"There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared on Turkish television on Sunday. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

Made in one of two speeches given to Turkish TV yesterday, it is a statement that characterises the social unrest in Turkey as much as it seems to validate it. While mainstream Turkish media has largely tried to ignore the tens of thousands of protesters on the streets of Istanbul, Twitter has offered them a way to organise themselves and publicise their cause. What began as a peaceful protest about the destruction of a park to make way for a shopping centre has turned into a broader expression of Turkish discontent. Many sections of society are angry at what they see as a concerted attempt by Erdogan to transform the democracy he is charged with maintaining into an Islamist dictatorship. A combination of gentrification, government corruption and hints of a crackdown on personal freedoms, such as drinking alcohol and kissing in public, has provoked the biggest social uprising in Turkey for a decade.

And let's not forget the media blackout – a lack of press freedom tends to be a decent sign that a country's top-ranking officials are getting a little too power-greedy.

Protesters clash with police in Ankara.

During the weekend, protests spread to over half of Turkey's 81 provinces. Most notable were those in the capital, Ankara, where violent clashes between riot police and demonstrators resulted in over 700 injuries, and Istanbul, where the number of wounded has reached 1,000. You can only guess those figures are rising as we speak, while officials have announced that over 1,700 arrests have been made.

Beşiktaş fans joyride a digger through Istanbul.

On Sunday evening, fans of the city's Beşiktaş football team commandeered a digger and drove it at riot police, and those who don't feel up to joining the struggle in the streets hang out of windows, adding to the din that has engulfed parts of the country by banging on pots and pans.

VICE currently has a number of reporters and filmmakers in Turkey. We called one of them on Sunday to make sure they hadn't suffocated in tear gas plumes and to get their perspective on the latest from the ground. There's also a selection of images from the weekend's events in the gallery above.

VICE: Have things calmed down or are they getting more violent?
VICE: Things have calmed down in Taksim Square for sure; protesters have built barricades all around the park so it’s very hard for police vans or bulldozers to enter. But since 9.30PM tonight clashes between police and protesters have gone off in Beşiktaş and it’s been brutal. They’ve been using tear gas and other gas which has made people vomit – it has been alleged that it is Agent Orange but I can’t confirm or deny that.

Have you encountered many injured people?
When you walk on the streets here every five minutes you’ll see someone who has an injury, be it a bruise or someone suffocating from tear gas. There are six makeshift clinics at Taksim, staffed with volunteering doctors and medical students because police aren’t letting ambulances through. There were 500 people needing treatment in the medical centre I was in yesterday; these people can’t get to hospitals. On Friday one protester was in front of a hospital and she saw 40 ambulances taking people in – at that point the official numbers of people who had been injured was less than 40. So I can’t confirm injuries but obviously a lot more people are injured than the media is reporting. At least where I am right now, Gaviscon, which is used to help the effects of tear gas, is sold out.

I’ve heard some reports that police have destroyed benches and billboards to make it seem like protesters did it. Have you seen that?
There are a ton of rumours floating around about all sorts of things. The first night we were here people were screaming about young people being killed openly on the streets by police, which is still unconfirmed. Then yesterday there was a lot of talk about Turkish Greenpeace confirming that Agent Orange gas had been used against protesters, but again I think that was just a rumour. I’m not saying it can be ruled out, but it’s hard to confirm. It is possible that police have gone into crowds intentionally causing a ruckus, but it could also have been football hooligans or anarchists. We actually spent time yesterday with a group of protesters who’ve spent the entire time gathering all the rumours and then trying to fact check them.

Anti-Erdogan protesters gather in Istanbul on Saturday night.

What kind of demographic are you mainly seeing?
Mainly young people, because we are mainly out filming the action in the evening, but the moving thing about this protest, and what a lot of Turkish people have been talking about, is that all types of people are protesting and chanting side by side. There are Turkish nationalists next to Muslim anti-capitalists and even Kurds. For Turkey this is very special. Added to that you see women in head-scarves, football hooligans and anarchists. Everyone is out on the streets because they found that this absolutely brutal clampdown on a peaceful protest is unfair, and they’ve joined forces to say, “No, this is enough.” So it’s a difficult question to answer – there are lots of people.

Do the protesters seem to have a common ideology?
Of course, like in any protest, you see socialist flags and anarchist flags but as I said before this is clearly not a protest with specific political agenda. Above all, this is a protest about human rights, freedom of speech and democracy. Everything began with a small protest to protect the Gezi Park from being demolished to make way for a shopping mall. An MP from the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, stood in front of the bulldozers and told them it was illegal to demolish the trees in Gezi Park without permission. He was shot by police with a tear gas canister and hospitalised. People are angry because this is one of the last green areas in this part of Istanbul and because it’s historically an important symbol of civil resistance, but also the gentrification of this area is something people have been angry about for a while now. Mainly, though, the more brutal the police are, the angrier people are becoming.

Are the protesters aligning themselves with the main opposition party in Turkey?
People are trying to take over the protest for their own ideological purposes but there are many different groups out there. I can’t emphasise enough how many different groups of people there are. You have hipsters next to nationalists next to Muslim anti-capitalists next to families next to anarchists. It’s about people standing up to brutality and saying they will have their voices heard. I can't believe I've seen Kurds and Turkish nationalists protest party together.

An man receives treatment for wounds at one of Istanbul's makeshift hospitals.

Have there been any pro-government groups or Islamists trying to attack the protest groups?
Yes, there have been pro-AKP people fighting alongside police against protesters in Istanbul and other cities. These people are very pro-AKP so you can safely say that they’re Islamists. There aren’t a lot of them, though.

Are there any demands, slogans, or chants that are common to most protesters?
I’ve heard “From shoulder to shoulder against fascism,” “Police take your gas masks off and we’ll see who the real man is” and "Don't stop expressing yourself, if you do you'll be the next one (brutalised)."

What are the state-friendly news stations broadcasting over there?
This is something that every person we interviewed talks about: they want to know if we’re Turkish or international media. There’s very little coverage. We were interviewing people in a hotel and on the news there were happy images of farmers and their cattle while outside it looked like a warzone. People on the street feel that this isn’t being adequately reported on. People are booing at Turkish media vans. Erdoğan keeps infuriating people with his TV appearances while Turkish media is very quiet about the protests.

Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_A_Shea

More on Turkey:

The Sixth Day of Fire, Tear Gas and Blood in Istanbul

Istanbul's Taksim Square Has Become a Warzone

Tim, who used to organise "slamming" parties until he got out of the scene a couple of years ago.

Week-long, unprotected orgies fuelled by intravenous doses of crystal methamphetamine are an increasing feature of London's gay sex-party scene.

The orgies – or "slamming parties", as they've been dubbed ("slamming" is a euphemism for "injecting") – are known to a small but rapidly expanding section of London's gay community. They are covertly organised over social networking sites like Grindr and Bareback Real Time.

However, that's not to say they're particularly exclusive; as long as you're gay, don't mind potentially exposing yourself to a host of STDs and can get into the idea of taking Viagra and injecting crystal meth (and sometimes mephedrone) for several days straight, you're welcome to swing through the revolving doors and join the party.

The various slamming get-togethers are pretty fluid affairs, taking place over several days and in several venues, from darkened private homes and West End saunas to dingy flats and suburban mansions. There are constants, however – the non-stop porn being streamed on massive projector screens, the cascading synthlines of shitty Eurotrance and the glow of guests twiddling with their iPhones, as they attempt to get hold of more drugs and bodies to invite along.   

“This new scene of bare-backing and injecting is pushing the limits of what’s socially acceptable,” says Tim, a 39-year-old web publisher who hosted and attended slamming parties for two years before giving it up. “Injecting crystal meth makes you incredibly horny and willing to do anything. People turn into animals when they come up on it. It’s basically a blizzard of sucking and fucking.”

Yes, the scene might sound a bit like the more hedonistic, cosmopolitan equivalent of dogging; less Micras, more Mosley madness – Dogging: A Love Story reimagined by William S Burroughs and Tinto Brass. But, given the sharing of needles and lack of condoms, the repercussions that come from these blizzards of sucking and fucking are arguably much more grim than what you're left with after a stolen encounter in a Stevenage layby.

Specialist drug services are witnessing a rise in gay men addicted to injecting crystal meth and, more worryingly, a jump in gay drug users who are testing positive for HIV.

Someone injecting meth at a slamming party.

According to David Stuart, director of Antidote – London's only dedicated LGBT-specific drug and alcohol support service – the number of crystal meth and mephedrone users injecting the drugs in a sexual context leapt from 20 percent in 2011 to 80 percent in 2012. Seventy percent of those injecting are reportedly sharing needles. "It's a staggering and frightening increase," Stuart told me.

And, of course, what makes these slamming parties unique is the slamming itself. Injecting meth (or "Tina", as it's commonly referred to in the gay community) provides a far more intense, longer and therefore cheaper hit than smoking it, ramping up your libido and stripping inhibitions. It's turned London's already pretty athletic gay sex-party scene into an extreme sport, with revellers apparently averaging up to five sexual partners a session.  

“The one thing I want to do on crystal is to get fucked by the biggest dick,” says Tim, whose teeth have rotted away due to a combination of being HIV positive and many years of injecting and smoking meth. “I was known as a total party bottom," he continued.

Some slamming parties are more extreme than others, with those at the harder end of the scale usually involving hardcore S&M, whipping and bondage. And if two people want to indulge in something others might not be comfortable with – like fisting or scat, for example – then they carry on the party elsewhere.

“People are often awake for days with no food or water, just fizzy drinks and Dunns River Nurishment [a nutritional milk supplement]," Tim told me. "But the stupid thing is that no one can ever cum, because crystal meth stops you cumming – as does Viagra – so it's just never-ending sex. It’s painful. Most people end up with no skin on their dicks and some end up in hospital because of panic attacks brought on by too much crystal,” he continued.

Tim says that, although he was one of the first to organise slamming and sex parties, the scene has become more widespread in the last couple of years. And many of the people now involved in bareback slamming are reportedly well-heeled professionals, despite the extreme nature of their drug use.

“There are those who pay for the drugs in order to attract parties. And, at the other end of the scale, there are people who are invited to parties because they're well hung and can get an erection on crystal with or without Viagra,” Tim told me, before recounting one of the parties he held a few years ago. “People came down from Manchester one time and there were about 12 guys coming in and out of my house. I remember my dark, sweaty living room with half a dozen men having sex with each other. Everyone else was checking out the internet for people in the area or squabbling over which porn stream to watch.”

Tim says the golden rules to holding these kind of parties are to hide your keys and your drugs, and to lock your doors, “otherwise your drugs will be gone and you'll have guests freaking out in the street”.

A rock of crystal meth. (Image via)

Victor – a 23-year-old Romanian who moved to London four years ago – has just finished treatment for crystal meth addiction after being involved with the slamming party scene.

