Members of University Colle London's Conservative Society. Photo courtesy of Louisa Townson

It’s been a long time since the UK's Conservative Party could count on the youth vote. As in the US, right wingers are often regarded as unhip and unfeeling rich men, and possibly as a result, your average Tory branch meeting looks a lot more like a Rotary Club get-together than anything resembling the bright young future of British politics.

However, according to last year’s British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, Generation Y’s support for the Tories has doubled to 20 percent since 2003. Surprisingly, a UK-wide survey also found that Conservatives are the most popular party among students, and March’s Guardian/ICM poll revealed that 54 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds would consider voting Tory at the next election.

I wanted to find out what this new generation of Tories is like, and I figured that the best way to do that was to go and speak to some of them.

Members of UCL's Conservative Society (left to right): Cameron Jones, Kevin O'Neill, Louisa Townson, and James Price. Photo by Huw Nesbitt

Though it's a center of radicalism within the UK student protest movement, University College London is also home to the oldest Tory student association in England, the UCL Conservative Society. Founded in 1908, the club began just two years after the Conservative Party launched its first national youth group, the Junior Imperial and Constitutional League.

Louisa Townson is the current UCL Tory Society president. A 24-year-old in the third year of a neuropharmacology PhD, she estimates that the society has about 40 members. She’s from David Cameron’s constituency of Witney, Oxfordshire, and is undoubtedly middle class, but hardly a typical Tory; she is, after all, a young woman in a party that has an average age is 59, whose 304 elected representatives include only 48 women, and which is currently taking flak for having no full members of the cabinet in posts concerning women’s issues.

So what attracted her to a party that’s mostly made up of old men?

Louisa and other members of the UCL's Tory Society raising money for Macmillan Cancer Support as part of their social action program. Photo courtesy of Louisa Townson

“I first became affiliated with the Conservatives in the 2010 general election,” she says. “The election debates in 2010 really engaged me and I found myself agreeing more and more with [the Conservative Party's] David Cameron and George Osborne. After that, I became a member. It was just Tory economics that convinced me, really. We'd had this huge [financial] crash and we knew we had to sort out the national debt and the deficit. Their broader principles also agreed with me. I’ve always been a firm believer in aspiration, social progress, personal responsibility, and small government.”

In short, the policies that inspired a bunch of students to storm Millbank way back in 2010 are the same that have won over UCL’s young Tories.

The tripling of tuition fees? “I think that was fair,” says Louisa. Unemployed people being asked to "volunteer" for their benefits? “I think it would be good if they can give something back,” she continues. One million unemployed young people and 50 percent of graduates going into non-graduate jobs? “Young people’s literacy and numeracy are worse than their parents,’” says James Price, a 23-year-old security studies student from Gloucester. “And if you do a degree in something that’s not going to give you practical skills, what can you expect?”

“We've always been the party of economic freedom, both left and right of the party, young and old,” says Oliver Cooper, president of the Tory youth movement Conservative Future. “On top of that, younger generations are more in touch with personal freedoms, civil liberties, and social freedom. Our younger members seem to be as interested in ideas of classical liberalism as they are in supporting tolerance of all sorts of lifestyles.”

Nick Robinson, former Young Conservatives chairman and current BBC political editor, taking a selfie with some young Tories. Photo courtesy of theblueguerilla.co.uk

Cooper may be right. Other data from the BSA survey supports the view that millennials are generally more tolerant of same-sex marriage, less likely to support patriarchal family roles, and the most likely to support a student’s right to wear traditional religious clothing at school. Basically, we’re less likely to be bigots.

However, in what could be seen as a slight contradiction, young people also have the lowest pride in the welfare state, believe that less money should be spent on welfare for the poor and that more people would find a job if jobseeker’s allowance wasn’t so generous. So what they seem to be saying is enjoy your gay wedding, but if you can’t find a job as soon as your honeymoon is over, suck it up and starve until you do.

Admittedly, this is only part of the story. Another report, commissioned by think tanks IPSOS Mori and Demos, concluded that there is actually strong support among Generation Y for benefits for single parents, the elderly, and those with disabilities. It also noted that young people’s dwindling pride in the welfare state may be the result of cutbacks to services, rather than some ideological objection—budgets are cut and the services get worse, so we support the programs less.

That general trend seemed to be reflected in the attitudes of the UCL Conservative Society’s members. They thought the anti-immigrant “Go home or face arrest” campaign was a “disgrace,” saw the introduction of gay marriage as a victory, and proudly tell me that they recently won a debate with the King’s College Tory Society in favor of immigration.

Mahyar Tousi, Conservative Future member and Conservative candidate for Lee Green, with some supporters. Photo courtesy of con4lib.com

“I'd say I was fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” says Kevin O’Neill, a 24-year-old from Northern Ireland who’s currently taking a break from studying medicine in Newcastle to read politics, philosophy, and economics at UCL. It seems peculiar that Kevin should be a Tory—he tells me that his family vote for the SDLP, Labour’s Northern Irish Republican counterpart.

In Northern Ireland, he says, “you vote according to your political background—no one's interested in the bigger picture. When I was 17 I became interested in current affairs, and someone like [former prime minister and right-wing icon] Margaret Thatcher I can feel some parallels with, not just in terms of her politics. She came from a working-class background, went to a grammar school, and just got on, which is similar to me.”

A love of Thatcher was something of a theme. James Price called her a “working-class radical,” adding, “My grandfather was a Welsh miner and my father was a Tory in the 1970s, and I’ve met Marxists who’ve had a hard time accepting that fact. But that was the great thing about Thatcherism—you could be whoever you wanted to be, regardless of where you were from.”

Young Tories posing with an anti-Tory poster. Photo courtesy of theblueguerilla.co.uk

Professor Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, believes that the party has never had any interest in its young supporters.

“The Conservatives are always claiming that they’re going to redouble their efforts to engage various 'hard to reach' communities like young people, but historically their efforts have never been impressive,” he says. “Institutionally it’s not a party for them—only 6 percent of its members are aged 18 to 24. And while predecessors to Conservative Future, such as Young Conservatives, might have been popular in the 1950s and 1960s when they had thousands of members, Tory youth politics has never been taken seriously ever since.”

There certainly seems to be a focus on the old with this government—Chancellor George Osborne’s spring budget, for instance, catered to older people through pension reforms and raising tax thresholds—probably because they’re more likely to vote.

Nevertheless, Cameron’s leadership has been so unpopular with the party’s traditional supporters that its membership has halved to 134,000 since 2005 (its lowest number in 70 years), with many members believed to have defected to UKIP. Of course, with that average age of 59, it's possible that many have simply died off, but Cameron still must feel that he can’t risk further instability with an election so close. He seems set to continue his appeasement of the Tory right until 2015, at the expense of young Tory modernizers. “Because there are so many backbench Tories whose views don't chime with the social liberalism that young Tories espouse, there are still these stumbling blocks for the party when it wants to reach out to young people,” says James Price.

So, while it’s clear that an increasing number of young people are identifying with traditionally right-wing views, it may be that the biggest hindrance to young people joining the Tories are the traditional Tories themselves.

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Photos by Jake Lewis

There's recently been some media coverage and a lot of hoo-ha surrounding a Facebook page set up to gather pictures of women eating on the London Underground. Before it was removed from Facebook, the group—titled “Women Eating On the Tube”—provided an outlet for camera-wielding voyeurs to take a break from sneaking up-skirts and instead indulge in a far more manageable, less arrest-able form of creepiness.

The page’s founder is "filmmaker and artist" Tony Burke. He claims that taking candid iPhone shots of women mid-chew is “an observational study” and “reportage photography,” as opposed to a bunch of assholes embarrassing busy people for indulging their basic human need to feed themselves.

The page was taken down last Friday. On the day of its demise, Burke visited the Radio 4 studios to sit down with pissed-off student Lucy Brisbane McKay, who had announced a protest on the Circle line against the page, “Women Eating Wherever the Fuck They Want.” McKay was correct in what she said: The policing of women’s behavior in this way is unacceptable, weird, degrading, and pretty embarrassing for Burke. But McKay said she wanted it to be a “celebration of women eating.”

What there is to celebrate about eating, I’m not too sure. There’s also something a bit top-hats-and-monocles about a picnic protest on the tube, so I went along to see if the organizers had figured out what point they were trying to make between the radio interview and the moment they stepped through the turnstile.

The feast was to begin at High Street Kensington station. A total of ten to 15 people showed up, mostly young women of student age, along with the odd older lady and a couple of guys thrown in to round out the demographic. One of the men was dressed as a sort of strip club musketeer and was defiantly eating a weird lunch of plain penne pasta with a spoon.

There was also a self-described "stand-up comedian, feminist, socialist, activist, and joy distributor" named Chris Coltrane, who you can see taking a picture of himself in the photo above.

Frances Scott (second from right) with some people she gave 50:50 shirts

Before we set off, a woman called Frances Scott arrived. Scott is the organizer of the 50:50 Parliament campaign, a venture calling for a more balanced House of Commons. She handed out T-shirts and posed for photos with the young ladies at the center of the event, but the girls soon removed the shirts, accusing Frances of attempting to hijack their protest.

Once we got on the train, it turned into an uncomfortable mini-frenzy, mostly because there's just not much room for a protest on a tube cart. Seasoned TV journalists and photographers jostled and argued with each other about shots and interviews, and I was personally interrupted about three times by some busybody from some TV station who wanted to speak to the girl I was having a conversation with.

The camera crews were obsessed with the girls who'd brought giant, showy picnic bags along for the ride. They seemed most interested in one who had about five bunches of bananas on her. I asked her if she'd ever encountered media attention like this before. She looked away for a second before completely ignoring me and chatting to her friend. It made me feel alone.

I turned to one of those women who weren't being bombarded by cameras, and asked her how it felt being ignored by cameras at a protest held to encourage people to ignore women with their cameras. She gave me the kind of daggers you'd normally give someone after they’d kicked your dog in the face.

I went down the train to speak to a few commuters. Though they agreed in principle that the page was a bit gross, they were all basically uninterested.

The author, eating on the tube in solidarity 

The more I thought about it, the more bizarre the whole event seemed. The train was unbearable to be on—journalists elbowing each other out the way for photo-ops while scribbling stuff in shorthand that anyone who isn't an idiot would probably already agree with. I can understand people uniting in resistance against some grand, overarching, damning social paradigm, but a gathering against a couple of dickheads with smartphones felt a bit pointless.

