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The VICE Reader: An Excerpt from 'New Orleans: The Underground Guide'

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This month a horde of out-of-towners will descend on New Orleans for New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. JazzFest celebrates traditional Louisiana culture and heritage and showcases some high-profile local acts while serving up a heaping mound of ultra-mainstream acts like Robin Thicke, Arcade Fire, Bruce Springsteen, and Eric Clapton. Those who are in New Orleans for the festival will likely spend days in the city without dipping into the rich array of music played in these parts every night, most of which will never wind up on the JazzFest stage.

Earlier this year, the third edition of my book New Orleans: The Underground Guide—which I wrote with Brian Boyles and which features photos from Zack Smith and Jonathan Traviesa—came out from LSU Press. The purpose of the book is to counter the incomplete image of New Orleans that has been planted in your head. Yes, the city does often still sound like brass bands, Mardi Gras Indians, and trad jazz, but New Orleans’s old-school image is mostly a marketing template the tourist industry is loathe to relinquish. The French Quarter has morphed into a beautiful shopping mall where almost none of the city’s important contemporary music is played. New Orleans’s past should be glorified, its amazing traditions kept alive, but not if it means the world ends up thinking the city’s most important artistic days are behind us!

I’ve been writing about New Orleans music and playing myself on the city’s stages for a dozen years, and the book is my way of highlighting all the bands and other local institutions that don’t get the press they want and deserve. Along with listings for nightclubs, record stores, thrift stores, restaurants, and hotels, the Underground Guide includes interviews with New Orleans’s best modern, non-traditional bands, solo artists, rappers, and DJs—musicians who sound like New Orleans without playing hoary old New Orleans music.

Here are two of my favorite interviews in the book. The first is with screamer Mike IX Williams, of classic New Orleans sludge metal band Eyehategod, and the second is with Katey Red, the transsexual queen of bounce rap.

Eyehategod performing at club Siberia. Photo by Gary LoVerde

Mike IX Williams has fronted the slow, heavy band Eyehategod for over 25 years, and also published the excellent dark and hilarious poetry book, Cancer as a Social Activity (Southern Roots Publishing). We interviewed Williams about Eyehategod, the history of New Orleans metal, plus other heavy southern bands you can go and check out (most likely at club Siberia) while you’re in town.

Eyehategod didn’t have a lot of company on the local music scene when y’all started in 1988, right?
Mike IX Williams: Not in New Orleans. The cool thing at the time was thrash metal. Slayer was cool. Even I had a thrash band in New Orleans. We heard the Melvins and we were also into Black Flag, side two of My War. And obviously we were into Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus and stuff like that. We weren’t even 100 percent serious at the beginning; it was just something to piss off people who would play these shows, and just have fun and watch people’s reactions when we’d just do feedback for 15 minutes, and throw in three riffs as slow as we possibly could. Before Eyehategod, Soilent Green was around. But they were more influenced by Napalm Death, and they kind of started playing slower later on… There was Hawg Jaw, and we were all friends so it wasn’t like anyone was stealing from each other. Graveyard Rodeo was a local band that had similar influences. Eyehategod was like taking the Melvins even further, more filthy and dirty and with the bluesy southern feeling to it also. There were bands in other cities, Cavity in Florida, BuzzO*ven was kind of starting up in North Carolina or Richmond. There was a band in Boston called Grief. And there was Neurosis of course, who were still a hardcore band at the time but were starting to play slower. We were hated for a long time; people just didn’t get it. We had a few fans who understood that it was just supposed to be heavy—in 1986 to 1988, as we were forming, people thought the faster you play the heavier you are, but that’s obviously not true.

And now New Orleans is one of the metal capitals of the world!
Yeah, people have moved here from other states, man, even other countries, to be part of the scene here. Though a lot of people left after Katrina, a lot of people came down after Katrina. That was a great time for music actually, right after Katrina, with bands starting back up and new bands forming. The greatest thing is around 1998 and 1999 when we did take a sort of hiatus because of personal problems and record label trouble—during that hiatus we noticed bands were popping up in England, and Japan even—a Japanese band called Greenmachine—Iron Monkey in England, bands all over the world with like this same exact kind of sound. That’s when we noticed it was something bigger than us.

Tell me about your affiliation with Phil Anselmo’s (of Pantera and Down) Housecore Records label.
I used to play with Phil Anselmo in Arson Anthem, where we had Hank III on drums. That since kind of fizzled out. Then Outlaw Order was a side project of Eyehategod but that kind of fizzled out too—though we have been trying to keep it on the burner. Now we have The Guilt Of…, which is a noise band with me and Ryan McKern. We have a 12-inch out with Merzbow. I also started a band with Scott Kelly from Neurosis. We did a three-week tour with no record, no press, no interviews, just got in a car and went out and we all did solo sets where I came out and did a reading, then Scott did his mildly dark acoustic stuff, and Bruce does experimental saxophone, and then we have this guy Sanford Parker with some drum machine stuff and just loud noise—then at the end we come out do three songs together that we wrote. That band is called Corrections House. A new seven-inch should be out as we speak.

Note: The first new Eyehategod album in 15 years—the last recordings featuring longtime drummer Joey LeCaze, who recently passed away—will be released this year.

Katey Red. Photo by Robin Walker

As hip-hop evolved throughout the 1980s, before bounce came along, New Orleans rap consisted of complex rhyming, and true-school MCing in New Orleans was the norm, with lyricists such as Tim Smooth, Gregory D., Bust Down, MC Thick, and Legend Mann. Then in 1991, “Where Dey At,” allegedly the first bounce song, was recorded in two versions by both MC T. Tucker with DJ Irv, and then shortly afterward by DJ Jimi as “Where They At.” Bounce MCs demand responses regarding your ward, your school, and your project. The lyrics are often dirty. As with almost all other New Orleans party music, fun is stressed over art. Some of the zillions of pioneering bounce artists include Partners-N-Crime, Ms. Tee, Mia X, and 5th Ward Weebie, whose track “Fuck Katrina” captured local sentiment after the storm—though the only real national bounce hit so far has been Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.”

In 1999, New Orleans’s Take Fo’ record label, founded by bounce pioneer DJ Jubilee (known as the “King of Bounce”) issued Melpomene Block Party, the first full-length release from Katey Red, a gay transgender MC from the Melpomene Projects. Other gay bounce artists have followed on Katey’s (high) heels, most notably Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby. We got Katey’s advice on where you should (and shouldn’t) party while in New Orleans, plus which bounce artists you should check out, and where.

Do you have friends outside of New Orleans who come to town to visit you?
Katey Red: Quite a few. Mostly when my friends come to town they want to go to my shows. But if they just want to have a few drinks we either go on Bourbon Street, or else sit in Siberia. Ian Polk, the creator of [TV show] Noah’s Arc, he came down and wanted to hang out with me, so I took him to a few gay clubs out here. I brought him to one of my shows at One Eyed Jacks, and I took him to Club Fusions because he wanted to see the drag show I was performing in.

A tuba locked up outside Pal's Lounge. Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

Some people disparage Bourbon Street, but you’re a fan?
You can never go wrong with Bourbon Street. I am not an every day Bourbon Street kind of girl though, so when I am out there it’s new to me, like going out of town somewhere. If I am on Bourbon I end up either by Oz, or the Bourbon Pub. They have pickpocketers and crime but… after Katrina, Bourbon was the first thing poppin’. That’s where New Orleans make they money at the dance clubs and strip clubs and gay clubs as well as heterosexual clubs. They got bounce music, reggae music, jazz, it’s all kinds of entertainment on the side street. They got people doing card tricks, they have people doing statues, people tap-dancing, people sitting on the stoop singing live and playing keyboards. And they also have historical things. It’s nice out there. Why would they talk bad about Bourbon?

Did you actually have your pocket picked on Bourbon?
Um, I had a fight on one of my birthdays on one of the side streets off Bourbon. Some guy was for some reason like, “Don’t look at me.” And I was like, “Don’t look at me!” And he ran up on me trying to fight me and I got him off me. That was the only thing bad ever happened to me on Bourbon Street. Normally people just want pictures and stuff.

