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Is Vancouver's Wreck Beach Crackdown For Real?

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Photo from the 15th annual Wreck Beach Bare Buns run, via.

I may not live in Vancouver anymore, but every time I go back, there are little differences that make returning feel like bizarro world. The latest victim of the west coast weed capitals cultural makeover seems to be Wreck Beach, the hedonistic hippie paradise that has near-legendary status not only within Vancity, but across Canada.

For the uninitiated, Wreck Beach, is a 7km stretch of beach adjoined to the UBC campus that is delicately referrred to as “clothing-optional." If you're okay with seeing all kind of sun-worn wrinkly bits, it's actually good fun, and has come to be known as the anti-thesis to the conservative “No Fun City” label that was slapped on the city long before I was even alive.

At the centre of the hedonistic solar system is the (optional) nudity, around which alcohol, drugs, and illegal bonfires make for long, lazy days, and some wild nights. The good times at Wreck stretch all the way back to the 70s and 80s, when cops decided that walking down 400 stairs to the beach would not be worth the trouble just to bust a bunch of longhairs who wanted to get buck wild and buck naked. Since then, vendors wander the shores advertising homemade weed brownies, alcohol and other illegal substances, making it easy for visitors to put the “trip” in daytrip while watching the totally sweet sunsets.

But recent reports suggest that the No Fun City vibe is determined to harsh Vancouver’s mellow, especially on everyone's favourite nude beach.

Alana Thomson, a 31-year-old who has allegedly been selling homemade alcoholic freezies on the beach, was charged last month with the selling and manufacturing of alcohol without a license, as well as possession of ecstasy and marijuana for the purpose of trafficking. In the wake of this, RCMP has promised to crack down on drugs, alcohol, and general fun this summer.

Wreck Beach has been a hippie oasis in Vancouver for over four decades. Photo via

I spoke with Drew Grainger, RCMP spokesperson who all but confirmed a future crackdown on Wreck Beach, explaining, rather vaguely, “We’ve had a bit of a staff turnover here at the detachment level, and some of the staff that are here now have a great deal of experience with problems like open air drug and alcohol use. We’re going to try and develop some strategies to build relationships that ensure the safety of all beachgoers that [are] down there.” Drew admitted that this has always been an issue for the RCMP, and that there is a certain level of tolerance.

But with Wreck Beach widely accepted by the public and law enforcement as a place where one could freely get their buzz on, why is it that Alana’s homemade booze freezies pushed the cops to prosecute, over the regulars who push what some would say are more unseemly drugs on Wreck? This may or may not have something to do with the regulars, some of whom don’t have good things to say about Alana and have plenty of influence over what goes on at the beach. In a recent interview with Metro, Alana said that she felt she was singled out because the old timers don’t like her. “They dislike me because I’m not completely nude,” she told Metro. The reason might be a matter of opinion, but it’s pretty clear that the tension between Alana and the regulars is real.

When I reached Judy Williams of the Wreck Beach Preservation Society for a quote on Alana Thomson, all she would say was, “I don’t want to talk about that little bitch anymore.”

Reasons behind Alana’s predicament notwithstanding, everyone who frequents the beach will be waiting to see whether the promised crackdown will play out badly for them this summer when thing pick up.

“I hope [it doesn’t happen],” said Natasha Wahid, an avid Wreck Beacher. “I think Wreck is good at maintaining its own etiquette there, and I think that’s why it stays safe. Actually, I’ve seen beachgoers get way more out of hand at Jericho Beach in [Kitsilano]... There’s not the same kind of respectful etiquette. I, personally, haven’t ever noticed a ton of cops, but I’ll be looking out for them [this summer].”

No beachgoers want their fun squished by the cops, but Judy Williams is doubtful that anything will be different this summer.

“Oh, honey, that’s nothing new,” she said about the crackdown threat. The real threats, she said, are coming from environmental changes that the Preservation Society has been fighting against since 1974. Stormwater control, motorboats spilling oil into the water, and UBC building projects have all threatened the maintenance of the beach in the past, and have all been combated by the Preservation Society. Judy’s attitude and the vague plans outlined by Drew Grainger make it seem very possible that the RCMP is just paying lip-service to a problem they know they’ll never fully control.

The history of Wreck Beach speaks for itself. It’s been an oasis (it literally has a section of beach called “Oasis” where nudity is mandatory) of freedom and liberal social values that has survived so far and has worked its way into the very fibres of what defines Vancouver. Hopefully, the RCMP will not end up ruining Wreck Beach and its legacy in the years to come.


@lindsrempel


Baltimore Is a Paradise

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Baltimore is a place eclipsed by the power of the District, the history of Philadelphia, or the cultural and economic gravity of New York. Its outlying counties are awash in the wealth generated inside anonymous, mirror-clad office parks over a decade of war. It exists in a blind spot, and this post-industrial cloaking device is the backdrop for these photos. Lives of little consequence, playing out in unseen spaces on the set of an HBO drama I’ll never find the time to watch.

(Text by Nick Biddle)

See more of Ashley's work here

The Falun Gong Member Who Fled China in Drag

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"Zhuqiang" didn’t want his picture taken or his real name used because he says that the Chinese embassy in The Hague keeps an eye on him. These are the leaflets he gave me.

A few weeks ago, I met "Zhugiang" in a park near my house while he was sticking up posters of people meditating. I asked him why he was flyering all the trees and he explained, in a combination of broken English and even more broken Dutch, that he was about to meditate.

I didn't understand how surrounding yourself with photos of other people meditating had anything to do with inducing your own pure state of consciousness, and we started conversation. He told me he'd been forced to flee to the Netherlands from his home in China a little more five years ago because he is a member of the Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual discipline founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992.

The Falun Gong isn't a violent organization whatsoever, he explained, but because it’s managed centrally and quickly gained millions of followers, the Chinese government considered it a threat. Deciding to deal with that apparent threat with a deterrence campaign, successive members of the Falun Gong have been prosecuted and locked up by the Chinese government since 1999.



Zhuqiang was keen to tell his story, so I met with him a couple of days later at the same place we'd first bumped into each other. Almost directly after I shook his hand, he pulled down his collar and showed me his scars—reminders, he said, of the various tortures he endured in the labour camp that he'd been sent to as punishment for his beliefs. "I was arrested in 2002 when the police saw me doing qigong—exercises that are part of the Falun Gong," he said. "I believe in the teachings of the Falun Gong and did the exercises because I was ill. Qigong can make you healthy again, but the police took me away and locked me up without checking anything."



Due to exhaustion, he lost all sense of time during his imprisonment, but thinks he spent longer than two years in a labor camp. When he was admitted, the guards asked him to sign a contract stating that he would never have anything to do with the Falun Gong again, including exercising qigong. Zhuqiang refused to sign it. "I didn’t get any food or drink or sleep for days—when I fell asleep, they kicked me until I was awake," he said. "I wasn't allowed to speak to anyone else. A month in, I got very ill and my whole skin was covered in abscesses. Then I signed the contract."



Immediately after Zhuqiang signed his freedom of belief away, he had to start working. He estimates that he was made to work around 20 hours every day, but he can't be certain. Together with other Falun Gong members he was instructed to make fake flowers, like the ones you sometimes see in Chinese restaurants.

Activists protesting against the murders of Falun Gong practitioners (photo via)

"The other prisoners and I had to work very hard," he said. "When I talked to the others, the guards beat me up. Sometimes I'd fall down because I was too tired to stand on my feet. That would lead them to beat me up or give me electric shocks." After a 20-hour working day, the prisoners were often forced to run. "I don’t know how long that took, but if you didn’t run fast enough you were hit with a bat. After running we were given mantou [Chinese steamed bread rolls], but they were always old and full of mold. After that, we went to sleep in a cell with 12 others."

After two years in the labor camp, Zhuqiang could no longer walk. He was of no use to the camp, so they let him sit out the rest of his sentence at home. "My mom stood by the prison gate every day to ask if her son could be freed. She gave almost all her savings to make sure I could get home," Zhuqiang recalled. While at his mother's home, he was being watched extensively. "There was a car in front of our door 24/7. I could never leave the house and the curtains could never be closed," he said.



A few months later, Zhuqiang started feeling a little healthier and devised a plan to help him gain his freedom. He figured out his guards' daily rhythm, noting down the kind of time they would usually get tired and nod off. "When I saw them falling asleep one day, I took my chance," he said. "I'd asked my mother to buy women’s clothes, lipstick and a wig for me. I put that all on quickly and walked out of the house, to a friend who would help me escape China."

Zhuqiang hasn’t seen his mother since. He calls her once a month, but they have to be careful about what they say because her phones are probably being tapped. Fortunately, however, the police haven't bothered her yet.

After fleeing his home in drag, Zhuqiang snuck into Hong Kong. He lived in a shelter there for a few weeks, before other Falun Gong members helped him reach Bangkok, where he spent the next three years living in another shelter. "Then the Dutch government gave me a ticket to come to the Netherlands," he told me. "I was so grateful."

It's been almost five years since Zhuqiang landed at Amsterdam airport and was taken to a centre for asylum seekers in the city of Amersfoort, Utrecht. A year later, he got a house in Amsterdam, near Westerpark—the park where I met him. He has a residence permit and talks a lot about how grateful he is to live here, but to say that all his problems have been solved would be a lie. He can’t find a job because he doesn’t know the language, and he's ill—a hangover from his time in the Chinese labor camp. (We sometimes have to take breaks in our conversation because he feels a stinging pain in his head.)

"Because of the electric shocks in the labor camp, I get constant headaches. I don’t sleep well, either," he complained. He's also found blood in the toilet or on his sheets when he wakes up, but he's yet to consult a doctor as he doesn't have the money. He has to register himself as a citizen, which so far has been almost impossible for him to do.



When he went to the City Hall with his Chinese identity papers, Zhuqiang was told that his documents needed to be translated by an agency. Without any stamps from an official agency, according to the City Hall employee, the translation is not valid, which means Zhuqiang wouldn't be able to register himself. "They gave me the phone numbers of three agencies. I called all three of them, but one of them was already closed, the other one only does translations from English to Dutch and the third one I can’t afford," he sighed.

A "Stop the Persecution" Rally in New York, 2007 (photo via)



When I called the Amsterdam municipality building to ask what Zhuqiang should do, a woman told me that there was a chance he could hand in certain documents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), such as copies of the interviews he gave when he first arrived in the Netherlands, and a copy of his landlord's passport. That sounded like a lot of intentionally difficult procedures all piled on top of each other, even to a local like myself, which made me wonder how a refugee who doesn't speak the language would ever make a successful application.

I told Zhuqiang that we could go to City Hall together and find out if there was an easier way, but he refused. "The man at the city hall said I could only come back if I have the stamps from a translation agency, and I don’t have them," he said. "I don’t want him to get mad at me. Maybe he'll kick me out of the country."

I wasn't able to convince Zhuqiang that a pissed off municipality official wouldn't be capable of throwing him out of the country, but he insisted he should only go back when he has his stamps. On the phone again, the woman said that it would be "easier if he already had his papers stamped at the Dutch embassy in China." I told her that he didn't really have the time for that between fleeing the guards outside his mother's home and sneaking his way into another country.

Update: After this article was originally published on VICE Netherlands, a really, really nice person offered to help Zhuqiang get his papers translated and officially stamped for free.

