The Central African Republic's capital of Bangui has seen its Muslim population drop from 130,000 to under 1,000 during the past few months. Over the past year, thousands across CAR have been killed, and nearly a million have been displaced. The United Nations recently stated that the entire Western half of the country has now been cleansed of Muslims.

CAR has never fully recovered from France's colonial rule, and it has only known ten years of a civilian government—from 1993 to 2003—since achieving independence in 1960. Coup after coup, often with French military involvement, has led many to refer to the country as a phantom state. The current conflict has now completely erased the rule of law, leaving the UN and international community looking confused and impotent.

In March 2013, the Séléka, a mostly Muslim rebel alliance, rose up and overthrew the corrupt government of François Bozizé, while bringing terror and chaos across the country—pillaging, killing, and raping with impunity. In response, mostly Christian self-defense forces, called the Anti-Balaka, formed to defend CAR against Séléka attacks.

Clashes grew more frequent throughout 2013 as the Séléka grew more ruthless. In December 2013, French and African troops went in to disarm the Séléka and staunch the bloodshed. The Anti-Balaka, seizing on a weakened Séléka, then went on the offensive.

CAR had no real history of religious violence, and the current conflict is not based on any religious ideology. The fighting, however, turned increasingly sectarian in the fall of 2013, with revenge killings becoming the norm. And as the Séléka's power waned, the Anti-Balaka fed their need for revenge by brutalizing Muslim civilians. 

"Too few peacekeepers were deployed too late; the challenge of disarming the Séléka, containing the Anti-Balaka, and protecting the Muslim minority was underestimated," Human Rights Watch said in a recent statement.

The bloodshed has not stopped. The UN is still debating whether or not to send peacekeepers. Even if a peacekeeping operation is approved, it will take six months for troops to be assembled. 

I’m a British photographer and rabbit lover. When I moved to New York City in 2011 for work, I didn’t get homesick, but I really missed my pet rabbit in London. To remedy this, I decided to visit some rabbit shows to get my bunny fix, which his how I ended up with a bunch of photographs of chubby rabbits from shows in Washington, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

See more of Leanne's work here and here.

Lydia Lunch and Marty Nation in Richard Kern's Fingered. Photo courtesy of Richard Kern

"I twist, you shout."

That's just one memorable line from a woman who practically breathed them, fueled by the most brilliantly poisoned oxygen, her words a veritable choke hold, an evisceration—our very own Lydia Lunch. Only she's not ours anymore. After almost single-handedly defining the pissed indifference of No Wave in late-70s New York with Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Beirut Slump, and 8-Eyed Spy, Lydia appears to have happily checked into a new age Hotel California. Appearances, however, can be deceiving when you're dealing with any high-octane brain once demonized and dismissed as "confrontational." Those who bravely, at times recklessly, confront the more insidious evils, and where to begin? With the corporate death machine? With the police state? With the cadavers of aging White Male America who suffocate the intellectual and political aspirations of any group that doesn't blindly submit to its power? Praise God and pass the Viagra, and prepare to be screwed for another century at least.

If you can believe a recent story in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Crimes, Lydia Lunch, now in her mid 50s, has re-imagined herself as a self-help guru in Ojai, California, the West Coast's answer to Shangri-La. Just how lost is this horizon? Taken at face value this might seem an odd career change for Lydia, but to those who know her history it makes a kind of perversely perfect sense. Teenage Lydia, from that noirish time, was the blunt instrument in all those bands. Her take-no-prisoners severity could clear a club within minutes, which I witnessed firsthand as one of the few who stayed behind. Lydia was a hybrid baby doll/gun moll/motormouth drill sergeant. Maybe self-help is borne of an intertwined damage and discipline, and Lydia, projecting both outward vulnerability and inner strength, was cut out for it from the very beginning.

In a 1979 interview with the Soho Weekly News she was asked:

SWN:  Why do you play such short sets?
LL: Less is more. That's how I feel. Like discipline. Or punishment. You don't need 30 minutes of my music to know what I'm talking about.

SWN:  Does a 30-second instrumental say it all?
LL: Yes. It says "FUCK!" "CHILD!" "HURT!" "FUCK!"

SWN:  Is the minimalism very important? There's an absence of dynamics in the music, your words express very simple feelings. They don't even express an opinion. Would anything more compromise your opinion of the audience, which is very low?
LL:  I never said that. Only that they're secondary, compared to me. I don't think more music is needed. And that attitude is what I feel. It's like primal therapy. I scream for you, you know. I'm up there screaming my fucking guts out. It's for you as much as for me, only I'd be…

SWN: The last to admit it.^"1

Portrait of Lydia Lunch (R) Courtesy of Rustblade Records

And now, 35 years and 3,000 miles away, in the tranquil garden of the Ananda Verandah, out in that golden West, where the possibilities for growth are always exploited, that admission has, in a sense, finally been made. But if we travel back in time to the late 70s, and even further, to that decade's antithesis, the late 60s, you have to ask: What sort of second act is possible after an annihilation? As Lydia herself would be quick to point out, many of us don’t have a first act, let alone a second. While an amped-up life can negate or make ridiculous whatever follows, we shouldn't be too hasty in our judgment. Because what passes for justice in this country tends to be delivered by those who remain safely on the sidelines, where basic values are fiercely protected even when rotten to the core. From inside that mealy apple, fallen not far from the tree, a lowly worm wriggles out to demand: Is there life after life? Far preferable that he slithers out from the fruit of the original sin than from the hollow socket of your eye. As Anne Sexton, the great confessional poet and eventual suicide, pointedly if flatly observed: "Most people's lives aren't interesting enough for a play."

***

Black Panthers, California State House, protesting for their right to carry arms. Photo courtesy of the Washington State Archives

Scanning the article I couldn't help wondering, Where do you go from Teenage Jesus or, for that matter, the Black Panthers? Bobby Seale co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with Huey Newton in 1966. The indelible image of BPP members defiantly armed with rifles, some with ammunition belts across their chests, on the steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento, on a spring afternoon in 1967, is just as riveting and unbelievable nearly 50 years later. And so is an image—captured only in a drawing, for an incendiary photo would have surely promoted their cause—of Seale, bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom in '68. The image belies the very notion of free speech. It also serves as a reminder that although show trials were first staged in the counter-revolutionary USSR, they later played to packed houses right here in the good ol' USSA (and still do, only now they're conducted behind closed doors on a military base). The Panthers knew the FBI would try to hunt them down and silence them, but there are times when a lesson and a life must be laid on the line, for where self-preservation and self-determination are one and the same the consequence of one's actions will never outweigh those of inaction. And the price of admission? Some paid with their lives, some with their minds. Those who survived may never escape a lingering sense that to endure is not so much a victory as a matter of having been left behind. Then again, can you spend an entire life walking the streets with a loaded gun? These days, caught between self-help and self-determination, you have to ask: Do you carry a yoga mat or a rifle? Or do you carry a weapon wrapped inside the mat?

In the wake of the turbulence, decimation, and disillusion of the 60s and 70s, Seale, in his second act, went on to work as a talk-radio host and to author a book titled Barbeque'n with Bobby, filled with his down-home recipes as a way of raising funds for progressive, socially engaged groups that were struggling under Reaganism. (Lydia published a collection of her own recipes in 2012, called The Need to Feed.) And as easy as it might be to mock him, just as it was easier to focus on guns over butter, Seale's initiative can be seen to parallel the Panthers' community activism. Particularly the free food program that began in Oakland in '69 and grew exponentially, with free breakfasts offered to many thousands of poor school children nationwide.

Seale's onetime brother-in-arms, Eldridge Cleaver, reinvented himself in another way entirely. His unexpected trajectory delivered him light years from the radicality of his earlier days, slipping sideways into absurdist radical chic with his outrageously irreverent “dick pants”—no concealed weapons here—to the very doorstep of a billion-dollar corporation that, until fairly recently, held to their incredulous belief in the spiritual inferiority of blacks—yes, the Mormon Church. Cleaver's book, Soul on Fire, the follow-up to his 60s prison memoir, Soul on Ice, suggests that even a person who doesn't believe in a heavenly reward may one day confront the prospect of burning in hell. After becoming ensconced in the Church of Latter Day Saints, Cleaver, who had once dismissed Governor Ronald Reagan as a punk and a coward, would end up campaigning for the man when he ran for president, redefining that most misguided of notions: You can't get there from here.

***

Edridge Cleaver in Rolling Stone, Oct. 9, 1975. Photo of Cleaver (R) by C. J. Walker/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

In the end, there's really only one question to be raised—along with the white flag: How much further can you ascend or descend from Nirvana? This may refer to the state of enlightenment or to the gold-plated unit-shifters of grunge. Take your pick. The recent announcement that a Nirvana single which was set to be pressed and released almost 20 years ago to the week, then hastily deleted after Kurt Cobain checked out, would finally appear, led many to believe his hour of darkness would finally see the light of day. The single was pulled because of the record’s B-side, a little number Cobain had titled "I Hate Myself and Want to Die." He did… and he did. Even so, the song doesn't unlock any particular mysteries, since the title and the lyrics don't illuminate one another, or anything else. If you watch it online, preceded by a commercial for Charmin Ultra Strong, you'll gain about as much insight from the friendly stuffed bear. A nothing-special throwaway song, relegated to the flip-side of a single, then tossed onto a Beavis and Butt-Head CD, and now shamelessly resuscitated to shake a little more change out of the pockets of a corpse. (David Geffen can't possibly need the money. Does Courtney Love?)