What about Club Caesar’s on the West Bank? You’ve performed there quite a bit.
Most of my out-of-town friends are Caucasians, so they don’t really want to go to places like Caesar’s, or Encore, cause it’s too wild and too rough. They want to hear bounce music all right, but they have Caucasian clubs that play bounce music. I would suggest that for them. If they wanna be around a different kind of environment and say, “I want to hang out with some black people, I wanna see where you hang at,” I take them to Club Fusions. It’s a lot of bounce going on in there. My fan base is real, real high in there. They may have a fight in there, but there’s no gunplay.

Chris Owens performing in her club. Photo by Jonathan Traviesa

Where can you hear bounce rap on Bourbon Street?
The Bourbon Heat or sometimes the Cat’s Meow. Maybe it’s because when I come in the club they recognize who I am and so then they start playing bounce music, but if they don’t [usually] play bounce music, they play it when I’m around.

Doesn’t Chris Owens's club also play rap and bounce?
I been there before. It’s real wild. I wouldn’t suggest my out-of-town friends go there. Sometimes they getting wild. I seen all kinds of things going on in the bathroom—stuff you only supposed to do at home! Wow.

If you're in New Orleans, you can pick up copies of New Orleans: the Underground Guide at two book parties. The first is on April 30 at Buffa’s and will feature noise artists plus a lecture and presentation by electronic musician Justin Peake; the second is on May 4 at Vaughan’s and will include sets by local rappers plus a live interview and poetry reading with Katey Red.


A Universal Guide to Bad Chinese Takeout

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A Universal Guide to Bad Chinese Takeout

VICE News: The Sunflower Revolt: Protests in Taiwan

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The Republic of China, or Taiwan as it is better known, has been independent from mainland China for over half a century, but China claims the island as its territory and has a stated aim of reunification.

Throughout March protests gripped the streets of Taipei, the capital, because of the way a service trade agreement was being pushed through congress. The trade agreement would allow Chinese companies to invest in a host of Taiwanese industries, moving the country towards greater economic integration with China. Many view the agreement as an act of commercial colonization by China and a threat to Taiwan's autonomy and democracy.

On March 18 a group of students overwhelmed police and occupied the Legislative Yuan (Taiwanese Parliament). Dubbed the Sunflower Movement, they remained camped there for 24 days. One of their core demands is to hold off any further trade talks between Taiwan and China until an oversight mechanism has been implemented.

Why Are Adults Obsessed with 'Wee Sing,' a Low-Budget Direct-to-Video Children's Series?

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Film stills courtesy of YouTube

When I was 16, my friend Jessica and I smoked in her basement in Dix Hills, New York as we watched a VHS tape of our favorite childhood movie, the 1989 children’s musical Wee Sing in Sillyville. As we ate nachos, we recited the dialogue and danced in front of the TV while speculating whether the actors had finger-banged each other between takes.

Wee Sing in Sillyville is the fourth of ten titles in the Wee Sing series, a collection of hour-long, direct-to-VHS children’s musicals featuring colorful characters, spoon-fed morals, and catchy renditions of public-domain children’s songs, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Created by Pamela Beall and Susan Hagen Nipp, two stay-at-home mothers from Portland, Oregon, the Wee Sing ethos—described by Nipp as “wholesome, safe, educational, nothing negative”—dominated the children’s entertainment market in the 80s and 90s, selling more than 65 million products worldwide.

Wee Sing in Sillyville was perfect entertainment for teenagers like Jessica and myself, who came of age during the the VHS home entertainment boom, because 16 was an interesting age: We still had vivid memories of our childhood, but we also had enough of a distance from our early memories to make snarky comments about them. Compared to other mid-1980s and early 1990s ephemera, like Saturday morning Disney cartoons, Wee Sing hasn't had quite the same online resurgence, but it has enjoyed a second life on YouTube, where a user who identifies himself as Mysterious Producer has posted full versions of the videos on his channel, as well as videos ranking the best and worst Wee Sing videos. (His criticisms mostly consist of minute details like, “the effects didn’t really seem magical to me” and “I hate these paper doll characters.”)

Like me, Mysterious Producer watched the videos as a toddler and didn’t think they had much of an audience until he rediscovered them as an adult. Unlike me, Mysterious Producer has turned his nostalgia into a hobby. After he posted the videos on YouTube, he discovered there was a “massive fanbase of Wee Singers.”

“Nowadays, there’s very little children’s programming that’s fun and educational while also being age-appropriate,” Mysterious Producer told me. “[The Wee Sing] videos were made for the very young, and no one else. When someone knows their audience, they are far more likely to hit their mark, and they did.”

Wee Sing is far from the only 1990s children’s home entertainment phenomenon to have amassed an online cult following. Thanks to websites like Buzzfeed (which devoted a listicle to Wee Sing in Sillyville last August) and Everything Is Terrible, even the shittiest, low-budget children’s TV shows have experienced a resurgence of popularity, for reasons mostly related to nostalgia rather than artistic quality. The internet has never made it easier for us to delve into our pasts, even the parts that we’d probably be better off not revisiting.

The same goes for the Wee Sing series. Wee Sing in Sillyville is a 58-minute-long, direct-to-video movie about Laurie and Scott, two children who are sucked into a magical world inhabited by a coloring book character named Sillywhim, a relentlessly upbeat, adorable woman with pigtails. The acting is wooden, the aesthetic low-budget (according to IMDB, the film was shot for $70,000), and the anti-racism narrative ham-handed, but the movie has struck a chord with many people.

As former elementary school teachers who specialized in music education, Beall and Nipp, who created the brand in 1977, certainly knew their audience. After they quit teaching to become stay-at-home moms, they regularly set up playdates with their children to sing traditional American songs. Beall said, “We couldn’t remember the third verse in ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ or what was the tune for ‘John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,’ so we went looking for a collection we could use as moms to refresh our own memory.”

Unlike today’s entertainment market, which is flooded with a plethora of music education resources, from Baby Mozart to an iTunes app that teaches infants the “Jazzy ABCs,” children’s entertainment included few educational programs for children in the late 70s and early 80s. “There was really nothing out there that we could find on the marketplace, no handy-dandy little booklet of fingerplays and songs,” Beall said. “We were scared of what was going to happen to these songs we’d loved so much as kids.”

Following an initial $200 investment, the women self-published a series of $5 booklets of children’s songs like “If You’re Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” with lyrics and illustrations to help guide musically-challenged parents. At first, they sold these short books at airports.

The West Coast publisher Price Stern Sloan picked up the booklet, Wee Sing Children’s Songs and Fingerplays, after it sold 20,000 copies within the year. The publisher encouraged Beall and Nipp to create audiotapes. They were initially concerned that the cassettes would inhibit the interactions between parent and child, but they relented and started releasing audiotapes in 1981.

Three years later, Nipp and Beall took their first steps into the burgeoning children’s VHS market, developing a treatment for their first film, Wee Sing Together. Written by Nipp and Beall, the first video is the story of Sally Smith, a cherubic (and insufferable) 10-year-old whose stuffed animals come to life and throw her a birthday party in Wee Sing Park. The hour-long video was long enough to have a sustained narrative and just short enough to hold the attention of kids between the ages of two and eight.

As Claudia Sloan, Price Stern Sloan’s executive producer, remembers it, the decision to enter the unproven field of children’s direct-to-video entertainment was a “big leap of faith”: “At the time, there were certainly kids’ videos on the market, but there was nothing really substantial, but video was sort of just coming into its own at the time, [so] it made sense for us to jump on that bandwagon.”

“We benefited from the musical theater formula,” said Nipp, who, like Beall, grew up watching musicals. “Lots of singing, lots of dancing, and not a whole lot of dialogue between songs.”

Compared to the rest of the videos, Wee Sing Together is not very impressive: The plot is threadbare, and the set looks like it was painted by a high school tech crew whose budget only allowed for the purchase of exactly two cans of paint (both unfortunately resemble mucosa at various stages of rhinovirus). Only the musical numbers are consistently on point. In “Rickety Tickety,” a hip-hop number that might as well be a Kidz Bop version of “Rapper’s Delight,” Sally flounces around on a table and raps about counting her birthday presents. 