“I had used cocaine and ecstasy before coming to England, but I met a dealer and he introduced me to lots of people. I tried smoking crystal meth and drinking GHB – I had great sex," Victor explained. “The first time I injected Tina was at a party in West London. Everyone was injecting and I tried it and it gave me an even bigger high. It was so incredible – I wanted that high again. I had no inhibitions, I tried new things, I got involved in sex parties – it was crazy.”

Both Tim and Victor know how deadly the slamming scene can be. Both have friends who have ended up in hospital, died or committed suicide, either because of the psychological effects of meth addiction or because they have contracted HIV or hepatitis C.

David Stuart told me that around 75 percent of the 800 men being treated at Antidote’s services are HIV positive, with 60 percent failing to adhere to their HIV treatment when under the influence of drugs. “Lots of things are driving [the drug use], including the ease of finding the drugs themselves and the use of internet sites to find sex parties and drug dens where people can carry out this behaviour,” he told me.

Stuart said the motives for getting involved in the scene are more complicated than pure hedonism. “Many gay men feel their sex is 'diseased' or 'sinful' – the kind their parents disapprove of. A culture of online 'hooking up' for sex is eradicating the usual process of developing an intimacy of sorts before having sex. Drugs can overcome these problems, too, providing an uninhibited abandon that these men rarely feel.”

Yusef Azad is the director of policy at the National AIDS Trust, which, as an organisation, has sent a letter to all London councils calling for action to address the lack of specialist services that address the "recent and rapid rise in the use of crystal meth in the context of high-risk sex".

Speaking to Azad, he explained the circumstances that prompted that letter: “What has changed is the sort of drugs that are used and the context in which they’re used. A lot of drugs are moving from clubbing to private sex parties. Apps like Grindr are facilitating networking among gay men for extended sex sessions on drugs. Everything we are hearing from clubbers and gay men on this scene is that it is prevalent and increasing. Three years ago, this wasn't mentioned at all.”

For both Tim and Victor, being involved in such an intense sexual scene has left them unable to have sex without the drugs. “It’s boring,” says Victor. “I can’t get horny without drugs. So for me now, I cannot give up drugs without giving up sex. It’s a been a huge waste and it's ruined my life.”

Max Daly is a journalist and author specialising in social affairs and illegal drugs. He is the co-author of Narcomania: A Journey through Britain's Drug World, published by Random House

Follow Max on Twitter: @narcomania

More stuff about drugs:

We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict About Rob Ford

Is Tabloid Outrage Just Getting More People into Legal Highs?

An Interview with a Mexican Coke Dealer

Watch - Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor

Mike Duffy, presumably thinking about ways to cheat taxpayers out of their hard-earned money so he can buy some tasty snacks. via.

If you’ve read a Canadian newspaper in the last few weeks (and I know you haven’t), you might have seen that the Conservative Party of Canada is facing another scandal—this one being one of the biggest in the seven-year Harper regime. It all revolves around Mike Duffy, a senator from teeny tiny Prince Edward Island who claimed 49 days worth of per diems (daily living expenses) meant to be charged to the government when a senator is doing official senator business. The only problem was that Mike wasn't actually in Ottawa, nor was he doing any work.

The thing is, when you’re working so hard at doing pretty much nothing in the senate, you can have a second house close to Parliament with a $22 000 annual allowance and $85 per day for meals and incidental expenses, whatever that could be. Jolly ol’ Duffy racked up a bill of $90,172 when he was balling out at hotels and scarfing down presumably delicious meals to the total of $1,398 in two weeks in Yellowknife, North West Territories during the 2011 election campaign and vacationing in Florida for a full week instead of working in the senate.

“And, so what?” said the Conservatives. “Duffy paid back his $90,172 tab, so we’re all good.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright cut Duffy a cheque from his own pocket to pay for the expenses. Now the RCMP is investigating.

When Harper was asked if he knew about Wright and Duffy’s plan, our supreme leader denied it. That would also be understandable if there wasn’t proof in an email written by Duffy that read: “I stayed silent on the orders of the Prime Minister’s Office.”

The thing is, we wouldn’t even know that Duffy violated spending regulations if not for quarterly senator reports that only started in January of 2011. Before then, senators just had to follow the “honour system” and were able to sign off on their own expense claims. It’s just like that Seinfeld episode where they imposed the “honour system” for a masturbation pact—but unlike the Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine—the senators didn’t actually follow it.

Last week 11 new rules were passed that make senators a bit more accountable and eliminated the previous federal protocol of 'just winging it'.

But that isn’t close to enough and they know it.

Way back in 1867, the Canadian senate was developed to enforce “minority interests”, to be a “sober second thought” of “qualified persons” to counteract the sometimes rowdy elected representatives of the House of Commons. 

Currently, the senate is split up just as it was when it was created in 1867 with 105 seats made up of 24 from Quebec, 24 from Ontario, 24 from the maritime provinces, 24 from the West, Newfoundland gets six and each territory gets one. That might have worked when there were only a few pitch-fork wielding farmers out west, but now a province like British Columbia with over four million people gets six seats and New Brunswick with 750,000 people gets ten.

These old guys and gals keep their jobs until they’re 75, which isn’t bad considering it was a job until death before 1965. At 67, Duffy has another eight years left unless he resigns, but what about a guy like Patrick Brazeau who at 36 gets the job for another 39 years costing taxpayers an estimated $7 million? The kicker? Brazeau was accused of sexual assault and discrepancies in living expenses. Even if given jail time, if the sentence is under two years he may get to keep his job with full pay.

Today we have a $92.5 million antiquted institution up from $92.2 million in 2012, who make $135,200 a year, also up from $132,300 in 2012. Add on living expenses for their second residence, travel expenses numbering as high as $310,000 in one year for one senator and bonuses that could range anywhere from $3,100 to $56,000 and you can see why tax payers should be giving a shit about Duffy's creative accounting. 

When asked if members of Canada’s Upper House have used loopholes to their advantage in the past, former senator Thelma Chalifoux told APTN News: “Oh yes, but it was all under the table and it wasn’t publicized.” Um, what?

Do you think the senate is a poorly thought out system that is kinda shitty? So do most Canadians. In a February Angus Reid poll, 67 per cent of respondents support having an elected senate, while two in five don’t think we should have a senate at all.

A number of senate accountability campaigns have sprung up including this one that advocates the very Canadian form of protest known as sending letters to your Member of Parliament.

Sweden, New Zealand, Turkey, Denmark and Australia all do fine without a senate and the US made their senate elected a century ago. Even the British House of Lords, albeit with appointed senators, pays only $460/day per senator, which in Canada for 90 days of work would only be a salary of $45,000—a cool $90,200 less annually per senator.

Harper has frequently insisted on senate reform, so why haven’t we pulled the plug on the damn thing yet? That’s because Canadians would have to amend the constitution in a national referendum with seven out of ten provinces representing over 50% of Canadians agreeing to get rid of it. The government has tried to amend the constitution before and it hasn’t worked out too well, see: Meech Lake Accord (1987), Charlottetown Accord (1992), which both included senate reform. The only time it did work was in 1982, but Quebec hasn’t technically even signed on to that yet.

Another option is to have an elected senate, which some provinces like Alberta already do, but that could create a power struggle between the senate and the House of Commons.

If the government tries to make changes unilaterally the provinces won’t agree. Instead, some may sue like Quebec promised to do. Federalism can really be a bitch sometimes.

Maybe the best bet is a referendum. 73% of Canadians support one on this issue according to the Angus Reid poll.

If the conflicts in the senate of the last few months means anything but a waste of taxpayer dollars, hopefully it will give politicians the slap in the face they need to change this wasteful institution.
 

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam

Previously:

More Canadian politics:

The Canadian Government Misplaced $3.1 Billion

The Facebook Comments Rob Ford’s Staffers Don’t Want You to See

Why is Christie Blatchford Blaming Rehtaeh Parsons?

Photo via Flickr user Rennett Stowe

American public schools and prisons are becoming increasingly linked—police officers are now a constant presence in many schools, which has led to students getting hassled and arrested by cops for what could be described as normal kid stuff, including performing science experiments on school grounds. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: the school-to-prison pipeline, which takes kids, mostly minority students who live in poverty, out of the classroom and into the legal system, shuffling them into the prison-industrial complex before they’re old enough to vote.

But there’s another, less obvious way schools are tied to prisons. Retirement funds for public school teachers (as well as other government employees) in several states have a combined $90 million invested in Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the largest private prison companies in the world. Though individual teachers didn’t decide to make their pensions partially connected to America’s gigantic, often abusive incarceration industry—many of them aren’t aware of all the investments made on their behalf—they are indirectly profiting from mass incarceration, thanks to choices made by their money managers who run public employees’ massive pension funds.

That $90 million figure is an estimate based on publicly-available NASDAQ data for public employee pension funds. Most of the money comes from three big states: California, New York, and Texas. Texas, through its Permanent School Fund and state employee retirement system, has about $13 million invested in CCA and GEO. California and New York, through their retirement funds for public school teachers and other state employees (which includes nonteacher school employees, like janitors and principals), each have about $30 million tied to private prisons.

These investments in the incarceration industry are piddling in comparison to these funds’ overall portfolios—the teacher retirement funds for California (CalSTRS) and New York (NYSTRS) are worth $167 billion and $96 billion, respectively—but they qualify as major shareholders in CCA and GEO Group.

If corporations are people, GEO Group shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of a child. In 2000, the company (then known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation), was indicted by the Department of Justice for running a juvenile detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where boys were routinely beaten by guards. One kid who had to wear a colostomy bag because of a gunshot wound was beaten by a guard for not tucking in his shirt, which he couldn’t do because the bag was in the way.

It didn’t end there. In 2012, GEO was indicted again, this time for running a juvenile prison in Walnut Grove, Mississippi, where kids were frequently raped, beaten, and denied medical attention. The seediest detail might have been that Grady Sims, the 61-year-old warden who was also the former mayor of the town, took a young female inmate to a nearby motel and had sex with her, then later tried to get the girl to lie about it to investigators. He eventually got the sexual-assault charge dismissed and pled guilty to witness tampering. He was sentenced to a whopping six months of house arrest.

Despite this track record, the government is still handing over kids to GEO Group through Abraxas, the private prison conglomerate’s juvenile-detention arm. In addition to running prisons for kids, this subsidiary takes kids who have been expelled from public school and puts them in “alternative” schools, which are supposed to be designed for kids who have behavioral problems but in many cases are home for teens who have been victimized by a system that overreacts when kids act up.

Several teachers I spoke to about their pensions being invested in companies that engage in such morally questionable practices.

“Why?” said Darleen Guien, a retired adult ESL teacher who worked for several years in the LA Unified School District. “[The private prison investment] is just a fraction of the fund. Why do they need that?”

Guien said that due to the size of the teachers’ retirement fund, she assumed it would have a few ethically questionable investments, such as Walmart, but she was disappointed to find out it was making money from private prisons.

