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America Needs Alzheimer’s Funding Now

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Photo by Mopic/Shutterstock

The morning after my father took a mirror off the wall because he thought the man in the reflection was trying to attack him, my mother and I drove him to a hospital for review. It was about a seven-hour wait that day, behind a long line of other people with other troubles. During that time, my father, oblivious to why we were there, restlessly tried to get up and leave, continuously getting in the way of other patients passing on gurneys and pulling angrily away from me each time I asked him to come sit back down. Following a brief examination, a nurse suggested we check my father in for further review. We did not know as we left that night that it would be more than six months before he came home again, or that he would never be the same.

I have written before about the complications of my father’s Alzheimer’s, but now that he has passed, after six years of slow digression, all I can think about are the other ways it could have gone. We were lucky that my mom was willing and able to care for him so that he could spend his last years at home, but at various points along the way, due to the classification and handling of Alzheimer’s in this country, it looked like a very different range of fates awaited him and my family.

Shortly after my father’s initial diagnosis, he was admitted to Wesley Woods, a local—and supposedly reputable—hospital for adult and geriatric care in Atlanta. We realized very quickly that things were changing faster than they should. Most days when we visited him he would be propped in a wheelchair, sometimes blocked off in such a way he couldn’t move the chair, and on so much medication he was drooling, hallucinating. This, of course, did not seem right, and yet the doctor we were told to ask about the medication he was receiving magically never seemed to be on site. My mother said she once saw him leaving through a back door after she’d waited several hours for him to come and talk to her.

When we finally did manage to corner him for a conversation, I’ve never wanted to punch someone in the face so badly. The doctor—who was the head of his department—sat behind a counter staring into his computer smacking gum with his mouth open, not even making eye contact with my mother while she asked what medication Dad was on, what we should expect to be able to do for him, etc. The doctor kept kind of rolling his eyes. As he peeled the gum out of his mouth and leaned back in his chair to toss it into the trashcan behind him, he said, “Your husband is basically a zombie. You will not be taking him home. The medication is required. You have no choice. This is what life is now, for you.” I had never—and have not since—felt such an electric urge to beat the shit out of someone. I took my mother’s hand as she broke into tears and led her out the door. A few days later, we had my father transferred to a new facility, which would become the source of a whole other world of problems.

In our experience with nursing homes we often found that the goal seemed to be to turn patients into zombies. My father was an active person, and remained so even surrounded by other people who were incapacitated by their diseases, so this approach often resulted in their medicating him to the point where he no longer wanted to move. Later, thanks to his newly catatonic state, other facilities would deem him too unwieldy to admit to their programs. The admission boards of these places, despite their massive costs, are often rigorous, and the process often felt more like trying to secure an apartment at the Dakota than trying to get my father medical care. And though many of the nurses who helped him during his stay at various locations treated him with compassion and respect, the memory of the awful doctor, and the coldness that he and others like him delivered their prediction of my dad’s fate, colored the whole world a sickly shade. It seemed at many points that we were being told to simply give up.


Photo via Wikimedia Commons

While trying to figure out what exactly we could do besides leave Dad in a rest home, we were advised to meet with an attorney to figure out the specifics of our oncoming financial burden. My father would be impossible to keep at home, they told us, due to his disassociation, need for constant observation, upkeep, and so on. The cost for an average rest home facility capable of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s in our area was estimated at $7,000 a month, not including medication, which would end up being more than another $1,000 monthly, at least.

Although Medicaid would assist with certain short-term expenses, long-term care had to be settled out-of-pocket, at least until we had been rendered poor enough to be unable to pay for it. An attorney, who required a $6,000 retainer before giving any advice, drew up graphs explaining how my parents’ savings, the money my 67-year-old mother had planned to live on for the rest of her life, would be rapidly whittled down until it hit what the government considered an allowance low enough for them to take over. The process might include, he said, selling my mother’s house, as this was factored into their savings. The attorney did design a system through which money could be funneled to protect it from the government over time, but the logic of how much or in what way this would occur was so complicated that my mom struggled to hold back her tears as she wrote all the facts down.

“Your husband caught the wrong disease,” the attorney told us, shortly before we left. “If he had cancer, this would all be paid for. But he has Alzheimer’s.” There are a lot of illnesses you can catch in this life, but few that are as misunderstood, or that threaten to spread like wildfire not only through the sick, but the daily lives of those surrounding them.

Caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients, in trying to help their loved ones, experience a range of symptoms that are like an existential plague themselves: exhaustion, depression, insomnia, mind-boggling stress… all while in the midst of the long process of watching someone they knew their whole lives disappear gradually before their eyes. Google “Alzheimer’s caregiver support” if you want to delve into a world as emotionally complicated and terrifying as any sort of physical ailment you can imagine.

For many months, my mom went against the attorney’s advice and paid the bills out of pocket, for a nice, if still depressing, elderly rest home not far from her house. Extra costs in addition to the base fee could be added if my father was a handful, which he often was, being more active than other residents. I learned the terms “catastrophic coverage” and “the doughnut hole” in regards to Dad’s insurance, which did help pay for the endless list of medications, up to a point. We were lucky that my dad had worked hard so that my mom could afford his care at this stage. It was certainly a privilege many other families would not have been able to consider, and therefore would have been forced to put their loved one into a home approved by the state. And although it would last for a time, my mother’s savings did have an endpoint, one that would arrive swiftly if we were to keep doing the same thing.