Still, anything organized to kick back against pricks who write stuff like, "Everywhere I go, I see women eating on Tubes. Like little mice hiding packets of chips and cookies in their bags and purses. Slowly, secretly, guiltily raising each bite-sized morsel to their salty lips in the hope that no one’s watching. Well, I’m watching. And I’m photographing, documenting the fascinating world of the Women Who Eat on Tubes,” can't be all bad.

The great public transport feast of Spring 2014, then: not all that great but nowhere near as bad as Tony Burke. For everyone else, it was just a bunch of people eating cheap sushi and cheese and onion chips on the tube.

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OK, now imagine this plane is much smaller and there is a woman putting it in her vagina—that's what @USAirways tweeted. Photo via Flickr user James Willamor

Late last night, someone was complaining to US Airways about a bad experience she had had with that airline. This is an entirely normal thing to do—as much as 75 percent of Twitter’s content is users bitching about airlines being awful and the airlines’ corporate Twitter accounts apologizing and asking the dissatisfied customers to fill out online complaint forms. The person running the @USAirways account followed the script when responding this afternoon, apologizing profusely and politely. Then @USAirways tweeted an extraordinarily graphic picture of a naked woman holding her legs up and apart to reveal a model airplane jammed rather immodestly into her vagina. That was not a normal thing to do. Here's how the exchange went:

@USAirways Unhappy that 1787 sat for an hour on tarmac in CLT because overweight, resulting in over hour late arrival in PDX...

— Elle (@ElleRafter) April 14, 2014

@ellerafter We truly dislike delays too and are very sorry your flight was affected.

— US Airways (@USAirways) April 14, 2014

@USAirways yeah, you seem so very sorry. So sorry, in fact, that you couldn't be bothered to address my other tweets.

— Elle (@ElleRafter) April 14, 2014

THEN THERE WAS A FUCKING PHOTO OF A LADY WITH A PLANE IN HER JUNK. (Link here, but it's NSFW because it's the kind of weird, vaguely funny porn that no one even masturbates to.)

Amazingly, that photo stayed online FOR A FUCKING HOUR while everyone on Twitter was like “lol” and “wtf” and “smh” and “haha now we know where Flight 370 is right? oh shit too soon my bad.” Then US Airways was like, “We apologize for an inappropriate image recently shared as a link in one of our responses. We’ve removed the tweet and are investigating,” as if there were a black box recording of a twentysomething hitting Command-V in the wrong text box, or as if there were some kind of vast conspiracy to make everyone look at a picture of some lady having carnal relations with a toy.

To see what kind of #SocialMedia and #Branding lessons could be drawn from this incident, I talked to Hanson O’Haver, the VICE Social Editor—a.k.a. the guy who runs the @VICE Twitter account.

VICE: What did the person running the US Airways do wrong? Or did they do anything wrong?
Hanson O’Haver: Well, I did a little digging and it looks like the image they post actually came from this tweet:

[NSFW, obviously.]

If you delete a tweet where you uploaded a photo, the link would be dead, so you can tell it originates from someone else's account, not @USAirways.

What probably happened is that they were tweeted that link, copy/pasted it to send around for laughs or for some HR report, and then went to reply to the other person's comment. They just pasted in the link and didn't realize that the link they had meant to use hadn't copied.

OK, and from a social media point of view, if you're running a corporate Twitter account, do you generally want to tweet images of hard-core, graphic pornography? Or is that more of a social media “don't”?
I mean, yeah, that's generally looked down upon by clients. But in terms of increasing engagement, it's certainly effective. Put it this way: US Airways wasn't trending nationwide before they sent an angry customer a photo of a toy plane inside a vagina.

What advice would you give the US Airways Twitter guy, as one Twitter professional to another?
I think the most important thing here is to deflect the blame. From the inside it's going to be pretty clear that posting the photo wasn't an experimental social media strategy, so what they want to do is find someone else who's at fault. For example, maybe if their agency would hire some more social media professionals they wouldn't be so sloppy. And also: If the airlines didn't keep everyone waiting all the time and didn't offer such terrible service, they wouldn't need to have people responding to complaints on the internet.

That said, they can also point out that it's already been written about by BuzzFeed.

As in, like, “It's not so bad! Look at all the press we're getting!”
Yeah, exactly, I mean, “All publicity is good publicity” doesn't really work as a slogan in the airline industry, but you've gotta play the cards you're dealt.

Is “trying to not get fired because of a typo/screwup” a big part of a Twitter professional's job?
It's a huge part. No one's ever like, “Good job, Hanson, you spelled Transnistria right!" But you spell Colombia as Columbia and 300 people notice.

The whole week Obama ordered that raid on Osama bin Laden, I was terrified I'd write “Obama bin Laden” or something.

And you can get fired over shit like that, right? You think the guy or gal in charge of @USAirways still has a job?
I mean I think I'd be OK? VICE understands that mistakes happen. But @USAirways probably has a different Twitter person right now, yes.

Any advice for aspiring Twitter professionals? Any lessons they should learn from this?
I guess just double-check your links? And don't let mistakes stop you from getting back out there.

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You bros are the unsung heroes of Coachella. Without you, who would brighten people’s days with a clever ironic t-shirt? How would women be able to dance without the impending threat of being grinded on?

A US Border Patrol van. Photo via Flickr user Mark

On March 26, representatives Steve Pearce (a Republican from New Mexico) and Beto O’Rourke (a Democrat from Texas) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would make the US Border Patrol more transparent and accountable by creating a commission to oversee the agency, establishing a process for filing complaints against it, and forcing agents to document instances when force was used against migrants. It may not get very far in the process of becoming a law, but it is important legislation. Generally, when people talk about immigration reform and so on, “border security” is usually described as an agreed-upon good thing. It isn’t.

Searches conducted by law enforcement on people crossing the border don’t need to satisfy rigorous Fourth Amendment requirements about “unreasonable searches and seizures.” This might seem logical, especially in the post-9/11 era, when fears about insecure borders feel reasonable to many people. But most of the 21,000 Border Patrol agents aren’t trying to stop Osama Jr. from driving from Tijuana with a truck full of smallpox, they’re manning checkpoints—which can be up to 100 miles from the border—that harass both peaceful immigrants just looking for work and US citizens. And while some of the more insane aspects of the war on drugs are being challenged, there’s still a bipartisan consensus that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Border Patrol, is Keeping America Safe.

On April 10, the Daily Beast reported on some of the abuses pepetrated by the Border Patrol in a piece titled "The Border Towns the Constitution Forgot," which is well worth a read if you need something to be outraged over. The core of the piece is a series of complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in October and again in January over the Border Patrol’s propensity for harassing people in Arizona.

The ACLU’s account from Clarisa Christiansen, which was posted on their blog earlier this month, describes how the resident of Three Points, Arizona, (a town 40 miles from the border) was pulled over by Border Patrol agents last May while driving with her two small children. She said she was an American citizen, but the agents became nasty and then downright threatening when she asked them why they were searching her car. Allegedly, one agent even pulled out a knife and asked if he needed to cut her seatbelt off.

There are other horrors stories about law enforcement becoming overly aggressive near the Mexican border—sometimes this means local cops conducting body cavity searches for drugs, sometimes this means Border Patrol agents breaking the windows of a pastor’s car when he resists being searched. As O’Rourke told the Daily Beast, “There are some really egregious incidents, people being detained for hours, their personal belongings confiscated, forced to undergo cavity searches, defecate in front of officers and undergo CT scans to prove that they’re not smuggling anything.”

The sacrificing of rights in the name of border security hasn’t made the headlines very often, maybe because most of the people being hassled are minorities, maybe because “protecting America’s borders” sounds like an easy, noble cause. The Pearce/O’Rourke bill is a step toward correcting the abuses perpetrated in the name of that cause, but the cause itself is a rotten one.

Now on to the bad cops of the week:

-Last Monday, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies showed up at an apartment where there was reportedly a mentally unbalanced perp with a butcher knife holding people hostage. When they saw a man run out of the apartment covered in blood with another man behind him, they assumed the second man was their perp and opened fire—but it was actually another victim who was trying to get away. John Winkler, a 30-year-old aspiring TV producer, died of his gunshot wound at a local hospital, and the knife-wielding suspect was taken into custody without the police firing a shot at him. It’s yet another case of an innocent person dying because cops pulled the trigger too quickly.

-The federal government nearly went to war with Cliven Bundy, a cantankerous Nevada rancher who refused to comply with governmental rules about not letting his cattle graze on land where endangered tortoises lived. This led to a 2013 lawsuit, which Bundy lost, and that led to armed federal agents showing up to seize his cattle as payment, which led to hundreds of cranky militia members showing up to support Bundy, which led to a standoff between Bundy and his allies and the Bureau of Land Management on Saturday. Thankfully, the authorities pulled back instead of escalating the tension a la Waco. That’s what people in power should be doing with a stubborn dude with a bunch of guns.

-The Dallas Police Department has been expressing some complaints over citizens filming their officers, saying it interferes with police activity. Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston told CBS Dallas that a recent incident in which a Cop Block volunteer activist was filming an officer makes cops nervous over whether people with cameras are civilians or criminals engaged in some nefarious scheme. Pinkston added that this confusion is “creating a major officer safety issue.” The DPD sent an email to its officers reminding them that people have a right to film them, which is the correct response—officers don’t have the right to privacy when they're in public, and a little bit of monitoring of the authorities is a step in the right direction.

-On April 10, the Department of Justice (DOJ) completed its investigation into the tactics of the Albuquerque Police Department, which has been rocked by scandal in recent years, particularly in the weeks since the APD fatally shot a homeless man in March during an incident that was captured on an officer’s helmet cam. That shooting of James Boyd —just one of 23 fatal shootings ones since 2010—caused major backlash, with police tactics during protests provoking more anger and leading to “chaos,” according to NPR. The DOJ concluded that the department has a pattern of Fourth Amendment violations, and regularly uses excessive force, particularly the lethal variety. Finally, the DOJ noted that in confrontations with mentally ill individuals tend to involve too often—something sadly not unique to the APD. The entire DOJ report can be read here.