“Teachers provide a public service,” she said. “It’s troubling to know that they’re investing in things that are so much against the values many of us have.”

She also felt that teachers have no control over how their retirement fund is invested. “It’s not like we’re shareholders in a company and we vote,” she said. “I don’t think we have any say in anything. All we can do is maybe write a letter.”

Joe Martinez is a principal at Villacorta Elementary in South San Jose Hills, California. Although he wouldn’t comment on the private-prison investments in particular, he seemed to agree with Guien’s sentiments about there not being much that teachers can do about what provides the money for their pensions.

“More transparency could be a start, but even if teachers were given all the information about the investments, I don’t think there’s really much of a way for their voices to be heard, or even if it would make a difference,” he said.

I asked him if it really mattered in the end. After all, private prisons might be despicable entities, but they’re not illegal. In fact, they’re often very profitable companies and hence worth investing in from a purely capitalistic perspective. Is it OK to invest in ethically problematic companies if the profits go to teachers?

“I don’t think there necessarily has to be a choice,” he repilied. “The people who control these funds, which are basically a lot of other people’s money, could just be more conscious of what they’re investing in.”

When I reached out to spokespeople for the teacher-retirement funds of New York and California, both emphasized that the job of these funds is to make money so teachers can enjoy their golden years, and when you manage funds as vast as theirs, you might get into some ethically questionable territory. They also said that the private-prison investments are likely tied to index funds, which means they are part of mutual funds that mimic the ebb and flow of the market as a whole. In other words, no one is really deciding to invest in prisons, they just aren’t deciding not to invest in prisons.

However, a line can be drawn. John Cardello of the NYSTRS said they don’t invest in hedge funds. Everything else is OK, though. “I can’t think of anything else that we consciously stay away from,” Cardello said.

But CalSTRS, which is nearly twice as big as their New York counterpart, has made headlines for distancing itself from controversial corporations. In 2009, they stopped investing in tobacco companies, and shortly after the Newtown massacre, they announced they would divest from gun companies that make assault weapons considered illegal in California.

“There’s a moral component to our investing,” said Ricardo Duran, a spokesman for CalSTRS. He explained that the fund has 21 risk factors that go into deciding what to invest in. Those factors include respect for human rights, civil liberties, and political rights. It also includes racial discrimination.

By those standards, however, how are private prisons not unethical investments? Hopefully, these publicly financed funds will review what they’re making money off of soon and stop investing in companies that profit from America’s worst social problems.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

Previously on prisons and schools:

Who’s Getting Rich off the Prison-Industrial Complex?

Why Are We Arresting So Many Children?

Silent But Deadly

At an army checkpoint on the way into the Libyan city of Misrata, an angry police officer with a pistol tucked into his pants demands I give a blood sample before locking me in a trailer. For what should be obvious reasons, this is a deeply paranoid town. When I eventually get into the center of the city, a protest against the Tawergha—a black-skinned tribe that used to live 25 miles away in the neighboring town of the same name—is in full swing. Worked-up young men tell me they're ready to kill if they don’t get what they want.

The demonstrators want to know who I am. They want to know where I’ve come from and they want to know what I think about human rights. "So what do you think of this organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW)?" Hassan, a former English teacher, asks me.

I quietly assure Hassan that I view all human rights organizations as parasitic scum feeding on the aftermath of war and turning it into dirty money to be squirreled away into its employees’ snakeskin pockets. "They turn tragedy into PR stunts," I tell him. "They have to transform victors into villains. That’s how they make their money. It’s sad. It’s perverse. But it’s all they know."

Hassan nods slowly while other anti-Tawerghan protesters crowd around.

"Public opinion matters a great deal to us," he says, seriously. "During the revolution, Misrata withstood great pressures and made great sacrifices. It was a hero, a champion. But now people are starting to say that we are the bad guys. It’s not right."

The acid of toxic loathing that's disfiguring Misrata’s public image is its intense hatred of the Tawergha tribe. It’s one of many tribal feuds that have festered since the revolution, further destabilizing the country at a time when the government is struggling to maintain any semblance of control. The feuds have also helped to ensure that violence, guns, and explosions continue to slosh around the country, staining the reputation of free, postrevolution Libya.

Misrata was smashed to pieces during the revolution. It was besieged for months by Gaddafi troops who hammered it with tanks, artillery, Grad missiles, and mortars. And for many Misratans, the ultimate betrayal came when Tawerghan raiders ripped through the city, raping and pillaging as part of the loyalist army.

Fathi Abubreda shows where he was shot by the Tawerghans.

"This man was kidnapped by the Tawerghans along with his five sons," says Hassan, plucking a man called Fathi Abubreda from the surrounding crowd. "He was held for two days in Tawergha before being transferred to Gaddafi’s notorious Abu Salim prison. He says those two days in Tawergha were worse than spending five months in Abu Salim!"

I watch as the man dutifully takes off his shoes and socks and shows me where he was shot by the Tawerghans: once in each ankle and once in each thigh.

Eventually a series of NATO air strikes turned the tables against the Tawerghans and the rest of Gaddafi’s forces. The rebels advanced and ended up tearing their way through Tawergha, forcing its 35,000 inhabitants to run for their lives before systematically demolishing whole areas of the town.

Since the revolution, the Tawerghans have languished in refugee camps and Misrata has fiercely resisted any suggestion of their return. But keeping large numbers of black people in special camps obviously doesn’t reflect particularly well on an entire city. Month-by-month pressure has increased on the Misratans to allow their shunned neighbors to return, and month by month the Misratans have ratcheted up their resistance.

On April 8, 2012, Human Rights Watch accused Misratans of "crimes against humanity." Three days later, Misrata’s local council replied to HRW, rejecting its "threats and admonitions." On May 8 of this year, a senior prosecutor at the International Criminal Court said her office was looking at the expulsion of the Tawerghans as a possible war crime. And around the same time, Tawerghan leaders announced their intention to return en masse on June 25, marching to the city waving white flags. A couple of days later, Misrata played its trump card: announcing the discovery of a mass grave in Tawergha.

When we arrive at the site of the mass grave it doesn’t feel like the epicenter of a poisonous tribal hatred that’s helping to destabilize an entire country. It feels more like an episode of Diggers, but on a particularly lazy day, when everyone slacks off and just hangs around smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. Men wearing blue overalls and white rubber gloves chat and joke. Occasionally one or two of them climb into a large hole to hack at the ground with various digging tools while a Libyan TV news crew films from the sideline.

According to Adel Al Ruma, the Misratan police captain in charge of the operation, little is clear. The location of the bodies was given to officers by an imprisoned Tawerghan leader who's being held in a military prison in Mistrata. So far they’ve dug up 11 bodies as well as various "remains." None have been identified, but Adel says some weren't buried in line with Islamic rituals and some had tied hands and feet—indicators, he says, that suggest the bodies were the Tawerghans’ prisoners who were killed and buried.

But the Tawerghans I’ve talked to don’t see it like that. The bodies have been dug up from various sites dotted around an existing Tawerghan graveyard, and they say the Misratans are a bunch of racists who are desecrating their graves, digging up their dead, and using their remains as sham evidence to validate their own crimes and disrupt the planned June 25 return.

Standing next to the graveyard, Adel shows me a dusty child’s coat that the team has dug up and a length of rope he says was used to tie up some of the bodies. Then we pick our way through the graveyard, where he points out other possible burial sites. The graves we walk past are low budget with breeze blocks for headstones. Some are painted green, Gaddafi’s favorite color. Others are decorated with AK-47 bullets.

Beyond the graveyard is an empty school and an empty mosque. Adel points out some graffiti that says "Allah and Muammar only." Empty bullet casings, plastic caps for RPGs, and empty boxes of bullets litter the unpaved streets, and rows of empty buildings seem to stretch on for miles.

Leaving Tawergha, we pass another paranoid checkpoint manned by half a dozen tanks and some men dressed in camouflage. I decide to call the former English teacher I met at the protest to try and make sense of the situation, but he serenades me with neurotic conspiracy theories.

Senior politicians are encouraging the Tawerghans to return so that a civil war is started and they can take power, he tells me. He also says he believes Human Rights Watch is being controlled by foreign governments and the Tawerghans are using the mercenary money they earned fighting for Gaddafi to buy influence at Libyan TV stations. This is all, of course, speculation coming from some English teacher.

"There are unknown forces at work," he tells me. "It’s more than two years since the uprising, but our revolution remains mysterious."

Follow Wil on Twitter: @bilgribs

More from Libya:

The Rebels of Libya

Back Behind Bars with Gaddafi's Would-Be Assassin

On the Road with Libya's Lions of the Desert

Photo via.

Back in the day, if you wanted god to bless your crops and make them grow high to the heavens, you prayed for rain. If that didn't work, you built a temple or maybe slaughtered a goat. And if that didn't work, well, then you just had to make sure the Man Upstairs knew you meant business by finding the nearest female virgin and sacrificing them. And then, finally, God would respond by, well, not really doing anything at all, since He doesn't exist. 

But if you thought that kind of virginal sacrifice was long in our rearview, you simply haven't been paying close enough attention. While bloody murders of virgins may be an antiquated activity, as this piece over in The Atlantic points out, killing them mentally is still going on plenty.

The article starts with the story of Elizabeth Smart, the kidnapping victim who was abducted for nine months when she was 14 years old. During those terrible nine months, Smart had chances to escape her captors, but she never acted on them. Among the reasons Smart gives for remaining? Her religious upbringing. 

Growing up a Mormon, there's a high level of importance put on someone's pre-marriage virginity. And if these women don't keep themselves “intact” for the big night, then they start thinking as Smart did: 

“Who could want me now? I felt so dirty and so filthy.”

And that mentality has seeped into our general culture in everything from “slut shaming” to those terrible revenge porn websites popping up all over the internet. Religion teaches that sex is dirty, that women who partake in it before marriage are whores to be treated like used tissues, that they deserve to be shamed. When, instead, they deserve to be cherished. Because the only difference between virgins and non-virgins is that wedding night sex with the latter fucking sucks.

Onto the roundup!

- A new children's book called God Made Dad & Mom tells the story a young boy who prays for his classmate and his two fathers for living a sinful lifestyle. And yes, this thing was endorsed by the American Family Association.

- In Afghanistan, the Taliban killed four police officers during attacks at checkpoints. Also, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Red Cross building, killing four.

- In Pakistan, gunmen killed a female polio worker and three Shiite Muslims. Also in Pakistan, a US drone strike reportedly killed a Taliban leader. These two events are not unrelated.

- America also used drone strikes in Yemen to kill suspected Al-Qaeda militants.

- In Myanmar, a mob of Buddhists burned down a whole bunch of Muslim homes, mosques, and schools, leading to at least one death.