It felt horrible to think of money when I knew my dad was dying, but money in some ways dictates reality. The only choice seemed to be to pay the bills for as long as we could, and in the meantime try to do whatever made Dad the most comfortable, without putting him in any danger. In the end, that meant bringing him home, to be cared for by my mother, myself, and my sister and brother-in-law, over what turned out to be several years. The process very nearly killed my mother, putting her through such a reign of stress and sleeplessness I don’t know how she went on from day to day. Had it not been for the Hospice caregivers who helped her through the final months, when Dad could no longer walk, I don’t know how she would have made it even with the rest of our family’s help. I know she did it for love, and, again, was lucky to have the will and ability to do so, even if at times it seemed like there was no end.

---

Alzheimer’s is a terrifying disease. You are physically healthy, but you can’t remember who you are. Day by day, your surroundings become more and more alien, buried. You develop a child’s brain, and are trapped in a body you no longer know how to care for. It is a slow and indescribable death, one that ends most often from falling down and hitting your head, or from choking on your spit because you can’t remember how to swallow. You can’t tell anyone what hurts or what you feel, because you don’t know.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 5 million Americans are currently living with the disease. One in three seniors dies with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, and in 2013, 15.5 million caregivers provided an estimated 17.7 billion hours of unpaid care valued at more than $220 billion. The fact that many caregivers end up requiring care themselves, and that spouses of the afflicted are up to 600 percent more likely to themselves develop dementia, should be a screaming alert sign that the way we handle Alzheimer’s support in this country is deeply flawed.

While the National Institute of Health spends $3 billion a year on AIDS research, and nearly $4.9 billion on cancer, for Alzheimer’s it spends only $500 million a year, an enormous drop-off for an illness as widespread and rapidly growing as it is.

Part of this is likely due to the fact that we mostly have no idea what Alzheimer’s is, much less what causes it or how it works, and as a result it ends up getting pushed under the rug. And yet none of those things should serve as a reason to leave people who have been affected by it on their own, free of support or hope in a world about as confusing and expensive as could be imagined. The only way out is to shed light, to provide care and assistance, and to educate, as with other illnesses. Many have fought hard for reform to Alzheimer’s assistance, treatment, and most importantly, research toward a cure, yet it remains a boutique affliction, one whose only relief will continue to be death, until something is done in the name of progress.

Follow Blake on Twitter.


This Week in Racism: Artists in Norway Built a Re-creation of a Human Zoo That Held Black People in Captivity

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Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–An art project in Norway has sprung up to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the signing of Norway's constitution. I'm not an art expert by any means. My interest in art starts at velvet paintings and ends with dogs playing poker, but this particular project piqued my interest because it's a recreation of a very real, very racist tourist attraction from the 1914 World's Fair in Oslo called Kongoslandsbyen (or "Congo Village"), which claimed to be a recreation of an African village—complete with black men, women, and children engaged in crude recreations of tribal customs. Global Post reported that a newspaper of the time quoted visitors as remarking that the exhibit was "exceedingly funny," and that it was" wonderful that we are white."

This is not the first time Europeans have sought to shed light on this disturbing artifact of popular culture. In 2011, the Quai Branly museum in Paris hosted in exhibition of material from human zoos in France, England, and Germany. It was common to bring back "specimens" from Africa to parade around for the enjoyment of well-heeled, curious white patrons. A BBC article on the exhibit mentioned a particularly famous South African named Saartjie Baartman who suffered from steatopygia, a condition they refer to as causing an "extremely protuberant buttocks and elongated labia." That sounds like your run-of-the-mill freak show, except with the added element of her race being a major part of the attraction. 

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Clearly, the fascination with black female asses was around long before the invention of the hip-hop music video. The Paris World's Fair in 1889 had a "Negro Village" attraction that offered 400 Africans to be gawked at by fairgoers, and occasionally those people were displayed in cages—sometimes nude or semi-nude. Granted, nudity isn't illicit in many African tribes, then or now. Yet, for the attendees, surely there was an element of the prurient at play, in the same way that people at modern zoos eagerly gawk at monkeys fucking each other and flinging their shit.

The concept of capturing and parading Africans around in cages fell out of favor, along with the telegraph, boiling drinking water, and the League of Nations, but the legacy of dehumanization of "the other" persists in the global culture. It seems like not a week goes by that a European soccer match isn't tainted by a fan throwing bananas at a black player. A common insult hurled at Barack Obama is comparing him to a chimp. One of the reasons that so many black people found Miley Cyrus's VMAs performance offensive is that they saw Miley parading taut black flesh around the stage for the implicit purpose of showing them off as objects or curiosities. That perception is very, very likely to be off-base and unfair, but it exists for a good reason. Historically, black people have been used as exotic objects or tools for labor since white men first found the African continent. Many blacks have that oppression in their DNA and need a trigger warning just to watch TV.