While discontinuity is truer to the sense of human flow, where the button that’s been depressed isn’t “play” but “repeat,” reinvention of the self can become its own revolving door. That’s delivering a product, chained to its care and maintenance, and the product is you. The popular term in business and the entertainment-industrial complex is branding. Maybe some of us would be a little less willing to be branded if it actually entailed bending over in front of a hot iron. Once you become someone else’s property, the past is on rewind as you return to the memory of who you once were. Simultaneously the master and the unfaithful servant, the body is exhumed in a future that never happened. Bits of encrusted dirt and mud are rubbed from your eyelids, as fingers crumble from your desiccated hand, scattered by the wind across the dry, dusty ground. Yet the middle finger remains, and is raised above your lifeless form, the only friend… still true.

Even if Lydia fully understands the necrophiliac S&M of the music industry, which isn't all that different from that of the film industry, the fashion industry (are you wearing McQueen this season?) or every other industry—not forgetting the art market—she wouldn't have been able to help Kurt Cobain. Neither could she have done anything for Philip Seymour Hoffman, David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, who referred to the lone well-intended but hopeless intervention of his friends as "the Inquisition." Besides the impenetrable fact that you simply cannot help those who don't want to be helped—just try to counteract the centrifugal force of a person as he or she spirals further away from a center that will not hold—Lydia's services are not available to the male of the species. Her "Post-Catastrophe" workshop is only open to the so-called second sex, advertised thusly: "Create an environment to Empower other women and Inspire artistic collaboration." 

In what could serve as the opening scene for The Life and Times of Lydia Lunch, a monologue, though tirade seems more accurate, would be delivered to set the stage: 

"I can understand why women trade flesh for money, power, control. What I DON’T GET IS WHY MEN ARE STILL STUPID ENOUGH TO FALL FOR IT. Ever since it was invented, Pussy has been treated as a magic elixir, a voodoo that some men just can’t seem to resist or get enough of. The hyper-sexualization and commoditization of women in all forms of media, culture, and music has NOT BEEN TURNED ON ITS HEAD by middle aged pop-porn princesses running around in lame aerobics costumes playing braindead disco as they sell mega-units for mega-corporate record company pimps. More useless entertainment which tells us nothing and only serves as a distraction …" ²

***

You have to wonder how Lydia would have reacted to Jane Fonda's second act as the queen of 80s aerobics after her anti-war activism in the 60s. Bobby Seale certainly felt a kinship with her reinvention, going so far as to acknowledge Fonda as an inspiration for his entrepreneurial foray into the BBQ pit. (Back in the day, she had been a very vocal and prominent supporter of the Panthers, and was under surveillance by the NSA for many years. Trading left-wing husband Tom Hayden for the ultra-rich neo-con Ted Turner might have appeased but not erased those associations.)

Fonda helped to set Americans on a course of exercise and more healthful living, giving birth to a craze that became a way of life, as well as big bucks—the fitness industry. And what would she have been doing instead? Remaking Barbarella? Maybe her workout tapes, numbering more than two dozen, which sold millions of copies, and millions of VCRs collaterally—can be spliced together with scenes from Barbarella, a fractured tribute to the woman without whom we might not have all those fabulous yoga and pilates studios, a $7 billion a year, seemingly recession-proof industry. Discussing this recently with the only person I know who goes to a yoga class, despite being into it and acknowledging the benefits, he struck a sour note, claiming that others attend less as a spiritual/physical thing than for their ego, as a way to show off. But while exhibitionists will always find a stage on which to perform, the evolution of Jane Fonda or Lydia or anyone who manages to successfully script for themselves a second act, and even a third, suggests something else: that the hardcore notion of being true to oneself is based on a one-dimensional image of a life, when the truth of life is that it's an unfolding, and to shed one skin for another is the visible sign of this process.

Photo of Jane Fonda as Barbarella courtesy of Paul Joyce

Self-help isn't for everyone, and the price of admission is both psychic and financial. If self-help seems to appeal primarily to a certain class—the ruling class and its devoted/indentured subjects—and that the cost of rehab with a stunning Pacific Ocean view is beyond most of us mere mortals, keep in mind that repression is most effectively and politely administered economically. And even if the spiel for Lydia's Post-Catastrophe workshop sounds at times like so much claptrap: "Art has the ability to act as salve to the universal wound. It gives voice to the silent scream within us all. It rebels as pleasure in times of trauma. It brings a sense of beauty and joy by rising up in celebration of life, a direct contra-diction to the widespread brutality of socio-sadistic bullies who seek to divide and conquer." Yes, despite the cringe-inducing spiel, more power to her, and in every way. In an interview from 2010, Lydia sounded much closer to, shall we say, her old self, insisting that "Pain always subsides, but wisdom, love, intensity, and genius feed the soul. And the soul is a hungry motherfucker." ³

Lydia Lunch is a survivor, not a casualty—or rather she's a casualty who lived to tell the tale, and now to help others. There are plenty of misfits from her gory glory days who aren't around anymore. But you know what? They don't give a fuck. That's the funny thing about consciousness. You're either here… or you're not. For some, self-help will always be the enemy within, and what of life? Which nowadays appears more and more lifelike. As the earliest new-agers, those blissfully enlightened nihilist-millionaires who tripped all the way to India down that long and windy road, told us oh so long ago, Life goes on within us, and without us.

You might as well live.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.  "Sin, Guilt and Lunch," interview with Lydia Lunch, The Soho Weekly News, Oct. 25, 1979. Quoted by Steven Parrino in his essay, "Stinted Expression," The No Texts, Abaton Book Company, 2003.

2. Statement from the "Post-Catastrophe" website, written by Lydia Lunch and Vanessa Skantze.

3.  Interview with Percy Howard, "Lydia Lunch will not go quietly," Aug. 10, 2010.

Look at that haul. All photos by the author

So there I was, groping around in a pile of trash in the middle of the night.  

People stared at the spectacle of a dozen dumpster divers carrying recyclable Trader Joe’s bags through NYC’s Upper East Side neighborhood. They didn’t look like they needed handouts, but they were digging through the trash in the streets not too far from Park Avenue. They were calling it “a movement.” These people are freegans: a group dedicated to saving food, shampoo, furniture, and anything else that people waste. They want to fight the system of consumerism because they believe it squanders the stuff people need. No one was homeless. On any given night, this meetup group hooks bagel stalkers from different age brackets and socioeconomic backgrounds with their e-mail newsletter. I saw a college kid break bread with a veteran. Each diver has different standards and different favorite foods, but they all share a bootstrapper’s mentality and are almost always on the hunt for things that are free. The food was for us, friends, people on the street—anything to keep it from piling up in a landfill. When someone throws something away, legally it's a public item, but that doesn't keep police and restaurant owners from hassling them.

There were people who survived solely on what they found, and people who dived twice a month who were just in it for the free food. And there was a lot of it.

The inventory from the biggest haul came from Gristedes grocery story: bottles of kombucha, stacks of pre-packaged guacamole and hummus, watermelons, peppers, breads, celery, salads, and packages of tri-colored fettuccine. It’s like this outside most grocery stores every night, but Saturdays are when the masses clean most stores out. There was plenty to go around for everyone’s personal stash and for the group feast that would happen tomorrow night. The leader gave me the address on a slip of paper. 

The haul from Gristedes

I’d been curious about freeganism for years. I wanted to know what a dive was like, what freegans considered cool to salvage and how hardcore it was. It shocked me that I wasn’t grossed out. But jacking $50 worth of pristine quinoa salads tossed into the garbage required so little effort. There wasn’t so much “garbage” in the bag. I was relieved that there were no discarded napkins or coffee filters to scrounge through; it was just a bag of salads and wraps in their packaging that had expired that day. “Companies are conservative with their expiration dates,” Janet, our leader, explained.

I looked over to a mild-mannered Wes Anderson doppelgänger who worked as an intern at a Chelsea gallery as he pointed a flashlight to reveal packages of Japanese sweet potatoes. A woman offered me a container of cold gazpacho she pulled just because I said I loved it, but I told her to keep it. A Brooklyn freegan once told me that people can get cagey about their prime spots, but most freegans believe in sharing.

I scooped out a filmy $12 bag of shiitake mushrooms from Dean & Deluca for the feast the next night. There were no takers for the bag of loose pieces of Swiss cheese because a regular diver, Adam, wasn’t there. Adam’s known for dunking his hand into unwrapped food and eats right out of the garbage.

As people walked by, they took interest in the operation going on. Some passerby swiped a still-soft chocolate chip cookie from the huge pile without stopping. A man slipped into the crowd trying to hide his grocery bags from Gristedes. “This proves it’s a bad economy,” he said. “We’re all suffering, right?” Then he walked off; he must have decided earlier that even though he was suffering, he preferred to pay for his guacamole. 

A recently unemployed woman ate her salad wrap rescued from outside of Organic Avenue.

“At least you’re being resourceful,” I said.

“Yeah. It helps,” she said.

“Would you go alone?”

“I’d feel too weird.”