- The highest court in El Salvador denied the request of a 22-year-old woman with lupus to get an abortion that will keep her from serious illness or death. Also worth noting, the 26-week-old infant has a birth defect that means it will be born missing part of its brain and skull, if it even survives the full nine months, which is unlikely. And yet, still, her life is of little importance to the court. Now's also a good time to probably link to this map of abortion and birth control rights throughout the world.

- Bryan Fischer, a crazy person with a radio program, suggested that the Boy Scouts of America should change its name to “the Boy Sodomizers of America” after deciding to now allow gay scouts.

- Three women complained last week that TSA screeners groped their private parts during pat-downs. And somewhere in Hell, Osama bin Laden lets out a sly smile at the news.

- Speaking of Al-Qaeda, who'da thunk they use memos and expense reports, just like a real business! Guess this is the kind of thing a business with plans on smuggling chemical weapons to places like Europe and the US does to get shit done.

- Plenty will see Minnesota Vikings superstar Adrian Peterson's comment about gay marriage (“I have relatives who are gay. I'm not biased towards them. I still treat them the same. I love 'em. But again, I'm not with that. That's not something I believe in. But to each their own.”) as some sort of innocuous statement that we're all going overboard about. Sure, every person should be entitled to their opinion. But the problem is, by even stating this opinion, it's legitimizing the point-of-view that gay people are not to be treated the same. Next time, best keep your mouth shut, AP.

- Nigeria passed one buttfuck of an anti-gay marriage bill, not only outlawing it, but outlawing any groups supporting gay rights, and doling out 10-year prison sentences for any same sex couples who publicly show affection. It should also be noted, there are no scientific reasons to oppose gay marriage.

- Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee told a little joke about not being able to trust “those damn Catholics” when talking about Notre Dame University perhaps joining his university's sports conference, and everyone lost their damn mind about it.

- And Our Person of the Week: Michelle Bachmann, who announced she'll no longer run for re-election. Now she will be free to spout out her religious-based craziness on Fox News and the like without actually having any actual power of any sort. In other words, the perfect kind of crazy religious fundamentalist. Please, feel free to visit her website and say “thank you.”

- And Our Bonus, Actual Person of the Week: Kathleen Taylor, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, who's taken a brave and controversial stance by believing that religious fundamentalism might be cured, as long as it's treated as a mental illness. “Someone who has for example become radicalized to a cult ideology—we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” she said. This kind of thing could certainly be more effective than simply gassing up drones and bombing the Middle East.

@RickPaulas

Previously: People Who Love God Porn

It was in the final stretch of what unexpectedly became a five-mile trek through the blistering heat near Ft. Meade where a beige sedan slowed down and its driver gestured for me to get in.

Maybe it was the onset of heat stroke that told me to hop in a stranger’s car, but it probably had more to do with the sense of community that captivated just about everyone on our side of the fort’s fence. On Saturday, nearly 2,000 supporters of Army Private Bradley Manning drove or took the bus from across the country to march in support of the soldier on the eve of the first day of his trial. His trial, including charges of aiding Al-Qaeda for leaking military documents to Wikileaks, which could bring Manning a life sentence in jail, starts today.

Anti-war activists, veterans, LGBT rights advocates, and journalists were heavily represented within the legion of Manning supporters on Saturday. The march was one among hundreds of rallies that have occurred in support of the 25-year-old former intelligence analyst from Crescent, Oklahoma, since he was first put in pretrial confinement more than three years ago. Some have been coming to Ft. Meade near Baltimore off and on since preliminary hearings began on site in late 2011, and events happened this weekend in cities from Seoul to Santa Cruz. 

During the course of the military trial that starts today, Army prosecutors will say Manning aided al-Qaeda terrorists by taking sensitive military information and sending it to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Manning and his boyfriend had just split up when he started uploading intelligence about the Iraq and Afghan wars to WikiLeaks in 2009, and just a few months later he found himself even more distressed when he was picked up by authories from his base outside of Baghdad. At least one-fourth of the time since has been spent in isolation. Manning has already pled guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him, but not to the most serious charges, including aiding the enemy, which could land him in prison for life.

Manning supporters say the leaked intel and the other material he’s been attributed with releasing helped bring attention to the horrific atrocities committed by the country he swore to serve. The word “whistleblower” couldn’t be any more appropriate, activists said at the weekend’s rally. Some have insisted the prosecution of Manning means no journalist will get away with publishing embarrassing info about the government ever again, and that threat is just one part of what brings people together to talk about the case.

Hundreds more kept arriving every few minutes at Ft. Meade on Saturday. It was hot. To make matters worse, though, roads heading to the site were rerouted, and many people had to schlep to the march after abandoning their vehicles illegally in not-so-nearby parking lots. At least two news organizations hauled media gear more than a mile in either direction.

It was just a minor setback, though. Lt. Dan Choi, a soldier that faced federal charges for an act of civil disobedience against the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, said during the event that heat shouldn’t stop people from celebrating a person who's brought so many strangers together in the name of telling the truth.

“We marched from one place on one street for one thing, for one reason,” he said after the mile-long march along Ft. Meade’s fence wrapped up. Choi and a few others took turns taking to the stage, sweating through their shirts while speaking passionately about the soldier to the hundreds who had managed to survive the sweltering hike.

“We came here because we want to be treated by our government in the way that our government was supposed to treat the people,” Choi said.

Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department worker who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, walked on stage moments later. Ellsberg, 82, explained in his own words what the power of a community can mean when people come together to stand for someone who, just like himself, was charged with espionage for trying to help others.

“I’m very happy to be here at what I regard as a family gathering,” Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg explained later what it meant to be labeled a traitor for essentially doing the same thing as Manning, but insisted that his contemporary’s contribution to the annals of whistleblowing is something that should be hailed, not hated.

“There would be tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq right now and many others would have died if Bradley Manning had not revealed atrocities,” he said.

Oddly enough, Ellsberg added, the media in the US was not making an effort to discuss this side of the story. “Our country, sad to say, is the country that perpetrated the crimes that Bradley Manning exposed. I think other countries have noticed something that not too many Americans have noticed: that Bradley was an extraordinary American who went on record and acted on his awareness.”

Then addressing the supporters, Ellsberg mentioned just a few of the groups who should have a damn good reason to respect Manning given what he gave to WikiLeaks.

“I would say that any group that Bradley Manning can be said to be a part of should be honored to recognize him as their hero,” he said. “Of course gays, of course transgender people. It goes for the people of Oklahoma—there won’t be many there who appreciate him. It goes even for short people. Anybody who can identify with Bradley Manning should be honored,” said Ellsberg. 

I don’t know if Bradley Manning would have pulled over his luxury sedan to pick up a disgusting, sweat drenched journalist and a ragtag group of colleagues attempting to inch their way back to our rental car this weekend, but that’s not how things worked out. Instead the chauffeur during our four minutes of hard earned air-conditioned bliss was a freelancer contracted by Iranian media to meet some reporters. Just as with us, he was also baffled by how the military seemed to take every precaution imaginable to make access to Ft. Meade on the day of the protest damn near impossible. And then after our conversation erupted into a debate about a contested diplomatic dispute between our respective countries, things subsided. We were all hot and tired, but we were also here for the same reason. To report a story no one else wants to about a guy who can blow a hell of a whistle and attract the oddest combination of interested parties in doing so.

Following over a year of motion hearings rarely attended by the mainstream press, around 350 news organizations submitted requests for credentials this time around. The court-martial against Private first class Bradley Manning begins today and is expected to run through the end of summer.

Photos by Jennie Ross

The first thing you need to know when you go to a Renaissance fair is that you’re a mundane. The people of the fair don’t give a shit about where you DJ, the art collective you belong to, or how you were recently featured on a blog someone you sorta know writes. If you aren’t wearing a costume, then you are nothing but a mundane, and they'll call you that to your face. Your being a mundane means that some folks are going to talk to you in their old-timey voices and try to convince you to buy grossly sweet honey wine from their booths, but they aren’t going to share their flasks with you, and they certainly are not going to fuck you.

In many ways the fair is an elaborate mating ritual complete with pregaming, peacocking, and corsets. Like at a college costume party or an office holiday party, the moment the booze comes out, inhibitions dissipate, marriages open up, and mistakes are made. But don’t worry, what happens at the fair is between you and your god, and as the cosplaying Puritans like to say, “You are likely damned to hell anyways.”

To find out what kinds of exotic "meates" you can sample, i.e., bang, I went to the Original Reinaissance Pleasure Faire in Irwindale, California, and talked to a few of the fair's fair maidens and gentlemen. (This fair just ended but no doubt there's a fair coming near you in... not too long. That's the great thing about the fake Renaissance—it never ends.)

Sara and Crystal

When I walked up to Sara and Crystal, they were resting in the shade, eating fried cheesecake on a stick. “Everyone is secretly hooking up," Sara told me. "For lack of a better way to put it, and it’s going to sound horrendously dirty, I will say it’s a very incestual group of people. People get to hang a lot looser than they do normally in their lives. It’s not just Renaissance fair, it’s a Renaissance pleasure fair, so you can get away with being a little more lewd than you normally would be.”

Fawn Girls

Katie and Jessica work at a suburban dentist's office, but when the faire comes to town they are transformed into fawns, complete with stiletto hooves. “The first year everyone called me a horny lady and a lot of people point at the fur asking whether or not I shave,” Katie said. All day men had been shouting at them and pulling their tails to the point that they were practically falling off. Meanwhile, they had also acquired a stalker. “It’s a real ego boost,” Jessica said.

The Stalker

Katie and Jessica's stalker didn’t talk, but the voiceless boy had been following the fawns around the moment they stepped through the gate. He never got too close to them—he just kept his creepy distance while silently contorting his face for hours.

Furry Fellow

There's a whole day during the seven-week fair that's dedicated to men showing off their pectoral muscles. It’s called “Jerkin Off Day.” I kid you not. The jerkin is a vest that dudes wore during Elizabethan times that you can now buy online. When it gets super hot out during the fair, guys are allowed to take their jerkins off. But some dudes just can’t wait to show off and thus end up pondering which sandwich to order from a food truck in their furry skivvies and boots.

Gag Spoon Lady

Many couples “open” their relationship up for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire so they can more comfortably swing. I’m not sure if this woman is one of those people though, because instead of talking to me, she kept gagging herself with a wooden spoon.

Hot Mumbling Metal Girl

There is a lot of crossover between metal style and Ren-fair style. I was pretty into this girl’s whole look and tried to get her to hang out with me by telling her what a babe she was, but she talked so quietly I couldn’t hear a word she said.

Bag Boyfriend

Bagman was the boyfriend of the aforementioned hot metal girl. Just when I had given up trying to understand her murmurs, Bagman walked up, fingers wiggling to indicated that he really wanted his photo taken. He seemed pretty rad.

Wheelchair Man

This guy was an explosion of the space-time continuum, and I liked it. Either that or he's Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin.