The Global Post story on the Congo Village re-creation reported that there are some African intellectuals who took offense at the project. Bwesigye bwa Mwesigire, a Ugandan writer said in the Guardian that the creators of the art project "can’t exonerate themselves because they mean well. Indeed, if they are serious about creating discussions of racism they ought to think deeper about the likelihood that their project may entrench the same prejudices they claim to fight.”

It's fine to be distressed at the lack of action on the part of many in the creative class toward the problems of racial animosity, but I would hazard a guess that there's not a ton of awareness that these places even exist. It's human nature to sweep embarrassing shit under the rug and ignore the fact that it even happened. If I had sex with a stripper in Guatemala and contracted syphilis, I'm not going to tell my OKCupid date all about it, but she might be better off knowing so she can hail a cab home and delete my phone number. These events are not fun to talk about, but the only way to repair the damage is to remember they happened. NOT RACIST for the art project, RACIST for the mere idea of a human zoo.

–The neverending saga of the "racist" Red Lobster receipt continues with no signs of stopping. This is like the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King of racism. Just when you think it's over, Frodo wakes up and starts calling Samwise a "coon." Toni Christina Jenkins, the Red Lobster waitress who claimed to have a received a customer receipt with the word "nigger" scrawled on the tip line, is now being sued by the man accused of writing the slur. Devin Barnes's name was clearly visible on the photo of the receipt Jenkins posted on her Facebook page after the alleged incident. Even though Jenkins was suspended for posting the photo and took the picture off her page, the image quickly went viral and tarnished Barnes's reputation as a non-racist (and excellent tipper). 

OK, actually, Barnes isn't an excellent tipper, because he admitted that he did not leave a tip, but he's adamant that he didn't call Jenkins a nigger. Barnes told WKRN that "A lot of people on the Internet who I don't know are calling me a racist... but I know I am not a racist. I don't see color. I have many mixed-color friends."

Ummm... Devin, if you "don't see color," how do you know you have "mixed-color" friends? Do they wear signs that say "mulatto" or "halfie" or "Tiger Woods"? Help me see the logic! Maybe this whole thing will teach Devin Barnes that he's better off leaving a smaller tip after sub-par service rather than stiffing the waitress. You never know who you're going to piss off. Your waitress might end up being a vengeful woman who accuses you of racism, posts about it on the internet, ruins your reputation forever, and gets $10,000 in sympathy donations from horrified citizens.

Oh, and this is directed at Toni Jenkins: If you actually slandered this man and profited from it, you are the worst person in the world. I'm comfortable saying that about you in public, since that's kind of your thing. 5

–An apartment complex in West Haven, Connecticut, is currently home to an elevator that is doubling as a bulletin board for area racists, according to a report from local news station WTNH-TV. Racist and anti-Semetic comments have been written (and summarily scrubbed off) on the inside of the building elevator for the past month. One in particular warned of a "hot summer," which was swiftly followed by a fire being set off in the parking garage. 

The news report above includes interviews with unnamed, befuddled alleged building residents expressing their dismay at such a hostile living environment. I hope the place is at least rent-controlled. RACIST

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

The State of the 313: Detroit Music After the Bankruptcy

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The State of the 313: Detroit Music After the Bankruptcy

Comics: Band for Life - Part 15

Migrant and Refugee Workers in Canada Should At Least Have Bathroom Privileges

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Image via Facebook
Last week, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal awarded 55 tree planters $700K in relation to the mistreatment and ‘slave-like’ conditions they were forced to endure at the hands of their employer in a reforestation operation in Golden, BC. The Congolese refugees weren’t paid, were segregated from other workers, fed inferior food if they were fed at all, forced to plant on rougher terrain, and housed in shipping containers with no bathroom facilities or clean water. In the ruling—which sees $10,000 dollars awarded to each individual for injury to dignity and self-respect (which they might never see because the company is now bankrupt)—the Tribunal equated the conditions as “comparable to slave-ships” and the workers expressed feeling like prisoners.

This was all uncovered back in 2010, when officials from BC’s Ministry of Forests were visiting the camp to presumably check in to make sure trees were being planted properly, not that people were being treated humanely. So it must have been quite a shock to witness the appalling conditions these men were living and working in. And it begs the question: If a couple of inspectors from the Ministry of Forests hadn’t have stumbled across this abuse, would it have ever been reported? Where was the ministry responsible for labour and employment standards in all of this, and how many similar situations have gone unchecked or are currently being perpetrated in Canada in May, 2014?

Migrant workers make up the most vulnerable and desperate sector of the Canadian labour force. It’s within this system that barriers to reporting workplace abuses are palpable, intimidating, and the mechanisms to do so can be deluded and complex. Workers fall through jurisdictional cracks as they’re brought in by the federal government through programs like the currently hot-button Temporary Foreign Worker Program, but then get lost in the blurred oversight of employment standards, labour laws, and complaints or enforcement processes that vary from province to province.

As the CBC touched on earlier this week, in provinces like Saskatchewan, where systems exist for migrant workers to complain about poor working conditions, they are hardly ever used. Rather than look at the reasons behind why only 40 complaints have been made in Saskatchewan since 2008, the genius of a minister responsible for immigration there, Bill Boyd, told the CBC that he believes a lack of complaints represents that "the vast, vast majority of employers are extremely responsible when it comes to these types of things."