I had to consider if I would. I imagined myself all alone, checking out the trash in broad daylight, looking not exactly pathetic but whatever is one level less nuts than that. I decided it wasn’t worth it. I was still marveling at how inviting and brightly colorful it all looked on the curb when it was time to tie up the rejects—bananas browned from days of neglect—and move on. Dumpster divers leave garbage sites nicer than they were before. They have that in common with Girl Scouts.

Being an amateur myself, I picked up some slimy garbage in hopes of finding something edible, and accidentally discarded it in a fellow diver’s general direction. A yellow rubber glove appeared in front of my face.

“That’s why I wore these,” a fellow diver named Mohammed said.

Look how much fun we're having!

The Italian market Agata & Valentina, the most upscale target on our hit list, was a bust. It was closed, but lust-worthy aromas of the prepared foods inside reached every corner of my nose. Outside, I lifted a bag of severed pineapple tops to find a ton of raw meat. Too scrappy. Too much work for the group.

We moved on, passing V-Note, a vegan restaurant owned by Gwyneth Paltrow. It would have been awkward to hit them up, what with everyone enjoying dinner and all. “We could claw at the window and go through their trash while they ate,” Cindy, the sarcastic leader said, laughing.

Dragging my free broccoli home, I had sticky ice cream hands thanks to some suspicious goo that collects on salad in a bag. It’s cool. I scrubbed my hands six times like I was reenacting Lady Macbeth’s OCD post-murder hand washing.

The next night was the feast, located in a residential building in East Harlem. They hold them to reward people who find food and share it. I set about chopping garlic, onions, and celery in the communal kitchen. My first task was simple enough: get rid of the mealy bits on the tomato with a cleaver. People come if they’ve been on the dive the night before, or they find something to bring in on their own. One woman produced potatoes and had prolonged their life span by separating them in her worn-to-death stockings.

Our rosemary bread was rock-hard, but it was nothing a microwave couldn’t fix. “I promise no one will get sick on this,” a cheery leader said. A drunk guy stumbled in looking for chitlins. Almost everyone was vegan—mostly for  moral reasons—so he gave up, but not before delivering a lecture on how an onion can heal a broken leg if you can’t afford to go the hospital.

Every age bracket was represented at the dive, but at the feast, it was mostly people who were retired—an improv teacher, a former management consultant—and the lone young unemployed legal assistant. Not every diver survives on a strict freegan diet; some of them donate food they find to Food Not Bombs, a collective that feeds people in need with rescued food in order to create a more sustainable future. One guy talked about the young kids who jump out of a van to take all the trash from Organic Avenue on 21^st Street. “They’re so ragged they look like they live in the subway,” he said.

I stared at my dish, which would elate hungry people everywhere, feeling disappointed in myself. I worried about anorexia rumors.

Somehow, bagging up the “rescued food” seemed less dicey than the end result: eating it. Boxed spelt crackers and cranberry oatmeal cookies tasted the safest. The stir-fry smelled good enough, but those $12 mushrooms and the tofu were gray. However, I’d pay full price for the asparagus, and the rice and beans were restaurant-quality.

These people were passionate and intelligent, but most of this stuff just wasn’t appetizing. It still impressed me that all this food would go to waste if it weren't for them.

I went into this thinking garbage... never good. But it struck me: the stuff was fresh enough to eat, and I didn’t poison myself. In the end, my own hangups about where it came from tugged at my stomach and got in the way of rational thinking. This was something I personally applauded, but didn’t want to take up.

So I chewed, nodding to signal how impressed I was while I fantasized about tunneling myself into the nearest steakhouse for a rehabilitative lamb chop. I was the only one who wasn’t into it; all the others finished their plates. As I washed the dishes, they invited me to dive again. But while they’re onto something, I remain a slave to the system. I prefer to see my food on a clean shelf.

Black magic gri-gri bracelets

The crisis in the Central African Republic has now been going on for more than a year, with violence between Christian and Muslim militias sparking very real fears of a Rwandan-style genocide. In fact, clashes between groups from the Christian Anti-Balaka and the largely Muslim Séléka—both of them umbrella militia organizations—have already left around 1,000 dead and more than a million displaced, with civilians being caught in the middle and burned, shot, or even eaten purely on the basis of their religion.

While in Bangui, the country’s capital, my cameraman Leo and I met Emotion, the leader of one of the local Anti-Balaka militias. They say they are attacking Muslims to prevent Islamist hard-liners from taking control of the country, but their indiscriminate attacks on entire communities suggest there may be more of a sectarian motive at play—and, understandably, the Anti-Balaka have acquired a pretty horrendous reputation for killing innocent Muslims in cold blood.

With that in mind, Emotion (who got his name because he cries a lot, though apparently out of passion, not fear) said he wanted to show us how well organized and peaceful his militia was. But before we set off to meet his men, Emotion said he had something to collect. Pulling the car over, he shouted out the window to one of his comrades, who rushed over to hand him a necklace made out of a few large leather squares.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“It’s for my protection,” he said. “It’s better than body armor. When I wear it, bullets and machetes can’t touch me. Even rockets can’t kill me.”

“Is it magic?”

“Yes, it’s called gri-gri,” he replied.

With the necklace in hand, Emotion drove us to a checkpoint manned by his militia. Stepping out of the car, we asked if we could film some of the guys hanging around, all of whom were wearing gri-gri.

“Sure,” one of them replied, “but you won’t be able to see me.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I’m invisible.”

Emotion with his gri-gri necklace

I looked at the men sitting around him, expecting to catch someone sniggering. But there was no reaction, just a bunch of nonplussed faces staring back at me. Back in the car, I told our driver Harve—a sensible-seeming local—about our new invisible friend, expecting him to crack a smile.

“He might be right,” Harve said. “A lot of people are invisible here.”

I couldn’t agree with him then and there, but promised to check our footage before passing final judgment.

Driving back into town, we stopped to film the French and African soldiers who were searching vehicles as they passed through military checkpoints. The French officer in charge came over for a chat, which mostly amounted to him telling me what a great job the French army was doing. I asked him whether the African soldiers working alongside the French also believed in magic, or if they too wore the gri-gri.

“Some of them do, but I prefer this,” he replied, tapping his body armor.

Christianity is the majority religion in the Central African Republic, with Islam and animism making up the two largest minority faith groups. However, most people—regardless of their religion—have as much faith in magic as they do in the Bible or Qur’an. For instance, about 40 percent of all prosecutions in the country involve witchcraft in some way, with lawyers often instructing their clients not to cast any spells while in custody. Shapeshifting into animals is also apparently a pretty popular pastime.

So it was no huge surprise that so many soldiers appeared to believe that small leather patches could protect them from live ammunition, even though it seemed absurd to our dull Western worldview. In a bid to find out where these beliefs came from, we asked Harve to take us to a witch doctor, who we hoped could explain what exactly you need to do to treated cowhide to make the wearer both invisible and invincible.

Philippe the witch doctor

In a town on the outskirts of Bangui, we were ushered into a small, dark one-room hut, which was decorated with a picture of Jesus and some frayed posters of various former Central African presidents.

We sat on some plastic chairs, and in a few minutes Philippe, a witch doctor in his mid 30s, wearing khakis and a Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt, appeared. He told us that the war in his country had been good for business. He’d been supplying gri-gri to the Anti-Balaka militias—which he claimed had played a pivotal role in their defeat of the Séléka rebels.

Leo explained that he spent a lot of time working in dangerous places, so he needed something to protect him from bullets and rockets. Philippe laid out his herbs, explaining what each one did. We had agreed on a price of about $100 (more than 50 times the average daily wage in the country) and wanted to pay half now and half on delivery the next day.

Philippe said no, telling us we had to pay about $80 right then and $20 the next day. We agreed, deciding it was probably best not to argue with a witch doctor. Harve then asked to get some anti-magic injections to protect him from dark magic, explaining that he needed a refill.

We returned the next day to find Philippe exactly where we left him. After exchanging pleasantries, he showed us Leo’s magic new accessory.

All that was left to do before Leo could waltz through a war zone without any body armor was for Philippe to read us the small print. “When wearing this gri-gri, you must not touch a woman who is on her period, or it will cease to work,” he said. “You must also not walk under a washing line with women’s underwear on it.”

This went on for a while—the magic's limitations seemed to mainly revolve around the menstrual cycle. I was distracted by this apparent obsession of Philippe’s at first, but soon realized that he was inadvertently responding to a question that had been bothering me: How does he explain it when a fighter, wearing gri-gri, is shot and dies? How does he justify his gear's ineffectiveness?


This period preoccupation seemed to be the answer. If he tells everyone that the wearer must have touched his partner while she was menstruating (or had walked under a washing line) without taking off his gri-gri, Philippe gets off scot-free.

Philippe's magical herbs

After Philippe had given Leo his gri-gri, he asked me why I hadn’t bought one of his necklaces. I could have replied with my first thought ("Because you’re a scam artist, and $100 is a lot of money for some magic string"), but instead found myself trying to explain through Harve that I had run out of money and couldn’t possibly afford it.

I then asked Harve to tell him that I would be back in the Central African Republic soon and would buy a necklace on my return. Being in a country where everyone believes in magic—and sitting in front of a man who claims to use it himself—I guess I believed for a brief moment, too, because I was definitely very worried that Philippe would cast some kind of gruesome spell on me if I didn't promise to buy one of his trinkets.