Metal Worker and Friend

If you are mundane, members of the fair who are wearing costumes see you as being “naked,” but that doesn’t mean they won’t call dibs on you. When a member of the fair calls dibs, it means they find the person attractive and are going to do their best to romance them. Some guys even carry buttons that say dibs on them and pin them on ladies who they’d like to have relations with. These guys were out on the prowl, squirting ladies they called dibs on with a water gun.

Me in the Stocks

Everyone at fair will try and convince you to fall in love with faire. And after two or three drinks, a slab of meat the size of your forearm, and their constant stream of kindness and hilarity, they just might succeed. “You have to do fair on your own terms,” one married fair goer told me after I watched him kiss a steady stream of women on the lips, including a very, very old prostitute.

I visited a Ren fair once before, in high school, when my nerdy boyfriend’s mom took us. We were too young to drink or drive, so we got super stoned, jumped into his mom’s minivan and were transported to the “past.” I don’t remember much except getting into a huge fight with my boyfriend over him locking me up in the stocks and throwing water balloons at me. (He bought me a hemp choker with a Celtic bead as an apology.) The experience was enough to put me off returning to a faire for more than a decade. 

By the end of the day, I decided that I needed to drop my leftover teenage angst toward the fair and that the only way to do that would be to face my fears head on. I had to go into the stocks.

The stocks were not the way I remembered them. Either a series of lawsuits had transformed the stocks into loose holes that you could easily escape from, or my memory had been confused by that shitty weed. Now that I was no longer a teenage stoner, I could easily see that it would be impossible to be ”trapped” and bludgeoned with water balloons again. Unless I wanted to be.  

@MaudeChild

For more Ren faire magic:

What the Fuck Is a Renaissance Faire?

All the great men of history have had their escape valves, their private passions. Einstein played the violin. Disraeli wrote romantic novels. Napoleon used to rub two ferrets covered in sulphur together until one of them caught fire. So it is with the head of Narconon International, Scientology’s notorious drug-rehabiliation wing.

His name is Clark Carr, and when he isn’t fooling around with e-meters, he's part of Laughworks, which claims to be a comedy group of some kind and also features the woman who used to voice Cubbi in Gummi Bears.

The guys and gals in Laughworks have been taking their laugh-an-hour routines around the Scientology world for the last decade, but of late they’ve gone quiet. Clark in particular has been busy defending his organization from charges that it routinely took out credit cards in the names of people it was supposed to be helping. All that changed last Tuesday, when Stand Up for Valley Org took to the stage in LA. As the name suggests, it was an entire evening of Scientologyl comedy devoted to raising money for the San Fernando Valley Scientologists' plan to build an Ideal Org, which is a deluxe kind of church. 

Scientology comedy means no swearing and no sexual references, just a bunch of high-ranking Scientologists standing in a hall trying to tickle your funny bone. Happily for them, the San Fernando Valley Scientologists had a trump card: the voice of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright. Plus the mediocre standup Elvis Winterbottom, the downright awful comedy songster Evan Wecksell, and, of course, Laughworks.

Laughworks isn't just not funny; the sketches are so unfunny that they achieve a kind of power in their unfunniness. They deliver what addicts would call a moment of clarity—moments when you can see not only the futility of your own choices, but the futility of your personal universe, and you resolve to change yourself at an atomic level. They continue performing, and recording and sharing, their "comedy" when most people would have quit many times over. It's sort of awe-inspiring, but also awful to watch. 

How unfunny are they?

This unfunny:

It's as if aliens with no conception of how human humor works had decided to mimic Saturday Night Live. Like aliens, the participants have a kind of emotional impermeability to them. The motivations of both the characters and the performers are totally mysterious, which makes it fascinating to watch, but also completely unwatchable. There’s just nothing human inside to feast on. Not a morsel of self-doubt, no flickering pilot light of human engagement. They load the program. They execute the program. Program executed.

What else is in the Laughworks repertoire?

Well, there is a sketch about their witness-protection program:

It seems that along with curse words and nudity, punchlines have been banned by the church's authorities. But skits that remind people of the most common media tactic for interviewing cult survivors are perfectly OK.

Also OK by the church, but not OK with anyone else, is this:

Clark Carr is a tall bald man you can see in this picture from way back in the day. It features Clark telling an addict that he has a scientific method that will liberate him from his drug prison.

His sketches are less funny than that:

If comedy is the ratcheting up of a superficially logical paradigm toward a counterintuitive end, then this is certainly comedy.

If comedy is funny, then this isn’t that.

Unfortunately even Laughworks’ pièce de résistance is stranded in similar territory. It strives to blow your mind, but instead lands in that awkward and very underpopulated place midway between Jean-Paul Sartre and Larry the Cable Guy:

“Any resemblance with the human condition is purely coincidental.” The audience of Scientologists knows that pseudo-profound zinger only too well. Note the knowing chuckle they offer: not so much laughter as collective affirmation that they’ve cracked it, that they've figured out what the really big secret to it all is, buddy. They know how to escape the box, thanks to the teachings of Hubbard, and I guess... that's... humor? To them? Maybe?

Follow Gavin on Twitter: @hurtgavinhaynes

More Scientology:

Reasons Why Los Angeles Is the Worst Place Ever

How Much Does the Church of Scientology Spend on Advertising?

Scientology's Celebrity Magazine Will Make Me Famous

Here's an example of the type of stressed out Snapchats my friends had to receive from me.

As I write this, it’s been over 30 days since I last masturbated. Consciously giving up jerking off is a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I’m not alone in thinking that. Another VICE writer from Australia admits it was hard after he beat me to publishing a story about this last week. I suppose I feel some kind of brotherhood with him, but mainly I’m just upset that I agreed to this assignment in the first place.

I’ve been masturbating since the age of 12 when I first discovered porn while using dial-up internet on my family’s computer. In those days, I had to be smart when I jerked it, because anyone could have walked in. Luckily for me, I never had to face the humiliation endured by many, including George Costanza, when a family member walks in mid-stroke.  At some point in my life jerking off just felt like second nature, like tying my shoes or combing my beard. When I first decided to give it up, I didn't consider I'd have to find a new pre-bedtime activity. I didn't consider I'd have to avoid boredom, have colder showers, and stop touching my penis in anyway except to pee. I began reading and writing a lot more. I did yoga in the morning and kegel exercises whenever I felt particularly on edge. In fact, I found kegel exercises to the best remedy for a painful NRB—No Reason Boner—not to mention the long-term health benefits for men and women alike.

It was a little over a month ago when a friend sent me a link to a subsection of Reddit called NoFap. She wanted to convince me to try the challenge, which to her dismay was a lot easier than she thought it would be. I found myself perusing the site, reading personal, intimate stories from men (and women, though fewer) taking part in the discussion. I found posts like, "When I started using she fell out of love with me..." and a subject line reading, "Instead of watching porn and masturbating I walked my dog and met this beautiful girl!”

If you haven't grasped what NoFap means, it stands for no fapping, no masturbating. It's a movement about abstaining from our solo sexual pleasures and the porn that fuelled the fire, so men and women can spend their time on more productive things. These were people who felt like porn and masturbation were having a negative effect on their lives. Some claimed they felt lazy, unproductive, and unmotivated; they were lonely and unhappy with their social and sexual lives. For many of these people, and I can honestly say for myself, masturbating had become an easy escape from the difficulties in our daily lives, a way to avoid our problems.

Although it's difficult to pinpoint the beginnings of the NoFap movement, one article claims it made its first internet appearance on a car dealership website forum in 2006. Fast forward several years and NoFap was popping up in other forums largely based on the discussion of men's health and interests. Towards the end of 2010, Gary Wilson, an anatomy and physiology teacher created a website dedicated to the negative effects of porn on the brain. By 2011, NoFap was created into a subreddit and psychologist Philip Zimbardo argued for the demise of guys in a Ted Talks presentation and the following year, Wilson presented his argument about porn at a TedX presentation in response to Zimbardo's previous talk.

Does porn really fry one's brain? via.

In his video, Zimbardo’s says young men have a new fear of intimacy that corresponds with a higher level of shyness and lack of social awkwardness. “Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a new way for change, novelty, and excitement,” Zimbardo says. As a result, boys are becoming out of sync with romantic situations, which develop slowly as opposed to their interactions with internet porn. Our brains were not constructed to see hundreds of naked women every week, yet we are overloading ourselves with this input.

Wilson and Zimbardo both call this kind of interaction with porn an arousal addiction. It’s an addiction, not for more like with drugs, but with newness. When a boy first begins to watch porn his brain is at a high state of plasticity; it absorbs everything. We use porn to give ourselves instantaneous results, which include a blissful climax. But, now, when it comes to a real life sexual experience, many young men are facing a number of challenges like erectile dysfunction (ED), social and performance anxiety, and a lack of motivation and energy.

The thing is, there isn’t much scientific research to support Wilson’s claims, one post on a forum is from a Canadian professor who disclaims what Wilson’s website promotes. But, this doesn’t matter to fapstronauts, as the members of the NoFap subreddit like to call themselves.

The symptoms that Wilson talks about align with the anecdotal evidence of many fapstronauts. They use Reddit to express these feelings: “I have been not able to concentrate on my work and my physical health,” writes one commenter; “So there I was, sitting in front of my computer contemplating fapping to a girl who I had declined sex with the day before,” another post reads. These people are using porn as their excuse for their unhappiness, which could totally be true, however there’s really no simple or one answer to each individual’s discontenment.

It’s all very touching and kind of weird, these NoFap posts. It’s an accepting community with a diverse range of members. They don’t judge and mock others, they share their sometimes disturbing, sometimes intimate stories. They are facing their fears and challenging themselves to forgo porn and masturbation and do something different with their lives. How long they will stay committed, is a personal decision. The movement ranges from month-long challenges, to 90-day challenges, to lifetime goals.

This is why the NoFap challenge is great. It can be something entirely different for each person and it can last as long as you want. Fapstronauts don’t have to give up sex for the duration of their challenge, although some decide to as well, to better learn self-control. In a lot of ways the movement is about getting away from porn; giving up fapping is just a way of making it easier to give up porn, and sex is just another trigger. This challenge presents a personal test of self-discipline, for developing confidence and learning to rekindle the desire for an intimate relationship.

Fapping has become a problem in the first place largely because it’s the easy way out. Consider when you masturbate the most. Do you do it when you’re stressed or angry? Do you do it when you’re bored, lonely, or tired? For me, it’s all of these things. But, what if I redirected these feelings towards other things. Consider the productivity you could have if you directed this sexual energy elsewhere. This is what the fapstronauts are arguing: not fapping will rejuvenate your sex drive, build self-control, and give you more time to do other things. While some no-fappers proclaim superpowers, others insist they’ve found talking to girls so much easier. This last point is a large part of men’s desire to start NoFap. It gives men purpose, a reason to approach a cute girl they’ve been eyeing from afar; it gives them a reason make an effort. As one fapstronaut puts it, “I am starting to enjoy the frustration. It puts this fight back in me. Every moment of discomfort is worth the renewed vitality.”