Yet the movie is also the most representative of the Wee Sing ethos because of how sharply it diverges from current family-friendly fare. Unlike contemporary kids’ movies, which tend to appeal to parents in the audience with sly in-jokes and pop culture references dating back to the Clinton administration, Wee Sing Together refuses to cater to grown-up tastes—as an adult, it’s impossible to watch the movie without being bored or resorting to snarky analysis, but you understand why Sally’s red party dress appeals to young children.

“Pam and I always told people, ‘It’s all about the kids, let’s keep that in mind,’” Nipp said. “We wrote the songs in the right tempos for kids, in the right keys for kids. Even in the choreography we worked hard at what tempo to do those in, and what motions kids could follow along.”

Inspired by the success of Wee Sing Together, Beall and Nipp signed on to make more videos. Between 1986 and 1995, they shot videos in Portland, with a predominantly local cast and crew. While Nipp and Beall mostly adopted a hands-off approach during filming, they were not afraid to step in when they saw saw someone compromising their vision. During final edits for 1988’s Grandpa’s Magical Toys, the women clashed with an editor over a scene featuring an anthropomorphized crayon doing the hokey pokey. When the lyrics called for the toys to put their “right hip in,” the crayon, who doesn’t have any hips to speak of, gets upset, and, in the original take, sticks his tongue out in defiance.

“The editor thought that was so cute, and Pam and I are going, ‘No, we will not do it that way, because we don’t want kids to mimic what the other characters do,’” Nipp remembered. “And they said, ‘That’s what kids do.’ And we said, ‘Well, we don’t want kids to do that.’”

The editor, of course, had a point—anyone who has a passing familiarity with children knows that kids stick out their tongues—but Beall and Nipp stuck to their guns. In the final cut of the scene, the crayon walks around in befuddlement, bellowing, “What’s a hip?” as the other toys enthusiastically comply with the instructions of “The Hokey Pokey.”

The bit is one of the wrier, more self-referential moments in the entire Wee Sing series—to the writers’ credit, it actually is funnier than the original shot. The scene also highlights what makes the series so refreshing to contemporary viewers to watch: In the age of Miley Cyrus, it’s impossible to imagine a contemporary parent or producer getting up in arms about something as innocuous as a tongue.

Wee Sing in Sillyville is the definitive film of the series—the Rashomon of the Wee Sing canon, if you will. Although the series as a whole tackles cultural issues of diversity and tolerance—albeit in a refracted, candy-colored sort of way—the movie's thinly veiled anti-racism narrative has the most obvious political bent.

“The other [Wee Sing] videos have entertaining storylines and silly songs, but to me Sillyville is a different kind of story,” said Renee Margolin, who played Sillywhim in the film. “There’s more of a concern, a gut feeling about it, where these kids have a serious dilemma and they independently come up with a solution.” The more grown-up theme partially stems from its grown-up source material—an Aryan Nation rally Nipp had witnessed in her neighborhood.

“It was a heart-wrenching situation, and we in the community thought, What are we supposed to do about this?” she said. “So I thought, How can we present this to children in a small way that they can understand?” The result was a magical world where colors didn’t like each other because they were different.

The thematic takeaway was simple, but obviously effective, since the film continues to resonate with its now grown-up fans. Fans even regularly recognize Margolin and her co-star Ryan Willard, who was cast as Scott at the age of seven, although Margolin is in her early 60s and Willard is in his early 30s.

“I get a lot of random Facebook friend requests with no messages, or emails saying, ‘Is this really you?’” Willard said. “I had no idea this movie was even going to be seen outside of Portland, but I’ve been recognized from it since I was, like, nine. It’s definitely an example of the smallest budget/biggest impact you could have.”

Although Margolin said she, along with other characters, appeared at the 1994 White House Easter egg roll, the brand didn’t expand like other children’s franchises. Nipp and Beall refrained from franchising Sillywhim or the other characters. Each video lived in its own independent universe, making it difficult for them to create a signature character for the brand.

“We didn’t necessarily have one character to hang our hat on. Each video was its own story,” Sloan said. “Whereas when Barney was created, that was one of the things they did differently and probably better than us—they had Barney, so they had a single branded character.”

Barney & Friends’s enormous overnight success in 1992 also signaled a shift in the traditional children’s entertainment market. “By the time they were doing the videos, there was this explosion with the market, which didn’t last very long,” said Wee Sing in Sillyville director David Poulshock, who also directed other films in the series. “So by our ninth title, things had changed pretty dramatically. There were all sorts of children’s performers, Barney-type projects out there, but by the mid-90s, they all just sort of seemed to implode.”

In 1993, Penguin purchased Price Stern Sloan, and MCA/Universal subsequently took over production of what would become the last of the Wee Sing videos, Wee Singdom, in 1996. The film, which features all of the Wee Sing characters and one new character (a stunningly uncharismatic musical note), was what Sloan referred to as Universal’s attempt to “create a Barney they could hang the series on.” When Beall and Nipp arrived in Burbank for production of Wee Singdom, they quickly realized they would no longer be working with local talent or controlling the series, as they had in Portland.

“When we did the videos in Portland, we were such a team,” Nipp said. “But in LA it was totally different. We didn’t have as much oversight, and Pam and I were trying to explain how we wanted things done, but Universal just knew better.”

It’s clear that the franchise had lost some of its luster: Wee Singdom’s songs weren’t as catchy, the characters weren’t as charming, and the budget was more strained. When I spoke to Mysterious Producer, he pointed out “that not one character in Wee Singdom blinks!” Even Sillywhim, who makes a cameo appearance in Wee Singdom, seemed a little bored. Margolin was in her 40s when they filmed Wee Singdom. An IMDB commenter referred to her as “long in the tooth.”

The executives at MCA/Universal apparently felt the same way. After the film’s release, they axed the series. The cancellation was painful for Nipp and Beall, but in many ways Wee Sing had reached its natural conclusion: The children’s VHS market was changing (Wee Sing's competitor, Kidsongs, ended in 1997, while production of Barney & Friends stopped in 2010), and its original audience from the days of Wee Sing Together had already reached pubescence.

During the mid-90s and early aughts, the children’s entertainment industry essentially became an oligarchy, falling into the hands of a select few major companies, like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It became increasingly difficult for locally-owned companies to gain a foothold in the market. It also became increasingly difficult for Beall and Nipp’s original intent for the series—for kids to stay kids, for as long as possible—to hold true.

With the advent of PCs and the internet’s growing popularity, even their target audience was becoming too savvy for Sally, Sillywhim, and their ilk. “Markets were changing. Kids were becoming more sophisticated,” Sloan said. “Everything that Pam and Nipp were hoping wouldn’t happen, started to happen.”

What Beall and Nipp were somewhat surprised to learn was that although children’s market tastes were changing, Wee Sing was enjoying a renaissance online among nostalgia-happy adults like Mysterious Producer and myself. Now, Beall and Nipp regularly receive appreciative emails from adult fans, who often attach clips of themselves lip-synching and dancing to the songs on YouTube. One of them, Beall said, even danced to “Risseldy Rosseldy,” from Wee Sing in Sillyville, down the aisle during her wedding.

Wee Sing Productions has continued to try to evolve with the changing market. For the past several years, Beall and Nipp have worked tirelessly to transfer the videos to DVD, releasing dozens of books and CDs—Wee Sing America, Wee Sing Bible Songs, Wee Sing More Bible Songs—in the process. They’ve even brought Wee Sing's ethos into the 21st Century with two apps, Wee Sing & Learn ABC and Wee Sing & Learn 1, 2, 3.

Although the children’s entertainment market has changed drastically since the early days of Wee Sing, Beall and Nipp believe children haven’t. “We still think Wee Sing has great value for kids, because kids learn the best through music,” Nipp said. “If people want adult humor, negativity, tension, like what you see on most kids’ series today, then we’re done. But we don’t think that’s the case.”

To test this theory, and to determine whether Wee Sing was just as relevant to today's kids as it was to me, I recently showed Wee Sing in Sillyville to Annabel, the five-year-old girl I nanny for. In many ways, Annabel encapsulates the challenges Wee Sing faces in their contemporary target audience: She has her own iPad and loves high-budget, frenetically-paced cartoons like Phineas and Ferb and Littlest Pet Shop, which routinely lampoons adult-oriented phenomena like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and America’s Next Top Model (she also understands the context of both jokes).