Meanwhile, if you step across the border into Manitoba, where they do surprise investigations and run sting operations targeting specific, suspected industries, they’ve found absurdly high numbers of employers breaking labour laws and abusing their workers. In Manitoba’s sushi restaurants for example, which rely heavily on foreign workers, 95 percent of the employers weren’t complying with employment standards. Yet Manitoba’s complaint numbers are similar to Saskatchewan’s.

As far as I can tell, from BC’s Employment Standards website, their process is the same as Saskatchewan’s—relying entirely on complaints and park rangers to stumble across abuses. Ontario is starting to implement a kind of hybrid system, with the Ministry of Labour accepting complaints along with the introduction of targeted blitzes of “industries that have a history of employment standards violations or industries that employ vulnerable workers” this spring and into 2015.

What’s clear is that a complaints based, reactive method of enforcement does next to nothing for workers whose rights are being abused. The problem is that vulnerable workers are scared to speak out and complain in the first place. They are likely to be unaware of their rights, distrustful of government, and under a threat from employers to keep things quiet. Language difficulties impose an added burden for many newcomers as well as a lack of skills or access to the internet. If you’re living situation is reduced to a shipping container in the middle of the forest—how are you going to download a ‘Self Help Kit’ to make a complaint to labour standards?

"To the extent that any of these processes depend on individual migrant workers coming forward and filing complaints, you're dreaming in Technicolor if you think there's going to be enforcement,” Fay Faraday, a lawyer with Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto told the CBC this week. In a report that she published this April for the Metcalf Foundation called “Profiting from the Precarious: How recruitment practices exploit migrant workers,” she recommends the following:

“The most significant shift must come from leveraging the federal and provincial government’s capacity to pursue proactive regulation and supervision of recruiters and employers. The goal should be to eradicate exploitative practice pre-emptively, so that a worker begins an employment relationship in a position of security rather than insecurity… The Manitoba model is built on a platform of proactive licensing of recruiters, proactive registration of employers, mandatory financial security provided in advance by recruiters, and proactive investigation and enforcement by the provincial employment standards branch.”

On Friday, upon hearing the BC Human Rights Tribunal’s ruling, Sebinyanja Wamwanga told the CBC  “I thank God for all who help us for this case. It will encourage people to say, 'Oh, Canada is a country of law.”

As Farraday recommends, there needs to be more targeted and definitive oversight of high risk industries that include elements of surprise and sting similar to Manitoba’s enforcement in order to keep employers honest. That way, the pressure is taken off the most vulnerable to make the complaints and take the most risk. If this proactive enforcement method is working in Manitoba, then it should probably be adopted nationally. Unless taking advantage of foreign workers was actually the whole point all along.
 

@ddner

Preserving the Syrian Swimming Pool Dining Tradition

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Preserving the Syrian Swimming Pool Dining Tradition

Bringing Back the Dead with DIY Forensics - Trailer

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Bringing Back the Dead with DIY Forensics - Trailer

This Warden Wants to Make His Job Obsolete

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Photos by Roc Morin

“In the other jails you’ve been in,” began Warden Rick Van Wickler, “do you remember the inmates yelling, and screaming, and banging?”

I nodded, scanning the faces of the men of D-Block gawking at us from the narrow glass windows of their cells: eyes wide, mouths slack.

“You asked how we measure success? This is one way we measure success. Everyone’s looking at us and no one is making a sound. They’re looking, and they want to yell right now. It’s right here in their throats.” The warden balled up his fist, tucking it under his chin. “And as much as they want to yell and bang and scream, they won’t because it is unacceptable behavior that will result in an undesirable action.”

The warden spoke slowly and deliberately, like a man indifferent to time.

The 54-year-old runs New Hampshire’s 230-bed Cheshire County Correctional Facility. I spent a day with Van Wickler earlier this month to see how one of the nation’s most modern and progressive jails operates. Aware of critics who see facilities like his as being too comfortable for inmates, the warden took special care to emphasize the unpleasant aspects of incarceration here. Van Wickler believes that punishment is his primary duty, but that it can be administered in a manner that encourages rehabilition, lowers costs, and vastly reduces the number of Americans behind bars.

“It wasn’t always this way,” Van Wickler recalled gesturing around him. In 1993, he had inherited an institution mired in corruption. The previous warden had operated a side business, selling stolen firearms to some of the same criminals that flowed in and out of his facility. When an official came to inform the warden that he was under investigation, the warden pulled out a handgun and unloaded into the official’s chest before turning the gun on himself. The warden had preferred death to the prospect of ending up in one of his own cells.

“Those were horrifying days because there were no standards to jail conditions,” Van Wickler stated of his experience as an entry-level corrections officer back in 1987. “The unprofessionalism was just unfathomable. Looking back, I don’t know how I stayed.”

“We were at another building at that time,” he continued. “It was very overcrowded—scorching hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. There was literally ice on the inside of the walls.”

“When I took over as warden, I immediately petitioned for the money to build another facility. It took 13 years to get it. But in retrospect, those 13 years were a gift. During that time I toured a lot of jails all around the country, asking the question, ‘If you were to build this place all over again, what would you do differently?’ That was a big advantage. I took the best of what each one had to offer.”