Back at the hotel, we checked the footage from the previous couple of days. To our astonishment, the man who claimed to be invisible was standing there in plain sight.

Magic in the Central African Republic seems a lot like a religion in itself, in that people use their faith in gri-gri as a kind of security blanket—a make-believe presence that keeps them courageous when they should be fearful. But while there's nothing wrong with relying on your religion for personal strength, it's a little harder to endorse shaman swindlers who charge militias a small fortune for something that's going to give them extra confidence while they're slaughtering a bunch of innocent men, women, and children.

Pauline and her merry band of PQ supporters have had a terrible month. via WikiCommons.

Parti Québécois operatives probably woke up this morning feeling pretty queasy, because their latest numbers are not good.

A recent Léger-Journal de Montréal poll has Philippe Couillard’s Liberal Party of Quebec enjoying a hefty lead over the PQ: 40 percent of respondents prefer the Liberals and only 33 prefer the PQ. This isn’t a fluke. As far as sample sizes go, this one, with over 3,600 respondents, is pretty big.

So how did the PQ get here? Just a few short weeks ago they thought they’d be cruising to a big win. There was talk of a PQ majority, there were questions about Couillard’s avowed federalist bent and charisma and the PQ’s very controversial secularism charter was, by most accounts, pretty popular.

But then it went all screwy. Or rather, the PQ went screwy with a combination of some bad hires, bizarro conspiracy theories, and relentless accusations of ignoring the principal issues (jobs, the economy) while focussing on distractions like the charter and a referendum on separating from Canada. Let’s look at these one by one to get an idea of how things went so sour for Quebec’s leading sovereignty party.

Bad Hires: Early on in the campaign, the PQ made a very big splash by announcing that local media baron and very rich guy Pierre-Karl Péladeau was joining the team. PKP (whose company, Quebecor, owned and shuttered my former employer, the Montreal Mirror) would add some economic savvy to a party accused of being composed of lightweights, artists, and intellectuals. It gave the party a jolt, but then people remembered PKP is a big-time union-buster—in 2011 he locked out unionized newsrooms at two of his biggest dailies and hired scabs. The unions, traditionally big supporters of the PQ, freaked out. And voters on the PQ’s left-wing are now eyeing Québec solidaire, a true-blue progressive lefty party with sovereignist leanings.

And then there are lower-profile, even weirder candidates. Take Jean Carrière, who was running in a Montreal riding until someone looked on his Facebook page and discovered a picture he posted of a woman flipping the bird, that was captioned: “Fuck Islam.” It was meant to be a pro-feminist statement, he said, because nothing says female freedom than slandering a religion! The PQ dropped him immediately (no big loss though: he was running in a fairly safe Liberal riding).

Then there's Louise Mailloux, a CEGEP professor who compared circumcision and baptism to rape, and repeated the absurd theory that the kosher food industry is a conspiracy created to make rabbis money. PQ leader Pauline Marois said she made those comments in the past and is now currently down with the party’s platform, which for all its talk of secularism does not read like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Mailloux is running against Québec solidaire’s leader in a gentrified Montreal riding and will likely lose. With Mailloux on our minds, we move on to…

Bizarro conspiracy theories: This weekend the PQ was in a tizzy because they thought students from Ontario and the rest of Canada are trying to “steal this election from Quebecers.” That’s a direct quote. Their fears stem from an election worker in a downtown Montreal riding who resigned last week, because he said there were too many anglophones and allophones (that’s people who speak neither English or French at home) registering to vote. So the PQ went on the offensive, until the theory was debunked by Elections Quebec on Sunday afternoon. Amid much confusion and accusations that students who are in fact eligible to vote are being denied their rights, things seem to have settled down, but not before the PQ was made to look paranoid, foolish, and cynical. (And not to sound conspiracy-minded myself, but the story was given a huge amount of play on Sunday by the Journal de Montréal—a daily newspaper jewel in Quebecor’s crown).

Losing the issues battle: The PQ’s raison d’être is an independent Quebec. That’s no secret. But support for a referendum on the issue is low, and the PQ's opponents, especially Couillard, know it. During last week’s televised debate, Couillard hammered home his accusation that Marois was preparing to launch Quebec into another referendum on sovereignty, while ignoring issues like jobs (Quebec lost 26,000 of them in February alone) and debt (at $175.5-billion, it’s the highest by far per capita in the country). Marois didn’t help her cause by equivocating on the issue, saying that a PQ government would only hold a referendum if the Quebec population was ready for one.

With less than two weeks to go before Election Day, it would be a mistake to write the PQ off completely. Strange things can happen in a very short time. But, it's certainly beginning to look as if Pauline Marois has suffered a stunning collapse in political fortunes, in the span of just over a month. 

@patricklejtenyi

Image via Pixabay user, Jodylehigh.
In a decision handed down earlier this month, the Federal Court of Canada ruled against Canada’s Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault, when it decided that the government can’t impose deadlines on any of its departments that take an unreasonable amount of time to respond to access to information requests.

The Federal Court case began after Legault filed a complaint on behalf of a citizen who requested documents concerning the sale of surplus Canadian military assets to Uruguay. Under the Access to Information Act, the public has the right to access government documents with limited exceptions, making the act immeasurably valuable to journalists reporting on the affairs of government. In this case, the curious citizen was forced to wait for nearly three years to receive the documents they requested from the Department of National Defence. In fact, the DND only delivered the documents after Legault filed her complaint with the federal court, possibly as an attempt to render the case moot and get it thrown out.

This situation might seem like an extreme example, but evidence has continually shown that since Conservatives entered power, the fortress that guards government information has become nearly impenetrable. Last year Canadian Journalists for Free Expression reported that from 1999-2000, the federal government disclosed information requested under the act about 40% of the time. By 2011-2012 under the Conservatives, this number dropped to 21%. In a recent Centre for Law and Democracy report Canada ranked 56 out of 96 countries for our quality of access to information laws.

It seems that there’s an overarching culture of secrecy within the federal government, which promotes a resistance to sharing information, even in the most arbitrary of cases. “I think we do see an awful lot of ‘public’ institutions that don’t really get the public nature of their information,” says Lisa Taylor, a lawyer and former journalist, who now teaches media law at Ryerson’s School of Journalism. “Nor do we see recognition that we’re owed this (information) unless there is a really good reason.”

How exactly did we get here? How does a government seemingly systematically decrease the accessibility of information that’s protected under a legislative act? Well, I’ll tell you. Under the Access to Information Act, if departments request an extension above and beyond the 30 days they are initially given to respond to the request, they are then only required to respond in a “reasonable period of time.” Obviously, this wording leaves room for massive interpretation, giving government departments carte blanche to conjure up any myriad of excuses to explain why they must delay the release of documents. Technical issues, interdepartmental communications, and nearly anything else, could constitute as a valid reason for delaying the process. The result is a possibly intentional stalling tactic that can leave journalists sitting on their hands for years as they wait for documents that are often integral to their reporting.

The difficulty in defining timeliness, when put in a judicial context, also explains why the Federal Court has little ground to stand on to merit punishing government departments that choose to delay. “What we have is a piece of legislation whose powers are more apparent than real. This is a pretty toothless act,” says Taylor.

This brings us to the justification of this month’s ruling against the information commissioner, and the eerie reality that Canadians are quite restricted when it comes to gaining insight into the affairs of our government. “Anyone should be concerned about acts that don’t give any real oversight and don’t give anyone the opportunity to try to resolve what’s clearly a problem,” says Taylor. “Because it gives us the illusion of laws protecting access to information.”

The DND case also reads like a bad omen for future transparencies, as it may set a precedent for government departments to get slap happy with dragging their heels on releasing information. “I think other departments could really take a page from DND’s playbook and be very confident that there is not going to be any significant scrutiny,” says Taylor. “Or even if there is scrutiny, it’s impotent scrutiny because nobody can really force the hand of any department.”

Even so, Winnipeg NDP MP Pat Martin is trying to do just that. He’s pushing a private member’s bill that aims to majorly reform the Access to Information Act. The proposed Bill C-567 would give considerably more power to the information commissioner—giving her the authority to order government departments to produce information under a deadline she deems appropriate. But Taylor is skeptical of a bill that gives heavy power to a non-elected official. “With Martin’s proposal, as much as it would completely resolve situations like the DND debacle, it creates a giant stick for the information commissioner to carry.” Bill C-567 goes into its second hour of debate on March 29.

Meanwhile, the information commissioner has until April 2^nd to decide whether she would like to file an appeal with the Federal Court. A spokesperson for the office of the information commissioner responded via email saying they were “analyzing the decision and considering our options.”

Taylor hopes the decision is appealed, and eventually finds its way to the Supreme Court, if only for the exposure. “It would allow if nothing else for people to maybe spill some more ink on this,” she says. “And maybe get people more engaged in the discussion.”

What will it really take for Canada to gain a healthier level of government transparency? At this rate, we may never know.
 

@GraceLisaScott

On Friday, we got two strangers to have an awkward first date in the apartment above our London pub, the Old Blue Last.

We livestreamed the date—which lasted three hours—on our website. They didn't fall in love.

