune systems, they determine white blood cell function and decide whether or not organs will be accepted for donation – regulating whether or not a new host will accept a donor organ as its own or attack it as an outside contagion. The better suited your MHC genes are to fighting the pathogens present in your environment, the healthier you’ll be.

And not only healthier, but more intelligent too.  A study of IQ scores and infectious disease found that both internationally between nations and nationally between states, IQ levels correlate more closely with the rate of infectious disease than any other factor. Given how biologically taxing it is for children to fight off disease, and the fact that our brains suck up 90% of our energy as newborns and one-quarter of our energy as adults, it stands to reason that healthier societies end up more intelligent on the whole and that instincts which select for healthy progeny would emerge.

So when it comes to picking a mate who will pass half of their MHC genes onto your child and largely decide the suitably of their immune system to the environment, the trick is determining exactly what “compliment” means, as researchers found that “women are not attracted to the smell of men with whom they had no MHC genes in common. ‘This might be a case where you’re protecting yourself against a mate who’s too similar or too dissimilar, but there’s a middle range where you’re okay.’”

“Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens…” 

-Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

Hopefully before too long Steven Pressfield’s newest creative manifesto, Turning Pro, will be bound together and sold part and parcel with The War of Art, his original attempt to bind and deliver exactly what it takes to launch a creative endeavor.  In these two works, Pressfield encourages the prospective artist to push through the roadblocks, both real and perceived, that are keeping him from actually producing the Work that he was put here to create.  The most common form these roadblocks take is Resistance, an umbrella term for everything from classic procrastination to the self-doubt that might prevent someone from tacking their artistic calling:

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. 

Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’ shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not alone if we’ve been mown down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here’s the biggest bitch: we don’t even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.

To conquer Resistance we are instructed to simply “do the work,” just sit down each and every day and spend several hours at our labor of love.  In Turning Pro he expands on this process, and explicates precisely what it is that separates the pro from the amateur, laying out exactly what someone needs to do accomplish the book’s eponymous goal:

The Lunch Pail Manifesto

1. We must find the work that brings our lives meaning.
2. We must strive to make our work purposeful, truthful, and authentic, a pure offering to our Muse and fellow human beings.
3. We must wage a lifelong war with Resistance and accept that instant gratification is an oxymoron.
4. We must not speak of our work with false modesty or braggadocio.
5. We must not debase our work for short term gain nor elevate it above its rightful station to inflate our ego.
6. We must not covet the fruits of our work, or the fruits of others’ work.
7. We must respect others’ work and offer aid to fellow professional laborers.
8. We must accept that our work will never be perfect.
9. We must accept that our work will never be without merit.
10. We must accept that our work will never cease.

Both of these books are essential reads for anyone looking to get into writing, or looking to produce any kind of art at all.  But that said, they miss a crucial factor.  Successfully creating Art isn’t simply a matter of sitting down each day and milling words onto a page or strokes onto a canvas.

The idea that human artists are directly inspired by Muses runs strong throughout both books, as Pressfield cribs the idea that a Muse brings inspiration to the aspiring artist directly from the Greeks.  He believes that there are forces outside of us, and outside of what we can prove exists, that guide anyone who is looking to produce art.  Writers don’t write books, writers are simple the vessels through which our Muse communicates with the world:

They know stuff we don’t. They want to help us. They’re on the other side of a pane of glass, shouting to get our attention. But we can’t hear them. We’re too distracted by our own nonsense.

Whether or not you believe in the mystical element of Pressfield’s claim, anyone who’s been “in the zone,” whether it was athletically or creatively, knows that to perform at your peak you have to turn your conscious off as much as possible and let your unconscious firmly take the wheel. Which brings us to the giant gaping hole that neither book addresses.

Creating worthwhile art isn’t simply a matter of churning out product.  In the same way that religious supplicants prepare themselves for spiritual experiences, be it Buddhist monks shaving their heads and giving away all their shit or everyday Muslims bathing before each and every prayer, prospective artists aren’t going to produce anything of value unless they do the work behind the work.

In the case of writing non-fiction or historical fiction that means doing hundreds of hours of research and annotation. Although he’s never come out with an exact number it’s impossible to imagine Gates of Fire being written without hundreds of hours of research being done first. And the same can be said for any successful work of non or historical fiction – compelling books that are based in the real world do not spring magically from our fingers, they are synthesized from hours and hours of grinding your way through once-forgotten pages.

The work before the work is a little harder to define when it comes to fiction.  But take Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, probably the single most influence novel for this generation of young American men.  Before writing it, Palahniuk spent months bouncing around between dozens of self-help groups, absorbing Desperation and Emptiness in as many different living and breathing examples as possible.  And to continue to pump out novels since then, he’s continued his wanderlust for novel human experience – many of them are documented in Stranger Than Fiction, a compilation of articles written about his journeys.

There are countless examples of one-off hits in fiction, writers who are able to pump-out a single successful book but then everything that follows seems to flop.  A clue as to why this happens is hidden near the end of Turning Pro, where Pressfield confides that his first decent screenplay was set in a prison despite the fact he’d never stepped foot in one in his life.  Pressfield attributes this to his Muse working through him, which he asserts is the only possibly explanation for being able to write so compellingly about prison life despite having never been inside one.

But there’s a simpler, duller explanation.