“What were some of those ideas?” I asked.

“Well, the first thing, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is that there’s no perimeter fence.”

“Right, I was lost for a couple minutes this morning trying to find the place,” I admitted. “I was looking for barbed wire.”  

“That’s the idea. Nobody wants a jail in their neighborhood, and we didn’t want to make it obvious. Most people don’t even know it’s a jail. They think it’s a school.”

“Does the lack of a fence impact your security?”

“That’s the problem with corrections today. They say, ‘We need more fences. We need more cameras. We need more sensors.’ Well, if you just fucking stay awake and do your job, you don’t need any of that. They’ll say, ‘We need a fence to catch escapees.’ Well, how about you don’t let them escape in the first place? But here’s the primary reason that I don’t want a perimeter fence: Children come here to visit mom or dad. It’s scary enough for adults to go through concertina wire. Imagine a four-year-old.”

“And you’ve never had any escapes here?”

“Never.”

Van Wickler ushered us into the sun-drenched lobby of the 94,000 square-foot institution. It looked like the waiting room of a doctor’s office, and that, the warden explained, is exactly the point.

“Good afternoon, Becky!” Van Wickler called out to the smiling woman behind the front desk. “Hello!” Becky chimed with all the sweetness of a kindergarten teacher.

“As you can see,” the warden continued, “we post some of the art and projects that the inmates do. The women just made these flowers in a recent craft shop. Inmates who never knew they could draw are now discovering new talent.”

As a testament to the unintimidating environment, the artwork is regularly stolen by guests coming to visit prisoners.

“They’re under video surveillance so we know who takes the stuff. We go talk to them, and they always give it back.”

We entered the secure zone almost imperceptibly. I was never searched in any way. As we strolled through the labyrinthine corridors of the jail, operators inside what is jokingly known as “the secret squirrel room” followed our progress via CCTV. Solid steel doors buzzed open one by one as we advanced—the bolts slamming home behind us. It was as if we were made out of vapor—some ephemeral material that allowed us to drift effortlessly through walls that held back the dense bodies of the prisoners. I felt it the whole time we were there: They were heavy; we were light.

“Make yourself at home,” I was told without irony. “You can photograph anything you like.” That unprecedented access was only possible because of New Hampshire’s autonomous correctional system. Unlike most jails across the country, this facility is funded at the county level. The warden’s word is law here. “We receive no funding from the state, and so the state has no oversight,” he explained. “The policies and procedures are developed by me. We don’t have the bureaucracy of going all the way up the chain. That makes us very efficient.”

First among the jail’s policies is its human-relations focus. “I think what we do here better than most places is we set limits and we enforce those limits. Not only for the inmates but for our employees. The mission of corrections, according to the American Correctional Association, is ‘Care, Custody, and Control.’ We believe it to be ‘Care, Custody, and Management.’ Rule one for my corrections officers is: You are not in control of anything. You do not control anybody. So-do not try. Rule two: You can manage everything. Let’s face it. We’re outnumbered. It’s 64-to-one in most cases. The only way that you can successfully run a jail is with the offenders’ cooperation. If they want to overrun you, they will overrun you. It would seem that the best thing to do is to gain voluntary compliance. The question is how do you do that?”

The women’s block constituted an open area of tables surrounded by tiered cells. A single corrections officer sat unprotected behind a computer console near the entrance. The warden discussed the advantages of that configuration. “In the old way of doing things, called ‘linear intermittent,’ the inmates were always behind bars or doors. You’d move them using correctional staff. You’d move them to eat, you’d move them to programming, and you’d move them back. The problem was, all that movement created flashpoints where assaults would happen. The design of this correctional facility is ‘direct supervision,’ meaning that the correctional officers are with the inmates 24/7.”

“Now,” he continued, “with ‘linear intermittent,' you’d have control rooms monitoring inmates through one-way glass, or through cameras. Under that old style of architectural design, the inmates would behave as though the area where they lived was their real estate. So, when you went in to bring them meals, or to do a head count, you were encroaching on their territory, and they gave you that sense: ‘You’re in my house.’ Well, the way we do things here, we’re in their area every day. That takes away their sense of ownership over real estate.”

The first inmate I met in the woman’s wing was a cat named Polo. “He’s from the Humane Society,” the warden said. “We have this agreement that the women will take care of the pets until they’re adopted. It’s been very good for the pets, and it’s been very good for the women.”

He pointed to the exercise yard, an enclosed space. Inmates were walking in a circle. “Doors will open in the top to allow fresh air to come in. The standard is for offenders to have fresh air. They don’t have to see the clouds or the horizon, and here, they don’t. That gets into the punishment factor. If you’re here for three years and you’ve never seen the horizon, can you imagine? I would think that’s a pretty significant infringement on one’s liberty.”

The warden stepped off to talk with an officer as I sat down with two of the inmates, Amanda and Maria. There was a half-finished Scrabble game between them.

“Gane?” I queried, pointing to one of the words.

“That’s the past tense of go!” Maria laughed.

“She likes to make up her own words,” Amanda explained.