Even though Annabel is only five, she already sees the world through a slightly adult lens. I wanted to gauge if Annabel was still wholesome and innocent enough to enjoy the colorful world of Sillyville, or if she was simply too jaded to fall for Wee Sing; perhaps she would see it as I did at 16, through a gauzy filter of snark, and speculate whether the actors had finger-banged each other between takes.

I am now 24 years old: still young enough to be nostalgic for my early childhood, but old enough for my most vivid memories of that period to start to ebb in my consciousness. As I watched Wee Sing in Sillyville with Annabel, her eyes fixed on the iPad screen, I realized that Annabel was not any savvier than I was at her age. If anything, the internet nostalgia factory has put Mysterious Producer and me in a perverse state of arrested development. Thanks to YouTube, we can turn on our iPads and re-experience our childhoods, over and over and over again.

I wondered how emotionally healthy that was, and if the same would be true for Annabel when she got to be my age. I wondered if it was still possible, in a world where kids have their own iPads and understand the context of cartoon animals’ America’s Next Top Model jokes, for the Wee Sing wish to come true and for Annabel to stay a kid for as long as possible. 

When the movie ended and Annabel announced that she wanted to watch it all over again, I knew that it was.

Follow EJ Dickson on Twitter

VICE News: American Jihadist

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In January 2013, American Eric Harroun traveled to Syria to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He would wind up arrested by the FBI on terrorism-related charges. This is Eric's story in his own words.

I Was High on Amphetamines When I Served the Original Cast of 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory'

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I Was High on Amphetamines When I Served the Original Cast of 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory'

Ukraine Cracked Down on Pro-Russian Activists This Weekend

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Ukraine Cracked Down on Pro-Russian Activists This Weekend

Comics: Batman Comics


Weediquette: Murphy the Heroic Dog

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Photo courtesy of Fotopedia

Right when I started college, I formed a permanent friendship with a few guys from my dorm. We rarely added people to our group because we thoroughly entertained each other. When junior year rolled around, I realized I had been hanging out with the same dudes for years. My friend Marv had recently moved into my house near campus, and I thought it would be healthy if we expanded our ranks, so I started inviting new people to come blaze with us after class. I quickly learned that my friends' collective sense of humor was less than universal.

Marv always cracked us up, but his jokes often offended people who weren’t familiar with his style. He often ended his jokes with a signature cackle, making it difficult to tell if he was serious or kidding. He once convinced me for several hours that CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin was Frankie Bush, the younger brother of President George W. Bush. I only recognized my gullibility when I brought up Frankie during a conversation with another friend. Marv overheard us and let out his cackle, letting me know that I had been fooled. Some of his bits were a bit more conventional. After he moved in with me, he obsessively pursued a four-month campaign called Scare War 2008. He would hide somewhere in the house and wait for me to enter the room, and then he would pop out and scare me. As soon as I reacted, he would stop and mark the accomplishment on a piece of notebook paper—the official Scare War scoreboard. By the end of the semester, Marv had scared me almost 30 times and I had only frightened him once. Years later, he said he had feigned being scared to spare my feelings. “I figured I’d let you get me that one time,” he said smugly.

When Marv moved in, he brought few belongings. He was always on the lookout for street furniture. Several times, he pulled up to the house with a hideous chair or side table strapped to the roof of his car, yelling for me to come help him carry it inside. One day, he walked in with a large, velvety painting of a Rottweiler. The painting was tacky, but the artist had executed the painting with skill. His name, Ortiz, was signed at the bottom. Marv proudly hung the painting above the TV, stood back, and smiled. “Really ties the room together,” he said.

A couple of days later, I returned home with Tom, a new friend I had made in class. He seemed pretty chill, so I thought he would get along well with my crew. When we walked into the house, Tom immediately noticed the painting and smirked. Marv, who was sitting on the couch, was not amused. Tom introduced himself to Marv and put out his hand to greet him. Marv stared at his hand like it was a tentacle. “Let’s smoke a blunt!” I said, breaking the tension. Tom tried to make small talk, but Marv eyed him suspiciously. As I lit the blunt, Tom returned to the painting. “What’s with the majestic dog?” he asked, chuckling a little.

Marv took a deep breath and told Tom a sad story: “That’s a painting of my dog,” he said. “I loved him, and he loved me. He was such a good dog. Every morning, he’d come into my room and pull the covers off me because he wanted to go for a walk. Anyhow, we were on a family camping trip once, and I took him with me on a hike. I was climbing a tree by the edge of the river, and I fell into the water. I couldn’t swim, so I started flailing around and yelling for help. That dog charged right into the water without any hesitation and dragged me close to shore. I grabbed onto some rocks and climbed out, but when I looked back, he was gone. The current swept him away. The last thing he ever did was save my life. My buddy Ortiz painted this so that I’d never forget him.”

We all sat there, stoned and quiet. I waited for Marv to start cracking up, but he didn’t. I knew it was bullshit, but the story moved Tom, and he felt embarrassed for laughing at the painting. “I’m so sorry,” Tom said. “What was his name?” Marv looked down at the can of Murphy's Irish Stout in his hand, closed his eyes, and wistfully said, “Murphy.” Marv looked up at Tom and narrowed his eyes. “And yes,” Marv said, “you should be sorry.”

Tom was clearly uncomfortable and left abruptly with a stoned, awkward goodbye. The second Tom walked out the door, Marv cackled uncontrollably. “Did you see the look on his face?” he yelled. “Oh my god, that was fun. I couldn’t think of a name, so I said Murphy, ‘cause I’m drinking a can of Murphy’s Irish Stout.” He showed me the drink and laughed even louder. “Bring some more random people over here,” he said. “I’m gonna fuck with their heads.”

I wasn’t planning on feeding Marv more unassuming stooges, but I did continue to bring over people who fell into his trap. I was just trying to find new people to smoke blunts with, but Marv wanted to fool as many people as possible. In the beginning, I sat there quietly as Marv told his story. Eventually I chimed in. When Marv would stare off into space with a sad expression after someone asked about the painting, I would say something like, “He doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s still very painful.” Most the time, we would run with the story for a few minutes and then let the person in on the joke. We only let the joke get out of hand one time.

We were at the house drinking 40s one night when a random acquaintance named Rav stopped by to burn one. It was the first time he had been to the house, so he asked about the Murphy painting. Marv was drunk, so his rendition of the story lacked drama and convincing details. Rav laughed and said, “That’s ridiculous. You guys are obviously clowning me.” He lit the blunt and started to talk about something else, but Marv stuck to the Murphy story: “That dog was a hero. He died for me, you son of a bitch.” Marv’s sudden hostility shocked Rav. I could tell from Marv’s face that he wasn’t going to back down. Rav said, “A hero? Don’t be ridiculous, man. It sounds like you’re fucking with me, so let’s just forget about it and smoke this L.” Suddenly, Marv went into a rage. He seemed like he had told the story so many times, he thought Murphy was real in his intoxicated state. He stood up and started incoherently yelling profanities in Rav’s face. Rav passed me the blunt and stood up. Marv and Rav stepped towards each other. I finally stood up and tried to break them up. Between hits of the blunt, I said, “Let’s chill. No need to talk about the dog. Marv, let it go.” Marv was not having it, but Rav finally backed down. He said, “You guys are both fucking crazy,” and then walked out. The second he left, Marv cackled louder than I had ever heard him laugh before.

I had to admit that it was pretty funny, but it seemed wrong to let two people go to blows over an imaginary dog. Marv agreed to retire the Murphy story, and we put the painting in the basement for the rest of the time he lived there. He lost track of the painting at some point—it probably ended up on the same curb he found it on—but the memory of Murphy and his final, selfless act will live with us forever. 

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The Fake Town Where London Cops Train for Riots

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This series was shot at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Center in Gravesend, Kent, a mock town that has been built purely so that young police officers can run around it, learning how to deal with angry mobs. The place is much like a film set—many of the peripheral buildings are just facades, while those at the "city center" are a lot more developed in order to give the trainees more varied terrain.

The training includes all sorts of scenarios the officers may have to deal with in real-life confrontations. One I was allowed to document involved 15 policemen forming a mob armed with petrol bombs, wooden bricks, and glass bottles. Completely in character, they proceeded to antagonize other officers, who were acting as the response unit, slowly dispersing and detaining the mob. The level of authenticity as well as the extensive practice of formations and drills really showed me how much attention and effort goes into preparing for public disorder in London. Now, I don't know if I should feel safe or scared.