As for me, in my four weeks of not fapping I haven’t noticed any major changes in my life. I’ve been making more time to make good meals for myself and I’ve been doing a lot more reading before bed instead of fapping to my computer. My girlfriend and I have been in separate cities for a while, but we saw each other for three days and the sex was as great as ever, so no differences there. I haven’t noticed anything different in my social life, and neither have my friends noticed anything different about me.

I’ve been exercising more regularly than I was before the challenge, and as I mentioned before, yoga and kegel exercises have become a regular part of my day. Physically, I’ve been feeling really good, considering the sometimes-overwhelming tension in my testicles. Mentally, it has not been quite as easy.

A couple weeks ago, my mind wasn’t in a good place. I felt lethargic, tired, and unmotivated. I couldn’t understand why; I just didn’t feel like doing anything. While there could have been many causes, one fapstronaut says that this is a natural reaction to trying to fight fapping habit. Mark Queppet has recently begun offering coaching to the men of NoFap. In one of his weekly motivational vlog posts he suggested that feeling low energy is a result of outputting high energy into breaking my habit. Whether you consider your practices to be an addiction or not, it’s still a habit which takes hard work to break, like anything. As Queppet puts it, breaking the habit is about learning to be comfortable with discomfort.

Even Edgar Allen Poe was giving me frustration boners.

More and more people are learning about this discomfort. The movement is catching on; the subreddit has almost 60,000 members (as of the date of publication) and the number grew by 2,000 members since I last checked, four days ago. IT appears more men are looking to the internet, not for porn, but for guidance on how to stay away from it.

For myself, now that this story has been published, I’m probably going to relapse. The writing of the piece has been painful enough since every sentence is a trigger, making me want to open my browser and go to town on my own dick. It’s been a tough challenge, which I welcome because that’s what’s important in life, challenging ourselves to do break habits and do different things.

So, go ahead and tweet at me if you’d like to join me in this adventure of abstinence. I will be your rock.

Contact Ken about your masturbation habits: @kjrwall

For more VICE stories on trying to quit:

How to Quit Porn and Not Entirely Ruin Your Life

Why I Quit Drinking

The Jerkoff Diaries

An exclusive video collage of kaleidoscope'd butts that Nate made for us.

The first time I met Nate Kogan he was at a house party wearing a bunny suit that was splattered with fake blood. I'd see Nate around at other parties every now and then but I only knew him as "bunny guy," until one day he moved in next door. I would witness new women coming in and out of his place every day and I assumed he was either a drug dealer or the king of Craigslist personals. I knew they weren't there to see the bunny suit. It turns out that he was actually photographing these women, usually nude, and then turning them into trippy GIFs. Nate man has a real gift for GIF making. While his photos may just seem like naked girls hanging out in a studio doing wacky shit, because that's what they are, his brain is hardwired to make some incredibly sweet looking digital animations that tend to revolve around boobs and butts as his subject matter.

I chatted with Nate about his work, his interest in the lowest common denominator, and shitty freelance clients.

VICE: How would you describe your work?
Nathan Kogan: I call it bubble gum art or Hubba Bubba art. You know how you put a piece in your mouth and it's really good and super sweet for like 9 seconds and then you're like I can't stand this shit and spit it out. But that's what it is. It's meant to be consumed in little bits but the best part about it is you have an entire pack in your pocket so whenever you want one of those you just gotta throw it in your mouth. I look at my stuff as completely disposable. I don't believe in timeless art, I think it's bullshit for the aesthetic I play in (changes all the time). Most people have nine seconds of attention and I want all 9 of them.

How did you get into making GIFs that look like an X-rated Nintendo game on acid?
The short answer is depression, art school, and then finding myself. I'm a child of the internet, I kind of like video but not really, and I love photos. I found the happy medium and they were GIFs. At first it started really simple and then I found my other love, which is psychedelics. There's a clear dividing line in my work from when that happened, and it's kind of raunchy and trippy and you think what's going on here it's crazy why is this chick blowing a hot dog that's made out of rainbows. Well, it’s because of drugs.

Was it awkward or shooting your first nude model?
No, I just met the right people. Art school taught me a couple of things; it taught me that tits and ass hijack eyeballs like no tomorrow. Nudity is less about "Oh look! There's a wicked pair of tits, I love those, I love tits that's great!" and more about like you're seeing tits right now on a 50 foot wall projected and you're going to stop and look at it you can't help it. Everybody loves that shit. It can be anything from a giant dick or ass or whatever the hell it is and it captures someone's attention and that's what I want. I go after the baseline lowest common denominator.

There's nudity, flashiness, dogs, cats all in a GIF form. That's pretty much the internet in a nutshell.
I look at the internet as a huge retrospective. As far as we've known it, it's been what, like 20 years of interaction? Facebook has been around since 2006? That's not that long of a time. Imagine a life without Facebook? For me that's weird. The 90s net was this weird thing for me where I look back at it and put it in a blender with all of my thoughts and throw it back out there. I like to use a lot of weird bad design cues from the time and do some whack stuff with that. I think that's why my stuff is kind of a mix of all that. It's kind of internet and psychedelics and sexuality had a super baby with a sick moustache who liked smoking dope. That's pretty much the basis of it.

There are a lot of artists working other jobs to pay for their craft and bills because their art isn't making any money. How did you finally make this into a full-time freelance career?
That was a big jump. There was a period where I was homeless for two months. Every once in a while I'd stay in a studio, which I didn't want to do too much of. I am actually really in touch with what it's like to be alone. I only really found myself last year with the help of some amazing people who are my life. I knew what I wanted to do and how to pursue it; like the Kingdom (Nate's website) is only a year and a half old so it's kinda new. NOW magazine and She Does the City helped me a lot out with exposure. The Kingdom was really small until they did an interview with me. That really set it off I started getting emails from little brands to do lookbooks and stuff like that.

I also try and treat everyone with respect and assume everyone is intelligent, and dropped pretty much all the drama away from my life. People who will hire you will notice these things and try to attach themselves to you, so I think that's why things have been going well. I love people.

I've heard of photographers feeding models booze and drugs on set to get them loose. Is that your strategy?
I have this one rule and it's on my set there's no alcohol or drugs. I know that's surprising. I had this really bad situation where this girl got really drunk on set, can't mention any names, but she got fucked up and then she got into a physical fight with one of my best friends. Since then I don't allow anyone to drink. Everybody thinks when I do these things I'm fucked up, but that's not the case at all. I'm baseline completely sober when I work. I don't care about anything other than getting the ideas out of my head onto the screen and I can't do that if I'm not sober. Like could you imagine holding a camera on mushrooms? It'd be impossible to keep that sucker from melting! One time I thought I could do these things on acid but then I'd look at my camera and it'd be too confusing. I did have a chat with it though and it specifically explained the specifications of the colour Cyan to me at the time. Thanks Camera!


More from Pat Maloney:

Does Big Shiny Tunes 2 Hold Up in 2013?

Learning About Madchild's Fan Club: The Battle Axe Warriors

A wall of Greek riot police. (Photo by Henry Langston) 

For the past week, we’ve been watching scenes of mayhem unfold in the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and other major Turkish cities. What started as a local initiative to stop a central Istanbul park being turned into a shopping centre became a civilian street war against the rising authoritarianism of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan's government.

As if to cement everything the protesters were already angry about, Erdoğan sent police in to quite literally crack skulls and fire tear gas and pepper spray at the mostly peaceful crowd. But alongside the highly visible violence, an invisible war is taking place on those from Turkey who dare to stand up and speak out against the government.

Bulut Yayla

The story starts not in Turkey, but in downtown Athens, from where Turkish asylum seeker Bulut Yayla disappeared last Thursday. According to eyewitnesses, at around 9:30PM Yayla was immobilised, beaten and pushed into a car on Solomou Street in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia. When support groups and lawyers looked up the car’s registration plate, the owner turned out to be none other than a member of the Greek police.

Shockingly, the Greek police force itself denies any knowledge of the incident. Yayla, a political activist who has been arrested and tortured in Turkey in the past, has been trying to apply for political refugee asylum in Greece for some time now. But given Greece's famous bureaucracy, it probably won't surprise you that Yayla hasn't had much luck.

When he resurfaced after his kidnapping, Yayla was no longer in Athens, he was in Istanbul, being held by the Turkish counter-terrorism police. Since then, he has informed Greek support groups of what happened after his abduction; with a hood over his head, he was passed between three different groups of people, crossed the border to Turkey (under what he said felt like a wire fence in the middle of the night) and eventually found himself in Istanbul.

The Greek police, of course, continue to deny any knowledge of the incident and claim that the car allegedly used in Yayla's abduction was retired from official use. But new reports of collusion between the Greek and Turkish governments over capturing dissidents makes those claims look a little unlikely.

A suicide bombing at the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. 

In the past few months, there have been reports in the Turkish media of police and government officials meeting with the explicit intention of cracking down on Kurdish and radical leftists. Those coming under the most scrutiny are members of the banned Marxist group Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), who Erdoğan blames for the bombing of the US embassy in Ankara last February. Yayla, a Kurd, was a member of the DHKP-C, which might explain the drastic measures taken to capture him and return him to the Turkish authorities.

For his participation within the DHKP-C, Yayla had already been detained and tortured by the Turkish police, before seeking asylum in Greece to escape Turkey’s infamous "white cells" – the maximum security prisons where solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are used to torture inmates. According to the IPS news agency, Greek police chief Nikos Papagiannopoulos and his Turkish colleague met on February the 4th and agreed that Greece would help Erdoğan’s government in its pursuit of activists like Yayla.

The deal was finalised a month later, with lucrative arrangements on both sides and promises of cooperation and investments in various areas – health, tourism and immigration being just a few – in a meeting between Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and Tayyip Erdoğan.

As IPS notes, “That same day, the Ankara Strategic Institution pointed out that private Turkish investment in Greece has been used as a pressure tool in order to promote the deal on extradition. More reports followed, referring to preparations for extraditions, but the Greek government is yet to respond to any of them.”

Ioanna Kourtovik, a lawyer who took interest in Yayla's case from the outset, told me, “There is nothing we can do through legal means from Greece. It was an illegal abduction and the Turkish side is trying to make it look like they arrested him in Turkey, while the Greek police deny having any knowledge of his existence. But as the Council for Refugees points out, Ayala had contacted the proper authorities and he was trying to apply for asylum, so they knew who he was and where he was. His lawyers will file a lawsuit against any responsible parties, which might implicate the Greek police if it turns out they had anything to do with the case.”

Besides constituting a gross violation of human rights, Yayla's extraction would potentially be in violation of the Geneva Convention. And this kind of thing isn't anything new – both Greece and Turkey are beginning to witness their governments' increasing hunger for the detention and torture of activists, coupled with extreme violence against protesters. It's a worrying trend we've seen play out over the past couple of years in Greece, and something that's becoming more apparent with the recent unfolding of events in Turkey. 