“Buteo?”

"That refers to beauty!” Maria affirmed.

“Well,” I chuckled, “you two seem to be having fun here. Do you all really get along that well?”

“No, not at all,” Amanda confessed. “We’re just pretending. It’s 30 women and 50 personalities!”

“Right, well, I’m sure that cuts down on the boredom a bit at least,” I offered. “What’s it like being here?”

“It could be worse,” Amanda shrugged. “There’s a lot of programs here. The CO's [corrections officers] are amazing. It’s clean. The food’s not that bad. We get to work. I was in Merrimack before; it’s a rougher place without those kinds of privileges.”

“How are the corrections officers amazing?”

“The way they treat us is very respectful. They refer to us as Ms. So-and-So, not Inmate So-and-So. And we do the same for them. I call them by their last name: mister and missus. I don’t call them officer. That weirds me out.”

“Also, when they do a room search, they fold our blankets back up,” Maria added. “They don’t toss everything. I’m from Mass, and Mass will toss everything. Everything ends up in a pile in the floor. Here they’re teaching us to be respectful of ourselves and one another, which of course, a lot of us need to learn.”

“So what are you in for?” I asked.

“Unlawful concealment,” Maria replied.

“What does that mean?”

“Attempting to shoplift.”

“And failing!” Amanda added with a laugh.

“How about your crime?”

 “My alleged crime is the manufacture of methamphetamine,” Amanda stated.

I asked to take photographs and the women posed playfully, like movie stars.

“So pretty!” Amanda laughed. “So skinny!”

“Send us copies, or I’ll hunt you down!” Maria threatened with a smirk.

I said my goodbyes and reunited with the warden.

As we walked out, I noted that the white floor of the corridor was interspersed with multicolored tiles. “When members of the public first see that, a lot of times they ask, ‘Why do you do that? It makes things too nice.’ I always say, ‘Remember that this is a place of employment as well. There are 80 employees here, and aren’t they entitled to a decent workspace? Aren’t they entitled to a little bit of color?’”

I asked what kind of prisoners we could expect to find at our next stop, the maximum-security block.

“There is not a criminal who is alleged to have committed a crime anywhere on the planet who’s not in this prison,” the warden stated. “We don’t handpick our inmates. Some pretrial offenders are here on federal contract.”

“How do you determine what level of security each prisoner gets?” I asked.

“Well, in the old paradigm, 60 percent  of the population was considered maximum security, but the way it was assigned was pretty arbitrary. Here, we do things differently. We make an objective review with data to determine one’s classification. With our system, you should have fewer than 10 percent in maximum security. That’s important because, if your mindset is that everybody is maximum security, you’re treating people like maximum-security inmates. Here we keep apples with apples, oranges with oranges, and snow tires with snow tires. If you mix them, that’s when you have assaults, and sexual assaults, and strong-arming.”

We entered a control room enclosed in glass. The warden pointed into a room of cells. “All of these people are on lockdown 23 hours a day. You get only one hour out in which to shower, or make a phone call, or clean your cell. Inmates are here for discipline reasons. Now, the standards say that you can be in here for an indefinite period of time, but I’ve limited that to 15 days. We’re trying to create a system where everybody always has an opportunity to see the end. We’re trying to say, as correctional agents, ‘Every day is an opportunity for you to decide to do things differently, and when you make that decision, we will be here to support you.’”

“Are they allowed anything in the cell?” I asked.

“They can have two books, but no photographs, no radio, no TV, nothing. Fifteen days can be a very long time.”

“And nobody ever stays longer than 15 days?”

“There have been people who have done extended periods of time because their behavior is so violent you can’t put them in the general population.”

“Why are they so violent?”

“I just think they’re institutionalized. These are people who’ve spent their whole lives in prison basically. They can’t make it in society more than a month or two without ending up back in the system. These are angry people who don’t have a lot to live for, and their entertainment is being feared in jail. They can’t hail being a high school graduate or being a good father, so being the toughest guy in the house is all they’ve got. And unfortunately, we disappoint them.”

On our return from the cell blocks, Van Wickler paused to indulge in his favorite vice: smoking cigars. He led us through several rooms of loud geothermal heating machinery, before opening a steel door in the wall. Suddenly, there was forest, and sky, and birdsongs—and all of it extra vivid. I could feel my heart slowing down. I took a deep breath.

The warden gazed off as he smoked, casting his eyes to the distant hills.

The future of corrections is out there, he insisted, not in here. “I would like to think that we’re on the eve of the community corrections model, that people can serve their punishment in the community and not in an institution like this. It costs $114 per day to house an inmate here.”

“How does that compare with other prisons?”

“It’s very similar. The average is tickling up towards $40,000 per year, depending on jurisdiction.”

One possible solution, Van Wickler believes, is a GPS-ankle-tether program that his jail currently operates.

Eligible inmates pay $10 per day to be enrolled in the program under which their movements are heavily restricted. That fee covers all costs associated with the program.

“The financial benefits are obvious,” Van Wickler noted. “They feed and clothe themselves, and they pay for their own medical care, all while still being incapacitated.”

Corrections veteran Major Hank Colby oversees the tether program. He spoke about the most common question he receives from the public.