It took me several months to secure access to the site; the conversations about what I could and couldn’t show were endless. Using a person’s face was forbidden, for instance, as it could put them in danger or single them out when they later came into contact with the public. As a consequence, I knew from the outset that I would have to photograph people from behind or from afar, and was therefore always going to be a step back from the action. This resulted in pictures more reminiscent of aftermath photography, rather than embedded journalism.

Control was shot over one day in December 2013. It is part of a larger, ongoing project called The Architecture of Conflict, exploring environments of human conflict.

Click through to see more photos from riot town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See more of James's work here.

 

Nobody Knows How Many Unexploded Bombs Are Hidden Under Berlin

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The Reichstag after the Allied bombing of Berlin (Photo via)

In the thick of WWII, Allied pilots dropped some 2 million tons (estimates vary) of bombs on German soil. Most of the bombs exploded, but up to 15 percent were duds and failed to detonate on impact. Today, these unexploded relics lie waiting. Experts figure that up to 250,000 live bombs remain scattered around Germany, and barely a week goes by without a bomb squad being summoned to one of them—unearthed, perhaps, by a hapless construction worker or a farmer tending to his fields.

Authorities take precautions, but there are still accidents. Bombs go off suddenly and sometimes people die. Though most of the Great War’s combatants are long dead, WWII’s casualty list keeps growing. Over the last few years, the presence of unexploded ordinance (UXO) has become a more pressing problem. As WWII bombs grow old, their stabilizing agents begin to decompose and they become sensitive to the tiniest of tremors. As this happens, the risk of spontaneous explosion increases.

This situation isn't unique to rural backwaters, either. Berlin, which was bombed to shit between 1940 – 45, hosts an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 unexploded bombs (in addition to reams of unexploded grenades, rockets, artillery shells, mortars, mines, etc.) with around ten to 15 live bombs found in the capital each year.

Those numbers are why Berlin has its own six-person government team devoted solely to the task of hunting down unexploded bombs before they corrode to the point of explosion.

Potsdamer Platz in 1945 after Allied bombing (Photo via)

On a recent weekday in Berlin I found myself squinting at an aerial photograph of the city’s central Potsdamer Platz, taken in May of 1945. The image was captured by a British Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber—likely before unloading a crate of explosives over the capital—and has since been digitized, dotted with bright red circles to signify every spot where a bomb has been discovered.

“Could there still be bombs here? In the middle of Potsdamer Platz?” I asked.

Hubertus Hartmann, a government-employed surveyor, smiled.

“What if they just built a road on top of one?”

Hartmann shrugged, “It’s a problem.”

Hartmann has prepared thousands of photos just like these, which together map out much of Berlin. His red dots vary in size; the big dots mark huge craters where bombs already detonated, the small dots tag barely visible sites where, perhaps, a dud bomb landed. Three weeks before we met Hartmann had spotted a suspicious marking on a photo of East Berlin, “We said, 'Maybe there is a bomb here.' We checked, and there was a bomb.”

Berlin’s office for Ermittlung und Bergung von Kampfmitteln (Identification and Recovery of Ordnance) is housed within the state’s urban planning department on a downtown street not far from the majestic Brandenburg Gate. Inside the office walls are plastered with yellowing municipal maps. Down the hall, the remnants of a 500-pound bomb sits in the corner of a darkly lit room.

The team itself is composed of tidy middle-aged German men—engineers, surveyors, and a regulatory guy, the kind of business-minded bureaucrats you probably wouldn't picture strutting around the Hurt Locker DVD case. A lot of their time is spent liaising with police and engineers, and dealing with requests from Berliners who want to ensure that building sites are bomb-free.

The root of their work lies in old aerial photographs that were taken in the 1940s by Allied warplanes; the office owns around 10,000 images and is looking for more. As of now, all the photos come from Britain and America. Moscow has some too, but it won't fork them over. “We don’t have one Russian picture,” the office’s Frank Künzling laments. “Russians… it’s a different point of view.”

But the Berlin authorities, by their own admission, fall far short of rendering the city free of deadly explosives. “Our orders are to look for high-risk situations, but not to declare a space bomb free,” explains Tobias Hinzmann, another member of the department. “If somebody would like to build a kindergarten… he should do more.” Landowners who want a thorough search of their property must pay out of pocket.

Indeed, the issue of funding is a touchy one. Money squabbles generally stem from a single question: When a bomb is dropped on a city, who does it belong to?

As it stands today, Germany’s federal government only accepts responsibility for German bombs. This means that if a German bomb is found in Berlin, the feds will pay for its removal; but if a British or American or Russian bomb is spotted, the state must foot the bill (unless the bomb was found during a privately funded investigation, in which case the landowner sometimes pays). “It’s a little bit crazy,” Künzling admits. And each state is crazy in its own way—regions fund their own bomb-hunting squads with their own rules, and these departments rarely communicate.

A US bombing raid over a German city (Photo via)

In Berlin, the ordinance investigation department uncovers up to 15 live bombs a year. The work is usually done quietly and doesn’t hit headlines, but that’s not always the case. Last April, news outlets the world over gawked when city authorities uncovered a 220-pound Soviet bomb just six feet away from a running rail line. Hundreds were evacuated and schools were shut while the bomb was defused.

Of course, that’s nothing compared to what happened in 2011, when Germany staged the largest bomb-related evacuation since WWII. In Koblenz, a western city on the banks of the Rhine, technicians found a gigantic 1.8 ton bomb in the riverbed. Before technicians could begin their work, 45,000 people had to be cleared from the area, which involved emptying two hospitals and a jail.

A few times a year Berlin police take a bunch of unexploded ordnance to a bunker deep within the city’s central Grunewald Forest, before shutting down the highways and clearing the airspace for half an hour so that they can safely blow it all up.

Between 1940 – 45, bombs fell like rain drops over Berlin. At first, Allied bombing raids were largely tactical, aimed at wiping out critical military and economic targets. But as the years dragged on, bombings of civilian areas became more frequent. Britain’s RAF War Manual explained, “Although the bombardment of suitable objects should result in considerable material damage and loss, the most important and far-reaching effect of air bombardment is its moral effect.”

The official goal, in other words, was to make ordinary Germans feel the pain. And it worked; hundreds of thousands of Germans died as a result of the air raids, and many more were injured or left homeless. Seventy years later, it’s a good time to be an engineer in the bomb defusing game. Indeed, Germany is now home to a meaty industry of private ordnance disposal consultants and specialty technicians.

An English bombat duty team extinguishing German incendiary air bombs (Photo via)

Modern bomb disposal itself was born during WWII. When London was set ablaze by Luftwaffe bombs during the Blitz, British officials decided to train engineers to defuse unexploded devices. The United States did the same. Over time, the need for such technicians increased as Germany began producing more and more sophisticated bombs.

Today, industry leaders form a macho clique, whose technicians sometimes eschew safety gear while on the job, because what good would a protective suit be in the face of a 1100-pound explosive?

One of Germany’s best bomb consultants is Dr Rainald Häber, whose firm Mull und Partner Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH is used by the Berlin government. “I’m 70 years old,” Häber told me, “and I’ve been working in this field all my life.” Foreign stints have taken him across Africa and into Japan, where he searched for waterlogged WWII bombs along the coastline.

When a bomb is found in Berlin, Häber explained, technicians usually try to defuse it. They might drill holes into the bomb and unscrew the fuse, or use a water beam to chop the bomb in two—and then cut out the fuse. Or use a smidge of high-grade explosive to pop out the fuse without setting off the bomb.

In movies, sweaty bomb technicians are often depicted as bent over a mass of wires, silently agonising over whether to cut the yellow or the red one. But WWII bombs don’t have wires. If a bomb is stable enough to transport, it might instead be towed away and then detonated in a controlled environment. Other times, if a bomb is found in the middle of an empty field, technicians blow it up then and there. There’s no standard procedure; it varies bomb by bomb.