-Back in October, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Shoreward, Illinois, police officers charged 11 people for marijuana and salvia-related crimes. How did the DEA find these people? By targeting a hydroponic gardening store, which sells the stuff you need to grow ordinary, legal crops like tomatoes. Nevertheless, on October 11 DEA agent Donn Kaminski saw 46-year-old Angela Kirking exit the gardening store "carrying a green plastic bag containing unknown items." This information was carefully included on the search warrant for Kirking’s home. Kaminski also picked through Kirking’s trash, claiming to have smelled marijuana and to have field-tested a stem, which was allegedly part of a marijuana plant. (Given the credibility of field tests, that’s not much evidence.) When the police busted in on a raid three weeks later, they found less than a third of an ounce of marijuana in Kirking’s home. She is understandably shook up and her attorney is arguing her resulting misdemeanors should be tossed out because the search of her home was based on her shopping habits. Also, how much did the cops spend to nab her tiny quantity of weed?

-On April 9, Wired reported that GoGo, a WiFi provider for airlines and used by millions, is so disinterested in user privacy that they sent a letter to the federal government reminding them that will go above and beyond in following the rules. That’s great customer service for the Feds, but not for the rest of us.

-Our Good Cop of the Week is Cash, a K-9 officer who awoke his handler when his home caught fire. William Patterson, a sheriff’s deputy in Hoke County, North Carolina, was asleep along with his fiancee and three of his five children when a fire started, and thanks to Cash’s barks, the whole family woke up and was able to flee the building. Good dog!

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

Women wearing the masks of G8 leaders protest climate change in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo via OxFam International

The tales of impending doom about manmade climate change are coming down so fast and furious these days that it can be tough to keep up. But the latest terrifying missive (courtesy of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC) is, mercifully, served with a bit of soothing chaser: Apparently, the political will to actually do something about reducing carbon emissions is starting to emerge around the globe. After blowing it for decades—perhaps best symbolized by that time Ronald Reagan, in an act that will go down as one of the dumbest populist appeals in American history, insisted on removing the solar panels installed by his predecessor on the White House roof—are political elites in the US and abroad ready to inconvenience themselves in the name of saving the planet?

"Especially when you look outside the US, there does seem to be rising political will to tackle climate change in many countries," said Glenn Hurowitz, an environmental advocate and managing director of Climate Advisers, a group that has been prodding foreign corporations on deforestation, among other issues. "An analysis just came out showing that if China fully implements its plans to crack down on coal, then the world will be back on track to meet the 2 degree target by 2020, which is really exciting."

So there's growing evidence that major powers—even those in the developing world whose economies have been industrializing at a furious pace over the past decade—are beginning to at least consider carbon pollution when making policy. In China, the new government under President Xi Jinping has promised to rein in pollution as part of its effort to assuage the quality of life ambitions of a burgeoning middle class. And Brazil has broken through as a real success story, reducing deforestation by 75 percent since 2004 and in the process curbing its own emissions by more than every member of the Kyoto Protocol combined.

Closer to home, however, the picture is still a pretty dark one.

"We haven't seen a major environmental law pass Congress in nearly two decades," said Alex Formuzis, vice-president at the Environmental Working Group and a former aide to multiple US Senators. "Capitol Hill is just extremely polarized, and the foothold that the oil and gas industry—the fossil fuel industry—has on the Hill is strong." It's true: a quick glance at financial disclosure reports shows that the energy industry effectively has many members of Congress on their payroll. And the 2010 midterms swept into office not just a fresh batch of climate change skeptics, but straight-up deniers who don't seem to care all that much what life on Earth will be like a few years from now (perhaps because they expect the Salvation is just around the corner).

In a nod to the hostile political climate, the IPCC's latest report focuses on mitigation, or what our best options are for stopping this trainwreck along with a sense of the costs. As you might expect, making a downpayment by reducing carbon emissions and exploring clean energy alternatives now (or by 2020) is likely to prove a good bit cheaper than waiting until sea levels have started submerging cities and wreaking havoc with more frequent bouts of extreme weather. In the United States, the closest lawmakers came to taking real action at a national level was when the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in 2009, only to let it die in the Democratic-controlled Senate the following year. Since tri-corner hats became a thing at right-wing political rallies around that time, Congress hasn't gone anywhere near a cap-and-trade system—or, for that matter, any other comprehensive approach to putting a price on carbon (which most experts agree is the only way to discourage pollution by businesses and consumers).

President Obama, to his credit, has vowed to use the Environmental Protection Agency to rein in pollution even if Congress does not act, though so far just one significant "rule" (or regulation) has come down—and that was in January of this year—putting a limit on the the volume of carbon emissions permitted at future powerplants. The real fight will come in June, when the EPA issues new rules for existing (coal-fired) powerplants, which are responsible for about 40 percent of US carbon emissions. Republicans are sure to raise hell and call votes in the House (and even try to force some in the Senate) to block the measures, though most advocates I canvassed are at least cautiously optimistic that they have the numbers to keep the nihilists at bay. (It's also worth noting that billionaire hedge-funder Tom Steyer just vowed to shell out $50 million of his own cash and $50 million from other donors to force climate change onto the agenda in this November's midterm elections).

Perhaps most important of all, the State Department is expected to (finally) release its "national interest determination" on the Keystone XL pipeline this spring as well, essentially a report for the White House on whether building a huge oil tube across North America is a good idea. Some labor unions, despite their traditional allegience to the Democratic Party, are threatening liberals in Congress with retaliation for opposing the project, worried killing it would have a negative impact on job growth. But advocates across the environmental community agree that only if the White House decides to block the monstrosity will we have a really tangible sign that the politics of climate change have shifted in the right direction.

"If they reject the KeyStone XL pipeline because of its climate impact," said Hurowitz, "that will send a powerful signal to Wall Street that investments in fossil fuels don't have a viable future."

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The St. Leon wind farm, in Southwestern Manitoba. Photo via Flickr user, Loozrboy.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finalized a report over the weekend that tells governments what can be done to avoid the dangerous and scary effects of climate change. Like a good psychic reading, the report intentionally does not provide a pathway to success, but shows us what the future could look like if governments tweaked different things, such as changing gas prices, adding green energy, subtracting nuclear power plants, etc.

When Environment Canada peered into its huge and very obvious crystal ball last year, it said that Canada is nowhere near reaching its 2020 emissions-reduction goals. It also said that most of Canada's success has come from provincial green energy initiatives, specifically Ontario's ban on coal-fired power plants.

But, as the IPCC report shows, the path to a green future isn't straightforward. As energy prices begin to soar in Ontario and more rural communities refuse to host wind projects, Ontario is learning that green energy, like all development projects, comes with certain costs that will be shouldered by some communities more than others.

The Provinces Are Picking Up The Slack

In Copenhagen in 2009, Harper committed to reducing Canada’s 2005 level of carbon emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020, meaning the country should by then be emitting 612 megatons (Mt) of carbon.

In the house debate last week, Elizabeth May asked the government twice if that commitment still stands. But Colin Carrie, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment, chose to give her a run-down of the government's climate change strategy instead of answering her question directly.

This strategy consists of regulating the transportation and electricity industries while leaving the oil and gas industry—officially Canada's biggest emitter, as of last Friday—to its own devices. Harper has been promising to write emissions rules for the oil and gas emissions since 2008, but has delayed implementation, saying that he will get around to it “in the coming years.”

Environment Canada's 2013 Emissions Trends Report answered May's question by saying that if the government continues down its current path, it will miss the 2020 Copenhagen target by 122 Mt. To put that number into perspective, the collective effort of Canadian consumers, businesses and governments so far has reduced carbon emissions by 128 Mt. 

Canada did manage to get its overall GHG emissions down by 35 Mt from 2005 to 2011, but this is largely due to the reduction in emissions from electricity production, which is almost entirely thanks to Ontario’s decision to phase out coal. The 2013 Ending Coal for Cleaner Air Act, the biggest single emissions-reduction action taken by a government in North America, closed the province's remaining coal-fired power plants and banned new ones from being built.

Robert Hornung, President of the Canadian Wind Energy Association, says provincial initiatives have opened the door wide open for large-scale wind projects to step in. Ten years ago, the capacity of the wind turbines in Canada was 322 megawatts. At the end of 2013, it was 7,800 watts, and in 2016, it will be 12,000 megawatts. Canada is the ninth largest wind market in the world, and there were only five countries that installed more wind projects last year, he says.

The Costs of Going Green

Ontario’s long-term energy plan, which was released last December, says electricity bills are expected to go up by 42 percent by 2018, and 68 percent by 2038. The industrial sector will see its bills go up by 33 percent in the next five years and 55 percent in the next 20 years.

That’s not good news for Ontario’s economy. The Globe and Mail reported last week that businesses have received letters from governments in the US trying to lure them over the border to save money on their electricity bills. While businesses have yet to take them up on the offer, it highlights a growing problem that Kathleen Wynn's government is trying to address through government relief programs.

The rise in energy costs is due to a combination of overdue infrastructure upgrades and the transition from coal to renewable energy. But Hornung points out that when you compare the cost of wind energy to existing sources of power, wind is obviously going to be more expensive. What people should be doing is comparing new wind projects to other new facilities, such as nuclear or coal plants. When you do that, the price of wind energy is quite competitive, he says.

While rising energy prices will be shared by everyone plugged into Ontario's power grid, many people living near wind turbines say they are the unwilling hosts to Ontario's vision for a green energy future.

Stephana Johnston, 84, is a member of Ontario Wind Resistance (OWR), a network of 35 groups and about 400 individuals who are fighting wind-development projects in their communities.

She built her dream home on 20 acres of farmland in Norfolk County, boasting what she proudly refers to as “a million-dollar view of Lake Eerie.” She put her life’s savings into a custom-built home that she thought would be comfortable and safe for the last two decades of her life.

But after 18 wind turbines, standing over 360-feet tall, went up within three kilometres of her house, she says she started to experience “excruciating pain” and sleepless nights. She now stays in a rented apartment in Port Rowan, Ontario and travels back to her house on Wednesdays and Sundays to bathe and do her laundry.

Whether Johnston’s symptoms are caused by the turbines or not, she may be stuck with what she has because her house has been on the market since December 2009 and not a single person has come to view it. She says she just wants to get back what she has put into the house, which was approximately $600,000 including the land.cc

Gallant says many people in OWR didn’t realize what they were getting into when wind energy developers started knocking on their doors. “You think, ‘wind is free...but you have a different perspective when [a 400-foot turbine] is right up next to you… all of a sudden you’re faced with something that is so out of character with the area and is going to create this rural divide, neighbour hating neighbour.”

OWR is pushing back against Ontario’s Green Energy Act and what it has taken away from rural communities in terms of democratic rights, says Gallant. “You can have a say if Tim Horton’s wants to put up a building on a main street, but you don’t have the right to say ‘no’ to a 400-foot tall wind turbine. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s why [almost 100] communities have voted against being willing hosts” of wind projects, says Gallant.