Exxon Mobil's CEO Is Pro-Fracking Unless It's Next to His Texas Ranch

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Photo via Flickr user shannonpatrick17. This story is from VICE News. See more and sign up now at vicenews.com.

One month from today, the world will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which dumped up to 750,000 barrels of crude oil into Alaska's pristine Prince William Sound. It was the largest spill in US waters until the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

In related news, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation, has joined a lawsuit to stop a 15-story water tower, to be used for fracking, from being built near his 83-acre Texas ranch. Tillerson and his fellow plaintiffs—among then former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey—argue that the proposed water tower would "devalue their properties and adversely impact the rural lifestyle they sought to enjoy." The plaintiffs state their ranches are all worth at least $1 million; Tillerson's in particular sounds wonderful, with "homes, barns, and a state-of-the-art horse training facility."

The lawsuit details the concerns Tillerson and his fellow ranch-owners have about fracking, including the noise, light pollution, and environmental harm they believe it will cause. They assert that the fracking will result in "undesirable development not in character with their neighborhood."

Oddly, Tillerson was quoted in 2011 criticizing "overzealous regulation" of the fracking industry. And in 2012, Exxon ran a $2 million series of pro-drilling newspaper and radio ads in New York.

Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—is the process of drilling a mixture of highly pressurized water, chemicals, and sand into the ground to release deposits of natural gas. Exxon appears to think it's relatively harmless.

Unfortunately for Tillerson, the lawsuit will have little impact on the water tower, which is already 75 percent complete, according to Lloyd Hanson at Cross Timbers Water Supply Corporation—the company that supplies water to most of the surrounding area.

“It’s not the first water tower in the area," Hanson told VICE News. "And we’ve never gotten any sort of complaints from residents before."

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VICE News: Lebanon's Illegal Arms Bazaar

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With Lebanon's security situation worsening every day, business is booming for the country's illegal arms dealers. The porous border with Syria and the vast stockpiles of weapons left over from the country's civil war mean that anyone with enough cash can buy any weapon they want—no questions asked. VICE News headed over to Lebanon to window-shop and see what's available.

Music World: Punk vs. Sharia

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Indonesia's punk scene is one of the biggest and most vibrant in the world. It's a place where the country's silenced youth can revolt against endemic corruption, social conventions, and their strict families. But in the world's largest Islamic nation, political authorities and religious fundamentalists persecute this rebellious youth movement.

Nowhere is the anti-punk sentiment stronger than in Aceh—Indonesia's only Sharia province—where 65 punks were arrested and detained at an Islamic moral training camp in which they had their heads shaved and clothes burnt. We traveled to North Sumatra to track down the last punks in Aceh, who still live under constant threat from the Sharia police.

The Fight to Stop Spain's Greyhound 'Murder Season'

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Photo courtesy of Baasgalgo

Spanish hunting season is almost over. Which, to anyone with a vested interest in prolonging the lives of animals, might sound like a good thing – except that in certain parts of the country, this is the time when the "greyhound holocaust” begins. This description, dreamt (nightmared?) up by local animal rights organisations, is not in the least exaggerated. Nearly 50,000 greyhounds, who are the hunting dogs of choice, are expected to be abandoned in the wild or sacrificed brutally by owners who no longer need them.

If the dogs are too old to hunt, or too hungry to afford until the beginning of the next hunting season, then a greyhound owner might choose to hang the dog instead. Some throw them into wells or cremate them. Running them over with a car seems to be catching on too, while a few years back there were several cases of hounds being tied to the backs of trucks and dragging them along the road.

Luckily, there are still people who fight every day to change this situation. Last week, Asociación Baasgalgo – a Spanish NGO devoted solely to the protection of greyhounds – banged its fists on the table. For the first time, a court in Toledo sentenced a local criminal hunter to seven and a half months of prison and disqualified him from owning or attempting to make money from animals for two years. Given that the guy had no previous convictions, he didn't have to do jail time as per Spanish law. But it's a start.

I spoke to the NGO's president, Beatriz Marlasca, to learn more about this case, as well as the issue of Spanish greyhound abuse in general.

VICE: Hi, Beatriz. Congratulations for the sentence. Could you tell me about the origins of this case?
Beatriz Marlasca:
Thank you. Well, in February 2011 our volunteers found a female hound on a land plot in the surroundings of Fuensalida, Toledo  – a town notorious for being a hound abuse hotspot. The dog had been hanged and her micro-chip had been removed. Interestingly, when they searched the area they found the earth beneath the animal had been stirred. After digging for a while, two more hound corspes appeared, and this time they both still had their chips. We immediately called the authorities.

Through the data contained in the chips they managed to locate the owner, who didn’t deny having hanged the hounds, although he claimed not to be responsible for the deaths of the buried ones. The autopsies revealed that the three animals were hanged with the same rope, although it is hard to prove that the third dog was also his. We have the same problem with many of the reports we submit: we can’t prove who’s responsible for the killings, but at least we managed to put on record that this practice continues today.

How do you find the abused dogs?
We have mainly worked in the Toledo area since 2009, so we are already familiar with the areas where hangings are most likely to happen, or where you can find pits with bodies. When the hunting season is over, we actually lead raids in the lands where we think we will probably find corpses or simply abandoned animals. For better or for worse, we find them.

Firemen rescuing a greyhound abandoned at the bottom of a ravine

Is Fuensalida a black spot as far as greyhound abandoning and killing is concerned?
It is indeed. At dusk, greyhounds in Fuensalida gather around rubbish bins looking for something to eat. The problem is massive. Just to mention some figures, this summer we collected ten hounds from around the bins in Fuensalida, not during the hunting season.

Lately, an increasing number of greyhounds can be seen in Madrid, Barcelona and other cities around Spain. This breed is being adopted by many people, which could mean a change of attitude towards these dogs. Have you noticed that?
We have certainly made progress in making people see greyhounds as pets and not just as hounds or racers. When people get to know them and see that they behave very much like cats, sleep almost 12 or 14 hours a day, never bark and are very well-behaved, they just fall in love with them. Of course, if you take them to the beach they will run around. But they are very quiet at home and don’t need to go out often.

It’s a sort of very nasty joke. They are so physically powerful and at the same time well-behaved – and that's what's earned them a most terrifying destiny. It's like a curse.

Photo via SOS Galgos

Do you think this sentence will be of any use? The hunter will not go to jail, since he has no criminal record.
We believe it will be useful. This is the first sentence on that matter, so it will establish case law. Seven and a half months of imprisonment is nothing, and certainly he will not go to jail for not having a criminal record, but as of now he does. He has been disqualified for breeding and trading hounds, too, which might be a persuading argument for other hunters.

Through our success we would like to encourage other associations to denounce and report these killings. Although reporting might seem an insignificant measure to take, it may contribute to bringing about a change in the criminal code to make sentences tougher.

This is a very tough task you've taken on.
Sometimes you feel like you’ve had enough, but then you realise that you can’t give up. What would become of them, otherwise? We go through a wide range of feelings in the process: indignation when we find a particularly terrible case, horror when we think how much the dog must have suffered, the bond between the dog and its carer, the fact that, despite all the suffering, the hound gets to trust the man again. Then they’re adopted and you feel proud and happy to think there’s one less dog on the streets. We’ve had countless cases, some of them really miraculous.

Tell me about one of them.
Some time ago, we found a female hound that had been hanged but was still alive. The rope had cut her trachea, so she could breathe through the cut. She had to have 30 stitches. After a month under intensive care, she fully recovered and was adopted in France. That happy ending is what drives us. It’s priceless to see the dog with a new family, sitting on a sofa, after all she went through. It’s hard and beautiful at the same time.

You can follow Juanjo Villalba on Twitter: @juanjovillalba

'The Sochi Project' Is a Reminder of the Olympics' Dark Legacy

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Dima, a child whose legs were burned at a wild barbecue party hosted by his parents. For six minutes, three times a day, he places his legs under running sulfurous water. Photos © Rob Hornstra / Flatland Gallery.

With the Olympic Games now over, reports from journalists about lobby-less hotels, rooms without water, and a host of other Sochi problems are now fading to the back of our collective consciousness. As countries bask in the glow of being so good at sports that they get to collect shiny metal discs, the dark legacy of the 2014 Olympics lingers on: Russian families kicked out their homes with no where to go; construction workers still without pay, and a generation of Russians left with figuring out how to pay the 50 billion dollar price tag.

Back in 2011, VICE followed photographer Rob Hornstra to Russia on a shoot for part of his, and writer/filmaker Arnold van Bruggen’s project, about the context in which the 2014 Sochi Games were to be built.

The Sochi Project, has been in the works for the better part of the last five years. Together, the two Danish journalists have been documenting the huge contrasts between people from the surrounding areas and the extravagance of the Sochi Games. This was a journey into the heart of Russia’s impoverished rural areas, to post-war zones and still-fragile towns. From Sochi’s tourist town to farmlands, to Abkhazia, the self-declared independent state to the South of the Sochi region, and over the mountains to the North Caucasus, a region where fighting has been ongoing for years between separatists and Russian security forces. Hornstra and van Bruggen were arrested multiple times, took many shots of vodka, and have been denied a re-entry visa since July 2013, without reason.

Their work has, for the most part, come to a satisfying end. The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus, published in October 2013, is a stunning compilation of the past five years, and the website is that and much more. With the closing of the Games, VICE got in touch with Hornstra to discuss the changes to Sochi, how the people feel about the Games, and if their work on the project is really finished.

Hamzad Ivloev, a former policeman in the North Caucasus, threw himself on a rebel grenade. 

VICE: Hi Rob. Firstly, where have you left things with The Sochi Project, now that you aren’t allowed back into Russia?
Rob Hornstra: Well, in a way our project is finished. Of course, the fact that we were refused visas also means we’re done, but it didn’t affect our work because we had already planned to complete our project by now. If you want to have exhibitions, a website, and a book, all before the games, it had to be finished in October. Our last visit for The Sochi Project was early 2013. That was really the last trip we could make. In the end, we do want to go back to follow up on the project.

If we had visas, we would be in Russia right now. To see how our main characters from The Sochi Project—people who we followed over five years—how they are now living through the Olympic Games.

Did you notice, even in your last visit, if there is still a huge contrast between the impoverished communities and this new Olympic paradise?
The contrasts are only getting bigger. In the beginning, when we were there, they wanted to build the stadiums there was absolutely nothing there. It was green fields. If you compare a green field, to human rights violations or to poverty on the other side of the mountains (the North Caucasus), that doesn’t really make sense. But, if you try to compare these fantastic $50 billion Games to the human rights violations and poverty on the other side of the mountains, then that’s an unbelievable contrast. The contrast has only gotten bigger in the last five years.

You were talking about not being able to get a visa to Russia. Did authorities not realize what you were working on earlier?
It’s difficult to say. When we started, we had a plan to first do Sochi, then do Abkhazia, and then only to start working in the North Caucasus near the end of our project because working there, you will get in trouble with Russian authorities. It happens all the time with journalists working there longer than two or three days.

The beach near Adlersky Kurortny Gorodok in Adler.

Have the perspectives of people in the Sochi region changed over the past five years?
Now that the Olympics have started, I think Russians are quite proud of it. In Sochi, not many things have changed. People live there and they earn their living on summer tourism. The Olympics are a winter thing that they don’t care about; they care about the summer tourism. If you go a little further from Sochi, people simply don’t care about winter sports. They don’t care about skating and skiing, which is something for rich Russians.