Tons of people watched, though, so here are the highlights.

Look out for more Friday Live! streams to distract you from the futility of Friday afternoons coming in the weeks ahead.

Ukrainians protesting the Russian media's selective coverage of the crisis in Crimea (Image by Ilya Varlamov)

Food isn’t just for eating. Just ask the suburban teenagers who use Mentos to make bottle rockets, or the "sploshers" who get hard-ons for baked beans. There's also a long history of protesters using food as their weapon of choice. We’re not talking razor blades embedded inside pizza crusts or watermelons shoved into cannons (although that’d be pretty great), more the old school egg-in-the-face business that makes the recipient of some flying foodstuff look like an absolute tit. Having to wipe a thick film of viscous yolk from your eyes doesn't do wonders for a politician's gravitas.

Launching food missiles has long been a good middle ground for protesters who seek to make more of an impact than they would by handing out pamphlets but who don't quite want to drive a truckload of explosives through the palace gates. Last week, this logic led to the Russian consulate in Odessa resembling the aftermath of a stag do in Bella Italia. Apparently, in both Ukrainian and Russian, to “hang noodles on one's ears” means to be taking the piss, which is exactly what a group of Ukrainians felt that the Russian media were doing with their dubious coverage of the crisis in Crimea. And so they set about covering the fences and gates of the consulate with a healthy portion of noodles, garnished with a few liters of ketchup.

A Ukrainian protester going nuts with the sauce at the Russian consulate (Image by Ilya Varlamov)

The first recorded instance of stickin' it to the man with perishables dates back to 63 AD, when Vespasian, Roman governor of what is now Tunisia and Libya, was pelted with turnips. Protesting punitive policies and general financial hardship, his subjects rained an almighty veg storm down upon him, though there are no records relating to the protesters' accuracy. There’s irony in there somewhere, but, to be fair, turnips make better skull-bruisers than they do soups, so who can blame them? Despite his eventual rise to emperor, it seems foul foods plagued Vespasian to his last day, when he died from a severe case of diarrhea. Incidentally, his belief and wish that “an emperor should die on his feet,” coupled with an extreme case of the shits, must have made for quite an exit.

Protest food has come a long way since the Roman turnip. One of the most brilliant modern-day examples is the cream pie. Beloved of the silent film directors of the early part of the last century, the cream pie was popularized as a form of protest in the 1970s. In fact, there are many activist groups who have based their entire ethos on the cream pie, including Al Pieda, the Biotic Baking Brigade, and the Entartistes, a member of which goes by the name of Pope Tart. You probably wouldn't want to spend much time with these people, but at least there's some flair for wordplay.

One of the earliest and most notable pieings was visited upon Anita Bryant, a pop sensation from 1950s USA who famously hated gays. While trying to rationalize her prejudices at a press conference in 1977, she received a substantial pie to the face from a gay-rights campaigner. Stranger than the pieing itself was the reaction: The thrower was instantly restrained and made to wait while Bryant and her husband fell immediately into prayer, presumably in an attempt to save his gay, pie-throwing soul. Give "cream pie" a quick google nowadays, and perhaps you'll look to the heavens, too, as you're confronted with an array of clowns and gross porn vaginas.

A yogurt-throwing Greek teddy boy being paraded through the streets of Athens (image via exiledonline.com)

For some malcontents, the choice of food is symbolic. The Greek practice of yaourtama, for example, is the act of throwing yogurt over someone as a form of protest. The practice seems to have originated among the Greek teddy boys of the 50s, who took to yogurting the "squares" of their day. The popularity of the trend was accelerated by the introduction of plastic pots (as opposed to ceramic), giving birth to perfect, portable yogurt bombs. It became such an issue that, in 1958, the Greek government introduced the controversial Law 4000 to curb it. Under the law, anyone caught slinging tzatziki or the like at his elders could be arrested, have his head shaved and the turn-ups in his jeans snipped before being paraded through the streets of Athens like a prize cow with weird pants on.

This draconian law was abolished in the 80s, but the power of yaourtama lives on, with the recent economic crisis in Greece sparking a fresh round of both fist and yogurt dousings. In 2012, days after Greek reporter Panagiotis Vourhas interviewed Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris on his show, protesters—apparently aggrieved that Kasidiaris was allowed the airtime—broke into the news studio and gave Vourhas what has to be one of the most accurate and effective yogurtings in history.

Look at it. It just keeps coming:

It's not just the Greeks taking their national cuisine to the frontline, though. You'll probably remember that, back in March 2009, Peter Mandelson copped a face full of green custard due to his support for a third runway at Heathrow. It wasn't quite the Euromaidan—rather, one mumsy woman from a group called Plane Stupid going a bit nuts in a gillet. The whole episode is so awkwardly British I'm surprised they didn't shake hands afterwards. Still, it was a pretty good shot, and there remain only two runways at Heathrow, so it must have done the trick. It is also rumoured that die-hard Diana fans once ambushed Camilla Parker Bowles in a Sainsbury's parking lot and nailed her with bread rolls. Those crazy fuckers.

While the vast majority of history's youth-led food protests have been carried out by progressive types, a group of Australian schoolboys bucked the trend in 2013, when they threw sandwiches at Prime Minister Julia Gillard on two separate occasions. It was argued by Slate that the attacks were deliberately symbolic of the sexist "make me a sandwich" meme, to remind the Prime Minister that a woman's real place is in the kitchen, not bloody parliament! But these were 15-year-old boys, and as frightening as it would be to think that Australia is overrun with teenage misogynists, Gillard laughed off the sandwich assault as "a little act of high jinks."

Still, Gillard is gone now. And you know who the new prime minister of Australia is? A massive misogynist.

But there is one particular food item that surpasses all others in the food-weapons arms race. Loved by anarchists and trick-or-treaters alike is the egg, a.k.a. a portable, well-weighted capsule of explosive, foul-smelling chicken ovum. Another Labor Party OG was involved in one of the most famous eggings of recent times. In 2001, a disgruntled farmer with a mullet threw an egg point-blank at the then-deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in protest against the Blair government's lack of support for farmers. Prescott, a former boxer, responded with a food protest of his own and threw one of his righteous fists of ham into the face of the young Lovejoy lookalike.

Other famous egg receivers ("eggees"?) include Arnold Schwarzenegger (brushed it off like a boss), Ed Miliband (laughed it off like it happened all the time), David Blaine (egged when he was living in that glass box, so probably too hungry to give a shit), everyone's favorite racist, Nick Griffin (bundled away by security like a hysterical guest on Jerry Springer), and the recently deposed Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Not everyone handles an egging well, or any covering with a foodstuff, even if on camera. Would you, if your eyelashes were sticking together with bits of shell and unfertilized baby chicken? Perhaps it's a measure of an individual's confidence, his ease with his position and the pitfalls that come with it, that determines how well a person handles a run-by egging.

By this logic, Yanukovych had no hope. During his first presidential election campaign he was struck by an egg as he stepped off the bus. After a quick examination of the mess on his jacket, he promptly hit the floor as if he'd been shot. Maybe it was hard-boiled.

Follow Mitch Syrett on Twitter.

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie (front, with the white beard and glasses) and 47 other defendants stand behind bars during the trial of Brotherhood members at a Cairo courtroom on March 6, 2014. Photo via Ahmed Jamil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Yesterday, an Egyptian court sentenced 529 alleged Muslim Brotherhood supporters to death—the largest single batch of simultaneous death sentences issued in recent memory, according to Amnesty International. The condemned are accused of attacking a police station in the Minya governorate, just south of Cairo, last year, stealing weapons, killing an officer, and trying to kill two more.

Even though many of them are still protesting their innocence, it took only two days to find more than 500 people guilty of killing one man. That stands in stark contrast to the fact that, more than three years after the first Egyptian uprising, not one police officer has been convicted of killing protesters—despite the hundreds of civilian deaths at the hands of security services during that time.

It’s not much of a surprise that this will go down as one of the quickest—as well as one of the largest—mass death penalty sentences in history. The trial began on Saturday and finished on Monday, and normal legal procedures, or even a vague sense of due process, were almost completely ignored. Defense lawyers said they had no time to read the 3,000-page case file and weren’t allowed to question witnesses for the prosecution.

When the judge announced the death sentences, no witnesses had been cross-examined, and the majority of defendants and their lawyers had been excluded from the courtroom.

"This is the collapse of the justice system in Egypt," said Ali Kamal, one of the lawyers for the accused.

The event that the condemned took part in was just one of many aggressive acts against police and Christian property following the deaths of around 900 people during the clearance of a Cairo sit-in last August, which was led by the Brotherhood in opposition to their ousting from power the previous month.

The verdict is yet another sign that Egypt's establishment has no intention of easing up on Brotherhood supporters, with more than 16,000 already arrested since former president and Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi was deposed by the military in July of last year.

Thankfully, it's likely that a more reasonable judge will eventually overturn the sentence and maybe even the guilty verdict, and the country's leading religious official also has the option to commute the verdict. But in the meantime, the convicted and their families must live in the shadow of an imminent execution.

A burned-out Minya church that was destroyed in the same wave of violence that led to the death of the police officer. Photo by Nadine Marroushi

Yesterday, I spoke to one of those sentenced to death, as well as five family members of the condemned. They said that none of the accused were guilty, which is slightly questionable—someone was murdered, after all. But it clearly doesn't take more than 500 people to kill one man.