As wind energy moves from the margins into the mainstream, it’s starting to deal with many of the same challenges as other mainstream energy sources and will have to take on some of the same responsibilities to maintain its social license to operate, says Hornung. 

VICE reported last month that the Canadian mining industry was finally coming to terms with the fact that community resistance is starting to affect its bottom line, and is now trying to save its reputation by winning the acceptance of the people affected by its operations.

It’s fair to say that wind-energy developers assumed they would have public acceptance when they started building turbines in rural communities, says Hornung. “What they’ve learned is that acceptance has to be earned.”
 

@iamrenders

The wreckage of a fiery California bus crash that killed ten and injured dozens of others was still smoldering just after midnight on Friday when 17-year-old survivor Jonathan Gutierrez SnapChatted a sickbed selfie to a handful of friends. Almost immediately the photo went public, and then viral, all of which—predictably—ignited a shitstorm around the internet.

“Like the Funeral Selfiebefore it, the Hospital Selfie exposes a massive generational divide about the etiquette of self-expression and oversharing, especially in the face of disaster,” Joe Coscarelliopined for New York magazine, while commenters called it “emotionally stunted” and “fucking stupid.” 

But actually, the gravely ill and gruesomely injured post self-portraits far more graphic than Gutierrez’s all the time. Though not as popular as #yolo or #tbt, hashtags like #piccline, #dialysis, #chemo and #amputee each turn up thousands of results, most of them geotagged to hospitals and clinics. While the comparison to funeral selfies is tempting, there’s evidence to suggest something very different is happening here.

“There’s a long history of people who are sick making images of themselves to make sense of their experiences,” said Professor Susan Bell, a sociologist who teaches illness narratives at Bowdoin College and argues that trauma selfies may be more closely related to the pathology self-portraits of artists like Jo Spence or Frida Kahlo than their oversharing coevals. “I think there's something about having that image or having the object and putting it out there that confronts people, that connects and disrupts in a way that's very different than words.”

Patients who post medically explicit snaps of themselves on social media often describe Instagram as a kind of opiate, one that amputee Libby Schaffer uses to ease her phantom limb pain and brain tumor survivor Noël Day Bishoptreats like group therapy. For Alex Blaszczuk, paralyzed from the chest down in a car wreck, posting her trauma online is nothing short of an exorcism.

“The more I repeat it the less real it becomes,” the third-year Columbia University law student and Google Glass explorer said of sharing her C5 complete spinal cord injury and its aftermath on social media. “The idea of sharing trauma, at least for me, is not so much to elicit anything back but just to get it out of me.”

When she’s not in class, the 26-year-old can be found #swaggerjackingstephenhawkingon Twitter and documenting her daily life on Flickr and YouTube. Though she said her disability is always the first thing strangers see, Blaszcuk argued that narrating her new body in pictures and video and to share those reflections on social platforms helps her define herself beyond her wheelchair.

“There’s this ‘supercrip’ narrative: despite injury you are able to do everything and so much more than just the average person, so you’re no longer a person, you’re someone who did something despite or because of your injury,” Blaszcuk said.  “This narrative of my mobility impairment somehow making my life a war zone is highly problematic ... I don’t assume that [peers] have a quote unquote constant struggle. I assume they’re dealing with their shit and I’m dealing with mine.”

It’s just the opposite for Day Bishop, whose epilepsy is all but invisible most of the time. Her hospital selfies are intended to call attention to the same things Blaszcuk’s self-portraits often elide. In posts that attract scores of comments on Instagram and Facebook, the focus is on the response.

“With medical stuff, people don’t know how to talk about it and don’t know how to start the conversation,” she explained. “Putting it out there [on social media] really helps. It’s really hard to, but it really helps.”

The New York-based filmmaker and actress said Instagram in particular has introduced her to an entire network of fellow patients, one she’s come to rely on for medical information and emotional support since having her tumor removed in 2012.

“When I was on Instagram, I would click on different hashtags of #brainsurgery or #craniotomy and see so many other people’s pictures of their scars. It was so cool,” Day Bishop said. “Just typing in a Google search on the Internet, that’s kind of what I was looking for. I was looking for affirmation from somebody else.”

As with Blaszcuk, whose credits Google Glass with returning her sense of aesthetic independence and facilitating previously foreclosed modes of self-expression, Day Bishop sees Instagram as intrinsic to her health and wellbeing.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she confessed of her illness. “[Instagram] is such a new thing...I feel lucky that I was able to have that resource going through this.”

Schaffer, 32, also leans on social media for support, though of a slightly different shade. For her, seeing others draw strength from selfies of her stump renewed her sense of optimism in the difficult months after her left leg was amputated. She suffers from Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome, an inflammatory disorder that was set off when she broke her left heel at age six and transformed her left leg into a swollen, useless appendage that caused her constant pain. She told me that the graphic images she posts online draw much needed attention to the rare and debilitating disease that’s affected her life for nearly three decades.

“I get emails on a daily basis from people all over the world,” Schaffer said. “I’ve become an inspiration for them.”

Recently, her online presence helped her heal from another medical trauma: Since her surgery in September, Schaffer said she’s turned to Instagram to ease her “phantom limb pain,” a complex neurological phenomenon that affects up to 80 percent of amputees, creating uncomfortable sensations where the limb used to be.

“When I take pictures and I see ‘oh, I don’t have a leg,’ I recognize that I don’t have the leg, and it helps with the pain,” she said. “Having other people who’ve gone through it say, ‘You look good, you’re doing great, your leg looks healthy,’ ... you sit back and think, I lost my leg months ago, but I’m still here.”

Although she’s often the object of Internet trolls, Libby said she both functions indispensable.

“Now that my leg’s gone, I get a lot of kids going ‘mommy, she doesn’t have a leg.’ The parents overeat and say, ‘no, don’t do that.’ But I say let them do that ,,, I try to make an example of myself,” Schaffer said. “That’s a bit part of the whole sharing online … if you want to stare, at least ask somebody. Don’t make assumptions before you know anything.”

Sick people will keep posting. The volume of images and videos alone suggests that trauma selfies are no more likely to fade than Frida Kahlo’s gruesome self-portraits of sixty years ago. It’s able-bodied people who angst over public images of the infirm, dismissing them as avatars of social media’s endemic narcissism. There are more than 400,000 millennials living with disabilities in America alone, with an untold number sharing their lives on Instagram et al. To those on the other side of the lens, graphic images are a way of forcing others to confront a reality most would rather not: that while the body may break, life limps on, just as complex and human as it was before.

“They’re all constructed in one way or another,” Dr. Bell said of the images. “One of the effects of doing this is to call people out, to say ‘pay attention!’ Another is to say, ‘I’m here, where are you?’ It’s a way of forming community among fellow sufferers, which also has a long history of occurring in different forms or mediums.”

Blaszcuk the law student adopts a similarly philosophical approach to her own trauma, citing French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s three orders—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—to explain how she internalizes a loss that was both instantaneous and unimaginable before it happened to her.

“You’re choosing to kind of say, this image or this text or this video, this is where I’m boxing in this experience,” Blaszcuk said. “Maybe not as tidy as I’d like it, but it’s a little neater, a little tidier than this monster that it is. Especially if I can make someone laugh about it, and then I laugh about it, then it’s just a huge relief.”

Photos by Riccardo De Luca

This past Saturday, an array of parties and political groups belonging to Italy's far left paraded angrily through the streets of Rome. They'd gathered to protest what they feel are destabilizing austerity measures brought in by the new coalition government helmed by Democratic Party leader Matteo Renzi.

The demonstrators have been particularly enraged by something called the “Jobs Act," which Renzi believes will simplify the country's labor system and cut unemployment. Unfortunately, it seems he wishes to do this by eliminating some workers' rights that make businesses less inclined to hire employees on a full-time basis.

There's also a new housing bill, which seeks to deny squatters rights to certain public services.

According to local media, the nationwide demonstration—dubbed “Social Movements Spring”—was attended mostly by “house occupiers and squatters, migrants and young temporary workers, students and activists." Right in front of the Ministry of Infrastructure building in Porta Pia, central Rome, protesters had set up a small camp to prepare for the action.

When I arrived there at around 3PM, the atmosphere was tense. Earlier that morning, it was reported that 80 youths had been arrested for possessing weapons and other "dangerous" objects. The movement's Twitter page, however, claimed that those detained were "right here in the square with us."

Depending on whom you believe, anywhere between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters began their march at 4PM. On my right, I caught sight of a banner from the Committee in Support of the Communist Resistance hanging from a tree. "Socialism is the future of humanity!" it read.

Monitored by an impressive number of police, the parade made its way to the Ministry of Finance headquarters, where everyone celebrated by pelting the cops with eggs and oranges.

A little later, a group broke away from the major bloc and headed towards Vittorio Veneto Street, in order to "besiege" the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.

Protesters threw eggs, bottles and firecrackers at the police, who for a while stood still without reacting. Meanwhile, those at the far end of the march dropped their caps, goggles and gas masks, while others put on blue windbreakers and got to fighting the police. I'm still unsure about the meaning of the blue windbreakers; it's something I've never seen at an Italian protest before.

Nevertheless, the mainstream Italian media has already taken to calling them the "blue bloc."

The standoff lasted for about 20 minutes. The first line of demonstrators launched smoke bombs and fireworks, to which the police responded with tear gas and a full baton charge, encountering little real resistance.

No one was able to escape the second police charge: anarchists, peaceful protesters, families, passers-by—everyone was at their mercy. I covered my face to save my tear ducts from the gas and tried to avoid a beating. In front of me, a middle-aged lady was knocked to the ground but was rescued by other protesters. I saw a mother rip her son from her stroller and take refuge in a sidestreet.

Several people fell and were arrested by the police.

Or just remained on the ground, like this couple.

The chief of police, Alessandro Pansa, described the baton charges as "pre-emptive." Nothing about the above looks very pre-emptive to me.

The main street had been turned into a battlefield covered with blood, shoes, scarves and other items. A rumor began to circulate that the police had “chopped off a man’s hand." Later, I discovered that the victim had in fact been injured by a firecracker he was trying to throw, and was a 47-year-old Peruvian named Juan Zabaleta, who lives with his family in an occupied building.

By that point, the demonstration was pretty much over. The procession returned to Porta Pia with no further moments of tension.

A certain weariness was in the air and the strong reaction by the police had left its mark. Dozens of cops and protesters had been injured (one of them severely), while six people were arrested.