“People always ask, ‘Well, can’t they just cut this off and then go kill somebody?’ I always say, ‘Absolutely, but the idea is to not put somebody on the program that’s at risk for doing that.’ That’s where classification comes in.”

One of the groups that could benefit the most, Van Wickler believes, is nonviolent drug offenders. As a former member of the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the warden is adamantly against the drug war.  

“I’ve seen people come into this institution for drug violations,” the warden explained. “I’ve seen the cost, not only to the taxpayer, but the social costs—the costs of parents being away from their children. Contrary to what a lot of media has portrayed and what law enforcement believes, not every person in jail for drug possession is a bad parent.”

“Why do you think that’s such a common opinion?”

“I think they believe what they see on TV—that you take a hit off a joint and the next thing you know you’re on the bathroom floor with a needle in your arm. What the American public just cannot seem to understand is how much drug use there is in our country.”

“How do you think they can be made to understand?”

“Well, let’s think about alcohol for a moment. The majority of people who drink alcohol in this country have no problems with it. They’re alcohol users: They drink on the Fourth of July, and barbecues, and at the Super Bowl. Then think about somebody who is an abuser of alcohol, meaning that they use alcohol much more than they should. But they’re still working. They still have a house. They’re still in a relationship. Finally, think about an alcohol addict—an alcoholic. Their lives have been destroyed by alcohol. Now, you can take the exact same analogy and just replace alcohol with drugs. Heroin? Cocaine? Meth? You have users, abusers, and addicts in pretty much the same ratios. Let’s not be so damn naïve and say that we in America don’t have professional people that are addicts, because we all know that’s not accurate. We have professional people who are heroin addicts, who have been heroin addicts for years, and are meeting the standards of their employment. That’s happening, and to deny it is an atrocity.”

“Law enforcement always brings up public safety as its rationale for drug enforcement. How do you respond to that?”

“Half a million people die every year in the U.S. from tobacco, and yet nobody’s talking about banning cigarettes. The most they’ll do is slap a warning label on the box. A hundred thousand people die per year from alcohol. Three hundred thousand die from obesity. A hundred thousand die from prescription medicines. Then you look at the number of all illicit-drug deaths combined and you get 16,000. And many of those deaths occur from people using impure drugs, since there’s no quality control on the street.”

“So what kind of policy would you like to see instituted?”

“We can look to Europe. They treat substance abuse like the health issue that it is. If you look in mental health books, they will tell you that substance abuse is a mental illness. So why are we incarcerating people for having a mental illness? Is that smart?”

“I took an informal poll of the inmates in the women’s block, and it seems like about two thirds of them are in jail for drug-related offenses. Does that sound correct to you?” I asked.

“That’s about average.”

“How does it feel to be incarcerating inmates like that, inmates you believe are really just suffering from a mental health problem?”

“I was in the military for 26 years, and my core is, I’m a soldier. My core is, I follow orders. My core is, I will do the job to the best of my ability, probably better than anybody else can do it. It does not mean that I’m going to keep quiet if I think it’s a bad idea. I incarcerate people who are here under current law today, and then tomorrow I go to the statehouse and testify against the very laws that are incarcerating people.”

“Does that ever create a conflict?”

“Quite the contrary. In one role I’m a corrections officer doing my duty, and in the other I am a citizen who has a right to use my experience and my observation to try and change policy.”

The conversation stalled as we both caught sight of a dark shadow, a bird of prey wheeling high above the hills. I watched the last of the cigar burn down to the warden’s fingernails. As long as the thing still sent up that fragile tendril of smoke, we could continue to stand there in the warm light of the sun. Only the throbbing heat of the ember getting too close snapped him back. He ground the stub into the wall unceremoniously before turning away and sealing us back in.

I had one more question as we retraced our steps back into the labyrinth: “Do your beliefs ever cause you to treat drug offenders differently than you treat your other inmates?”

“No,” he warden answered, eyes fixed on mine. “We treat every inmate with dignity and respect.”

Roc’s new book, And, was released recently. You can find more information on his website.

 


African Refugees Are Having a Hard Time Living in a Dutch Prison

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A few weeks ago, I went to Amsterdam to visit a community of African refugees who live in a former prison called the Vluchthaven. The group calls themselves "We Are Here" and are considered illegal immigrants by the Dutch government. They've been very visible over the last two years for protesting the indifference that many politicians in Holland have shown towards immigrants and people seeking asylum from war-torn countries.

Those who don't live in the jail's cells are holed up in a disused garage known as the Vluchtgarage, a cold concrete structure on the outskirts of the city. Now their situation is getting more desperate because the time period in which they're allowed to stay here is coming to an end, and many of them will be on the street come Saturday.

The Vluchthaven, which was originally intended to house low-risk criminal offenders, is home to some 130 stateless refugees including Thomas, a We Are Here founder who's originally from Sudan. Thomas met me at the door as I was signed in by guards who are still employed by the state to monitor the prison.