Hitler glumly inspecting bomb damage in 1944 (Photo via)

The worst kind of bomb to encounter is undoubtedly the “chemical long-term detonator bomb”. During WWII, Allies pioneered a kind of bomb that did not detonate on impact, but rather exploded hours or even days after it hit the ground. By the time the bomb went off, Germans would have come out of their bomb shelters, the idea being to terrorize the population and yield maximum carnage.

These chemical bombs contained a vial of acetone that, over the course of several hours, would corrode the celluloid ring holding the bomb’s detonator in place. When the celluloid dissolved, the detonator would spring forward and then BAM. But here’s the thing: If a chemical long-term detonator bomb lands on the wrong angle, the acetone drips the wrong way and the reaction does not take place.

Today, these bombs are fragile as hell; sometimes they “self-detonate” for no apparent reason.

Moreover, as the bombs age, it becomes too dangerous to defuse them, and engineers are left with no choice but to blow them up on site. So what happens if a chemical long-term detonator bomb is found in a big city? Such was the case in 2012 when a 550-pound American explosive was found in Munich. Thousands of residents were evacuated before the bomb was exploded. The resulting firebomb set neighboring buildings on fire.

What has experts fretting now is the possibility that, some day very soon, all remaining WWII bombs will have to be detonated instead of defused. In this case, Germans might have to grow accustomed to explosions on their bustling city streets.

Meanwhile, the ordnance department in Berlin is chugging along. Standing before his wall-sized map of the city, the department’s Künzling rues, “It’s a hard price to pay for the war.”

Follow Katie Engelhart on Twitter.

Wheat Isn’t the Reason Why You Can’t Stop Farting

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Wheat Isn’t the Reason Why You Can’t Stop Farting

Fresh Off the Boat: Fresh Off the Boat: Chengdu - Part 3

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In the season two finale, Eddie learns the subtleties of Sichuan cooking from a Master chef Yu, visits the sculpture factory of artist Deng Le, and climbs into a treehouse parlor to discover an appreciation for the delicate hand motions of Taiwanese tea pouring. He spends his time with different generations of Chinese to discuss cultural preservation as China moves forward and becomes open to the rest of the world. 

Former Miami Heat Center Rony Seikaly Is a Real DJ

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Former Miami Heat Center Rony Seikaly Is a Real DJ

Don't Pay Your Taxes

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War tax resisters protest in New York City in April, 2013. Photo via Flickr user The All-Nite Images

Conservatives like to think of April 15—Tax Day—as the date when hard-working citizens hand over half their paychecks to the federal government so it can buy hard drugs and an HD television for every deadbeat in America. Liberals believe something similar—that taxes redistribute income from the rich and powerful to everyone else—which helps assuage their guilt over calling the cops last Christmas on the homeless man outside their condo. Reality is less convenient for either faction: The vast majority of income taxes collected by the federal government isn't going to the poor at all—unless prison now counts as public housing—but to a military that enjoys a budget just about equal to what the rest of the world spends on guns and bombs combined.

It's enough to make you want to stop paying income taxes altogether.

Corporations, the only legal persons who seem to doing well these days, don't consider it their civic duty to contribute to the federal government. Offshore tax shelters and creative accounting practices have helped 57 of the top 500 companies in the United States pay an effective tax rate of zero. And that makes the rest of us look like suckers. If the planet's wealthiest corporations aren't paying their taxes, why should a short order cook at Denny's?

To be sure, taxes in the US are not as high as they are in Sweden or France, but the average American also gets far less for his tax dollar: In Western Europe, national health care means free trips to the doctor, not a mandate to buy private insurance, while America's priorities are such that more income tax revenue goes to the Pentagon than any other government program. (The things people in need actually benefit from, like Social Security and Medicare, are funded largely by other taxes.) Factor in the cost of caring for veterans and paying interest on all that debt racked up from a century of almost constant war, and you'll find that close to half of the money collected from federal income tax is devoted to covering the expense of armed conflict in one way or another.

If you don't like that, you should know by now that voting for change hasn't changed much of anything, with Barack Obama, the only sitting president to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, proposing a record-breaking military budget the year after he won it.

Refusing to give your money to a government that can literally print money might not change things in the short term. But war tax resisters, as people who refuse to pay federal income taxes as a form of protest are known, have decided they have no choice in the matter: They can’t in good conscience financially support a system that spends billions of dollars on machines of death while millions of people go hungry, and they don't believe a politician's failure to act takes away their own responsibility to do whatever they can.

“I wouldn't kill another person myself—and to pay someone else to kill people in my name with my tax dollars, it's essentially the same thing,” said David Hartsough, a Quaker peace activist in his 70s. “I don't have to look at the blood,” he told me over the phone, “but the blood is on my hands.”

Speaking from his home in Northern California, Hartsough said he has been resisting federal taxes since the war in Vietnam. For a long time, he purposely earned so little money he simply didn't owe any taxes, the most popular (and most legal) form of tax resistance. After getting married and having kids, he started earning enough that he started getting a bill from the government; these days, he pays half that bill, explaining in an attached letter to the IRS that he wants the half he does pay to go toward the Department of Health and Human Services, not all that killing stuff.

Don't listen to Lil B.

Often, Hartsough never hears back, though sometimes he gets a form letter from the IRS stating, gosh, it sure would be nice if he paid all his taxes, which he probably just forgot about. Some years the IRS gets a little nastier and takes the money from one of his bank accounts; some years it doesn't.

Of course, the taxes one pays without a fight will go into the same pot as the money the IRS takes by force, letter or not. Hartsough knows that his civil disobedience alone won't make a dent in a trillion-dollar war machine, but that's sort of beside the point: He wants it to be known he doesn't support this system—that he doesn't want any blood on his hands. And besides, if we’re ever going to get to a point where there are enough people resisting that it can make a difference, someone has to go first.

“Even if there's just one of us or ten of us or a thousand or a million, we have to live by the highest truth that we understand,” said Hartsough. “It's an act of personal witness, but if enough people did this we could stop the war machine in this country. Instead of waiting until everyone else does something you feel is right, you have a responsibility to set an example.”

Hartsough still pays his state and local taxes, because while they might now have SWAT teams with tanks, state and local governments do not yet have armed Predator drones—and you do have to pick your battles. He doesn’t just pocket the money he refuses to pay the IRS, either, but deposits it in an escrow account called the People's Life Fund, one of the many ways a tax resister can put his money toward a good cause while keeping open the option of taking it back should those letters from the government become sufficiently threatening. Tax resisters can either donate their money outright to the People’s Life Fund or let it sit there in case the IRS comes knocking; the interest earned by the account goes toward charitable causes in the Bay Area—about $10,000 to $20,000 a year, according to Susan Quinlan, who works with the fund.

“What it’s a testament to is that war tax resisters are engaging in a conscious act of civil disobedience,” said Quinlan. “They are not trying to get away with something just to keep a little more money for themselves. They are really trying to make a point that we as a society could be doing a lot better things with this money than sending it off to Haliburton.”

Imagine if the tremendous resources devoted toward building the weapons of war were spent on, say, anything else. The US government is wealthy enough that it could make a serious dent in hunger and poverty across the globe if it focused on such things. Instead, it is set to spend $1.5 trillion on a fighter jet that may not even work while billions are cut from the food stamp program.

It's no surprise, then, that many people are fed up with a system that prioritizes bombing the poor over feeding them to the point they embrace tax resistance, unwilling to wait around for the change promised by a politician every two to four years. What’s surprising is how infrequently these war tax resisters are actually bothered by the government. The state has nasty bite, but it relies primarily on its bark: those form letters spit out by an IRS computer.

“I think we've been taught to really fear the IRS and the government and to feel that we have to comply, whether we believe in what it does with our taxes or not,” Quinlan told me. But the banal evil of bureaucracy in this case works in the tax resisters’ favor: Most of the time, the IRS will respond to a letter politely explaining one's refusal to bankroll evil with a collective, institutional shrug. If someone's open about what she’s doing and not just stashing her money in an offshore tax shelter, she won’t face prison time. And the privileged few with decent jobs in this post-job economy could see money from their bank account seized and their wages garnished—but even that’s not necessarily going to happen.