The demonstration has split the Italian public. Some really didn't like seeing Vittorio Veneto Street—"one of Rome's most famous"—being "harassed and vandalized." The Minister of Infrastructure, Maurizio Lupi, declared the protesters to be "criminals and villains": "After facing the umpteenth clash in Rome, we must have the courage to say that whoever occupies a house without authorization is committing a crime," he declared.

Rome's Mayor, Ignazio Marino, warned of "a violence that is [...] capable of striking the whole city."

People weren't slow to criticize the police, either. Journalist Fiorenza Sarzani from the newspaper Corriere della Sera argued, "What should concern us is the behaviour of the police, who allowed the protesters to stay way over 15 minutes in Vittorio Veneto Street and then rushed the crowd instead of clearing them out. This is odd behaviour, especially due to the fact that in such a narrow space, with hundreds of people pressed up beneath the Ministry, it could have ended up in the worst of scenarios."

The leaders of the movement have declared that the 12th of April is just "the beginning of the protest against the Renzi Government"—a protest that "must grow" in the months to come. It seems Italy's new prime minister will receive at least a few more unsolicited visits to his front doorstep like the one on Saturday.

@captblicero

Some of Scurvy Crew's Spanish opium

Dread Pirate Roberts captained a ship that many thought was unsinkable. But when the FBI seized the original Silk Road on October 1, 2013 ,and arrested the alleged kingpin—29-year-old Ross Ulbricht—the online drugs empire began to capsize. Its hundreds of thousands of customers scattered across the Deep Web, and up to seven known Silk Road vendors were identified and arrested.

As the chaos unravelled into the mainstream and stories of Dread Pirate Roberts’ (DPR) alleged murder-for-hire antics made headlines, one prominent Silk Road drugs syndicate sat in their European safe-house with a ton of opium and a decision to make—would they cut their losses and disappear into the ether while they were still ahead, or keep their lucrative online drugs network running in the midst of all this extra attention?

The displaced drugs syndicate, known on the Deep Web as the Scurvy Crew (TSC), decided to go back to work. For them, back to work meant laundering Bitcoins, vacuum packing drug parcels, and jumping the Moroccan border with bags stuffed full of uncut drugs. Silk Road may have died a sudden death at the hands of the authorities, but as one of the highest rated vendors before the FBI shut-down, the Scurvy Crew saw its demise as an opportunity to diversify.

After six months of negotiation, via encrypted email and several phone calls from throwaway SIM cards, the boss of the Scurvy Crew agreed to meet me. He told me he would explain to me the inner workings of his Deep Web drugs venture, from its humble beginnings to the near million-dollar profits it now apparently generates. Known to me only by the pseudonym "Ace," the boss claimed to represent a new breed of drug dealer.

“I don’t do this just for the money,” he wrote to me via email. “I like to provide a premium service.”

Ace agreed to meet with me because he wanted to prove that the world of high-end deep web drug dealing is a network of complex, unique, and even respectable operations—not the underworld of fumbled contract killings and Bitcoin scams that the media often focuses on. I wanted to write about how someone (who’s still currently at large) becomes a successful Silk Road businessman, and Ace was exactly that. I’d also discovered that he was possibly the last person to communicate with Ross Ulbricht before he was arrested last October in a San Francisco library.

I was told to fly out to somewhere in mainland Europe, but I had to be vetted before I could meet Ace. He asked for my full name, date of birth, flight numbers, arrival times, passport number, hotel address, and even what means of transport I’d use to get from the airport to the hotel. I gave him what he asked for and was told that Scurvy Crew associates were “running” my details.

After a few days of radio silence, The Scurvy Crew made contact again. When the message they’d sent me decrypted, the only words written were: “Don’t move from the airport until you have instructions." It seemed a little ominous, but I decided to take a flight out to the agreed location and wait.

Arriving at the airport, I did as I was told, waiting for a phone call from the gang that, in the Silk Road's early days, was supposedly responsible for 30 percent of the money that flowed through the website. After 20 minutes, my phone rang. It was Ace.

“Make your way to the nearest train station,” he said. “My guys are nearby.”

I left the airport and made for the train. As it pulled off, Ace rang me again to confirm that his guys had just seen me get on the train and that everything was running smoothly.

“One of my people is on the train with you as well.”

Five minutes later, another call came in. Ace instructed me to alight at the next station and walk into the plaza nearby. I sat around for a few minutes and tried to guess whom, out of the hundreds of people walking around me, could be the Scurvy Crew footmen on my tail.

Another call. Ace.

(Click to enlarge)

“Okay, I can see you now,” he said. “When I walk up to you, just say hi and follow me.”

Within a minute of hanging up the phone, a tall but otherwise non-descript white guy of about 35 approached me and nodded.

“Ace?” I asked.

The man grinned and shook my hand, while I remained preoccupied by the fact he looked more like a hungover accountant than your archetypal drugs boss.

I followed Ace for about 15 minutes as we walked to a more secluded area of the city, eventually making our way into a small dingy bar, where some tables and chairs were set out upstairs. Ace asked me to empty my bag out onto one of the tables. I unzipped the duffle bag and poured out my stuff. He searched through my crumpled shirts and notepads, combed through the inside lining of my bag and asked me to hand over my passport and my phone. The battery was removed from my phone and my passport was scanned over, presumably to check that the number I’d given previously corresponded with the one on the hard copy.

After a few minutes of precise security checks, Ace was happy I was who I claimed to be.

“It’s nothing personal,” he said. “You just can’t be too careful in this game.”

Was he the real Ace, though, or was this one of his footmen trying to trick me?

To prove he was who he said he was, he pulled out a small laptop and logged in using the same PGP key we’d been communicating with for months. He also logged into the Scurvy Crew user account on the new Silk Road—Silk Road 2.0, a replica launched on November 6 that’s supposedly run by former staff members of the original site. While it serves a purpose, Silk Road 2.0 is riddled with errors, Bitcoin theft, internal drama, and hacking attempts.

However, it still seems to be the main point of business for Deep Web drug dealing, something that quickly became apparent when Ace showed me his seemingly never-ending order list for that day—requests for Spanish opium, Moroccan hash, and crystal LSD stacked up one after the other as he scrolled down the screen. 

I wanted to know how this guy ended up working his way down a path that eventually led to Silk Road notoriety and a flourishing business of international drug trafficking. Ace rolled up his sleeves, anxiously looked around the bar, then sat down opposite me. As he began to tell me his story, his demeanor switched; he took on the role of a professional in his element, like when a wealthy gambler explains the intricacies of his winning technique.

Some of The Scurvy Crew's acid

It turns out that Ace started his narcotics career in a more traditional way: small-time street dealing. “Me and group of guys were [dealing drugs] out of a European city, I guess about four years ago now,” he told me. “We were selling what everyone wanted—coke, weed, pills. We were a group of four runners, and I was organizing them and getting the restocks in. Eventually, one guy got arrested, then another guy got arrested, then we figured it was too much of an expendable business doing it that way. So we gave it a break. Each man went their own way and we started trying to make a living in a more legit way.”

However, the legitimate path proved boring for Ace, so he went travelling with the proceeds of his previous job. In 2011, a couple of years into his trip, he was lured back into selling drugs after learning about Silk Road from a group of Australian tourists he'd met in Spain. 

“In Australia, it’s hard to get decent drugs at a decent price, so these girls used [Silk Road] a lot," he said. "I took on board the idea [of dealing on the Deep Web]. I did about four months' research. I did quite a few purchases and saw that this was a viable option. So I then started thinking about what I could sell. Being in Spain, where I was at the time, it’s quite well known that Bayer grows opium there, in tightly controlled, private military-guarded fields."

Ace was referring to the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, whose chemists were ironically the first to produce and market heroin to the public in the late 1890s. Ace claims to have it on good knowledge that the company still grows high quality opium in Spain, which they cultivate for use as an ingredient in some of their products. When I tried to confirm Ace's allegation with experts, one drug researcher told me that it actually isn’t all that unlikely; pharmaceutical companies, via third parties, supposedly buy poppies from all over the world to extract opium for scientific or medicinal use. And when I contacted Julien Little, Bayer's UK spokesperson, I was told that, while they don’t grow opium themselves, it’s “possible that Bayer use closely monitored contract farming” for cultivating opium.  

So Ace may well have stumbled upon a crop of somebody’s premature golden brown. And going by the incredibly high quality opium and armed guards he said surround these poppy fields, he’s certain he'd found a professional pharmaceutical supplier's camp, even if there's no way to verify it completely.

“To find such fields you’ve got to study the news articles that come out [about them]. Then you’ve got to either bribe reporters for the locations or you’ve got to be ‘in the know’ with certain farmers,” he said. “As soon as you’ve got the rough area, then you drive around while the flowers are in bloom and come back two months' later when the poppies are green but the petals have fallen off.”

Equipped with his newfound knowledge of Silk Road, a machete, and a sack, Ace decided one night in 2011 that he’d take the risk and sneak into one of these fields—which may have been grown for Bayer but who knows, more importantly, they're fields full of opium. After one night trawling through the dirt and the poppy stems, he came home with a sizeable amount of opium to extract, quickly going on to sell his product on Silk Road and reaping modest but steady profits. To avoid drawing attention to his new line of work, he set up a small limited business to launder his Bitcoins through. After the first month, Ace was sold. Silk Road would become his battleground in his war against the War on Drugs.

To keep up with demand, he eventually hired a few local friends to help with the poppy cultivation. It was at this point, as people sat in the comfort of their homes ordering Ace’s opium over the internet, that the danger of his new line of work became all too real. Late one night, as Ace and his associates crept through the opium fields, scoping out the maturity of the poppy heads, they heard gun-shots ring out from the distance. Bullets skimmed past above them and tore through the brush. The private security guards were close by.

(Click to enlarge)

“I thought to myself, ‘They can’t be firing at us,'” Ace told me, recalling the night with a look of horror. “So we started crawling around on our hands and knees, then suddenly my friend screams. He’d been shot in the leg.”

His friend writhed around on the ground with a hot bullet hole in his thigh, before Ace and the others grabbed the injured party and dragged him through the poppy field: “We were begging that these crazy cunts didn’t see the poppies moving,” he told me.

Driven by the adrenaline and the fear of catching a bullet, Ace and his friends made it the short distance out of the poppy field to their car. “We dumped him in the back of the car," he recalled. "It was lights off all the way to the end [of the path] through these olive groves to get out the back. My friend's bleeding out in the back of the car, so we took him to a vet we know who stitches us up if we get into trouble.”