At the start of the book Pressfield talks about the halfway home he spent an extended amount of time in, and whose residents he spent most of his time telling stories with. Who were these residents? Former psych-ward patients.  Although they’re not totally analogous, it’s not hard to imagine that Pressfield absorbed countless details and vivid feelings about what it’s like to be confined – shared memories which made their way into his screenplay about prison life.

Both The War of Art and Turning Pro are invaluably reads to the aspiring artist. But their central thesis, that all you have to do is sit down everyday and “do the work” is flawed.  Works of literature that leave a lasting impact on the world aren’t created through daily doing the work of writing alone.  Writers must do the research, either literal academic research or investigating the way other people live their lives and see the world, to give their Muse the raw materials to work with.  In a way Pressfield briefly hints at this in The War of Art:

The part we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we’ve got, the better and richer that part becomes.

People who write compelling novels are very rarely happy and well-adjusted, the vast majority of their first works are largely biographical.  But once they’ve shared that side of themselves, unless they go out and seek to understand other people’s demons they’re not going to be able to produce anything else simply by sitting down and rolling their face across a keyboard for a few hours every morning.

The work behind the work isn’t simply a matter of will, artists are required to immerse themselves in worlds that aren’t their own by either pouring through endless stacks of books or walking as closely as possible in as many strangers’ shoes as possible.  It’s possible to sell books without truly breathing life into them, millions of books even.  But those books will ultimately fade away to nothing, and their writers will have left nothing behind.

Writing can be either frivolous or immortal, there is no in-between.  Either you’re breathing life onto the page, or you’re not.  Sitting down just for the sake of slapping sentences onto a page isn’t how you imbue your writing with a soul, if you don’t seek out the information and experiences that your Muse needs to feed off of, your writing will wither out and die along with her.

“The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last.

Stone crumbles.
Wood rots.
People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

If you change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves.
The way they see the world.
If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.
And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.”

- Chuck Palahniuk

(read the book free online - help launch the Kickstarter - read the Reddit AMA)

Unrest and instability plague a predominately Muslim nation after an economic recession creates growing swells of social upheaval, street demonstrations, and violence.  Islamists are poised to fill a growing power vacuum, but right as their scraggly grasping fingers are closing in on control of the state, the military steps in to prevent them from gaining control.

Sound familiar?

But what’s going down in Egypt isn’t by any means unique, the description at the top of this article was cribbed from the Wikipedia entry on the 1971 Turkey coup d’etat, the second coup in what ended up being a half-century of repeated military interventions that were each enacted to preserve a democratic Turkish state.

Here’s the thing though. Almost 50 years before the first coup Turkey’s supreme leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, began the process of ripping Islam from the national fabric in a series of reforms that did everything from get rid of the Islamic calendar and the Arabic alphabet to banning the veil and any public religious iconography.  This secularization was meant to forcefully modernize Turkey and bring it as close to lockstep with the West as quickly as possible, and surprisingly enough it was accepted by the majority of Turks… at least in the long run.

It’s not that Islam was totally removed as an influence on Turkey’s culture and government, but its influence was drastically curtailed.  The final step was a series of legal reforms which removed sharia, or Islamic law, as the primary source of judicial precedent.  Which brings us back to Egypt.

Given the excitement in most Western media outlets about the possibility of “democracy” coming to Egypt, you might expect that Egypt is on the verge of becoming a progressive state that embraces Liberalism, Justice, and Freedom as they’re all understood through our red-white-and-blue colored glasses.  And so it would probably surprised you to learn that when Muslims in Egypt, who account for almost 95% of the population, were polled a month before Mubarak’s ouster:

- 82%  supported stoning to death as punishment for adultery

- 77% supported hand amputation as punishment for theft

- 84% supported the death penalty for anyone who leaves Islam

Contrast that with Turkey, whose support in those respective categories was 16%, 13%, and 5%.  Now unless you’re going to argue that Pew Research is part of some vast Zionist Conspiracy, it’s pretty apparent that Egypt is a really long fucking ways away from anything even beginning to resemble a nation where liberalism and civil rights, as they’re understood in the West, are embraced.  Or even awkwardly patted on the back.

And that same poll had another telling statistic, 85% of Egyptian Muslims polled responded that Islam’s influence in politics is positive, while only 2% answered than it was in fact negative.  Why is this so notable?  All of the above punishments come directly from shariah, all of them are intrinsically tied to allowing Islam into the political realm.

If those poll results seem antithetical to the interviews you’ve been seeing on cable news, as John Bradley explains in his bracing and honest book After the Arab Spring:

Most Westerners understand these countries through their own journalists and pro-democracy activists, who obsessively home in on an English-speaking liberal elite.  There is no great conspiracy at play.  It is just that most of them do not speak the local languages and, whenever possible, understandably prefer to avoid government appointed minders and translators. Even if they do know better, they have little choice but to provide the “they want to be free like us” copy their editors back home demand.

What you see, especially on your television, is very rarely what you in fact get. Egypt’s revolution is at most a few weeks away from entering the nasty, vicious, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs” Robespierrean stage.  Exactly what comes next is anyone’s guess, but given the average Egyptian’s penchant for publicly removing a wrong-doers limbs (and or head) from their bodies in a gratuitous display of public justice, it’s hard to imagine that it’ll make for pleasant television viewing.

But odds are, it ain’t gonna be boring.  So if you’re into watching history drift into snuff film territory, hunker down in front of your television and get ready for the worst side of humanity to rear its all-too-often-forgotten head.