A piece of paper that war tax resisters say helps fund death and destruction all over the globe. Photo via Flickr user Ken Teegardin

“They've never actually done anything,” Erica Weiland, a 30-year-old activist from Seattle, Washington, told me when I asked her about the consequences of her tax resistance. Weiland generally tries to avoid owing taxes in the first place, but when she does owe something, she files a return without paying a dime. And while she’s received a few letters, she’s never responded, nor had a problem. Freed from the burden of paying for broken fighter jets, she has been able to give money instead to those causes she believes in, which she said is “one of the things that's the most rewarding about being a war tax resister.”

Weiland learned about tax resistance while working with the group Food Not Bombs, which helps feed the homeless in cities across the United States (at least where its activities are not banned). She met a war refugee from Sri Lanka who refused to accept anything more than room and board as payment for his labor, not wanting to contribute in any way to the sort of violence he witnessed firsthand—funded, in part, by the US government. If a poor immigrant could do it, Weiland decided she could too, and she hopes her actions will send a message that Americans are not as powerless as popularly imagined. “I want to show people that there's more that we can do to resist war and stop military actions than just marching and sending letters to Congress,” she said.

The point of an individual act of conscience, in other words, is not to make one feel better about one's self, but to spur collective action—to get other people to do the same. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, either: By withholding just a few dollars a month, you could still have some effect, no matter how small. “If a million people resisted paying just a dollar, the government would notice,” said Ruth Benn of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

This type of activism is nothing new, and the government has taken notice before. During the war in Vietnam, as many as 500,000 people engaged in war tax resistance, with most simply refusing to a pay a nominal tax on their phone bill. While most got away with it, the IRS tried to set a lot of examples, in one case seizing and auctioning off someone’s car over an unpaid tax bill of $1.25.

That's a reminder that there are still risks associated with not paying one’s taxes, particularly if the government begins to fear those individual acts of civil disobedience could cascade into a broader rejection of civil authority. But even the truly risk averse—those who like making more than a poverty wage but also live in fear of an audit—have an easy form of resistance available to them: not letting the government withhold taxes from their paycheck. This is just sound financial advice, actually. If you stop overpaying the IRS—which is what you are doing if you receive a refund—and instead stash your money away in a the lowest of low-interest savings account until you need it again on April 15, you will end up with more dead presidents in your pocket than if you had let the government just borrow that money for free.

Whatever you do, whichever amount of risk you choose to accept, at least consider something David Hartsough told me: “We all have a responsibility to listen to our own conscience, and if that lands us in jail or means economic hardship, that’s not as bad as the curse of having killed people.”

Charles Davis is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by Al Jazeera, Inter Press Service, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

DISCLAIMER: This article is for entertainment purposes only. The opinions and views expressed are the opinions of the designated author and do not reflect the opinions or views of VICE.


Looking at the Tragicomedy of Canadian Native-White Relations with Thomas King

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Thomas King, one of CanLit's most celebrated literary figures. Photo via Lorenz Calcagno.
Thomas King is dangerous. The threat he poses isn’t, however, the result of his six-foot-six, 250-pound frame. King is educated, empowered, and enlightened. His latest work is no exception. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is an altogether sad and funny historical investigation into white-native relations in the US and Canada. VICE caught up with the award-winning author to discuss his book and the two things they say you should never talk about with strangers: politics and religion.

VICE: You do an enviable job of riding a unicycle down the thin line between comedy and tragedy with The Inconvenient Indian. To what do you credit that impressive balancing act?
Thomas King
: I suppose it’s the way in which I’ve developed a storytelling technique over the years. Certainly a lot of it is reserve humour. Storytellers on the various reserves that I’ve hung out on have a particular way of telling a good story that puts comedy next to tragedy, and vice versa. Maybe it’s just looking at the world and realizing that it’s a pretty crazy place.

You’re 71, a celebrated author and a respected member of this country’s intellectual elite, but are there still time when you get cut by those “sharp shards of bigotry you find when you run your fingers across the Canadian mosaic”?
Oh yeah. Not so much anymore, because people are willing to treat me with a particular deference. But when I’m roaming around the countryside, I’ll hear things. I was up at Manitoulin Island not too long ago and there was a guy who was pontificating about lazy, welfare indian bums. It’s out there. You can’t be a native in North America without knowing that, at your back, it’s there.

The book was said to have opened old wounds for you. Other than the noted racism you were inevitably forced to revisit in the process, what other injustices did you relive while writing?
The old wounds were some of the fights we got in over native rights and how little we were able to change. To go back there and see what kind of high hopes we had for our efforts and to see how little we changed the world is pretty disturbing. The old wounds were some of the friends that I lost in that fight, both to the political and social turmoil that we went through in the 60s and the 70s, and also to things like alcoholism and drug abuse.

Native people make up four percent of the Canadian population but account for an astounding 18 percent of federal prison inmates. To what do attribute this cataclysmic discrepancy?
I think that the kinds of political efforts, policies, that have been inflicted on native people has made it very hard if you’re on a reserve to make a living. Federal policy has not been kind to native people, no matter what anybody says. And poverty will beget all sorts of other social ills.

Democracy is not simply a form of government but, as you write, “an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product.” Can you elaborate?
We’ve come into a world where capitalism has changed. It has become a much greater force in our social and political lives. I suppose it always had a guest bedroom in politics, but now it’s sort of taken over all of that. And so we get this bundled arrangement in the same way that we get our cable and internet and home phone bundled. It’s a bothersome arrangement. I’m not sure why—maybe I’m just an old fart and I get cranky when I see change.

Taking aim at Stephen Harper’s government, you’ve alluded to legislation they’ve proposed or signed into law as the cause of your ire. What bills or policies were you talking about?
Certainly some of the omnibus bills that the Conservatives passed, bills that had within them the idea that we could turn native treaty land into fee-simple land, in other words break up the tribal estate. The Conservatives have gone further than that. The new Fair Elections Act, which is such an oxymoron; the throwing away of the long census; the shredding of scientific knowledge. All of those things just really get me cranked up. There’s no reason for that kind of nonsense and stupidity.

You said that Harper “has no love for native people whatsoever.”
I don’t think that Mr. Harper has Canada’s best interest at heart. I know that he does not have First Nations’ interests at heart. Love is probably too strong a word; he doesn’t have much of an interest, and if he does, it’s to get rid of native land. One of the problems with pipelines is that they have to run across treaty land. And I think, in his heart of hearts, Harper would like to have all aboriginal treaties abrogated.

Do you think the current government can survive another election?
Oh sure. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing much out there to stop them. Thomas Mulcair and the NDP may get some good purchase; I’d love to see that because I have no idea what the NDP would do in power federally. The Liberals don’t seem to be doing much of anything right now. I don’t know how Justin Trudeau is going to lead that party to a victory. It’s not that we don’t need change. I just don’t see where change is going to come from.



The cover of King's latest award-winning book.
In 2008, you ran for the federal NDP in a failed bid for a seat in the House of Commons. Would you consider running again?
That’s easy: no. The fact of the matter is I don’t see where I can make much of an impact politically, or as much of an impact as I can if I’m free in society without a leash on me. Federal politics require teamwork, and that teamwork means that you have to be willing to say and support things that you may personally not believe, and I simply found I couldn’t do that.

Your beef with Christianity dots the manuscript but comes to an adversarial, perhaps even confrontational, zenith in one chapter. Do you truly feel that the Christian faith is “the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism”?
I think in many ways it is. I don’t have much complaint with Christianity in theory. In practice, it’s another thing. Christianity says do unto others as you would have them do unto you, right? And yet, Christianity was responsible, in large part, for slavery and for native residential schools. In practice, it’s not a generous doctrine. It doesn’t like gays and lesbians and it doesn’t like people who are different.

Would it be safe to say you don’t have much good to say about any organized religion?
No, it wouldn’t be, because there are parts of organized religion that are laudable. My problem is the way in which they practice those tenets. Most all religions have generosity, equality, love as part of the doctrine. But it’s how they practice, or how they define it, that is my problem.

Are you an atheist?
I’m nothing, to be honest with you. I make my way through the world. I don’t need Christianity or atheism or anything else to tell me how to act, how to run my life. I’ve got a fairly good sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s moral, what’s not. I don’t need a priest to tell me that, I don’t need a minister to tell me that, I don’t need a God to tell me that.