His friend survived. Ace thought about this for a minute and said: “I don’t think [the private security] even thought there was anyone in the fields... they just thought it’d be fun to fire into the poppies.”

This close shave made Ace realize that risks had to be taken to get the best drugs. So instead of shying away from the task, he decided that a trustworthy crew of hard workers was needed to progress to the quality of business he’d set his sights on.

“The Scurvy Crew properly started on a hash run from Morocco to the south of Spain,” he said. “Basically, I joined a couple of friends who decided to see what the hype was about, because everyone at that point was smuggling hash in from Morocco as a little earner on the side. Me, coming from the coke and MDMA business previously, didn’t really have any clientele when it came to selling bulk amounts of hash, or even single deals—but now I had Silk Road. So I then used that as a way to sell what I’d bring back from Morocco.”

Ace was at the top of the Scurvy Crew, allowing him to rule not with an iron fist, but to demonstrate the premium service and integrity he believed could be applied to the drugs game exclusively through the use of Silk Road. Sure enough, his crew became a trusted and reliable name on the Silk Road. Judging by their feedback, you can see that what they branded as their "Bayer opium" was the best out there. Plus, no one else was selling it—and probably for good reason; as Ace put it: “Not many sellers have got the balls to go into an armed field and steal opium.”

The money increased, the Scurvy Crew matured. Ace now had runners and packagers working for him; within the space of six months he’d gone from a one-man seller crawling around in the dirt to having a team of people helping him shift his product. The opium and the hash moved out almost as quickly as it came in. Ace couldn’t handle all the volume himself, so he purchased two safe-houses to process his product. Soon, the business was a well-oiled machine with even more dedicated staff members.

“We have a team of our guys go out to the fields. They collect the opium, they dry it—which is about a ten-day process; you have to knead it all the time, like dough, to get all the air out. Then you get the moisture out. The drier the opium, the higher the quality,” explained Ace.

“Then inside the safe-houses the opium is heated up, it’s rolled into a thin layer using a pasta machine and comes up to about cardboard thin. As soon as that’s ready, it’s cut up into blocks. We use a guillotine to slice it—each square being a gram, or five grams, or ten grams. As soon as the order comes in in the morning [from Silk Road], the address is printed for that order. And then it goes into two layers [to be packed]. One is a vacuum-sealed layer and the other’s an MBB [moisture barrier bag] layer. Then it’s put into a letter and sent on its way all around the world. It’s a production line. And if we’re talking about sending out, say, 1,000 grams a week now, maybe we’re losing 10 or 20 grams [to customs], so it’s definitely worth it.”

Taking around $14 profit per gram, the Scurvy Crew is now making around $14,000 a week on their opium alone.

Even by the end of 2012, after roughly one year in business, Ace was making “far too much money” for his limited company to be a viable option when it came to laundering his profits. Normally, to find an accountant dodgy enough to help him wash that much money, he’d have to mix in circles he just didn’t have the criminal prowess to get into, even if he’d wanted to. Again, though, thanks to the endless connections from Silk Road, Ace was only a few mouse clicks away from someone who could lend him a hand.

“I found a very good forger who has always helped the Scurvy Crew with a good ‘cash-out service,'” said Ace. “He’s created us accounts in America, Switzerland... and what he does is utilize the main three Bitcoin exchanges [to sell the Bitcoins]. The cash goes directly into the faked accounts in Switzerland and the US.”

With money coming in fast, the Scurvy Crew lived a more comfortable lifestyle. They ate well, they bought property, they traveled often. But thanks to Ace’s ethics, he claimed the people he bought his hash from also became wealthy.

Some of The Scurvy Crew's Moroccan hash

“Over the years we made personal relationships with the [hash] farmers in Morocco,” said Ace. “What I noticed is that there were quite a lot of farms that were completely derelict—they didn’t even have toilets. [The people there] were just shitting in a hole in the ground.”

While trekking out to Ketama and Azila in the Moroccan mountains to buy this high altitude hash, Ace decided he’d give something back to the farmers who had helped him make his small fortune. “We made exclusivity arrangements with the farmers, because of the amounts that we buy. So we decided to give them a lump sum at the beginning to help them improve living conditions,” he said.

One mutually helpful deal specifically stuck out in his mind: “One of the farmer’s wives was really sick and couldn’t afford the medical help, so we made an agreement with this farmer where we’d pay for his wife’s medical care and some basic refurbishments, as it gets really fucking cold up there in the winter. So we installed basic heating, a toilet, got his wife seen to, gave a bit extra to install an irrigation system. So eventually, when the first crop was ready after three months, we took that for free in exchange for the help we’d given. Now we have a great working relationship where, as soon as the hash is ready, we’ve got someone who goes over and pays the farmers upfront for it. We bring it back. That’s been going really well now for two years.”

With the opium and the hash flowing, thousands of customers on Silk Road were now consistently buying The Scurvy Crew’s products and leaving positive feedback, commending their drugs and also the stealth and speed in which they arrived. Business was good, their reviews were excellent and Dread Pirate Roberts himself was happy with Ace’s progress. The two spoke often. It was a “working relationship.”

“We stayed in good contact,” said Ace.

The first time I actually saw Ace’s name on Silk Road was while trawling the forums in the wake of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest. The forums are now gone, but Ace—as far as I could see—was the very first person to raise a red flag about Dread Pirate Roberts before news of the arrest hit the media. On October 1, 2013, Ace made a comment that effectively said: “I think something is wrong with DPR." Around 30 minutes later, the forums were awash with the news of Dread Pirate Roberts’ alleged capture.

Naturally, Ace was cagey when I asked him about this. “I had a feeling something was up,” he said.

Judging by the time and date that Ace was chatting to Dread Pirate Roberts, he believes they were literally “halfway through a conversation when [Ross] got arrested.”

(Click to enlarge)

“I think one message that I sent to DPR was answered by him, and the next message I sent one minute later was answered by an FBI agent,” he explained. “It was the weirdest thing ever. We were in the process of discussing adding a couple of features to the site—I could tell it was him because it was the normal way that he used to speak—then the next message I got was in a completely, completely different manner of writing.”

Ace said Dread Pirate Roberts suddenly asked for a copy of his ID. This isn’t that unusual, as it’s known that DPR would gather personal information on those working in his inner circle, but to drop it into conversation at random was unsettling for Ace.

“I just cut the conversation there. That minute I got on the forums and said, ‘Hey guys, I think something weird is going on.' The thing that struck me as really weird was that [the message] was encrypted with [DPR's] PGP key, and his key-ring was still open, so I know from that moment they were on his computer.”

This was also the moment when Ace's business hit the rocks. The original Silk Road was seized by the FBI and all the Bitcoins resting in its escrow service were swallowed up with it. That’s an estimated $28.5 million of Silk Road booty taken by the authorities.

“The Scurvy Crew lost over $500,000 in the fall of Silk Road one,” said Ace, looking pained about his losses even now. “The troubles [of the Silk Road seizure] didn’t last long, though,” he continued. “I think within two weeks of it shutting down we were up and running on both the other markets.”

The “other markets” were the alternative online drugs bazaars at the time: Sheep Marketplace and Black Market Reloaded. Both had been operating at the same time as Silk Road, but remained in the shadow of Dread Pirate Roberts and his superior marketplace. With that ship sunk, however, Silk Road users migrated to their former competitors. The influx was almost unmanageable.

Backopy, the founder of Black Market Reloaded, had to close new registrations for three days after his traffic increased from around 2,000 new users a day to over 5,000. Sheep Marketplace went from having 500 drug listings to 1,500, just a few days after Silk Road’s departure from the Deep Web. Both markets, however, have now fallen into the abyss. Sheep Marketplace went AWOL with thousands of its users' Bitcoins, and Black Market Reloaded shut down completely on December 23, 2013. Backopy’s reasoning for this was that his marketplace couldn’t “hold another wave of refugees” after Sheep Marketplace disappeared. He said on the Black Market Reloaded forums that “Tor can't support any site to be too big,” allowing time for his 30,755 registered users to escape with their Bitcoins.

The "Sheep" marketplace, one of the alternatives to Silk Road

With a flawless track record, the purest opium and hash on tap, and a position so trusted on the original Silk Road that Dread Pirate Roberts’ associates still had contact with Ace, the Scurvy Crew has managed to weather each Deep Web drug storm exceptionally well. The crew is now on Silk Road 2.0, rebuilding its client base (many of whom loyally follow the Scurvy Crew around the Deep Web) and looking to branch out into selling other drugs.

However, while Ace is still currently at large, his position as boss means he rarely has to get his hands dirty any more. “I get up in the morning and check the shitloads of messages I always have,” he laughed. “I go through them and create a work-list, which I split into two, because the opium and the hash are stored at different safe houses. I send one of the opium lists over to the opium safe house, which means all the packages need to be made ready for that day. I send the other list to the hash safe house, and I expect both of [the packages on the list] to be posted by 4 PM that day. Then the cycle repeats itself. I spend the rest of the day talking to my team and organising the business.”

At this point Ace again demonstrated (perhaps to prove he wasn’t bullshitting) that he really is "about that life," flicking through several big orders on Silk Road 2.0 that he’d just received. There was little doubt in my mind by this point that Ace was who he claimed to be. He seemed genuine enough and always eager to show me evidence of his statements. He was clearly proud of the business he’d built and the money he’d managed to make himself and the others he's recruited to help.

“Do you know what it’s like to be able to get up every morning and decide that you want to go have dinner in Paris?” he asked me. “Or buy a new car because you’re bored of your old one, or have houses in loads of different places? It’s a life I never thought I’d have.”

He said this not with a bragging tone, but one of astonishment. I sensed that it was cathartic for Ace to have someone to speak honestly to about his business. He was clearly work driven and living the life of Riley, but the dark, tired rings around his eyes hinted at the toll a lifestyle of such secrecy has on a person.

“The downside is the lies,” he said. “There are days when I’d rather do the nine-to-five than have to constantly watch my back, constantly worry about who’s knocking on the door, or where I can go, or is that someone following me down the street. I don’t know what details the FBI have got of me—all I know is I’ve got to keep going and have fun while I’m doing it, otherwise it’s not worth it.”

He finished our interview with the caveat that he was more scared of losing the fight against the authorities than spending his life in prison. Having spoken to my fair share of criminals, I’d heard this spiel a hundred times—only, Ace might actually have meant it. There was no boasting and no self-trickery, just a matter-of-fact honesty. He believed in what he did.