A raid on an Istanbul DHKP-C safehouse in January this year. 

A "zero tolerance" dogma is firmly in play in both countries, which roughly translates to "it's now totally fine for us to kidnap people who piss us off" – surely a terrifying prospect for activists exercising their basic human right to protest. In both countries, counter-terrorism laws are already absolutely brutal. And while those laws have been used many times in Greece for stuff like setting up and prosecuting kids for the heinous offence of carrying a stick during a protest, prospects are even worse in Turkey. Suspects have been known to be held in detention for up to two years without charge, and confessions extracted through torture are admissible in court.

Both governments now subscribe to the kind of law and order that has seen Greece's police force turn into a private army in tensions over the Skouries gold mine, and Turkey's hyper-violent officers attacking citizens over the opening of a shopping mall in Istanbul. But human rights apparently mean little to Samaras and Erdoğan, as long as there are lucrative business deals to be struck. They‘re both selling off their respective countries bit by bit, with little accountability and surrounded by governments steeped in corruption.

As blood is washed off the marble stones of Taksim Square, as activists are illegally abducted from one country to face trial in the other and as the act of voicing your opinion increasingly begins to mean that you're a "terrorist", the mainstream media in both countries continue to ignore the real issues, instead condemning protesters or, if they're tired of that, immigrants. It appears that the two countries, who have suffered more than their fair share of social unrest in the past, are beginning to find a common ground on which to move forward: an utter apathy towards the opinions and wellbeing of their own citizens. 

Follow Yiannis on Twitter: @YiannisBab

More from Greece and Turkey:

Turkey's Weekend of Street War, Jubilation and Joyridden Bulldozers

Istanbul's Taksim Square Has Become a Warzone

Greece's New Anarchist Generation Are Being Tortured By Police

Over the last six months the FSA and the battle for Aleppo has transitioned from a full-on frontline assault into a slow-paced but still deadly sniper war. Photographer and videographer Robert King recently returned to the conflict-ravaged city to meet the snipers of the FSA, interviewing them about the new challenges they face on the ground as they steadfastly peer through their scopes and pick off the enemy, one by one, day by day.

Watch more videos from the Ground Zero - Syria series:

Al-Qusayr Field Hospital

The Burning of the Old Souk

Aleppo Field Hospital

Under Fire for Bread in Aleppo

The Bombing of Aleppo's Dar al-Shifa Hospital

The Free Syrian Army

RZA. Photo via Wikipedia.

One of the high points in my career as a journalist happened back in January, when I had the honor of chewing the fat with my hero and Wu-Tang Clan mastermind, the RZA. We were supposed to talk about a new Ghostface Killah album featuring production from his protégée Adrian Younge that RZA had executive produced and was going to drop on his then-newly-launched Soul Temple label. However, I hadn't heard the album yet. And I only found out I was slated to conduct the interview a few hours before I had to show up, which I did out of breath and a little bugged out. I was also woefully underprepared—I even forgot to bring a camera, so I couldn't get a picture with Mr. Bobby Digital, something my entire family is still pissed at me about months later. Luckily, I did have my recorder, which is good. And I'm pretty sure I didn't smell, despite having sprinted to the interview in what felt like a coat made of whale blubber on a peculiarly warm day for the dead of winter. 

The album we talked about, which I finally got a chance to listen to and love a month ago, is called Twelve Reasons to Die. It hit the streets at the end of April and features Ghostface spitting a fictional narrative that falls somewhere between The Candy Man and The Crow. You should really listen to the record for yourself, but basically it details how a black gangster named Tony Starks, who works for the Itallian mob, becomes the Ghostface Killah, a phantom assassin who avenges his death everytime a mysterious vinyl record is played. As would be expected, Ghost's rhymes are flawless, pulling you into a world where wronged gangsters can come back from the grave. But what's most surprising about the record is the production, which Adrian Younge laced with live instrumentation and throwback techniques. The beats sound like Sergio Leone scores and Delfonics ballads—the latter makes plenty of sense considering the standout track "Enemies All Around Me" features William Hart of the famed Philly soul group. 

I would've dropped this impromtu interview with RZA and Adrian a lot sooner, but I was hoping to get another chance to connect with RZA and possibly Ghost after I had time to digest the album and add a perspective with some hindsight. I'm still waiting on that one, if only so I can snag a picture with RZA or Ghost throwing up the W and make my father proud. (Wu-Tang, for retired dads living in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, really is forever.) 

So here is an old interview with a rap legend and a rising hip-hop star that is still definitely worth reading a few months after it was conducted, especially if you're like me and you eat, sleep, and breath all things Shaolin. We talked about the collaborative process for Twelve Reasons to Die, what it's like working with Ghost, and how the Wu-Tang Clan are actually mutants.

VICE: So Adrian, just to start off, how did you come up with the concept of Twelve Reasons to Die?
Adrian Younge: Initially, Bob Perry, co-owner of Soul Temple with RZA, hit me up to ask me if I’d like to do a Wu-Tang project. I’ve always composed from the RZA perspective. My concept was always, what would RZA do if he was a producer in the late 60s? So, when he hit me up about doing that project, I was like, OK, this is too good to be true. Then he hit me up a few weeks later and I was like, “Yo, you’re serious? Alright. Then we have to figure out a concept to make this important to people.”

Why make a concept record?
Adrian: Whenever I’m creating, I ask myself why anyone should care. I figured if we came together and did something that was based on a story, it could turn into something more massive. I thought about it every day for a couple weeks and the story hit me. I planted the seed and the people around me helped to nurture the concept.

RZA: The concept is what attracted me to the project. I like to think conceptually when I make my music. When I see somebody producing in that same vein, I invest in that. You see a guy like Adrian, and you know that he has a future ahead of him.

Was there a moment in the process when you said, “Woah, Ghostface is really putting his all into this?”
Adrian: I’m a hip-hop dude, but I generally say that I left hip-hop in ‘97. To me, at that time, it was making a shift I didn’t feel. I’m somebody who’s been trying to find a hip-hop album that gives me the same feeling the music did in ‘97. To finally hear it and to have been the one to produce it is incredible. Ghost exceeded my expectations, and I always expected him to come with it. That, in turn, inspired me to do more and make it even better.

Adrian records a lot on analog equipment. What do you think about that in terms of not sampling, but using organic instruments to create sounds that are reminiscent of samples?
RZA:  Hip-hop started off from sampling certain parts of old records. The musicians who were making those old records weren’t coming from the hip-hop perspective. Now you have a new generation of people who’ve grown up on hip-hop, whether it was Wu-Tang or G-Funk or whatever. And they’re musicians, but they’re able to think in a hip-hop way. It’s great to see.

Has working with traditional musicians like Adrian showed you anything about yourself?
RZA: I noticed the stuff I sample on every album has an A-minor progression. That’s just what my ear is attracted to. I didn’t know it was an A-minor when I did it. But now now that we’ve got a producer like Adrian who is a musician, we can really attain the spirit that we want. And having all that old equipment is great. This guy is sitting on a lot of old toys. The only other people I’ve seen with that many old toys in the studio are the Black Keys. He’s able to create a sound that made those old records. I think it’s great for hip-hop.

Some might argue what Adrian does isn’t hip-hop at all.
RZA: People think if we take the rappers off of a record, it won't be hip-hop anymore. But I disagree with that. Say this was just an instrumental. You’re going to hear that soul you’re looking for. If we come back to a generation of people who don’t become musicians because they’re using their Logics and their Abletons and they don’t get that musician part in life, they’ll use this record as their sample base. It will come full circle.

That’s an exciting thought.
RZA: Yeah, as a musician myself, it’s fun to see a someone who can execute those ideas so I don’t have to. It’s a big relief to me. It’s like being a great dancer and wanting to see someone do the most incredible spin that you were always working on, just because you want the world to see it too. You get to a point in life when you aren’t breakdancing anymore, you’re choreographing dancers in movies. But you see a young guy come and he does that fucking Triple Lindy that you dreamed about. That’s how I feel right now.

Adrian Younge. Photo via Facebook.

Adrian, as a hip-hop fan, why not sample?
Adrian: Hip-hop was started on the break. It’s about finding those breaks and those chords. I stopped sampling because my brain was going further than the chords. When RZA was doing his thing, he was finding all the ill breaks and creating weird changes that were syncopated and made sense. Now, I can make the entire sample myself and evolve it.

RZA: Right. And not just on the drum, but the music on top of the drum.

Adrian: Quincy Jones said that hip-hop mastered the drums. When I’m recording these drums, I record them as if they were made from the SP using different snares and different mics and different set-ups on the same songs. But it’s still all live. This process is pushing the musical and compositional component of a subculture and style of music that is dear to me.

Can you really go any further than where hip-hop has already been?
Adrian: Every generation declines. Hip-hop got to a point where it was getting better and better and it hit a pinnacle. Then it started to drop because it was getting into pop and becoming more of a dance thing. This record is something that takes it back to that passionate core.

You guys come from different generations of hip-hop. Was there something you learned from this experience that you didn’t know before the process?
Adrian: One of things I’ve done with music is study why musicians are the best. When I got a chance to meet RZA, I’d ask him some of those questions. But I already had the answers for what I thought he did. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was wrong and my mind was blown. It’s like he was helping me to sculpt my future and mold my thought process when it came to finalizing shit. He’s had 20 years of experience with this. I have not. I’ve learned a lot just by upping my game.

RZA: For me, making music has been a lot about searching—searching for the right sample to get that bell, searching for a digital keyboard that can play certain sounds. But to go back to his studio and to see all the analog equipment that made those sounds, I learned that if you want a bell then buy a damn bell. You’ve got a fucking mic. I work with a digital orchestra and I enjoy it. It has its benefits. But if you want organic sounds, 90 percent of the time a computer isn’t going to generate that. Trying to make all this music with the older equipment showed me you can stick to the organic way. You don’t have to change because the equipment changed. You can still use that same old shit. You can still go down and get the same musicians. I knew that, but I forgot it, and Adrian reminded me.

You’ve been working with Ghostface for a long time. In terms of this project, did you see anything different come out in him as an MC?
RZA: Ghost is a dope MC—one of the dopest to ever touch the mic. But on this particular record, he reminded us that Ghost can get into any water and swim well. He killed it on the Kanye record. He killed it on the Wu-Block record. But on this one here, he kept a cohesive narrative. I don’t think he’s done that since Supreme Clientele. Even Supreme Clientele somewhere in the middle doesn’t hold the narrative. Cuban Linx was the first time a story was really kept all the way. It was Tony Starks and Lou Diamond and they were there all the way through. This is a return for him to a complete narrative from front to back... I’m going to give a quote about Ghostface that Quentin  [Tarantino] said to me, “Two of the greatest writers in American music history are Bob Dylan and Ghostface Killah.”  