We heard a lot about how reporters, just days before the Games, were staying in incomplete hotels. Did this surprise you?
Yeah, it surprised me because what we always said is that no matter what happens, this is Russia and it will look fantastic. I think the stadiums and the facilities for the sportsmen are really quite perfect. For the journalists, it’s surprising because if you need to have one thing perfect, it’s for the journalists because they have to write about it.

I was wondering if it’s possible that not having the accommodations for journalists prepared was meant as a 'fuck you' from Russia to journalists, you know? Like they’re saying they don’t care about the journalists as long as the athletes are happy, because in the end that’s what the journalists will be reporting on.
I don’t know. I think we sometimes we undervalue the Russians—their smartness and power. I think it was just a mistake. I think they just failed in getting everything in on time.

View from the road between Shamilkala and Gimry. Gimry is a hotbed for the current Islamic-inspired separatism.

Has your approach to the project and the way you took your photos changed throughout the past five years in Russia?
The style of photography didn’t change, and hasn’t changed since my studies. If you look to the content… in the end, we became bitter because, well, we were already expecting this facade in Russia, but if you see what’s happening so close to the Games then you get so frustrated.

I don’t know if you know that the Dutch brought a big delegation to Sochi?

No, I didn’t.
Yeah, well our King is there. So is our Prime Minister, and a few important ministers. Our King is shaking hands with a guy who is responsible for abductions, for human rights violations, for violence, for poverty. It’s embarrassing to shake hands with this guy. That’s why we were hoping, through this project, that things would get better.

That’s what [Putin was] telling the international committee in 2007, that they’re going to develop the North Caucasus, and build ski resorts to develop the economy. It was all fake, all artificial and no IOC member is asking questions like, 'What’s happening to all these promises?’

Olympic stadiums being built at the Black Sea coast in the Imeretin Valley.

I feel like I may already know that answer to this. But what are your thoughts on what will become of the Olympic complexes, five years from now?
Nothing will happen. The stadiums will be there, Putin will make sure some international conventions will take place there. He’ll have some meetings there and some international people will come for the ski resorts.

I don’t think Russians care. I wonder if it increased the worldwide image of Russia. There is already so much written about the violence and the human rights violations that people already see the Olympics as a facade, and that’s how they should see it. I think it simply shows Russia. There’s one man in charge, and it’s Putin.
 

@kjrwall


Big Night Out: Do Brits Get Hip-Hop?

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The UK hip-hop scene is a largely maligned part of British music. It's often mocked for its propensities for peaked beanies, bad lyrics, silly names, and the overwhelming stench of cheap skunk. Clive and the team headed down to Bristol—the spiritual home of the British B-Boy scene—to investigate if people from the UK can rap, or if they should just leave it to the Americans.

An Alleged $350 Million Dollar Hack 'Could Be the End of Bitcoin'

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An Alleged $350 Million Dollar Hack 'Could Be the End of Bitcoin'

Quirky Dickheads Ruined William Burroughs's 100th Birthday Party

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Photos by Jake Lewis

This year would have been William Burroughs's 100th birthday. He died in 1997 at the age of 83, which is pretty good for a man who spent the majority of his adult life treating his body like a pin cushion. When he wasn't traveling the world, trying new drugs, or accidentally shooting his wife dead in a failed William Tell trick, he wrote books that are now sold next to Jack Kerouac's and Allen Ginsberg's, and read by every teenager who's outgrown Salinger and wants to look like an edgy intellectual on the subway.   

Perhaps his most well-known is 1959's Naked Lunch, a chronicle of heroin visions that's partly set in the dreamlike "Interzone," an imagined city based on his experiences of living in Tangiers's lawless international zone after World War II. Parties in the Interzone tend to be pretty chastening affairs, where madmen "go about with a water pistol shooting jism up career women."

When I heard that something called Guerrilla Zoo was going to recreate one of these parties to celebrate Burroughs's birthday, I thought it would be impossible, thanks to legalities and common decency. But I didn't want to write them off without seeing it for myself, so I got a ticket and went along.

My photographer, Jake Lewis, and I arrived early. We hadn't been told where we were going, just that we’d be provided with transportation. There were two men in silly hats waiting for us. "This way to Interzone!" they shouted, ushering us towards a waiting taxi.

We got in, along with a couple. Why were they there? "We’re dancers; we're involved in the show." Did they know anything about Burroughs? "Yes, he was a novelist, short-story writer, and painter," the woman replied. "He wrote 18 novels and novellas. The first was Junky, published in 1953." I asked her if she got all that from Wikipedia. "Yes," she said.

We still hadn't been told where we were going, but our taxi driver let it slip that he was going to drop us off at some paintball center called Bunker. I got the impression that he was not a fan of immersive theater. But by the cheery look on his face, he is definitely a fan of getting paid to take idiots to the middle of nowhere, in the cold, without any firm plans of how they’re going to get back.

We arrived at Bunker to find this man, shouting: "Hands against the fucking wall!"

It became apparent that, if we wanted to party, we were going to have to deal with some actors screaming at us for a while first.  

Someone in our group had made the mistake of wearing a hat. "Who do you think you are, Hatty Potter?" screamed the soldier, instantly reminding everyone that they were the audience in a live, unscripted piece of theater. "You think that's funny, do you?" he shouted. No one was laughing.

Eventually we were spat out into the bunker's main room, where we found some kind of cyberpunk-steampunk-psytrance hybrid trying his best to be the worst person in the world. The paintball area had been covered in biohazard signs and the faint scent of patchouli oil hung in the air. The DJs were playing the kind of distorted, discordant music Judd Apatow might use as a soundtrack for a clip of Paul Rudd having a bad acid trip, and I quickly realized why Burroughs sought out the sweet relief of smack oblivion.

It wasn't long before we were approached by a roving actor with a gold-painted face. "It's OK," he said. "You don't really exist. We're all figments of our own imagination." He pushed a pamphlet into my hand that read: "Have you ever actually seen yourself and the rest of reality in the same room together?" I had no idea what it meant, but guessed that it meant very little.

I told him I agreed, and that ultimately our inevitable mortality renders all life meaningless to the point of nonexistence. So he said: "You see, you don't really exist. We're all figments of our own imagination." It was like standing near one of those extras in GTA who just cycle through the same few lines of dialogue over and over again until someone runs them over with a dune buggy.

We walked into a side room and found a dream machine, another guy with a gold face, and a man in a fedora making out with someone. I wasn't sure whether or not it was part of the show.

The idea of the dream machine—invented by Burroughs, his "systems advisor" Ian Sommerville, and artist Brion Gysin—is that it can induce hallucinations without the aid of any drugs. Only, what this party really, really needed—both for authenticity and general enjoyment—was some drugs.

At the far end of the bunker, there were a line of people waiting to get tribal face paint applied and three rooms to explore. In the first room, we had to make an appointment to see a doctor.

While we waited, we ducked into a Moroccan tearoom where four typewriters were laid out on a table. I was invited to start typing, but as I tapped I quickly realized there was no ink in the machine. Unperturbed, a pretty girl in a red kimono leaned over my shoulder to tell me that she could read what I was writing. "It's good," she insisted.

Soon, another girl appeared and handed me a card, telling me I should seek out her associate. The card read: "Interzone Incorporated." The whole mysterious, cryptic effect was dampened slightly by the Facebook symbol promoting "dreadfallstheatre" and the large "Easyprint" logo on the back.

Anyway, it was time for my doctor’s appointment. The man behind the desk was Dr. Benway, one of Burroughs’s favorite creations. I put my hand out to shake his, and he peered at it curiously before setting off on an extended riff about whether my hand was working again since he "reattached it." I told him that it wasn’t OK at first, but now that it’s back on the proper side it was all right. As hilarious as that piece of improv might sound on paper, he showed no sign of breaking character. I could tell this guy was a pro.

We did a bit of improvised patient-doctor stuff before he wrote, "No more downers. The only way is up!" on a sheet of paper above a prescription for "25mg Bug Powder." He then handed me a bag of sherbet.

The final room had the biggest line of all. While we waited we were approached by a man who looked so uncannily like Peter Weller—the actor who played Burroughs's author-surrogate "William Lee" in the Naked Lunch film—that I worried the guy had fallen on seriously hard times and resorted to booking amateur theater jobs in the Docklands. He was looking for the woman in the photograph, but we told him we hadn’t seen her, unless she’d lost quite a lot of her clothes and swapped Blitz parties for Munich's industrial sexclub scene...

And got into free bleeding after that 4Chan hoax :(

I'd been expecting another doctor, but when we finally got inside the last room the man who introduced himself as Schindler explained that he was really more of a spirit guide. He improvised a bit more nonsense and handed me another fake bag of drugs, a brown paper envelope filled with popping candy. After the appointment, everyone who'd met with the spirit guide was blindfolded and led away. 

When it came to my turn, Jake was explicitly forbidden from following me. Which was a shame, because what happened next was the best part of the night.

I was led into a backroom, still blindfolded. When my mask was removed, I was standing three inches from a reflection of my own face, surrounded by lots of beautiful people dressed as Amazonian gods and goddesses. They indicated that I should crawl into a tiny den, which of course I did, because tall, good-looking people holding candles have a strangely hypnotic power over me.

Inside, a shaman placed a large walnut between us and handed me a hammer. I smashed the walnut, and the gods outside the den went wild. Soon I was in the middle of a crowd, all of them jumping and cheering my talent for smashing nuts.

When I was finally ushered back out into the party, I tried to tell everyone that the ritual was worth waiting for, but the line was snaking toward the dance floor, and nobody seemed to think it could be worth the hassle. Which seems to be a central problem for this sort of night: Create intimate individual experiences and it won’t feel like a party, but make it popular enough to feel like a party and the intimate things become a chore.

Back at Dr. Benway’s, he’d given up dispensing sherbet and moved onto "operating" on his assistant, Sylvie. He shoveled white powder into her nose while fumbling around behind a curtain as she screamed in obvious displeasure. Before long, he popped his head up to tell us that "Sylvie has been a wonderful host" and "extracted" a pair of dripping, bloody balloons from inside her.

The party was really getting started!

Disappointingly, the dance floor looked like this. 

Out in the smoking area, I tried to get a sense of whether the night had lived up to whatever expectations people had come with. "It’s been interesting," one man told me. "I knew it was William S. Burroughs–themed, and although that seems to have gone out the window, it’s good. It’s pleasant."

"It’s disappointingly under-populated, dear boy," added a man in a bowler hat. "I promised my friends an unusual evening, and at least I delivered that. We could have been eating steak and drinking wine, and instead we’re dancing to industrial techno and country and western."

I think this man in the painters' uniform was eavesdropping, as he instantly rushed over, placed a cup on my head, and offered to perform the William Tell trick on me. Impressively, he shot it straight off (it seemed a little pedantic to point out that, if he was trying to add to the authenticity of the evening, he really should have killed me).

At that point, it seemed like we’d exhausted the Interzone, but I remembered I still had a card that I was supposed to give to "an associate."

Somewhere past a big plastic spider web we found a curtained room, behind which a nightmarish woman with an orifice for a face exchanged my card for an explanation of the true meaning of Interzone.