Is it true that The Book of Mormon teaches that “dark-skinned Lamanites,” or natives, will turn white as they accept the Mormon gospel?
Yeah, that’s the very general reading of it. The term is “turn white and delightsome.” They may have changed that language, but that was the language that was available when I was living in Salt Lake City and dealing with native people from the Southwest in the Mormon Church. The expectation was that dark-skinned people, who were not quite as good as the rest, would in fact turn white.

In matters of spiritual, social, and political significance, there is a chasm that exists perennially between fact and fiction, between what is and what is perceived to be. Has authentic native history been lost to that proverbial gap?
A great deal of what native people had passed on from generation to generation was lost in the time that native people and Europeans were trying to get along together. How much of that was lost, nobody knows anymore, so I really don’t know. Whenever you say something’s authentic I get a bit nervous and begin to squirm in my seat; I don’t like to call anything authentic. There’s a problem with that word for me. It gets used too much. It’s a word that’s supposed to ground something in the truth that may not even exist.

Finally, your book has been called an “alternative history” to white-native relations. Would you agree with that statement?
I think it’s a history of white-native relations. I don’t think it’s an alternative anything. It’s as mainstream a history as many of the histories that are written. It’s different angle, certainly. And if alternative means that, then sure, it’s an alternative history. It’s another way of looking at the same history—a way that we don’t normally look at the history of North America. 

Here’s Why Russia and Canada Are Clamouring for the Arctic

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Canadian icebreaker ship Louis St. Laurent, Beaufort Sea. Photo via Paul Nicklen/National Geographic stock/WWF Canada.
It’s a frozen, white, endless landscape for nine months of the year, with majestic glaciers that are thousands of years old, it’s also home to 100,000 people in Canada alone. With one of the harshest climates in the world, the Arctic Circle is slowly becoming the resource capital of our humble planet. The region contains the largest iron, ore, and nickel mines on earth. Gold and diamond mines are already being exploited, with oil and gas next in line. How the environment will change by the exploitation of resources at the top of our world will have a cascading effect on us all. 

The Arctic is huge. It covers an area of 14.5 million square kilometres, which is more than half of North America. Partly because of its massive size, five countries currently lay claim to its territory: Canada, Russia, US, Norway, and Denmark. But Canada and Russia control most of the Arctic Coast line (40 percent of Canada’s landmass is in the arctic), so the real, ultimate fight of who controls the area is between these two heavyweights. And Canada is gunning to take the North Pole. With shrinking ice and the thawing permafrost the Arctic land can now be explored. And this is exactly what these countries plan to do.

Russia has been exploiting the resources in their Arctic for decades and doing it faster than Canada; with at least 25 mines in operation, it is one of the worst polluters of the Arctic environment. Canada has some of the strictest pollution prevention controls, so the rate of development has been more cautious—but the environmental policies aren’t perfect. To exploit any mineral and oil resources in the north, there are many factors to take into consideration. “Our environment is very fragile,” says Baffin Island’s Lootie Toomasi (chairman of the Arctic Fishery Alliance).

There are serious risks to both on-shore and offshore drilling (particularly deep-water drilling), with water and air pollution amongst the biggest risks. The environmental watchdog group Pembina’s senior analyst, Shauna Morgan, worries about these gaps in regulation: “There are no air quality standards developed for the oil and gas industry, for the kinds of emissions they produce.” But threats to the environment start even before the drilling begins.



Beaufort Sea Ice, Herschel Island, Yukon Canada. Photo via Monte Hummel/WWF Canada.
Seismic surveys, which determine where oil is located on the seabed, create a considerable amount of noise. “There is a real issue with ocean noise,” explains WWF CEO David Miller. To conduct a seismic survey, a ship tows an air gun that shoots incredibly loud blasts of compressed air through the water to the seafloor. How loud is this sound cannon? At 250 decibels (to give you an idea, the average space shuttle launch is 180 decibels), and it’s blasted through the water every ten seconds, 24/7, for days or weeks. The volume has caused some to worry about hearing loss in marine animals.

“This is not only bad for the local fishers, but for hunters as well,” says Lootie. “The Fisheries Alliance has submitted their concerns to the National Energy Board about the survey.” They have yet to hear back.

According to Toomasi, a lack of resources to manage possible oil spills are another concern. To mitigate the fear, WWF has proposed that the drilling company needs to drill a same-season relief well. If a spill occurs, the relief well can take the pressure off the main drill, thereby trying to minimize the damage.

WWF has been working with local groups to monitor the effects on the ecosystem of the Arctic environment. “If you’re not going to protect nature, you’re not going to have a stable economy,” says Miller.

Protecting the environment, while still ensuring economic development, differs from country to country. The Russian government has developed without much consideration to the land or people of the region. It has also been charging ahead with further mining and oil projects, determined to take control of the Arctic. The country has 16 deep-water ports, and twenty percent of its GDP comes from the Arctic. They have exploited the resources faster than most countries. “Russia doesn’t have the presence of sea ice, because of the Gulf Stream, but Northern Canada has the heaviest amount of sea ice in the entire region,” Michael Byers, a UBC professor and author of Who Owns the Arctic?, tells me. “It’s not economically feasible to drill for oil,” he continues, but “it may be in ten to 20 years.”

And it is those ten to 20 years that the oil companies are banking on. Byers went on to explain: “Oil companies will sometimes explore for resources that are not economically viable, and have no intention of actually extracting any oil, except to boost their share price.” At the moment, the Arctic’s remoteness, short season, and sea ice are all factors to preventing serious resource extraction—but all of this is changing.

As the earth warms, companies are venturing to the Canadian north, and with wells already marked; they will be searching for black gold. The prospectors will keep coming.

Currently, Imperial Oil is seeking a permit to drill in the Beaufort Sea. “The Beaufort oil proposal is in some of the most deepest waters than anything that has ever been done in the Arctic,” says Miller. The proposal for the well is in a very sensitive area, a rich feeding ground for fish, beluga whales and polar bears. This is where WWF has proposed that Imperial Oil needs to drill a seasonal relief well.

The Arctic is undergoing a profound change, its “being fundamentally transformed through the acidification of the oceans, massive disruption to the ecosystem which affects the lives of people living there,” says Michael Byers. Exploiting the resources in the Canadian Arctic is a tightrope walk—it’s slow and deliberate—and each step is tricky. The communities are in favour of boosting their economy, but not at the cost of their environment and livelihood. 

Both Canada and Russia are claiming the North Pole as part of their territorial domain, if they are able to prove that the continental shelf from their country extends all the way up. The United Nations will be the governing body that will decide which country can claim the pole, or whether it will remain international waters.

But the concern over seabed mining and oil drilling is a serious one. “The ocean is like our farm. We rely on it for our living, for our food,” explains Lootie Toomasi of the fishery alliance. But these farms in the Arctic Circle contain 30 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply—and some of the largest mineral and metal deposits that exists. As the sea ice in the Arctic Circle melts and water passages open up, this vast untouched land stirs El Dorado-like visions, and now international prospectors are circling like hawks. 


@aeyliya

The Modern Chinese Fighter

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The Modern Chinese Fighter

VICE News: Racial Injustice in Milwaukee

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On December 14, 2012, a young black high school student named Corey Stingley was aggressively restrained after he tried to shoplift alcohol from a store in West Allis, Wisconsin. Three white men held Corey to the ground, “squeezing the hell out of him,” according to an eyewitness. When the police arrived, he was no longer breathing. He died two weeks later from brain injuries resulting from asphyxiation. The men who restrained him were never charged. 

Corey’s story is painfully similar to those of young black men across the country. Did his skin color preemptively decide his fate in the American justice system? VICE News follows Corey's father, Craig, as he seeks justice in the hyper-segregated city of West Allis, and mourns the death of his son.

VICE News: Love, Serve, Surrender: An Alleged Pedophile's Perfect Scam

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Hippie guru Jay Ram was hailed as a public hero for fostering, adopting, and caring for dozens of boys that had nowhere else to go. But years later, a new picture has emerged. Several of his sons have come forward to say that he preyed on them sexually and forced them to recruit other boys to molest.

VICE News has uncovered new evidence that shows that charities and child welfare agencies missed several clear warning signs, and continued to place new children in Ram's care. Until now, he has never faced justice.

Click here to read more on VICE News's investigation.

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