Growing up listening to Wu-Tang as a young kid, I always looked at the different members of Wu-Tang as almost like comic book characters. You all had such larger than life personas. Do you ever intend to tell the origin stories of other Wu characters you've helped create inside this universe?
RZA: As far as Wu and comic ideas, I’ve written something called Black Shampoo. In it, everybody’s a superhero and it touches on their own personalities. For example, everyone knows Meth is a weed smoker. In this story, some guys come and confront him at a table. They’re going to kill him. They’ve got guns pointed under the table. And he’s sitting there smoking this big blunt. The blunt flies across the table and knocks the guys back. That’s my imagination on how super he could be. Wu has always been something that’s real, but we always had this superhero idea about ourselves. That comes from when you you feel that you have the proper position in the world to be a supreme being. Or, instead of the supreme being, because there’s only one, the ability to be supreme amongst other beings. There’s a small part of me that says, “You know what motherfuckers? We are mutants.” Think about it, Meth has smoked for 30 years straight and never been to the doctor for anything. Iron Lung, right? He must have iron lungs. Ghostface really has a ghostface. It’s hard to find him. It's like he disappears.

What was it like actually turning this album into a comic book?
RZA: The trick that a writer needs to understand is, when you’re dealing with hip-hop, you’re dealing with concentrated language. It’s like concentrated orange juice. You have to add cups of water to it. If I say, “Camouflage chameleon/ ninja scaling your building/ no time to grab the gun/ they’ve already got your wife and children” within two lines, all this shit has happened already. To make this a story, they have to stretch that out to a 10-minute scene. That’s one of the secrets of writing from listening to hip-hop and hearing the story and being able to extract it out. But the writers were good. I like what they did. They took the story and instead of making it from just one point of view, they did something cinematic with it. They made it a parallel story.

Your music’s always been described as cinematic. Has the process of working on The Man with the Iron Fists changed your process in general?
RZA: It has impacted everything. That was like the final education. It was definitely a college graduation thing for me. I have my PhD in art right now, thanks to that experience. But the final, ultimate test is, can you beat death? So far, nobody has beaten the ultimate test. That’s a test for your ass. But doing a movie definitely comes close.

RZA, any advice you want to give to MCs and producers out there who want to be the next RZA or Adrian Younge?
RZA: There’s no limit to artistic expression. You just have to find that wavelength and ride that wave all the way to the shore.

Thanks Adrian Younge and Ruler Zig-Zag-Zig Allah!

Buy Twelve Reasons to Die the album and the comic.

@WilbertLCooper

More interviews with rappers:

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to Be a Pretty Motherfucker

The Underachievers Talk About Stop-and-Frisk and Kimani Gray

Gunplay Doesn't Fear the Pine Box or Prison

Matt Ellis doesn’t smoke weed. He simply doesn’t enjoy being stoned. The all-too-familiar itch of paranoia that follows a few deep rips of pot is enough to keep him from using. But that’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy—or maybe even need—weed. It’s in the one green that he sees gobs of the other.

"At the end of the day, it’s about making money,” says Ellis, whose Denver-based biomass extraction company is one of countless others riding a wave of high tech innovation in the wake of recent measures in Colorado and Washington state legalizing small amounts of weed for recreational use. “I mean, I want to help people, don’t get me wrong," Ellis tells me, referring to a medicinal pot industry brimming with new and diffuse cannabis-concentrate highs that his company, ExtractionTek Solutions, is poised to capitalize on. “But we gotta make a living.”

It’s an increasingly common refrain around here. There is no place in the world quite like Colorado, which just laid groundwork for the first regulated, taxed, legal recreational weed market in the United States. When Amendment 64 kicks in next January, adults 21 and over in Colorado will be able to legally purchase up to an ounce of weed from licensed dispensaries. They will also be able to tend their own personal grows of up to a half dozen cannabis plants, provided only three are flowering at any given time.

In a place where technology, politics, economics, science, and the pursuit of happiness collide in the latest and greatest vaporizer, chatter of a proverbial Silicon Valley of Weed has never sounded less less crazy than it does today. There are fortunes to be made in the new business of getting stoned.

Photo by Carl Heindl.

The dust has not settled over Toronto’s violent G20 protests from 2010. In response to the planet’s most powerful leaders congregating in Ontario’s capital city, massive security fences were erected around Union Station, cop cars were set on fire, protesters were brutalized and arrested, then sent to a temporary detention centre set-up by the Distillery District in the city’s east(ish) end.

The handling of the G20 protest was marred with sketchy doubletalk that infuriated protestors and granted the police clandestine privileges to attack and arrest anyone they found to be out-of-line. The most alarming example of this was a rule that barred anyone from coming within five metres of the newly erected security fence. No one was told about this bizarre little rule until after the protest, once 1,100 people had already been arrested. Since then, Alok Mukherjee, the chair of the Toronto Police force, has apologized this and more, saying he was bummed about anyone who had: “their rights abridged, their liberty interfered with and their physical safety jeopardized.”

One of the more high-profile cases surrounding the G20 summit is that of Adam Nobody (that’s his real name!). When the footage embedded above leaked out onto YouTube, it absolutely appeared to show the police using what the Special Investigations Unit would later call “excessive force.” Adam was kicked in the face and wound up with a broken nose and cheekbone. At first, the word from the Chief of the Toronto Police, Bill Blair, was that Adam was “violent and armed” because he thought the popular clip of Adam’s beating had been “tampered with.” 

Shortly after that, Bill Blair came out to retract his statements saying he had absolutely no evidence Adam was violent and armed in the first place. Ok. Why did your police force beat him up, then?

On Monday evening, news broke that a new video shows Adam dropping an “easily ignited” water bottle, that has since been determined to contain ethanol and toluene, right around the line of police who were patrolling Queens Park, where he was beaten on camera. The word is that Adam will be claiming in court that this water bottle contained water and whiskey and was not any kind of explosive device.

In case you are not up on your explosives, toluene is used in paint thinners, and can also be mixed in a certain way to create makeshift bombs. There is some precedent for toluene to be floating around in Canadian drinking water and ethanol is, of course, found in whiskey. Based on this, it seems like there could be enough reasonable doubt for Adam’s whiskey-and-water defense to work, and maybe he can just get off with a bruised face and a public drinking ticket.

Either way, this new development raises a few questions. Could the police who brutalized him identify, with some kind of chemical-spotting X-ray eyewear, what was in that bottle in the first place?

If Adam Nobody was in fact brandishing a Molotov cocktail (or something similar) then the police’s excessive force would be justified—but did they really identify the bottle as dangerous at the time? Should a civilian be beaten every time they drop a water bottle near a police officer?

This will certainly be an important case to watch as the injustices and controversies of G20 continue to unravel and develop. The flip-flopping of the Toronto police between stating Adam Nobody is a violent man, and then a non-violent man, and now a man with a predilection for homemade explosives is a confusing back-and-forth that truly requires this story to be placed under further scrutiny, as it continues to get weirder.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Some Pics from the Toronto G20

I Went to the G20 and All I Got Was This Bloody T-Shirt

A New York anarchist has been jailed for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury about his political beliefs, his friends, and the legal support he provided to Occupy Wall Street.

Gerald “Jerry” Koch, 24, was subpoenaed to a grand jury that is believed to be investigating the 2008 explosion outside a military recruitment center in Times Square. The blast damaged the front door of the center and injured no one, but the FBI began a "terrorism" investigation of local anarchists.

Koch isn't accused of this crime—or any other crime. Prosecutors told his lawyers that they think he was at a bar in 2008 or 2009, after the bombing, and that someone else at the bar knew about another person who was involved. Koch was subpoenaed to a grand jury in 2009—when he was only 19—and publicly stated that he didn't know anything about it and wouldn't cooperate.

On May 21, he appeared before the grand jury again, refused to answer any questions, and remained silent the entire time. More than a hundred supporters yelled out to him as he was taken to jail.

"By the time you read this," Koch said in a statement released after the hearing, "I will be in the custody of the United States government for continuing my refusal to cooperate with a federal grand jury. This is the right thing to do."

If the government's six-degrees-of-separation logic and bar-talk investigation of Koch sounds sketchy, it should: grand juries have been used for decades as pretext for gathering information not necessarily about crimes but about the actions of social movements including the Black Panthers, environmentalists, and antiwar activists.

Grand juries are secretive by nature. Prosecutors won't even acknowledge if a grand jury exists, let alone say what is being investigated. When you appear before a grand jury, you don't have the right for your attorney to be present. Nor can you assert your First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights and refuse to talk about your politics, your friends, or yourself. If you do, you can be held in contempt and thrown into jail until you cooperate. They can keep you there as long as 18 months.

Grand juries are intended as a safeguard of sorts within the court system. They're meant to determine if the government has enough evidence to move forward with a prosecution. But all of that secrecy and unchecked power lends itself quite well to political fishing expeditions, and that's what is happening in Koch's case.

"Jerry was the person everyone could count on to be waiting for them outside of jail, to support them in the courtroom, and to help with their legal defense," his supporters said in a statement. "It is clear that the State’s goal is not just to pressure Jerry into informing on the radical community, but to take away someone who is an integral part of our community—someone who makes us all stronger."

Koch's imprisonment is the most recent case in a growing crackdown on anarchists and other radicals, and signals an increased use of grand juries against them.

Last year, six anarchists in the Pacific Northwest were subpoenaed to a grand jury investigating vandalism during a May Day protest in Seattle.

Matt Duran and Katherine “KteeO” Olejnik are two of the anarchists who refused to cooperate and were imprisoned. They both spent five months in jail. Two months were spent in solitary confinement, treatment that the Seattle Human Rights Commission called inhumane. Eventually U.S. District Judge Richard A. Jones released them, saying that "their resolve appears to increase as their confinement continues.”

Their resolve was only possible, the resisters say, because of the support they received from anarchists and civil rights advocates around the world. "It can't be said enough how important prisoner support is," Olejnik says. "It's what keeps people strong on the inside. It's what kept me strong. One letter can make all the difference… They are trying to break you."

Koch, who has years of experience providing legal aid to activists, is now on the receiving end of prisoner support efforts.

His partner, Amanda Clarke, recalls the 12-hour-days Koch would spend at courthouses, on the phone, and in the streets helping those arrested at Occupy Wall Street protests. In one case, a group of activists were facing multiple felonies and Koch raised thousands of dollars in donations in just a few hours for their release.

"It's really scary, seeing the government go after one of your friends in this way," she says. The grand jury and Koch's imprisonment has instilled fear in radical communities in New York, but she says it has been overshadowed by support and outrage from new allies.

"I overheard someone on the subway talking about Jerry and saying 'how can this be the law in our country?'" she says. "That's exactly it. How can you put someone in prison who is not even charged with anything?"

Will Potter is the author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege.

Follow Will on Twitter: @will_potter