Except that didn’t happen, because they’d shut up shop at midnight. Instead, we just walked in on a group of people drinking beers and cups of tea. One of them gave us a quick demonstration of what the vagina face mask would have looked like if we’d gotten there on time. 


By this point, everyone else was cutting their losses and heading back into town. Jake and I decided to beat the rush for the taxis and ended up sharing a cab with a boy with long hair, who, having been told he couldn't smoke in the car, offered us all a bump of ketamine. Another night entirely started from there—one that I imagine Burroughs may have enjoyed far more.

Follow Kevin (@KevinEGPerry) and Jake (@Jake_Photo) on Twitter.

A Guy Who Looks Like Psy Is Scamming Free Drinks from Rich European Kids

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Last year, a French-Korean guy named Denis Carre went to Barcelona Fashion Week and was mistaken literally everywhere he went for Psy. Yes, Denis was wearing the sunglasses from the "Gangnam Style" video, but that clip has been viewed more than 2 billion times—you'd have thought people would be able to differentiate the real Psy from a slightly tubby French-Korean man in a suit and black sunglasses. Could the cult of celebrity really make people this blind? And, perhaps, even a little bit racist? Or was it more that they just wanted to believe that they were looking at the most viewed face on YouTube?

Denis is a friend of mine and I was with him that year, taking photos of the whole thing. So I witnessed—among other surreal moments—club owners offering him bundles of cash to perform, and car dealership managers trying to hand him the keys to sports cars, just "because it would be cool to see him drive."

A year later, we returned to one of this year's Fashion Week parties to find out if everyone would still be excited to see Denis in a suit.

According to the op-eds, our generation's cultural attention span looks something like an endless loop of "smack cam" Vines. So we figured people might have forgotten who Psy was, or why they ever gave a shit about him in the first place. To jog their memories, we had a bunch of stickers, T-shirts and temporary tattoos made up that read: "DO ME GANGNAM STYLE."

Turns out that was maybe a waste of money; people generally seem to remember global epidemics that dominate popular culture for an entire year.  

Once the groundwork (trying to convince fashion editors to put "Gangnam Style" stickers on their £900 Balenciaga bags) was done, Denis arrived, flanked by loads of flashing cameras, and posed for photos with these two ladies. Everyone started pointing, obviously thrilled that a South Korean man was in the same room as them.       

This security guard took the initiative and ushered Denis and the models into the club.

The whole thing at this point was a weird blend of funny and depressing. It's kind of funny that people thought Denis was Psy, but it was also depressing because the only stuff they really have in common is that they're both Asian and often wear sunglasses inside buildings. 

Denis was taken straight through to the VIP area, where lots of people posed for photos with him while incorrectly re-enacting the "Gangnam Style" dance. I felt kinda bad, but there's something about seeing beautiful people embarrass themselves that never gets old.

As a sidenote: apparently wearing sunglasses indoors at clubs in Barcelona turns you into a sure-fire lady killer—look at this! And then look what happens when you don't wear any :(

I think we all owe the pick-up artist community one huge apology. 

While the security guard was busy flashing devil horns in this group photo, this guy on the right ordered a few bottles of champagne to the table.

This is where it started getting kind of ethically dubious. Do you drink booze someone's bought for you purely because they think you invented that dance they did at their uncle's wedding? Or do you fess up and buy your own bottle of marked up prosecco? In the end, we didn't say anything, because it would have probably been more humiliating for the guy if everyone realised he'd just mistaken a random guy in a suit for someone who's been all over everything for the past year and a half.        

In fact, since the whole "pretending to be Psy" thing took off for Denis in a big way, he's always getting offered free champagne—it comes with the territory when you look a bit like a famous person and hang around with drunk people. His "liver is fucked" now, apparently, so mostly he pretends to drink it or just stands around with a full glass of whatever it is that people want to get Psy drunk on.

We decided to leave the first club because we'd heard that Pierre Sarkozy—flaxen-haired son of Nicolas—was DJing down the road, and we all know there's no better night out than one soundtracked by the offspring of a former world leader. Before we left, the queue of people who hadn't been let inside yet all started taking photos, shouting and continuing to incorrectly do the "Gangnam Style" dance while grinning at us. 

Aaaaaaand here's Denis with Pierre Sarkozy (long hair, smiley). He was very excited to be standing next to a South Korean man with a "Gangnam Style" sticker on his shirt.

The weirdest thing is that Denis pulled exactly the same stunt in exactly the same place last year, and was all over the internet for it. Yet, this year, nobody even questioned that he wasn't the real deal—they just took him straight to VIP areas, bought him bottles of champagne and wanted to have their photo taken with him.       

Then Pierre put "Gangnam Style" on and Denis was shoved onstage, where he took his shirt off and danced around a bit while people took photos and grimaced. He didn't do the dance—he just sort of flailed his hands around and did a pretty mediocre impression of someone riding a horse—but that didn't seem to bother anyone. They were all perfectly happy to point their phones at him.

Either way, this felt like the culmination of the night's crescendo—a whole room of people celeb-worshipping a man whose only link to fame is looking moderately like Psy when he wears exactly the same clothes as him.

I've never seen so many people so excited about so little. It was how I imagine a Beatles crowd looked in 1964, only with iPhones and sharktooth necklaces instead of pleated skirts and wet knickers.

Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the giddiness from seeing someone they thought was famous. Maybe it really has been long enough for people to forget what he looks like, or maybe they're all just a little bit racist, but about 800 people at this point were convinced that the man in front of them was Psy.

Imagine these people finding the photos they're taking the next day. Maybe once they'd sobered up they'd notice he wasn't the real guy. Maybe they wouldn't. Ultimately, though, would it really matter? They thought they were seeing a celebrity and were very pleased about it. In the end, they got what they wanted and Denis gets to keep sipping free champagne. 

See you next year, Barcelona.

Follow Maciej on Twitter: @mpestka and buy the book documenting his and Denis' time in Barcelona, Life of Psy, here.

Has New Zealand's Milk Gone Bad?

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Milk is a big earner for New Zealand. According to the Ministry of Primary Industries, dairy reaped $13 billion for the country last year. But recent scandals have seen the New Zealand dairy industry lose its grip on the global market. In 2008 there was the infant formula that poisoned thousands of Chinese babies, and last year milk was recalled from several countries out of concern that it was tainted with botulism-causing bacteria. Then, this month, a video of a New Zealand worker bashing a calf to death emerged. The brutal footage was released as Chilean authorities investigate the huge NZ-owned company Manuka for animal abuse. The revelation caused red faces throughout both countries and prompted people to start looking at practices in New Zealand more closely.

Just like humans, cows need to make babies in order to produce milk. In New Zealand, nearly four million calves are born each year as a dairy industry byproduct. Around 1.7 million get sent to the slaughterhouse for beef, and the remaining calves are either sold for pet food, reared as replacements, or destroyed on the farm. But there are no records kept to separate these categories.

Hans Kriek from animal advocacy group SAFE says routine calf-bashing is one item on a long list of brutalities. The former animal-welfare inspector has seen the suffering of calves swept under the carpet to protect international reputation.

VICE: Hans, why is there so little monitoring about what happens to these calves?
Hans Kriek:
Well, there are only about ten animal-welfare inspectors for the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI), and they have to deal with every single animal welfare issue in this country, where you have over 100 million animals. And some of the inspectors cover areas that are so phenomenally large there is no proactive monitoring at all with regard to the treatment of those calves.

The ministry says there are 56 inspectors… what’s the discrepancy there?
Well, recently, they suddenly gave inspector status to fishery officers and people who check for food-safety standards. They aren’t animal-welfare experts—they don’t know what to look for. So with regard to the proper animal-welfare enforcement there are only ten. For all animals in New Zealand.

Without proper monitoring, how do we know what happens to these calves?
We know what happens with the vast majority. The majority of them are removed from their mothers after a few days and taken to the slaughterhouse. So that’s the 1.7 million that MPI referred to. The industry has been holding that up as “Oh, look how humane we are. We take them to the slaughterhouse, and they are humanely killed.”

You don’t believe they are humanely killed?
Well, they take the little calf away from the mother, and I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed it on a farm, but the bellowing of these cows is just incredible, because they are calling for their babies.

The calf is only four days old when it is put in a little box on the side of the road of a dairy farm, usually with a couple of other calves. And they can be starved of food for up to 36 hours. So there you have these baby animals who are still weak on their legs and sitting in these boxes without any food, waiting for the truck to come around. The truck drives around lots of farms, so it can take a while before they are picked up.

I used to be an animal-welfare inspector for the SPCA, and I dealt with complaints about the rough treatment of those bobby calves all the time.

What kind of stuff did you see?
Well, I've been at the slaughterhouse when the calves are unloaded. They have to come down a ramp, but they are so small and weak, and the ramp is so steep, that they don’t want to go. So you have these workers pulling them by their ears and holding them by their tails and dragging them off the ramp. Then they throw them in wheelbarrows, because some of them just can’t walk.

Finally, the animals are taken to the slaughterhouse, and they are shot in the head and killed, so that’s what the industry in New Zealand calls high standards and humane. In our book it’s absolutely inhumane.

What about the calves that remain on the farms. We don’t hear much about them.
Absolutely. There is absolutely no monitoring of what happens to them. For one, most calves are born too early, because in NZ there’s a process called calf induction. That’s when veterinarians inject the cows to abort their fetuses so the farmers can start milking the animal earlier, which is a brutal practice. And the fact the veterinary profession collaborates with the industry to do this—it’s appalling.

When I worked as an SPCA officer, I had a complaint about a dairy farm, and when I went out there I saw this pile of little calves that the farmer had bashed to death with a claw hammer.

You saw that on a farm?
Yeah, he had just bashed them on the head. So we don’t know how many calves in New Zealand are disposed of in this way, but the fact is that it’s not just a few. It is fairly routine practice.

Why do you think it took the calf-bashing video from Chile to raise the subject in New Zealand?
That’s the media for you, I suppose. The moment there is a bit of footage of something gruesome the media runs with it. But the fact is, when you have a dairy industry, you are going to have suffering calves and cows, no matter what. That’s the reality. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that. We still encounter people who have no idea that a cow has to be pregnant in order to produce milk.

The dairy industry is lauded as being wonderful for New Zealand because it brings in a lot of money, but there are downsides to that industry. We already know that there are severe environmental downsides. But now people can see there are animal-welfare downsides. I think that took people by surprise, even the media. The industry was trying to portray this as a one-off thing that happened in Chile, but as the story unfolded it became clear we routinely do it in New Zealand.

How do you explain the general feeling of apathy in the public before this came out?
I think people have busy lives, people have things to do, and so they by-and-large don't want to know. It’s like people who buy battery eggs. They don't want to know where those eggs come from. And in the case of the dairy industry, they don’t really want to know how the milk gets to the supermarket. And what the consequences are for the animals.

So what could the government do better?
First of all, they should appoint an independent welfare watchdog. This could be a commissioner for animals for instance, like we have a commissioner for children. So then you have an organization that can solely advocate for animals, and they don’t have to look at economic facts or at farmers' interests.

What is SAFE’s ultimate goal with regard to dairy farming?
Well, from our point of view, you can lead a very happy and healthy life without having a dairy industry. I haven’t consumed dairy for over two decades, and I’m perfectly fine. So from that point of view, SAFE would encourage people to consume far fewer dairy products. Ideally speaking, none at all. Because that’s what pays off for the animals.