One man said that his brother, who was sentenced to death in absentia, was profoundly disabled and would be physically incapable of attacking a policeman. Another, a medical student in hiding at a friend's house, told me that he had been hundreds of miles away at the time the police station was attacked.

More than 400 of the defendants are not in custody. Ezzat Mohamed, who’s currently in hiding away from his home in Minya, is one of them. His wife, Nihad, said that he was innocent and called the sentence a "tragedy,” adding that her four children—aged from six to 17 years—were finding it hard to understand what was happening.

She kept repeating in Arabic, "Allah suffices for me, for he is the best disposer of affairs," a line from the Qur’an that the devout use to soothe themselves in times of trouble.

Her 17-year-old daughter, Nada, spoke to me on the phone in broken English. "It's a horrible feeling, that you lost someone from your family," she said. "My father is a very kind, respectable person."

She paused, before reverting to Arabic and whispering, “Down with the military government."

The sheer volume of the sentences and the grotesque flippancy surrounding them will surely do nothing but harden the polarization between supporters of Morsi's Brotherhood and backers of the military-installed administration, which resigned unexpectedly yesterday, paving the way for Commander-in-Chief Abdel Fattah al Sisi to make a bid for the country’s presidency.

Haithem Zeidan, a lawyer practicing in Cairo, who describes himself as "pro-army," told me that the death penalty decision was not final and would probably be reversed, but said that he welcomed it anyway. Like millions of other Egyptians, he believes the Brotherhood are a terrorist organization, as they were officially designated by the interim government last December (though no evidence has been provided to support the classification).

"This verdict reduces the terrorist movement and deters them from doing these things again," said Zeidan. Like many, he believes that harsh repression is a legitimate and effective deterrent against the Islamist opposition.

Things could get even worse today, as 683 more people accused of involvement in the Minya violence are appearing before the same judge. One of the accused is Mohammed Badie, the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood, the organization’s leading figure.

Beyond the Brotherhood, there is a group of militants who have taken to shooting individual policeman dead while they're isolated at checkpoints. Some young Brotherhood activists are now moving closer to the idea that "anything below bullets" is an acceptable response to state violence, including targeting individual officials for nonlethal reprisal attacks.

If Mohammed Badie is sentenced to death—and even if that sentence is ultimately commuted—it's likely that the response from Brotherhood members won't be nearly as restrained as it has been in the past.

Follow Tom Dale on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

From the all-out civil war in Syria to the internet restrictions in Turkey and the return of military rule in Egypt, the revolutionary youth of the Arab Spring seem to be facing one hurdle after another. VICE obtained an exclusive copy of a study that concluded that the “Arab Spring” seems to have been just a “translation mistake.” Additionally, there is no evidence at all to support the theory that people in the Middle East had revolted against their rulers. The revelations come as an embarrassment to Western media outlets that have been claiming for three years that people from Tunisia to Syria were engaged in popular uprisings, as it becomes apparent that the misperception was a result of a multitude of translation mistakes by reporters and commentators who are not sufficiently versed in Arabic.

The study that VICE obtained a copy of prior to publication was conducted by a panel of European and American experts and was funded by the government of Saudi Arabia, but there is nothing to suggest that it had ulterior motives in commissioning the report beyond its commitment to truth and accuracy in reporting. The experts analyzed hundreds of videos and articles and recorded many witness testimonies that all firmly point to a giant misunderstanding.

According to the report, Western reporters in Tunisia and Egypt were confused by the scenes of thousands of people on the streets and wrongly assumed that they were protesting against the regimes when in fact they were spontaneously expressing their support for their leaders. Upon reading the reports in the Western press, Tunisia’s former president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, a sensitive and considerate leader much beloved by his people, felt deeply hurt and decided to leave power before the truth emerged.

A similar scenario was repeated in Egypt, when President Hosni Mubarak decided to leave power rather than risk upsetting his people. The report points out to Western support of the two presidents as evidence of their essential goodness, as it is inconceivable that the Western powers would support corrupt dictatorial regimes.

A crucial piece of evidence was the mistranslation of the phrase al sha’ab yurid ithbat al nizam (the people want the stability of the regime) as al sha’ab yurid isqat al nizam (the people want the fall of the regime). The reporters quizzed about this claimed that it was very loud during these demonstrations, and it was an honest mistake than anyone could make.

Unfortunately, events quickly spiraled out of control before anyone could correct these mistakes, and as the celebrations spread to other Arab countries, the Western press continued to misinterpret them as protests against the rulers. The study harshly criticized lack of familiarity with Arab culture and norms and poor language skills for these failings, which have inadvertently destabilized the region and perhaps the entire world for years to come.

A spokesman for the Saudi government outlined the reasons for commissioning the study arguing that the Kingdom has always been interested in promoting cultural understanding and accuracy of reporting, so it decided to use its resources to correct this giant mistake. “Arab people have huge respect for their leaders, and protests have no place in our culture. Sadly, foreign reporters misinterpreted these events due to their lack of training in cultural sensitivity and poor grasp of the complex Arab language,” he said.

Tragically it seems that the very first public gathering that sparked the theory of an “Arab Spring” was a surprise birthday party that people in one Tunisian town had planned for their leader and that Western journalists present misinterpreted as a demonstration. The passionate and raucous nature of Arab celebrations was lost on the reporters, who are predisposed to see Arabs as angry mobs. The report recommends further investment by Western governments and media outlets in cultural sensitivity training to overcome those barriers in the future.

The Saudi spokesman urged everyone involved to come together to put a line underneath this chapter, citing his government’s effort to end the misunderstanding in Egypt and repair the damage done by misguided Western reporting. “We are very close to re-establishing the situation exactly as it was in 2010 before all of this started. Please urge your governments to support us in correcting this historical error.” He lamented how a small translation mistake caused this much damage, and urged Western reporters to rely on official version of events in the future to avoid such confusion.

Karl Sharro is an architect, writer, satirist, and commentator on the Middle East. He has written for a number of international publications and writes a blog, Karl reMarks, about Middle Eastern politics and culture, with occasional forays into satire. Follow him on Twitter.

Image by Alex Horne

It’s not exactly news that people do drugs in college. But in recent years there’s been a flurry of reports from both the UK and here in the US that suggest students are increasingly getting high to help them do their work, rather than to block out its existence until the day it's due.

The majority of media attention awarded to these “smart drugs” so far has been directed at their misuse, given that some of the most popular substances—like Ritalin, Adderall, and modafinil—were originally developed to combat specific disorders, such as ADHD or narcolepsy. But there’s also been a steady rise in the use of supplements designed to improve brainpower in healthy adults over extended periods of time, as opposed to the brief but efficient effect you’ll get from using any of the time-tested prescription drugs.

These supplements are known as nootropics and range from the mundane (ginseng) to the unpronounceable (phenylalanine). As with the prescription drugs, little is known about their long-term side effects.

It’s difficult to draw any clear distinctions between nootropics and other brain-boosting drugs, but if you, like many others, share the views of John Harris—professor of bioethics at Manchester University in England—there’s very little need to draw those distinctions in the first place. “I’m interested in cognitive-enhancing drugs," he said. "How you define nootropics doesn’t interest me.”

Of course, not everyone agrees. Corneliu E Giurgea, a Romanian psychologist and chemist, synthesized piracetam—the first nootropic—in 1964 and established an exact set of criteria in doing so. For Giurgea, nootropics must enhance learning acquisition, increase the coupling of the brain’s hemispheres, and improve executive processing (that last one involves tasks such as planning, paying attention, and spatial awareness). Importantly, these drugs must also be non-toxic and non-addictive.

Due to the wide variety of supplements classed as nootropics, there’s no single way of explaining how they work. Broadly speaking, however, nootropics achieve their effects by altering the supply of neurochemicals, enzymes, or hormones in the brain. Giurgea’s piracetam, for example, can improve the memory of users by altering the levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which, in turn, affects the plasticity of synapses in the brain (the extent to which entire brain structures, and the brain itself, can change from experiences). We understand our memories to be composed of complex matrices of synapses, and our ability to access them is related to how well they can link. Improved plasticity makes it easier for synapses to hook up.

Three of the most popular British vendors (Nootropics.co.uk, Intellimeds.co.uk, and SmartNootropics.co.uk) have all appeared in the last two years, so it’s clear that there’s been a recent surge in the popularity of nootropics. However, the benefits of some of the substances used to make the supplements have been known for years. We all know the productivity perks of caffeine, for instance, and the brain-boosting power of fish oil has been touted for as long as any of us can remember (with or without the help of nootropics). For those reasons, caffeine and fish oil form the base of many nootropic “stacks”—super-effective nootropic combinations.

Image by Johnny Mellor

Sean Duke is an American neuropharmacologist who specializes in devising stacks. He refers to those who take nootropics as “noonauts” and claims that they "are the mental equivalent of bodybuilders." On the nootropics Subreddit—and a number of other online message boards—noonauts from all corners of society come together to obsess over drug regimens and optimizing doses and boast about how many books they can mentally bench-press.