After two hours of chatting, it was time to leave. I collected my stuff and thanked Ace, and while I was most likely being watched, I was allowed to leave the bar unescorted.

When I eventually found my way back to the train station, something caught my eye. I looked up and saw a huge rotating Bayer sign.

There is no suggestion that Bayer buy opium for any illegal purpose or market any illicit drugs.

There is also no suggestion that Bayer knew about the shooting at Ace or would condone such activity.

Follow Jack Hanrahan on Twitter

The outsider view of Austria tends to revolve around some pretty specific cliches: the idea that it’s almost exclusively populated by buxom ladies holding tankards; fat, dormant Nazis (which might not be all that untrue); and alcoholic man-children in funny tunics and knee-high socks. In that respect, Vienna isn't that different to the rest of the country; it's just more "urban." But Vienna is as contradictory as a schnitzel served with cranberry sauce.

The city somehow offers everything but nothing. There are—despite the extensive pedestrian zone on Mariahilferstrasse—more suicides than road deaths. There is a violent "black bloc," but it’s said to be mostly composed of West German "riot tourists." There’s also a separate language knocking about, which is mostly made up of bits and pieces from other languages (but no one speaks it these days, anyway).

Vienna is kind of a paradise, but it's also not—just like any other city you spend more than a week in.

See more of Stefanie's work here.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

The messiness of a bachelor's apartment exists within a fleeting window in a man’s life. Being a single, straight male means not having expectations put on you by someone else. The living space of a single straight man often dramatically changes when he lives with a woman. As a rule, the woman’s aesthetic wins, and that’s usually a good thing. 

I set out to capture that time in a man's life between living with his parents and marriage; before the aesthetic touch of a woman influences his living space. 

Follow Matthew Rababy on Twitter.

On the second day of the self-styled People's Republic of Donetsk's existence, people gathered in the Regional Administration Building to discuss their new government and make plans for the future. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky attended the meeting where things got a bit heated, and later interviewed Serhiy Taruta, the current governor of the Donetsk region. Taruta argued that those who declared independence from Ukraine have no authority to do so and are not supported by most residents of Donetsk. There's still about a month left before their supposed referendum, and the future of Donetsk is uncertain.

Screenshot of Digital Canada 150, an astoundingly disappointing document via.
Remember back in college when you had an overdue paper to write for a class you didn’t really seem to care much about? Did you ever just “repurpose” a decent paper you’d already written last year, sprinkle in a few new items so it’s not plagiarism (it’s not, amiright?), and hand that shit in on your way to the liquor store? Well, you’re in good company, because this is exactly what the government of Canada has just done with its new Digital Canada 150 Strategy.

After spending an excessively long time in the works, Digital Canada 150 is the government’s vision for developing Canada’s digital economy over the next five years. Every other industrialized country has some kind of strategy to promote their own digital sector, so it’s about time that Canadians had their own national plan to get some of that sweet, sweet internet money.

There are five pillars in the 26-page document: connecting Canadians, protecting Canadians, Economic Opportunities, Digital Government, and Canadian content. Taking a look at the Economic Opportunities section, I counted 10 bullet points of “new” items. One of these was the already-announced Canada Jobs Grant, which landed the government in hot water when it ran expensive television ads extolling the program’s virtues before the program had even been agreed upon by the provinces whose funding it poached. This glaring example of more PR-before-policy stands among some other sensible, if unambitious, items.

If you take eight minutes to read it all, it’s easy to tell that the plan we’ve just been handed is a collection of very unambitious goals and reheated policy announcements. In one emblematic example, the government actually delayed its own telecom regulator’s goal to make 5 Megabit per second broadband accessible to 98% of Canadians by 2015 (apparently over half a million folks don’t really even deserve slow internet).

5 Mbps is the government’s standard for acceptable internet speed in Canada in 2019. Just how slow is 5Mbps? For comparison’s sake, people are getting download speeds of over 300 Mbps on their phones in South Korea, and Google Fiber is delivering 1000 Mbps download and upload speeds to lucky residents in select American cities. Townsfolk in Olds, Alberta, are also set to enjoy 1000 Mbps from a municipally-owned internet service. If 5 Mbps is the best we can reliably deliver to Canadians by 2019, we’d better get ready for some less-than-world-leading economic outcomes.

To be fair, those of us now living in the big cities may have access to a comparatively speedy 25 or 50 Mbps connection. But even this urban standard falls flat when we compare ourselves internationally. Countries like Romania, Latvia, and South Korea are now roundly beating us on upload and download speeds. This disparity is reflected in world governments’ future targets for download speeds.  

Digital policy expert Prof. Michael Geist put together some data from the OECD, and here’s what some other countries’ speed targets were three years ago: 

Austria	2013	| 100% access to 25 Mbps
Australia	2021	| 100% premises, 93% homes, schools and business to 100 Mbps
Denmark	2020	| 100% access to 100 Mbps
Finland	2015	| 99% within 2 km of network permitting 100 Mbps
Germany	2014	| 75% access to 50 Mbps
Greece	2017	| 100% household access to 100 Mbps
Hungary	2020	| 100% access to 30 Mbps
Luxembourg	2020	| 100% access to 1 Gbps
Slovak Republic	2020	| 100% access to 30 Mbps
Sweden	2020	| 90% access to 100 Mbps
United States	2020	| 100% access to 4 Mbps

 

As Geist shows, Canada’s 5 Mbps goal seriously lacks ambition. You might think that this could reflect a certain challenge: our population is relatively small compared to our enormous land mass. But as journalist Dave Nowak rightly points out, Canada is actually quite urbanized compared to other countries:

“Given the relatively high concentration of the Canadian population, it should actually be easier or more efficient to roll out advanced telecommunications services here than in Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway, Austria or Switzerland, yet all of those countries outstrip Canada in terms of broadband goals and wireless performance in general.”

On the very first page of Digital Canada 150, PM Harper boasts: “We are now ready to take our place as the most technologically advanced nation on the planet.” What planet is he referring to?

The strategy doesn’t establish a set of speed targets for urban areas, rural areas, schools, universities, or businesses. Instead, it just delays an already existing 5Mbps target and assumes it will be satisfactory across the country. To try to give them some credit, let’s assume that the government has full trust in the existing market players like Bell and Rogers to deliver world-standard internet in cities. If this is the case, why not make this clear in the strategy? The whole 5 Mbps target just smacks of hollow PR designed to pretend there’s a policy when nothing really exists.

Why are speed targets important? Internet speed matters for more than just wholesome consumption-centered activities like Netflix or watching other people play video games on Youtube. Small and medium-sized Canadian businesses are actually so hampered by slow upload speeds that it's often faster and cheaper for them to copy data to hard drives and physically deliver them to clients.

Sadly, the internet seems poised to remain slower in Canada than in much of the rest of the world. What about the rest of the strategy?

Geist’s analysis suggests there’s not much to get hopeful about: “For a strategy document, it is curiously lacking in actual strategy. The government updates Canadians on what it has done and provides some insight into what it plans to do, but there are few new strategies articulated.” Geist points to the UK’s Digital Britain report, which clocks in at ten times the size of Digital Canada 150. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but the strategy lays on heavily about competing in a global economy and sets out the importance of the government’s role in making that happen.

One important omission from the Digital Strategy is any discussion of net neutrality, i.e. the concept of treating all internet traffic equally. A recent court decision in the US basically killed net neutrality in that country, allowing internet service providers to provide faster access to their clients for sites willing to pay more money. Now, companies like Netflix are being forced to enter into agreements so that their content (which competes with the cable offerings of ISPs) isn’t unfairly slowed down.

The consequences of letting net neutrality die are pretty shitty for free speech and innovation, to say the least. If Comcast doesn’t like what you’re saying (or offering for sale), there isn’t much to stop them from slowing access to your site down to a crawl. This is a horrible environment for fostering new inventions, ideas, businesses, and services. That explains why the European Parliament recently voted to protect net neutrality by law for all EU member states.

Canada has a pretty good track record on net neutrality, which is good. But Canada’s big content-owning networks, which are also Canada’s major ISPs, seem to be all too ready to protect their legacy interests by charging more for internet traffic that threatens their lucrative broadcasting business.

Given the pivotal importance of net neutrality for digital innovation, you’d think it would deserve a mention in the strategy that’s supposed to guide our digital economy policy. But it gets passed over in favour of announcing the making of eight more Heritage Minutes episodes, presumably about how the economic Action Plan saved the country from certain ruin.

I spoke with Steve Anderson, Executive Director of OpenMedia.ca, a digital rights nonprofit group, about what could be different in this plan.

“The government just collected more than $5 billion from auctioning off wireless spectrum, half of which could be invested back into our digital economy to really expand fast broadband access and address the digital divide. Instead, they’ve announced about $500 million in two new programs, which just isn’t enough and will leave Canadians in the slow lane,” he said.

Anderson was also very concerned with the government’s half-hearted commitment to online privacy. Nowhere in the strategy was any mention of reviewing the massive collection of Canadians’ data by CSEC or its spy agency partners in the Five Eyes. When even president Obama is embarking on a plan to rein in a few of the most privacy-melting practices of US spy agencies, you’d think that Canada’s government would at least pay lip service to this important issue.

As we’ve seen before from the Harper government, what we have here is mostly a political announcement dressed up as something substantial. As Professor Geist puts it, “other countries offer far more sophisticated and detailed visions for their digital futures [and are] 5 to 10 years ahead of Canada” in doing so. After years of waiting, it’s not an encouraging sign when our bureaucrats come up with a very short PDF of reheated announcements and delayed, embarrassing targets. Canadians counting on having a future job that involves the internet or computers should give this strategy a failing grade. 

@chrismalmo

Iyad Al-Shaer in the home he built and subsequently had to demolish. Photos by Dylan Collins

In the Shu’Fat neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Palestinian Iyad Al-Shaer stood inside the gutted interior of a modest breeze block structure. The building, an addition to Iyad’s own home, was set to be a new residence for his brother Baser and his fiancé. But the fully furnished home, complete with a heart-covered bedroom that Baser had designed for his future child, now had three gaping holes punctured in its roof.

Just days after completing construction, the Israeli-controlled municipality issued Iyad a demolition order for his “illegally” constructed home, built without one of the expensive permits issued by the same set of authorities. Unable to afford the protracted and costly legal battle, he chose to destroy the structure himself.