@danielle_street

The Loudest Sound System in the World Would Kill You if You Heard It

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The Loudest Sound System in the World Would Kill You if You Heard It

Tutwiler Women’s Prison Is a Hothouse of Sexual Violence

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Photo via Wikipedia Commons

One night in June of 2008, James Sutton—not a guard but a nurse at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, in Wetumpka, Alabama—allegedly ordered an inmate, Felicia Dixon, to go into the showers (nobody really showers at night) and asked her to sit down on a bench. According to court documents, he then stood in front of her, unzipped his pants in front of her face, and demanded that she perform oral sex on him. She hesitated. He said, “You are wasting time. Just do it a [little] bit.” Dixon did nothing, and Sutton moved closer to her mouth. He goaded her, “Shit! You owe me. Now come on; open your mouth, just a little bit.” Sutton claimed that he’d let her use a telephone and brought her food from outside, so naturally Dixon should pay it back in trade. She put his penis in her mouth for the duration of about a minute, presumably all she could stand.

In many contexts Dixon, as a woman, maybe even as an exceptionally comely or vaguely manipulative woman, would have the right to ignore this pressure; every woman has a right to refuse sexual contact, no matter what the circumstances. But that entitlement to civil liberties, in many cases, is functionally revoked when you’re incarcerated. So if somebody like Sutton, in his capacity of employment with the prison, weren't even threatening physical violence, but were guilt-tripping her for all of the favors he’d done for her, Dixon, as an inmate, would feel powerless against him. As the details of her lawsuit reveal, “Plaintiff is a state prisoner, controlled by verbal command and order.” This is the way she was conditioned to behave. What else could she have done?

Reports of a hostile, sexualized atmosphere at Tutwiler prison have been well-documented since 1995. In 2007, the Bureau of Justice Statistics named Tutwiler the “women’s prison with the highest rate of sexual assaults in the nation.” A new report indicates that incidents of sexual abuse and inappropriate sexual interactions between inmates and staff have only skyrocketed since then.

There have been complaints about Julia Tutwiler penitentiary for ages. It was built in 1942 and was supposed to house a maximum of 417 prisoners; today it holds about 900. After a 2002 lawsuit filed on behalf of inmates regarding overcrowding and unsafe conditions, 300 women were transferred to a private prison in Louisiana. As of last year, when the Department of Justice held a three-day investigation in response to a report released by an Alabama nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative, the population was already back to 928.

The report from the Department of Justice’s investigation, the findings of which were published on January 17, 2014, is ghastly. In a perfect penitentiary world, there is supposed to be a protected channel through which inmates are permitted to report abusive activity not only by guards but also by other inmates—this is all afforded under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003. The top-down corruption and malign disregard, not only for nationally accepted investigation procedures but for these women’s daily lives, was so egregious that the DOJ regularly states in its report that it believes almost every single piece of data cited is likely not representative of what really went on at all—the DOJ believes that the reality is much worse.

But the situation presented in the report is already terrifying. For instance, 36 percent of Tutwiler staff were identified by inmates as “having had sex with prisoners”—whether consensual or not, it’s illegal under state law. One officer routinely licks his lips at inmates and offers to exchange sexual favors for fresh uniforms and underwear. Officers march into the showers unannounced (a direct violation of PREA statutes) while women are bathing to perform a head count—they did this with impunity, even in the three days while the DOJ was on site. Often they linger in the showers, deliberately miscount, or have the women all turn to face them so that they are standing in full-frontal view of the officer. One officer impregnated an inmate in May of 2010. Staff speak abusively to the women, calling them “stupid bitches,” “hating-ass bitches,” “too cute to be in prison,” and “pieces of shit.” Some of the women in drug treatment are affectionately called “dope whores” by one officer. This same guy also told another inmate to “shut her cum catcher” when she tried to address him. Another officer flamboyantly made fun of an inmate who had razor burn on her thigh and encouraged other staff and prisoners to mock her too.

The DOJ unearthed that officers use sex to play favorites—they smuggle drugs, makeup, coffee, sugar, perfume, alcohol, and tampons for women who put out. It’s not just guards, either. One instructor let women use his prison-approved laptop to send emails or to work on court and tax documents and résumés in exchange for a cellphone photo shoot of the prisoners in their underwear. Officers encourage sexual relationships between the women; they arrange for special contests in which prisoners win the opportunity to spend mealtime with their girlfriends. This may sound sweet but for the fact that it, like playing favorites, leads to a competitively sexualized environment, culminating in bizarre events like at least two improvised “strip shows,” one on New Year’s Eve, when an officer happily volunteered his flashlight as a strobe.

But the problems are systemic, and multi-layered. Female convicts are often poor, come from broken homes, and, frequently, are victims of sexual abuse or assault prior to incarceration. A place like Tutwiler not only subjects women to daily abuse but presents a sexually hostile environment eerily similar, in all likelihood, to the ones they left on the outside. So much for rehabilitive justice.

Furthermore, the DOJ discovered significant discrepancies between the prison’s own incident documentation and the state PREA coordinator’s information. Apparently, myriad “incidents” were missing, and more than 113 were marked as “pending,” with no investigation or disciplinary effort mentioned. So when inmates do register complaints against staff, the paperwork often stalls, and potentially offending officers, many with multiple allegations, are not removed from duty.

And this all takes place in an overcrowded women’s prison, in which there are very few female guards. Tutwiler is chronically understaffed, and often guards there work overtime "on loan" from men’s prisons. During the day, there are 14 officers overseeing the general population. On average, one officer patrols a single dorm of more than 150 women. At night, there are ten officers left in charge of 900 inmates. The dorm and open shower layout provide guards with unobstructed views of everything these women do, including taking a shit. They’re totally vulnerable, not only to the guards but each other. They’re zoo animals on display.

These conditions, along with numerous other complaints, have revealed so many Eighth Amendment violations that the DOJ isn’t even done with Tutwiler. It's decided to continue its investigation, concerned now not only with the sexual abuse but with the dysfunction of the facility as a whole.

Sure, prisons are notoriously horrible, especially throughout the South. But Julia Tutwiler seems to have a uniquely savage reputation. In one case cited in the report, in September 2009, Brittney Cooper was picked up on a parole violation and held in nearby Bullock County, Alabama, for several days. Cooper had learned from an earlier medical examination that she was with child. The day she arrived at the Bullock County Jail, she noticed some irregular bleeding, and when she notified the officer on duty, he admonished her by saying that if she complained any more about needing medical help, the sheriff would surely ship her off to Tutwiler. Which means, that, yes, Tutwiler itself was used as a threat to keep a woman quiet while she sat in her cell and suffered the miscarriage of a child that experts later determined could have been saved.


The Stoners' Paradise of Humboldt County Is Dreading Weed Legalization

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A weed-grow operation in Humboldt County, California. Photos by Emily Brady

Populated by a mix of hippies and rednecks, Humboldt County, California, is one of America’s most unique farming communities, with around 30,000 people (more than a fifth of Humboldt's population) involved in growing marijuana. One popular definition of "Humboldt" on Urban Dictionary describes it as a "weed haven in Northern California... [with] some of the best buds in the world." What North Carolina is to tobacco, Humboldt is to wacky tobacky—and residents would like to keep their most famous product away from legal markets. 

In the run-up to the vote for California’s cannabis regulation bill in 2010, which would have largely legalized the drug, there was a sticker plastered on trucks, shacks, and homesteads in this secluded, densely forested wilderness area that said, "Save Humboldt County—Keep Pot Illegal." That attitude is based on simple, rational economic reasoning: Experts predict that if weed were to be legalized in California (which is very likely to happen by 2016 at the latest), the price of Humboldt weed would plummet, taking down local businesses with it. 

The plants have become so entwined with the local economy that economists estimate a quarter of all the money made in Humboldt comes from marijuana cultivation. And because many of the growers don't pay taxes (or even use banks; they bury their money underground in plastic tubes and glass bottles), local services are maintained by marijuana money, which has been used to buy fire engines and set up a local radio station, two community centers, and small schools.

The bumper stickers that residents of Humboldt County were sticking on their cars in the run-up to the 2010 weed-legalization ballot measures

The world behind the "Redwood Curtain," as locals refer to it, is unique in the US. Shops and restaurants admit their survival depends on the cash that weed brings to the area, and nail salons have been set up to cater to the area’s emerging group of young women—known as "pot princesses" (or, behind their backs, "potstitutes")—who date the rich marijuana bosses. As one grower put it, "The legalization of marijuana will be the single most devastating economic bust in the long boom-and-bust history of Northern California."

Of course, there are problems with basing an entire economy around an illegal activity. Police raids, although less frequent than they were in the 1980s, can sweep up a family’s entire harvest, and there's plenty of opportunities for gun-toting thieves who prey on grow operations. In one recent raid, a couple in their 60s were relieved of seven pounds of processed marijuana—along with several guns and thousands of dollars in cash—when gunmen turned up at their home. Of the 38 murders that occurred in Humboldt between 2004 and 2012, 23 were drug-related.

To find out more about this secretive narco-economy, I spoke to journalist Emily Brady, who spent a year living behind the Redwood Curtain for her book, Humboldt: Life on America’s Marijuana Frontier.

A grow op in Humboldt.

VICE: How did Humboldt become so dominated by weed?
Emily Brady: During the late 60s and early 70s, some of the young, counterculture hippies from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco got into the "back-to-the-land" movement, which was all about migrating out of the city, growing your own food, and building your own homes. A lot of them moved to Northern California. When they got to Humboldt they found this beautiful place where land was cheap, and they built little shacks. The hippies liked to smoke pot, and some took the seeds from their Mexican weed and put them in the ground alongside their vegetables.

Around this time, the US government sponsored a marijuana crop-spraying initiative in Mexico, where most of America’s weed supply came from at the time. So the hippies began to grow weed, first for themselves, and then to sell to their friends back in the city. Humboldt’s marijuana industry started just as the area’s logging industry was going into decline. At first, most of the hippies were broke and living on welfare.

When did it turn into the large-scale operation that we know it as today?
What really changed Humboldt’s fledgling marijuana industry was the introduction of the sinsemilla ("seedless" in Spanish) growing technique, where you pull out all the male plants. What happens is the females get sexually frustrated, so to speak, and produce lots of resin in hopes of catching the male pollen. The resin contains THC, which gets you high. Sinsemilla is stronger, and you get more money for it, so soon everyone started growing it. There wasn't a lot of blowback from the government in the 1970s because the war on drugs hadn't started, so people thought it was an easy way of making a living in the woods.

Many of the ranchers and loggers migrated into the marijuana industry because they could see it was a good opportunity. At first, there was this culture clash between the relatively clean-cut, churchgoing rancher types and the hippies with their long hair and seemingly loose morals. But then you started to see bumper stickers on pickup trucks saying, "Another Logger Gone to Pot." A lot of the loggers still wanted to be loggers, but there was no work, so growing pot was a way to stay in the area they loved.

A marijuana grow in one of Humboldt's forests

What’s Humboldt like?
It’s a beautiful, wild, sparsely populated faraway place. When you drive north from San Francisco, you go through a redwood forest, and you really feel like you have crossed the frontier. A lot of the people there are super independent—they live outside of the electricity grid, use solar panels and wind power. They built their own schools; some are volunteer teachers. They even minted their own money. It’s not really in use, but there was a movement to have their own coins. It is the most independent place I have found in the States.