Duke’s steroids allegory also works on a legal level. As with all drugs, the government’s method for legislating cognitive enhancers is scattershot at best. Modafinil—a substance created to treat narcolepsy—cannot be sold legally without a prescription in the UK, but it is legal to import for personal use. The same goes for piracetam. This creates a pretty illogical situation in which UK suppliers can sell experimental nootropics unimpeded but cannot legally sell piracetam—a substance that has been thoroughly proven as safe for more than 40 years.

Duke says of humans, “We are all nootnauts; some of us just try harder.” And it’s a sentiment that’s been true throughout our history. Great advances in our evolution have been precipitated by adjustments to our diets. Our brains swelled when we began eating meat 2.3 million years ago. Then, a million years later, our ability to cook food gave rise to Homo erectus, our closest ancestor, who developed a digestive system 20 percent smaller and a brain 20 percent larger than his predecessors.

In the 1950s, Britain and America experimented with mind-altering technology for military gain. One of the CIA’s most cartoonishly evil projects, MKUltra, investigated the effects of psychotropic drugs, shock therapy, and hypnosis on participants, some willing and some not. Scientists attempted to make their subjects better at dealing with torture or more likely to tell the truth, and worked to “increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.” However, the science backfired, and the agency’s attempts to control the human mind had remarkably counterproductive results.

Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter were two volunteers for the MKUltra experiment at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, a mental health facility in California. Kesey spent time talking to the patients there and decided that they were socially marginalized rather than insane. His experiences inspired him to write the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest. Hunter would go on to join The Grateful Dead, and it is said that he was under the influence of the MKUltra experiments when he wrote the words to “China Cat Sunflower.”

Both figures played a seminal role in arguably the biggest cultural movement of the 20th Century—one that endorsed the use of psychedelics for their ability to broaden horizons and produce a new kind of society. 

Image by Johnny Mellor

Timothy Leary, a close friend of Kesey's, took a scientific approach to expanding consciousness. In 1964, he published The Psychedelic Experience, which laid out a practical framework for experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. In Romania, in the same year, Giurgea published The Fundamentals to the Pharmacology of the Mind, in which he stated: “Man is not going to wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.”

In the eyes of the scientific community, Leary’s passion for his subject transformed him from detached researcher to evangelist—the pervasive memory of him is of a guy who dropped acid with Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon; no one really remembers any meaningful data concerning the effects psychoactive drugs have on someone’s brain. Giurgea’s work, however, became a field of serious research.

Studies have repeatedly shown the practical benefits of nootropics, but their impact on society has been less explosive than Leary’s work. This is, in part, because the effectiveness of nootropics is dependent on an individual’s neurochemistry, which is closely tied to weight, sleep patterns, and even mood, meaning the results of their use can vary hugely.

As Leary got older, his focus moved from drugs to technology. He proclaimed that “the PC is the LSD of the 90s” and began what came to be known as the cyberpunk movement. Many adherents of the subculture went on to work in Silicon Valley, and it was from here that the Information Age unfolded.

In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: “There were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days.” The exact details of what he said were quickly proven to be incorrect, but we exist in a world of overwhelming information nevertheless. We are now expected to deal with an exorbitant amount of data endlessly streaming to us from every corner of our lives, and our natural response to this has been inadequate; we have no time to question fictions if they suit our worldview—the first paragraph of a Wikipedia page is as much knowledge as we need to get by. 

Image by Alex Horne

Despite our natural ineptitude at managing this volume of data, we are increasingly treated like information processors in many aspects of life. Performance targets, efficiency ratings, and calculated margins of error have become the parameters we work within. In education, even the most abstract and non-prescriptive subjects are being reduced to an exercise in memorizing facts. And in attempts to plan and organize society, we are treated as predictable machines. Instead of Leary’s vision that computers would liberate us, we are becoming the computers ourselves.

Wearable technology like Google Glass is the logical extension of this concept, minimizing the distinction between our devices and us. It keeps us fed with information and ensures we are never offline. But can we adapt to such an existence? Maybe nootropics can help us come full circle.

Smart drugs could be seen as the key to unlocking our full potential within the narrow confines of a society reliant on technology. In a Daily Mail piece, for example, a “James,” a Cambridge student, said that, when taking modafinil, “Your brain worked more like a computer as it processed information.” And although the government still doesn’t quite know what to do with nootropics, John Harris thinks they could be fundamental to the future of education: “They may even be provided to all students as a matter of course,” he said.

The fact remains, however, that we are not information processors, and the human brain cannot be fully understood in terms of chemistry. Duke said: “If we were just chemicals, how can one explain free will? Free will ignores the energy-defined constraints of chemistry.” Ultimately, free will is more powerful than our chemical makeup. The brain plasticity that piracetam aids is consciously guided whenever we make a decision to learn a new language or to play an instrument.

So while smart drugs can provide an edge in a world where processing power is paramount, viewing them as a universal cure risks reducing humans to automatons. Duke says: “The jury is still out on these drugs being evolutionary as opposed to de-evolutionary. How much are we guiding our brain to make connections that cannot be re-visited without the aid of the nootropics? We certainly don't know now, and I'm not sure if we ever will.” What he’s saying is that if we start providing cognitive enhancers to children, we may be narrowing their future capabilities, prioritizing their functionality over their creativity and individuality.

William Gibson, another famous cyberpunk, once said: "Technologies are morally neutral until we apply them.” Many noonauts are currently enhancing their lives with brain-boosting supplements, but if cognitive enhancers become normalized, which is more likely: that we become a society filled with intellectual experts, or that our increased capacity for work results in a larger workload?

Smartphones mean the office is always in our pocket. Smart drugs could mean the office is always in our minds. Which sounds like a really shitty place to end up.

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on TV. Photo by Ekin Özbiçer

It was 11P M on a Thursday night in Yeniköy, a neighborhood in the northern part of Istanbul. My wife and I sat in our living room, watching Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, address his followers at a pre-election rally in the city of Bursa. The rant was about Twitter. “Twitter, shwitter!” he yelled at an ecstatic crowd. “We’re going to uproot it! I don’t care what the international community says. We’re dealing with an international conspiracy here!”

I switched the channel, and there it was again: Erdogan's face, contorted and angry. Another channel, the same face—neatly trimmed, Islam-approved mustache bobbing up and down as he continued to shout about the evils of social media, threatening to shut down Twitter and other social networking sites.

This scapegoating wasn't anything particularly new, either; it's just that the target had changed. Previously, he's blamed an elusive “interest rate lobby,” the US, Israel, "the atheists," and even topless men dressed in leather for the violence and economic losses that came out of the massive Gezi protests last summer. Now Twitter is the guilty party. “Twitter and all [the other social media outlets]—none of them are bigger than our nation," he proclaimed. The following day, authorities blocked access to Twitter—a move that was denounced by President Abdullah Gül.

Given that a leaked wiretap revealing the illicit goings-on of his government has been released in segments on Twitter every day for the past month, Erdogan’s beef with the micro-messaging site isn't exactly surprising. The government is attributing these leaks to a mysterious “parallel state” (a former suspect was the "robot lobby"), implying that the secretive Fethullah Gülen—a past ally of Erdogan's, but now a rival Islamist leader living in exile in Pennsylvania—is responsible.  

The leaks started surfacing right after some 1,700 police officers were reassigned and roughly 120 judges and prosecutors were implicated in the "December 17 Operation"—a criminal investigation into government corruption. A number of high profile personalities (including the sons of some of Erdogan’s closest associates) have already been arrested on charges of embezzlement, bribery, smuggling, and international money laundering. Inquiries are ongoing.

The source of the leaks are two suggestively named Twitter accounts—Haramzadeler (“Sons of sinners”) and Baş Çalan (“Prime Thief”)—which have outed Erdogan and his closest stooges’ private conversations. The (unproven) leaks have implied that there are no limits to the prime minister’s reach, suggesting he single-handedly micro-managed the fate of controversial real estate development projects and handpicked university deans (a role reserved for the president), supreme court judges (a role reserved for the High Commission of Judges and Prosecutors, a supposedly independent body), and even popular football chairmen.

The public believed it to be a case of self-censorship when privately owned national news channels decided to broadcast cooking shows and documentaries about penguins during the massive Gezi protests, but it appears that nearly all of those decisions had been down to Erdogan. He reportedly watched every single TV show—even following the news tickers along the bottom of the screen—and read every piece of news he could.

He allegedly instructed his allies on the editorial boards to interfere with the content he disliked, pulled newscasters off the air, and fired voices too critical for his taste. The illicit—and yet to be verified—leaks give the impression of a media system where all the main players, thanks to their interest in maintaining government contracts, had been not only complying but actively cooperating with the government and its demands.

Photo by Çağlar Kanzık

Back to that ordinary Thursday night. A few hours after Erdogan’s rant about Twitter, we switched the channel to CNN Türk. On screen was the journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, a known government apologist, who was commenting on the speech we'd just watched:

[Forces] are trying to redesign Turkey through publishing illegal recordings on this internet [sic]. Unlike how it would play out in the US, UK, or France, the court orders are not fulfilled by Twitter or Facebook. If someone listened to President Obama’s private calls illegally and leaked them on Twitter, we know they would be promptly packed away to Guantánamo. When it comes to Turkey, though, nobody cares about court orders or protection of the private lives of its citizens. They have to come open their offices here and respect the Turkish law—that’s what the PM meant. Otherwise he neither has [the] will nor the power to shut Twitter down, and I would be the first to oppose if he did.