Self-demolitions like this began a few years ago and have continued—albeit somewhat under the mainstream media’s radar—ever since, with Palestinians compelled to destroy their own homes in order to avoid the steadily increasing fines leveled by the municipality.

The demolished roof of Iyad's brother's home

While the Palestinian population in the city has quadrupled to over 300,000 since 1967, municipal authorities have only zoned nine percent of East Jerusalem land for Palestinian construction. Even with this space being set aside, permits are rarely granted, and the result is widespread “illegal” Palestinian construction—which, of course, Israeli authorities can then order to be demolished.

Tens of thousands of Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents now live under the constant threat of having their homes demolished by Israeli authorities, part of a policy of displacement that has been taking place in Jerusalem with a startling degree of public support for more than four decades.

“We know that there are some 20,000 ‘illegal’ Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem,” Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) told us. “[That’s] about a third of the Palestinian housing stock.”

“They don’t consider us citizens, so they push. It’s not a personal thing—I am one of many,” says Iyad. “They push us to go outside of Jerusalem. I call it a soft transfer.”

Iyad walking through the home that he built and subsequently had no other option but to demolish

Wringing the city dry of any Palestinian or overtly Arab presence is not a new Israeli practice. What is relatively new, however, are the self-demolitions being inflicted on the Palestinian community—the financial penalties giving people no other option than to destroy their own homes and move away. Meanwhile, Israel saves face; houses are being cleared without the pesky publication of photos depicting their systematic ethnic cleansing of the area—no bulldozers, no Israeli youngsters wielding M-16s, and no wailing women. It is a PR miracle.

“For Israel, it’s much better for you to destroy your [own] home,” said Iyad. “The media doesn’t have to know.”

According to Richard Falk, the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in occupied Palestinian territories, Israel’s policies in Jerusalem are “unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.”

Speaking at a press conference in Geneva at the end of last month, Falk accused Israel of creating an impossible situation for Palestinians in Jerusalem, using bureaucratic processes such as the “revocation of residency permits, demolitions of residential structures built without Israeli permits, and forced evictions” to push Palestinian families out of the city.

In order to legally build in Jerusalem, one must first acquire a 150,000 shekel [$43,200] building permit from the Israeli authorities. Permits are rarely given to Palestinians, and those who are lucky enough to get one face difficulty paying the full fee, as nearly 80 percent of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line. Consequently, thousands are left with no choice but to build houses without the required permit, putting their new homes at risk of demolition.  

“It’s a bad feeling,” Iyad said, describing the day he had to drill through the ceiling of his brother’s dream home. “When you start and you damage your home yourself... I am a man, but I was crying. I am still a human being—I have feelings. I tried to be a man, but man is a human being.”

According to the Palestinian Counseling Center, while all families whose homes are demolished suffer from considerable trauma, “Those who demolish their homes themselves bear additional shame from straying from the national position of remaining steadfast in resisting the occupation’s policies.”

Maher Sorri standing in what's left of his home

In February of 2014, Israeli bulldozers arrived at Maher Sorri’s house, threatening to demolish the home he had built for his wife and child. The municipality had originally come to destroy a neighboring house, but when clashes broke out in resistance to the impending demolition the forces of the Jerusalem Municipality turned their sights on Maher’s home, which had been built without a permit three years before.   

Standing in front of his destroyed home, Maher told us: “There had been no demolition order issued—no previous warning at all.”

The young Palestinian man had been given a “choice”: destroy his own home or pay the 50,000 shekel [$14,400] fine levied by the Jerusalem municipality for their demolition “services.”

“It’s a common joke among [Palestinian] East Jerusalemites—the only services they get from the Jerusalem municipality are demolitions services,” said Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.   

With nowhere to turn for support, Maher was forced to take matters into his own hands. He hired a relative with a tractor to destroy his house, saving 47,000 shekels [$13,500] in the process. The family now lives in his father’s house, six people sharing two small bedrooms. “We were very sad,” Maher told us. “[Before], we lived as a family, alone with privacy.”

The Red Cross gave Maher Sorri, his wife, and his young daughter a tent to replace their destroyed home

Talking to B'Tselem, we were told of five cases of self-demolitions in East Jerusalem so far this year, though others have likely gone unreported. And while this phenomenon is on the rise, Israel still has no qualms about getting its hands dirty. According to Jeff Halper of ICAHD, in November of 2013 alone, Israeli authorities issued 2,000 demolition orders throughout East Jerusalem. More East Jerusalem homes were destroyed in 2013 than in 2011 and 2012 combined, marking a five-year high, according to statistics compiled by The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

This year, demolitions continue apace. Hayat Abu-Saleh, an analyst from OCHA, told us that as of the March 26, 132 structures have been destroyed in the occupied territories, including 19 homes in Jerusalem. The majority of these demolitions were carried out by municipal bulldozers and various dutiful squads of Israeli police officers.  

One particularly depressing case occurred on an early February morning in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Qadoom. At 5:30 AM on the February 10, a squadron of 51 Israeli policemen descended on the home of Palestinian Mohammed Swahar, his Jewish Israeli wife Norean, and their four children. 

Standing next to the Red Cross tent that now serves as the family’s home, Norean explained that, just two months before, the family had spent all their savings renovating the entire house. A new bedroom for their son, a new Plasma TV, and even a craft area for the kids.

“When they came, they wouldn’t let us take anything out of the house,” Norean told us. “If they took it out, they broke it, destroyed it. I was over there with my children watching them destroy everything we have built.”

Mohammad and Norean Sawaher's children scavenge the rubble of their destroyed home for intact belongings

The traumatic event came as a complete surprise to the Swahar family. “We have never received a demolition order before, not in 20 years,” said Norean. “The municipality has no answer. The vice president of [the] municipality, his name is David. We had a meeting, I told him my house was destroyed and he said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”

The demolition, understandably, has taken a toll on the Swahars’ five young children. “The children were terrified—now they are wetting themselves every night, because they were coming into the house with dogs at 5:00 in the morning,” said Norean. “[The kids] were sleeping in their beds, when suddenly [there were] 51 [police] in the house. My husband was sleeping. They beat him up.”

When asked about the situation in East Jerusalem, Norean said: “They don’t want Arabs here. I was Jewish—I grew up in Israel and served in the army. When I met my husband, I converted. Now, I see how they treat Arabs and how they treat Muslims here. It’s not human.”

The Silwan neighborhood, which—like many Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem—faces serious overcrowding problems due to restrictions placed on it by Israeli authorities regarding construction permits and land use.

Besides the disregard for other basic rights, the restrictive building laws are part of an official Israeli policy aimed at maintaining a Jewish majority in the city of Jerusalem. And this elaborate system of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices diminishes Palestinian hopes of claiming Jerusalem as the capital of their future state by the day.

As Shawan Jabarin, director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, told us, “This is part of a long term plan of how to minimize and decrease Palestinian numbers in Jerusalem. How to change the demographic map, how to change the geographic map, the historical map, and even the narrative. House demolitions are just one method they are using to implement their plan.”  

Of course, little attention seems to be paid to the ramifications this has on the city’s Palestinian community. As Iyad told us, “We worry about the future of our kids. We have no hope, no options. The only option is to live behind the wall, to live outside of Jerusalem. I am from Jerusalem—why do you force me to live behind this illegal wall? I am from Jerusalem. I was born here.”

@collinsdyl

The German Federal Constitutional Court in 1989. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Collage by the author

Last week, 122 German law professors signed a petition demanding the decriminalization of drugs and the legalization of marijuana. The current anti-drug legislation was written in 1981 and is badly outdated, the professors say—though locking people up for marijuana is no longer a priority for cops, the petition's signatories think that there's still too much time being spent charging drug users with crimes.

To find out exactly what they hope their petition will achieve, I called up the man behind the initiative, Professor Lorenz Böllinger from the University of Bremen.

VICE: What are you aiming to do with this petition?

Lorenz Böllinger: This is an attempt to basically make Parliament function again. Constitutionally, laws must actually be scientifically justified, and they must be checked and updated regurlarly. That is our objective, regardless of whether drugs are dangerous or not. It's more a question of whether criminal law is capable of anything.

How do you mean?
Well, there is no way [US President Richard] Nixon's war on drugs can be won. Drug use goes on regardless of crime enforcement. We have seen all sorts of studies, and the result is always the same: that business cycles of drug use exist entirely independently of statutory provisions.

So you're saying that drugs will always be used.
Drugs have always existed, and the longing for this kind of pleasure will always exist. You can't question or argue with that statement.

Have you ever smoked cannabis?

I'm 68, and have smoked cannabis. I remember the good and bad parts of it very well.

Are you aiming for full legalization?
Yes, but not in a generalized way that will have us all buying drugs at [the supermarket] soon. The idea is to get our point accross on the basis of expertise—with studies on specific regulatory models for each drug. For the least dangerous ones, like cannabis, we would [want to make it essentially legal], perhaps ensuring there were quantity limits or a registration process. When it comes to heroin or crystal meth, we would have to follow a stricter model.

Lorenz Böllinger. Photo courtesy of the University of Bremen

Are you not worried that more people will use drugs?
There is good evidence that this is not the case. In countries like Portugal, Spain, and Belgium this model has existed for ten years. In the Netherlands, cannabis has been freely available for 40 years with excellent results. Consumption hasn't increased—on the contrary, it has slightly decreased.

Your petition has now been signed by over 100 experts. Why did it take so long for anyone to take the initiative like this? 

That's a good question. My thesis is that nobody dares question politicians. At the same time, drug laws present an effective means to maintain certain monitoring and control functions.

Is our society ready for legalization?
We have been brainwashed by the media and politicians for the past 40 years. Individual problem cases are massively blown out of proportion and context. Drug-related deaths, for example—these are always attributed to drugs, when the reason behind them is actually the anti-drug laws. Drug-related deaths are almost in their entirety caused by the unpredictability of the ingredients. If these drugs were prescribed, this wouldn't happen.

I am a professional psychoanalyst too, and have worked with heroin and cannabis addicts, and I can safely say none of their problems come from drugs. These are psychological and social problems that make people dependent.

Have you ever talked to Marlene Mortler, the Drug Commissioner of the Federal Government? 

No, but I have sent her the petition. I don't expect an answer from her.

What would you say to her if you ever met her?
I can only laugh about it, really. She was appointed Drug Commisioner this January but she's really only worked on agriculture and tourism. This is basically a statement on how much the government cares about making reforms in that field. They only want peace on this front.

Can your petition change that?
I believe that it is in our hands to draw attention to the issue. But it will bring nothing, politically. The majority will simply vote against the reforms.