And what’s a "hipneck"?
This is the name for the amazing hybrid of hippie and redneck, the children of hippies and loggers, who have become more common since the marijuana industry helped bridge the cultural divide. A typical hipneck is a country boy or girl with a name like Sunny Sky or Rainbow, who wears branded jeans and drives a pickup truck to their very large marijuana grow.

How embedded is marijuana in everyday life there?
It was a real surprise for me that there was this place where the economy was entirely dependent on pot. Old grannies, housewives, whole families make a living farming pot. In Humboldt, the currency is cash or marijuana. It’s everywhere. I went to a school fundraising event, and they were auctioning off bubble bags (which are used to make hash from plants) along with knitted scarves and baskets of tomatoes. It’s such an ingrained part of the culture some of the schools and the fire department even give out marijuana plants for community members to grow to raise money for them. One big grower I spent time with, a volunteer fireman, worked for a man who earned about $1 million a year from pot. Years back, even a former deputy sheriff of Humboldt County was caught growing a load of pot in his retirement. But people aren’t stoned all the time there—it’s mainly the tourists and seasonal workers who are getting stoned.

Police seizing a big bunch of weed.

I’ve heard that even the local radio station is in on it?
Yes, the radio station, KMUD, broadcasts community-service announcements for the growers whenever anti-drug police have been spotted in the area. When someone spots police helicopters or a convoy heading up a dirt road, they call into the radio station to report it, and the announcer will broadcast the exact time and location the police have been spotted. A lot of the adverts on KMUD are for things like products to take resin off your fingers, and there’s a lot of chat about growing techniques.

You met Bob, southern Humboldt’s straight-laced sheriff. What did he think about all the weed in the area?
It’s accepted by the local police, including Bob, that growing is what people do there. But Bob tried to stick to the rules and seize plants from people who couldn't show a medical marijuana growing license. Everyone knows that growing for the medical market is mostly a ruse in California, because it’s mainly for the black market. Bob would get frustrated with people taking advantage of the medical law in front of his eyes. "I’m so sick of dealing with this pot shit!" he would tell me. You have this strange situation in Humboldt where the cop, Bob, wants legalization, but most of the growers are against it.

Who distributes the crops outside Humboldt?
Dealers are respected members of the community. They are seen as ambassadors to the outside world. They deal with the person from the city and take the risk of being busted, or cheated, or worse. When one of Humboldt’s main dealers died a few years back, there was a huge outpouring at the funeral because he was the one who moved the pot and helped bring money into the community. One dealer I know is a former logger, an honest, kind, and generous man whose father is a decorated World War II veteran in his 80s who also grows pot.

Local weed being processed

What effect would legalization have on Humboldt?
As long as it’s illegal federally, there will always be a black market. Since growing plants for medical marijuana became legal, the market has become flooded and pot prices have gone down. But full recreational legalization would mean the price would fall even farther. A friend of mine made $6,000 a pound in the early 90s, and now earns about $1,200 a pound. If the black market that Humboldt relies upon disappears, there is speculation that pot could go as low as $500 a pound.

Is everyone against legalization?
No, the community is divided. About 60 percent voted against it, and 40 percent for it. One woman I met, who moved to Humboldt as part of the back-to-the-land movement in the 70s and took up marijuana farming, voted for legalization because, although it was her livelihood, she wants the plant to be freed from the law. But her son voted against it, because he’s totally dependent on it for a living and he doesn’t know what else he would do; he’s never had a bank account, paid taxes, or trained in anything. All he knows is how to grow good weed.

What will people do if it’s legalized?
Many people are freaked out that the economy and the market are going to crash, and they don’t know what they're going to do for money. People fear that this industry—which they have built with their hands, literally scraped out of the earth—is going to be taken from them, just like alcohol production was taken away from the moonshiners after alcohol prohibition. They are worried they won’t have a place in this new legal world. They're scared they will have to move back to the city and abandon their homesteads and their land. Some will keep growing pot, because that’s what they know and they’ll have to grow more and it will be harder to earn a living.

Others are really excited about the opportunities for branding and tourism that would come with legalization. Some people can’t wait to hang a little sign in front of their house saying “Marijuanarie Open for Business.” They aim to capitalize on Humboldt’s storied history and its brand. I also think some of the big growers will find a way to position themselves to benefit from the legal system and remain successful.

But for the sake of most of the growers in Humboldt, I hope there is a market out there for the organic, outdoor grown marijuana that made them famous, because it’s difficult to make a living in rural America these days. They are the wealthiest farmers in history, but only because what they farm is illegal.

Max Daly is the co-author of Narcomania: How Britain Got Hooked on Drugs. Follow him on Twitter: @Narcomania

Tales from the Los Angeles Poverty Department: A Gentrification Story

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May the shopping carts of LA roll on in their victory parade.
 
While it didn't get much attention in the mainstream press last year, a court's decision that police don't have a right to throw away people's possessions (a ruling that the Supreme Court let stand) was a huge win in a 30-year standoff between homeless and pro-gentrification policing in LA's Skid Row. Thanks to the work of local activist groups like the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), a performance group now having a big retrospective at the Queens Museum in New York, the City of Angels is having a hard time flushing the homeless out.
 
LAPD’s a local theater group whose projects almost always come with a political agenda. It collaborates with low-income communities on everything from plays on prison psychology to Skid Row versions of Fluxus happenings. On Friday at the Queens Museum, I found several members of the Queens-based group Drogadictos Anónimos speaking like high-level bureaucrats. They were reading lines from the Spanish translation of the LAPD play "Agents & Assets," a word-for-word transcript of a 1998 hearing from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; the committee discusses allegations by investigative reporter Gary Webb implicating the CIA in the crack epidemic of the eighties. It’s a dense script, full of legalities, political niceties, and verbiage like “the report is littered with damaging admissions."
 

“Talent Show,” 1985 (Image courtesy of the LAPD)
 
“This is insane text,” said Henriëtte Brouwers, LAPD's co-director and the wife of John Malpede, the group's founding artistic director.  "But once people can speak the political language, it gives them a lot of confidence, whereas before they might have heard this [political jargon] and changed the channel. Now they are owning that language.” (So they are: A 17-year-old DA member immediately summed up the text for me, say that it's "because the government is supposed to be working for us, and it's not.")
 
“A lot of drug addicts think that addiction is their problem, or that it makes them a bad person,” said Henriëtte. “Just opening up the notion that, well, there was hardly any cocaine before 1985—and putting that in a bigger history of foreign policies and illegal foreign policies and covert wars—damn, that actually has something to do with me being addicted. That’s huge.”
 
Henriëtte went on to tell me about Skid Row and LAPD’s history, from the crack epidemic of the 80s up through this summer’s Supreme Court victory. Her recollections are below.
 
Henriëtte: [My husband] John Malpede started LAPD in 1985… That's really when homelessness came into the public view. Because, before the early 80s, you had “vagabonds” or “bums," but “homelessness” didn't exist; the word hadn't been invented, really. In the 80s Reagan started to change housing policy, taking away funding support for low-income housing and diminishing the amount of affordable housing. And as governor of California he'd closed a lot of mental-health institutions, so people with mental problems came out into the streets in California. In the 80s that policy was extended nationwide. And during the Reagan administration, people receiving disability benefits were required to re-certify to continue receiving benefits, and this proved to be impossible for many mentally disabled people. These people ended up on the streets. And then the crack epidemic happened. So all of the sudden there were thousands of homeless people. So he became interested in that; how did that happen?
 
Basically, John was a New York performance artist from Columbia University. He likes to say, “I got tired of wearing black clothes and hanging out all night." He wanted to be a part of what was happening in society.
 

"Call Home," 1991 (Image courtesy of the LAPD) 
 
VICE: And so this version of Skid Row really started in the eighties.
Yeah, that's another history. Skid Row was full of flop houses, in disrepair, full of temporary workers. The train station used to be there, so hotels were filled with people who were working in the terminals and the wholesale fish and vegetable distribution and the warehouses nearby.
There was really a transient population of workers, mostly poor white people, many addicted to alcohol. There where also native Americans and Latinos. And then in the 80s, with the crack epidemic, the homeless population took over; it was predominantly African American, with huge crack addiction problems. It was just wild, really wild and dangerous. The dope was sold out of the hotels, and people were thrown out of the windows if they didn't pay. There were big bonfires.
 
They said they were going to clean it out and make it a new area. And that's when people who had started to change the situation on Skid Row, like the Catholic Worker Movement, said, yes, we have all these hotels, they are in terrible shape, but let's clean them up and have affordable housing for people who are poor. Luckily, at the time, Mayor Bradley was very progressive, and it was just sort of magic that he accepted that plan. So instead of knocking it down, they preserved affordable housing in all the empty banks and hotels.
 
Now in Skid Row there are more than 50 of those SROs (single-room-occupancy hotels) where people live in very small rooms, but they are safe and clean. In the Bowery places like Whole Foods have taken over the neighborhood, but that never happened in LA. There is a real community of poor people who look out for each other, who take care of each other; all the recovery programs are there.
 

"Jupiter 35," 1989 (Image courtesy of the LAPD)
 
Often people see photos of people on the street, and it's like, "Oh, there's all these homeless people everywhere, how terrible."  What people don't know is that many [homeless] get off the street and move into those hotels. There are people who've been living in Skid Row—many people in LAPD—for 15 or 20 years already. They cannot move out because there's no affordable housing left anywhere else.
 
But it really has gentrified since 2002, and because it’s very desirable real estate, you have to fight for it every ten years or so. More recently, mayor Villaraigossa invited New York's police commissioner, William Bratton, to come to LA and made him our police chief. He started the "Safer Cities" initiative, with the goal of cleaning up Skid Row and making it safe for developers. So in a small area of about 50 or so blocks, Bratton put in 50 extra policemen, and they started enforcing laws that were not enforced anywhere else in Los Angeles. Jaywalking, sitting on milk crates… homeless people can’t pay the fine, so the next time they get a ticket, the [police] come back with a warrant and they go to jail.
 
[New Yorkers will remember this from when Bratton was New York police commissioner during the Giuliani years; it’s part of his broken-windows policing tactics, which also includes Stop-and-Frisk. Bill de Blasio recently reinstated him as police commissioner.]
 
Henriëtte: So you’re criminalizing poor people.
 
[She points to a video of LAPD's performance "Utopia/Dystopia," featuring herself and Lorinda Hawkins dueling with vacuum cleaners.]
 
Henriëtte: The script comes from a City Council meeting on law 41.18(d), which made sitting, sleeping, or standing for long periods of time in the same spot illegal. Jan Perry, the City Council person for Skid Row, wanted to enforce that law, and the ACLU fought against it. She managed to put it on hold for a whole year so the city could keep arresting people.
 
Finally, they came to an agreement that the law could only be enforced from from 9pm till 6 o’clock in the morning; then people could sleep. At six o’clock they came with a big water cannon, and after that, they could arrest anybody they wanted who was sleeping on the street. They came by with big garbage trucks [to throw people’s shopping carts and belongings away].
 
[She gestures to a red shopping cart with a plaque on it.] 
 