It seemed that Selvi was totally oblivious to the events that followed the rise of WikiLeaks and its massive campaign against America's military and government, in that all the subpoenas, take-down notices, and identity requests they sent to Twitter admins achieved absolutely nothing.

In fact, Erdogan and his co-conspirators are much luckier than their Western counterparts in many ways. As the leaks show, their focus has been largely local or, at most, regional—an illegal shipment of gold to Iran here, a bribe from Dubai there, a little power mongering and corruption on the side. This stuff is nowhere near as controversial as Edward Snowden’s NSA/GCHQ/PRISM leaks, which exposed outrageous misconduct on a global scale.

And what happened there? Well, Snowden won't be going back to Virginia any time soon, but he isn't exactly locked up in Guantánamo, either. And despite all the uproar, it seems that operations at the British and American intelligence agencies are continuing as normal.

Erdogan and his allies need to understand what their Western counterparts have already grasped—that without citizens being able to vent through social media, you run the risk of them taking their frustrations to the street. And as the governments of Turkey’s surrounding countries saw during the Arab Spring, Molotov cocktails and braying mobs are much better at toppling rulers than angry tweets and Facebook updates.

Instead of turning to violence, we spend every day waiting for the next leak, like our parents spent every week waiting for a new episode of Dallas. And like J. R. Ewing, Erdogan has become a baddy of light entertainment—someone we love to hate, just another player in a society obsessed with spectacle.     

That's why all the leaks in the world ultimately won't make any difference to Erdogan or his government. Accepting the social media response to a government scandal has the power to prevent legitimate physical action—it turns the outrage into another storyline within the grand spectacle, morphing Erdogan from a tyrant into a TV villain. Which is exactly why he needs to drop his assault on Twitter, because, in the end, people will naturally lose interest in the drama. Just like Berlusconi, Bush, and Sarkozy, the ratings will drop, and Erdogan will fade away into obscurity.   

For Los Angeles locals, Venice has always been a cheery, dirty microcosm daycation. The beach is filled with decades-old locals who are mostly leathery hippies, peacefully maintaining it as their own, plus a permanently homeless population just looking for a grassy spot to get drunk and nap.

Ever since the gangs of the 90s were priced out by techies and "creative professionals" creeping in from neighboring white-bread Santa Monica and yacht-bread Marina Del Ray, there’s been a calm, commercial peace with the police, allowing the street vendors to hawk their handmade wares.

Unfortunately, the “anything goes, free love” vibe also attracts drug addicts and loud party boys looking to get fucked up, with no regard for cleanliness or spiritual enlightenment via drumming.

In 2012, I briefly lived in a coke dealer’s unfinished house off the beach, so I knew the background police presence was nothing new, but new ordinances on vending and excessive noise have ended in a series of violent altercation between cops and locals at the infamous weekend drum circle. The most recent was Sunday, so I drove down to see what had changed.

When I arrived around 4:20 PM, the drumming was just picking up. Concentric circles of decreasing levels of involvement defined their participants. The final circle consisted of vulture-like SUVs in slow orbit around the celebration, picking off those drinking from glass bottles or sucking down blunts in plain sight.

I approached an officer idling in his car some 20 feet from the edge of the drum circle. He seemed more than willing to talk—friendly even—behind menacing wraparound shades while his partners prepared for the worst.

I asked him if they expected a bigger police presence than normal: “Oh yeah,” Officer Mark said. “Last week, people got drunk and high and started throwing bottles at us when we shut down the drum circle.”

The relatively recent noise ordinance allows the LAPD to stop the drumming, but in doing so effectively pushes the crowd off the beach, despite their right to stay until midnight, sans “excessive noise." Mark continued, “Now, you’re not allowed to smoke weed or drink alcohol, and you’re definitely not allowed to throw glass at police officers.”

Something crackled over the radio and Mark excused himself before gunning it towards the boardwalk. Three more SUVs whipped past me with their lights blaring, and some ten officers piled out to descend on a potentially homeless guy and his unleashed dog. Clearly, he was a local.

While two cops put him in handcuffs, the rest milled around. An artist building the Sphinx out of sand on the sidewalk told me it was just a couple dudes in an argument, nothing serious. Fights on Venice Beach are a regular occurrence, but the flurry of police out of seemingly nowhere felt new.

The latest ordinances—and the increased police force—were bolstered by a wealthy community looking to preserve the cultural epicenter they’d paid through the nose to live in, missing the point that the original community existed solely because of a lack of such ordinances. Hippies, performance artists, street vendors, and that guy on roller-skates playing Hendrix see curfews and permits as antithetical to their very existence.

The previous lack of a police presence hinged on the cooperation of Venice’s residents, the ringleader of which appeared to be an older orange-ish gentleman with long white hair and a matching beard. He was standing on an upturned metal barrel waving a “Peace to All Nations” flag, dancing and occasionally fist-bumping with similarly tanned locals.

The 66-year-old "Eagle Soaring Chief" of Venice Beach wore a security officer badge on his tattered, open shirt. He looked like he’d been ripening in the sun for the past 12 years.

As a self-appointed ambassador to the people, the Chief says he's earned the right to peacefully regulate “his” beach, working with the locals to take care of problems the police either can’t or won’t deal with. “If they don’t like it, I’ll ban them from the beach. The police can’t ban people, I can,” the Chief of the Beach told me.

“I’ve been here for 66 years, [the police] just showed up six days, six minutes ago. I don’t blame them, but hey I don’t want alcoholics on this beach either. I don’t want drug addicts on this beach. If I catch anybody fighting it—see my teeth?  That’s why they’re all knocked out, sir.”

The Chief explained that the previous week’s altercation was the result of three “knucklehead” drummers nobody knew, and that the police crackdown was in response to three plastic bottles thrown from the boardwalk, not glass.

Despite the encroaching presence of the LAPD, many of the locals seemed content with their presence, as it meant fewer drug addicts and troublemakers, although they too seemed oblivious to the effects of increased regulation.

For the next few hours till sundown, the crowd doubled in size, splitting into two interconnected circles. The Chief wandered around, smiling and laughing. Every hour another SUV would pull up to the crowd and empty a few officers onto the sand.

With 20 minutes to go, a half-dozen officers surrounded the officer in charge, Sgt. Brian Gura. I asked him how many he had prepared and he gestured towards the boardwalk, “Enough. We want to avoid a repeat of last week.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but lining the boardwalk must have been at least 30 officers ready to grab the incoming crowd if things got ugly. As the sun dipped into the water, the cops on the beach piled into their cars and turned on the Christmas lights, driving slowly and deliberately towards the crowd.

The Chief waved towards the drummers and sliced his hand through the air as if to say, “We’re done!” A few other regulars did the same, and about half the crowd dispersed towards the boardwalk as Sgt. Gura exited his car, flanked by three officers, and made his way towards the still dancing center. He smiled as they cleared out.

One guy came up to them filming on his iPhone, demanding an explanation for the intimidating police tactics. Gura replied, “I'm not trying to intimidate you, you're just very short and I'm very tall, there's nothing I can do about that.” People laughed, order had been restored. A few idiots kept shouting “TURN DOWN FOR WHAT?”

Back at the boardwalk, as police began to leave, a few stayed to talk to and joke with the regulars; tensions gone and night falling. The Chief came up behind me, put his hand on my shoulder and pointed at the diminishing taillights. “We’re alright now” he said with an air of eternal hope, “it’s mutual.”

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

Nobody I talk to under the age of 40 knows the work of Neil Winokur. This seems odd in light of the 68-year-old photographer’s achievements: His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few. MoMA included him in its important 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. In 1994 the Smithsonian published a monograph of his pictures, titled Everyday Things. By objective standards, he is an important artist. So why does a Google image search of his name retrieve only a narrow selection of the hundreds of photographs Neil has exhibited over the course of his career?

I will admit that, until a photography-critic friend mentioned Neil to me a couple of months ago, I had not heard of him either. Why was his work not covered in my college photo-history classes? Most artists with his credentials go on to found cult-like educational institutes or build extravagant palazzos. They do attention-getting things like performing with Lady Gaga or Jay-Z.

When I went to visit Neil at the quiet Manhattan apartment where he lives with his wife, their twins, and their two cats, the reasons I hadn’t seen him in recent headlines became clear to me. He’s not that kind of artist. This is a grounded man who is incredibly dedicated to his family. He has worked as a used-book buyer at New York’s Strand bookstore for the past four decades, and so of course his house is filled with books.

Neil’s work proposes that it is possible to depict a culture through its most ordinary objects. A native New Yorker, he applied this logic to his hometown for the 1999 series New York. He lured the viewer into these starkly graphic tableaux with a color wheel of luminously atmospheric backgrounds, giving each object a great deal of importance. “Andy Warhol said that everybody has 15 minutes of fame,” Neil told me. “I do still lifes because I think these objects should get theirs.” These objects are products of our society, so they can be held up as mirrors to it. As Neil puts it, “I try to photograph objects that are archetypal, objects that have a meaning to society beyond themselves. An American flag, a glass of water. I did a toilet, and it sold out almost immediately.” —Matthew Leifheit

Images courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.