An installation at the Queens Museum
 
Henriëtte: People were arrested for stealing shopping carts and sitting on milk crates. So the Catholic Worker had a lawyer design this plaque saying that the homeless own these carts; now L.A. is full of these red carts with the plaques on them. But the police still tell people that their carts can’t be in the same place for more than two hours, and they throw it in the garbage trucks with all your possessions. So [Catholic Worker] fought it in court, and they won; this summer it went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which refused to consider the case (when the city repealed it) so that the lower court's decision stood. Now the police cannot throw peoples possessions away. And the city is forced to notify the people in advance when they are going to clean the streets.
 
[She’s standing in front of a local newspaper with the headline: "THE GREAT SHOPPING CART VICTORY PARADE."]
 
And then of course the cops find all kinds of ways around that. When the city lost the lawsuit, the police, the BID (Business Improvement District), and the City Department of Sanitation just didn't clean up the streets anymore, and so the piles of possessions and garbage grew higher and higher. Then the police said there was a safety hazard and tried again to repeal the decision. After they lost that case, they said that there was a TB epidemic about to break out, which turned out not to be the case. It's always a new fight.
 
The exhibit Do You Want the Cosmetic Version or the Real Deal? Los Angeles Poverty Department 1985–2014 will be on view through May 11, 2014, at the Queens Museum. The LAPD's Agents & Assets will be performed on February 28, March 1, and March 2 throughout NYC.
 
 
Whitney Kimball is an NYC-based art critic currently on staff at the blog Art F City.  

Sarnia Residents Are Battling Suncor Over Wind Turbine Regulations

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Cornelis with a sign, on his property. All photos by the author.

The snowy fields of southwestern Ontario, dotted with occasional barns, houses, and silos, give little hint of the struggle going on within the hearts, minds, and property rights of rural people. A struggle that some say will change their lives and permanently alter their landscape.   

This week, the fight over rights to erect electricity-generating wind turbines moves from the rural side-roads near Sarnia, where land agents have been persuading farmers to host the giant towers, to a nearby courthouse. Spurred on by their residents, the mayor and council of Plympton-Wyoming take on both energy giant Suncor and Ontario’s controversial Green Energy Act tomorrow in a David-and-Goliath battle to assert local control over the locations and numbers of wind turbines to be built.

“We’re just the public fighting a billion dollar corporation,” said Keith Watson, 55, whose family has farmed in the area for generations. Watson entered the fight after a town council meeting where Suncor said locals couldn’t tell them where to build, or they would have to “tattle” to the province about their resistance to the turbines. Since that time, he and others have formed the lobby group PW-WAIT (Plympton-Wyoming—We’re Against Industrial Turbines) to try to stop Suncor’s plan, which calls for 46 towers across the area. “That’s only Phase 1,” said Watson, who believes close to 90 percent of his neighbours and friends oppose the plan.    

Suncor launched the case after the town passed a by-law demanding at least two kilometres between each turbine. The provincial Green Plan, passed in 2009, allows developers to build them with only a 550m space. 

Considering that provincial laws usually override local ones, Watson isn’t terribly hopeful about tomorrow’s hearing. “We might just have to lose in order to win,” he mused, citing the fact that other court cases in the province may appeal lower court decisions, and try and make a case under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. His group hopes the town will appeal if they lose Wednesday also.

Another sign on the Cornelis property.

Suncor would not comment this week about the Plympton issue, for fear of prejudicing the case, but last year company spokesperson Michael Southern said the company has taken the “very rare step” of legal action because no agreement could be reached with the council. “We would prefer to work with the municipality,” he said at the time, but it seems no turbines could be built at all in the area with the two kilometres setback the council wants, Southern added. Watson and Cornelis say Suncor could squeeze in about four or five of the huge generators under the local rules.

Since the Green Energy Act came into force, wind developments have sprouted around southern Ontario, and in front of them, fighting mad, are local opposition groups such as PW-WAIT. The Act, meant to promote the growth of alternative energy sources, has created a wave of political backlash, largely credited with almost wiping out the governing Liberal party in rural Ontario in the 2012 election, reducing the party to minority status in the provincial legislature. With more than 50 citizen action groups across the province listed on the website of Ontario Wind Resistance, an umbrella organization for wind opponents, the protestors are stepping up for an even bigger fight, as another election is widely-expected this spring. 

Whatever the outcome of the hearing is, divisions in the community will remain like the scars from excavation for other turbines going up already, just down the road to London. “As one woman said to me: ‘If it pits neighbour against neighbour, family members against each other, and friend against friend, you just don’t do it,’” recounted Watson on a recent afternoon at the local Tim Horton’s. With the likelihood of the giant towers going up near property lines, some neighbours won’t even meet each others’ eyes when they pass on the road, said Watson’s friend Ron Cornelis, whose family home and farm will have a turbine looming over from the property next door if Suncor gets approval from the court and a final go-ahead from a government agency. That approval process is set-up “totally backwards,” so opponents have to prove the turbines will cause harm, rather than demanding the companies prove they’re safe, fumed Cornelis. “It’s a good thing they don’t bring new drugs out for people that way,” he offered in comparison. 

“Living in the county here isn’t like it used to be,” said the tall father of one. A local family he knows is badly split, with two brothers and father working to erect turbines, while two other brothers are members of the PW-WAIT group. The family still gets together, but “it’s not like it should be,” he said. “The mom doesn’t allow turbine talk when the family meets." 

According to Cornelis, people who sign leases for turbines stand to make $12,000-$25,000 per year, but it takes years to return the land to agricultural condition after the excavation and construction work to put up the towers.

Some landowners who signed leases, faced with their neighbours’ concerted resistance, and having learned about hazards of turbines, are now trying to get out of the leases, says Ingrid Willemsen, a board member of the lobby group. People who were victims of “deceptive sales tactics” often signed those leases, Watson told VICE. The salespeople would tell a farm family they might as well sign since their neighbour had already, when it turned out the neighbour hadn’t signed at all, he claimed. Someone backing out of a lease found the company had a line on it also, Cornelis added. “Are they borrowing money against other peoples’ properties?”

The sense of common threat has brought many locals together to an extent “never seen before,” said Keith Watson. “It’s amazing to see the passion of the community,” shown at public meetings called by his group, and at local and county council meetings. The group has not only persuaded their council to take the steps that provoked Suncor into the legal attack, but it has also provoked citizens into donating money, on top of their tax bill, to fund the legal defence, which could cost as much as $250,000, said Mayor Lonny Napper last year. With only 24 landowners to benefit from hosting the turbines, and an organized and vocal opposition group, Napper said the town has to support the majority who want him to fight.

There are also worries about wildlife. Southwestern Ontario is on the migration route for thousands of tundra swans that pass through the area twice yearly. “Suncor says the swans don’t land here,” he said, offering this reporter a photo he says shows the large white birds in his fields. 

Cornelis in Tim Horton's.

Nothing lasts forever, and the dying days of wind turbines are a worry in Plympton-Wyoming. One of the by-laws being challenged by Suncor demands a $200,000 deposit or credit note to pay the bills when the towers reach the end of their days. Even that may not be enough, as Watson and Cornelis claim to have read a report that it may cost up to $1 million to remove one.

The opponents’ determination will be on display at the Sarnia courthouse tomorrow, as they plan to be out in force to protest before the hearing. Among them will likely be Lisann Cornelis, Ron’s wife and mother to Adam, 9, who attends school just up the country road from their home and farm. At least one turbine will be in a field to the back of the school, worrying Adam’s parents, who feel more evidence is turning up to support the contention some people can be seriously affected by infrasound made by the turning of the turbine blades at a frequency too low to be heard consciously by humans (though that’s often disputed).

Lisann has another worry; the value of the home the Cornelis’ have almost completed renovating. “We’re looking at a 30 percent drop in value, and what if we have to move because our health is affected by the turbines,” she wondered. “I want the city people to think about this too,” she stressed. “Electricity prices are going up for everybody,” because of the preferential rates Ontario will pay to wind energy developers for the power they generate, she said

Last minute preparations are underway for tomorrow’s protest. While Suncor may try to avoid making waves before then, the company’s opponents have no such reluctance. They’re hoping, no matter how quiet they are in that courtroom, the judge will see them and understand how much is riding on the decision that will be made there.

This Man Has Survived on Pizza Alone for 25 Years

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My friend Dan survives on nothing but pizza. It's said that variety is the spice of life, but for Dan, a 38-year-old woodworker based in Maryland, oregano is the only spice involved, because it’s the only thing that he will put on top of his pizza. The next time people tell you to eat your vegetables, you can tell them to fuck off and enlighten them with the story of this guy.

Everyone who knows Dan wonders how he’s still alive. Beyond the fact that his diet is completely horrifying, he also has diabetes and frequently gets low blood sugar. When his blood sugar dips into the danger zone, it sometimes results in his blacking out on the kitchen floor in his underwear with frozen food scattered around him. There was that one time he bought a new car and then blacked out on the drive home. He swerved off the road and totaled the vehicle, besides from that isolated incident, his pizza diet seems to be working out for him. I recently spoke to Dan to hear more about how he came to subsist on gluten, tomato sauce, and cheese alone. 

VICE: It's been said that you're the king of pizza. How did you get that reputation?
Dan Janssen: I've been eating pizza exclusively every day of my life for the past 25 years, and I'm not just talking about a slice of pizza every day. I usually eat an entire 14" pizza, and I only eat cheese pizza. I never get sick of it. If I go to one pizza shop or another brand, it's like eating a completely different meal.

What's your go-to pizza?
My absolute favorite pizza is from Pontillo's in Upstate New York. [Author's note: It’s a chain based in Rochester with 20 locations in that area.] I haven't had it in over ten years, so I can't speak to whether it's still good, but the last time I had it, it was far above any pizza I'd ever had.

Why don’t you eat other food?
I used to eat “regular food” like every normal American, but when I was 15 or 16, I made the decision to become a vegetarian based on ethical reasoning. I still loved the taste of meat, and I still love it to this day, but due to my beliefs, I gave it up. That was about 23 years ago. I also hate vegetables. 

Does your current diet affect your diabetes? 
When I first got diabetes, my endocrinologist said, "You should go to a nutritionist. You eat horribly." So I went to a nutritionist, and it was a waste of time. They just basically give you a list of things to try, saying, "Oh, you're a vegetarian; you should try this, this, and this." And of course I'm not going to try any of those. I like pizza. I've never gotten a negative reaction except from my first endocrinologist. But all the other doctors have said, "Your cholesterol is fine. You seem healthy. Keep doing what you're doing." I haven't had anyone truly concerned about it, except for my fiancée, and she's not overly concerned. With her advice and support, I've been seeing a therapist about my food aversion, and we've been exploring why I have such a limited diet. I must say, even though I sound like a horribly unhealthy and fat person, I'm not. I'm thin. I have tons of energy, and I feel great every day, so there might be something to the exclusive pizza diet.

Can I ask what you have been talking about with your therapist?
They’ve helped me uncover some things that I always knew but never realized the significance of. Like when I was four or five, we lived in the backwoods of North Carolina, where I went to daycare in Ms. Stanfill’s home. She would try to feed all of us Brunswick stew every day, which is not something you would ever feed a five-year-old. It's either chicken, pork, or rabbit with beef and okra, lima beans, corn, potatoes, and tomatoes. I would protest and try to run away, but she would grab me. I can't remember whether she would beat me or spank me, but I know that she would throw me in a closet as my punishment for not eating the stew. I would sit in there crying and screaming for a couple hours until my mom came to pick me up. 

Wasn’t there was another traumatic story that you mentioned involving your sister?
When I was five, I was in the backyard. My sister fed me some mushrooms, which turned out to be poisonous, and I had to be rushed to the hospital. They fed me Coca-Cola and Karo syrup until I vomited, and then I kept vomiting uncontrollably the entire night. I was fine after that.

That sounds terrifying. Of the major pizza chains, which are your favorites?
Well, I'd say they're all pretty bad, but I do frequent them. Pizza is like sex—even when it's bad, it's good.    

Do you like to cook at all?
God, no. My cooking consists of the microwave oven. I never really understood cooking. You put so much time, energy, and expense into it, and then you eat it, and it’s gone.

Are there any foods in particular that you would like to try to eat in the future?
I never want to give up my love and passion for pizza. However, I would like to be able to go to a restaurant where they didn't serve pizza and order off the menu, which I can't really do right now. My fiancée is vegetarian, so it would be nice to be able to go out to nicer restaurants with her. We're sort of limited as to where we go because of my pizza addiction. But at the same time, I don't want to give it up. And I don't want to become a foodie or one of those people that has a fetish around food—other than pizza—because I think that's a dumb by-product of our narcissist society. They have to have locally grown food from around the corner and all that bullshit. I like processed food. I like preservatives and pizza. My dad's the same way, too. He had triple bypass surgery and then a week later went out and had a huge steak dinner.

Since you've been seeing the therapist, have you started eating any different foods?
[Laughs] No. In fact, one of the reasons I like to go see her is because she's in the city and I can go to Joe Squared (a pizza place nearby) after to get pizza.

Great. Enjoy your pizza, Dan.

Barrett Brown's New Book 'Keep Rootin' for Putin' Skewers Mainstream Media Pundits

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Photo by Nikki Loehr.

Next week, Barrett Brown's legal defense fund is publishing the jailed journalist's hilarious new book, Keep Rootin' for Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence. Brown's new work takes down talking heads and argues for the revolutionary potential of the Internet. The book couldn't address his case directly, since his prosecutors secured a gag agreement, but implicitly shows why his legal battles are so important.

You remember Barrett Brown, the colourful author who loudly defended the hacktivist collective Anonymous. After the 2007 release of his first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, Brown embraced the cutting edge by publishing his deep research into WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and leaked documents from military and corporate “cybersecurity” contractors in the Guardian, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. He did it all with gonzo flair, publicly labeling himself “Cobra Commander” after the cartoon character, addressing fellow activists by video from bubble baths while drinking wine, and the like.

His new book tears apart the error-ridden blather of five influential pundits and calls for their replacement by populist researchers and activists equipped with the Internet. He envisions a sort of cyber-Library of Alexandria, a more lateral space for public discourse based on the historical record rather than on opinion, often reckless or incoherent, paraded as fact and bestowed from above.

But the kind of inanity he blasts in Keep Rootin' for Putin is now aimed at him by the government. He faces more than a century in prison chiefly for sharing a hyperlink, allegedly, to cancelled credit card data from the Stratfor hack, which landed five million of the Austin-based intelligence firm's emails on WikiLeaks. The credit card data didn't come from him; he just pointed fellow researchers to it during the media buzz generated by the hack. His prosecutors shared the same link by putting it in his indictment, right there on Page 1. So it's okay, ethically, for the Department of Justice to share the link, but not for him to do it?

The government's stupidity extends to charging him for allegedly making threats against the FBI agent who raided his and his mother's homes. In addition to Brown's now-infamous YouTube rants against Special Agent Robert Smith, the prosecution cited his disapproving tweet quoting Fox News analyst Bob Beckel saying of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: “A dead man can't leak stuff...illegally shoot the son a bitch.” They argue Brown's quoting of Beckel represents a threat against the FBI agent. But Assange is “not the alleged victim” Smith, Brown's lawyers say dryly in their January motion to dismiss the threat charges. “Mr. Beckel, to wit, remains unindicted.”

In that motion, the defense points out Brown's much-cited video quote that he was “going to ruin [Smith's] life and look into his fucking kids” was immediately preceded by the words “I don't say I'm going to kill him.” They point out the First Amendment requires such statements to rise to the level of a “true threat” of “physical harm” to become offenses. The motion lists the prosecution's selections from Brown's videos and Twitter timeline and shows which statements don't threaten bodily harm, which are conditional, and so on. Further, the context in the videos and on Twitter suggested he meant the sort of journalistic investigation/character assassination widely practiced by Anonymous.

Such Department of Justice stupidity is shielded by the sorts of pundits Keep Rootin' for Putin criticizes, because their professional output is noisy bullshit behind which the authorities can conspire unexamined. Brown aims to burn down the pundits' credibility.

First on the book's hit list is Thomas Friedman, unfortunately a bestselling author and twice-weekly columnist for the New York Times. He told readers in 2001 to “keep rootin' for Putin” as the man to reform Russia, in a column that paid attention to Moscow sushi bars but not the wily leader's creepy backstory. Brown points out that in 1999, Putin had been director of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KBG, while the Kremlin was planning to bomb Moscow and blame it on Chechen terrorists. Agents from the Service were caught planting explosives in the city; other bombings were attributed to Chechens. Putin, elevated to prime minister, used the supposed attacks as a pretext to invade Chechnya, a war so popular it helped propel him to the presidency. Friedman ignored this deadly intrigue, and instead complimented the “California-Kremlin” rolls.

By itself, Friedman's mistake would be a story of a failed prediction and misplaced focus, but it gets worse. In an August 2008 column entitled “What Did We Expect?” Friedman mocked the Clinton and George H. W. Bush administrations for “short-sightedness” in foreign policy choices the columnist said fueled Putin's rise to power—with nary a word about his own, earlier propaganda for the Russian politician. These are day-in, day-out mistakes for Friedman, the book shows, but the New York Times has been feeding them to us for two decades straight.

The Washington Post gives us the same sort of serial nonsense, Brown explains, taking on Richard Cohen and Charles Krauthammer, two pundits for the paper whose columns have hit newsstands nationwide for 30 years. He traces how Cohen in 2007 accused Hillary Clinton of “forever” lying, then a year later blamed those who made the same claim, accusing them of committing a “ferocious mugging of memory.” He proves Krauthammer has been wrong about basically “every military and foreign policy matter on which he's opined from 1999 to 2010.” As Keep Rootin' for Putin piles up evidence, you begin to realize the mainstream media isn't there to inform you, but, whether through design or sheer incompetence, to distract you.

Brown wipes out William Bennett, host of a nationally syndicated talk radio show, anti-intellectual chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Secretary of Education under President Reagan, and author of such bestsellers as The Children's Book of Virtues. As drug czar under President George H.W. Bush, Bennett said beheading drug dealers would be morally appropriate (“I used to teach ethics—trust me,” he explained to talk show host Larry King) and blamed addiction on Satan. “Bennett is so full of horse shit,” Brown writes. “He could fertilize every bombed-out coca field from the Yucatan to Bolivia.”

The book's last target is Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic for 37 years. Brown ridicules Peretz's writing style, quoting this example: “The New York Post and Reuters both report not exactly that Bernie Madoff has cancer. But that he's told his fellow inmates that he has cancer, pancreatic cancer, at that. Which means that, if the tale is true, he'll be a goner soon, very soon. Unless there's a medical miracle, as sometimes there is even in such terrible afflictions of the pancreas.” Peretz's logic is no less tortured.

Keep Rootin' for Putin, in contrast, is a quick, fun read. You can knock it out in two or three sittings, and you need not be a news junkie to follow the arguments and get most of the jokes. It's written in a bloggy style, with interludes of Led Zeppelin lyrics and surreal examples. “Let us say that I am a Roman pundit named Barriticus,” Brown writes at one point, “and I am living a few years after the initial food riots have occurred. When I givemy magnificent oration, after first having made love to several high-born young ladies...” There are also plenty of Easter eggs for bookworms, with allusions to such writers as H.G. Wells and Dostoevsky.

The book is certainly not dumbed down. His analysis ranks up there with the best of the brilliantly paranoid political authors. You have to hope the Texas juries in his April and May trials scrutinize his case as closely as he does the pundits. Given that gag agreement, it seems Brown's prosecutors fear his intelligence.

Keep Rootin' for Putinis a manifesto, not just some book version of Media Matters, the liberal fact-checking outfit whose articles you email your right-wing uncle to refute the articles he emails you. Brown argues the Internet is our superpower for removing the pundits. It allows us to catalog and cross-reference their mistakes, making a book such as his easier to produce. He has an admirable way of calling for taking up arms without scolding us. “We have a chance to dismantle the obsolete media structure that has already crippled our nation to some great extent and will cripple it further,” he says, “unless those of us who recognize this problem take some sort of, like, action.”

Cutting through the hubris of the pundits, he points out, will clear the way for our own communications. “The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual on the planet can now communicate with any other individual on the planet,” he says, explaining that we are no longer beholden to nationalist pundits who, as leech-like intermediaries, filter and firewall information. With global networks, we can conduct our own projects for news, analysis, and action. If you want to communicate with revolutionaries the pundits ignore until it's profitable, as Brown and Anonymous did to support the Arab Spring uprisings, you can. If you want to crowdsource research into leaked emails of the government's shady contractors, as Brown's ProjectPM did, you can.

That is, unless the government shuts you down—as they're trying to shut down Brown. This new power for the people, the Internet, with its ability to forge bonds between activists worldwide and publicly archive forbidden data on sites such as WikiLeaks, terrifies the authorities. He takes it all in stride. “Life is full of possibilities,” he notes, “most of them sarcastic.”

Brown, who pleaded not guilty to every charge, is ready for the courtroom battle. On his team is legal heavyweight Charles Swift, who represented former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Salim Hamdan before the Supreme Court in the most significant case to date dealing with the war on terror, winning Geneva Conventions protections for the prisoners and limits to presidential power. Hamdan was ultimately acquitted of all charges. Attorney Ahmed Ghappour, an expert in national security cases, is also on Brown's team. Free speech advocates Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have rallied to his defense.

The prosecution, despite the gag agreement, is already losing on the media front. This month, on House of Cards, a show popular enough to be mentioned on President Obama's Twitter timeline, the hacker character Gavin told the FBI to drop all of Brown's charges. Venues big and small, from this one to the New York Times to WhoWhatWhy, have been questioning the government's case.

Keep Rootin' for Putin has its faults. It could have been buttressed a bit with some statistically-minded analysis of the flows of capital and patronage that put the media institutions and their pundits in power. His asides sometimes get a little distracting, as when he states, “I'm also increasingly irritated by my own writing style.” But for the most part, the style is jazz.

As a generalist, Brown tended to shift focus, which allowed him to draw connections between disparate subjects, but gave the book a bit of a rocky history. He started writing it in 2006, then stopped, then finished it in 2010 before diving into the wild world of Anonymous. The book was originally contracted with Cambridge House Press to be published under the title Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures Of America’s Chattering Class.

If you're at all interested in the media and its failures or the Internet and its potential, you'll find Keep Rootin' for Putin entertaining and, despite the pundits' ridiculousness, inspiring. To get a copy, visit the Free Barrett Brown website and follow @FreeBarrett_on Twitter for announcements. The book will be available for donors to his legal defense fund.

 

Douglas Lucas is a freelance writer and journalist in North Texas. Check out his website and follow him on Twitter: @DouglasLucas.

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