Thomas from Sudan

Thomas gave me a quick tour of the jail and explained why he and the other refugees formed We Are Here. “We started We Are Here to bring attention to the fact that we are living on the streets and in these temporary shelters. We have to make visible the problems that we are confronted with on a daily basis. We had no options other than living on the streets, and for this we are treated like criminals and often taken into custody by authorities and imprisoned in one of the huge detention centers. Many of us here have been imprisoned or left in these detention centers for years on end. We have no dignity, and we are living in a political and juridical vacuum."

A Somali refugee

Thomas told me that back in 2012 he and a group of fellow refugees pitched tents in protest in Amsterdam, in attempt to raise awareness. The authorities quickly moved in on them, and many of them were arrested.

They stayed together and kept up the momentum, setting up tent encampments and squatting in numerous locations. Eventually they had a minor breakthrough: the mayor of Amsterdam offered them shelter in the former prison. “So we accepted his six-month offer, which began on December 3, 2013,” said Thomas, “though many were excluded for bureaucratic reasons and went to squat in the Vluchtgarage a few days after we moved here. This means We Are Here are still together, but we are living in different places right now.”

Thomas explained that most of the people in We Are Here have applied for asylum again and again. In Holland, refugees get access to lawyers free of charge. However, the lawyers often do not have the expertise or desire to be particularly helpful, and sometimes they don't even show up in court, Thomas said.

The vast majority of the refugees are in limbo. On the one hand, it's difficult to get granted asylum. On the other hand, it would be impossible for them to go back to their countries of origin, due to either war, persecution, or something else. It is also difficult and risky to go to other European countries, since the Dublin II law restricts the refugees to the country where they first applied for asylum. If they're spotted somewhere other than the country they first applied to, they'll be sent back to that country. This usually means they will end up in a detention center, which is basically the same as a prison.

Hassan from Somalia

Thomas told me that most of the refugees who have spent time in detention centers are traumatized by it, and the prison is a nasty reminder of that. Most of the people in the prison accepted the mayor’s offer to live there because they had no other option. It was winter, so they really needed somewhere to stay. I asked Thomas what would happen when they get kicked out. “After that date, who knows? We are used to being pushed around, so we expect no different.”

Those who weren't in the Vluchthaven were staying in a disused garage—the Vlughtgarage. I went there to take a look and found a wreck of a building. It had large, open rooms, and people lived with no privacy whatsoever and no heating. Women generally can’t live there because it’s unsafe. More than 100 or so men were living in crude dorms. They sat around. It seemed that there was little else for them to do.

Nagi from Sudan

I met Nagi, a 31-year-old man who fled Sudan three years ago. He told me that, after schooling, he went to the Sudanese capital and to the University of Khartoum, where he earned a degree in political science and eventually a master's in international relations. While at Khartoum, he became active in the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) and worked for a number of international human rights groups, including Save the Children. For his media work with SLM, he was quickly targeted by Sudanese government intelligence. After death threats directed at him and his family, he fled to Holland. Since then, he has spent 13 months in detention centers, a prison, and on the streets. As a co-founder of We Are Here, Nagi works alongside the many refugees who find themselves in this stateless condition.

“A message that I would like to send to the those in the US and elsewhere is that in many ways we are all immigrants,” says Nagi. “We have all migrated at some point. Even the Dutch queen emigrated to Canada during World War II. So why can't we? If I return to Sudan, I face long-term imprisonment or possibly death for my political views.”

The contract at the prison runs out at the end of this week. When I visited, the refugees were afraid and didn't know where they would go. The city council had voted for a plan to create a shelter for refugees who are considered sick and vulnerable. Living in a former prison was far from ideal, but it provided a few months of relative stability.

I asked one of the volunteers who helps the group for an update. She emphasized that the situation is fast-moving, but told me, "From Saturday on, around 100 of the refugees who currently reside in the Vluchthaven will be on the streets again. Only 50 of the refugees are considered too vulnerable to be put on the street. Some can stay because they are working on returning to their country of origin. All others who are not considered to be sick or vulnerable, or who do not work on their return, will be on the street, and no solution is provided. It is a very alarming situation, and nobody really knows what to do."

Follow Giles Clarke on Twitter.

More about refugees:

Syrian Refugees Are Stuck at the Jordanian Border

Refugees in Kenya Are Being Forced Back to War-Torn Somalia

Iraq's Kurdish Refugees Celebrate International Women's Day

 

The First Nations Education Act Is Dead

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Grand Chief Derek Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, staunchly anti Bill C-33. Image via YouTube
The playbook on how to sow discord among native groups in Canada may well have been borrowed from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince: divide and conquer. Throughout Harper’s tenure, the Conservatives have continually introduced confusing, complicated, and contentious bills that sparked revolts like the Idle No More movement. Most recently, the government must have known when it tabled legislation about aboriginal education with little to no First Nations consultation that it would cause outrage. But that didn’t stop them. No, what was made clear at a special chiefs assembly held in Ottawa to discuss the issue is that, if nothing else, Bill C-33 was designed to draw a line in the sand and cause division among First Nations. That realization may well have contributed to the chiefs' decision to reject the bill entirely this week.

The bill, which has been described as “horrific” by Grand Chief Gordon Peters, sought to remove further control from reserves to provide their own K-12 education while reducing the amount of funding for on-reserve education. This lack of financial support, in the midst of a crisis where less than 50% of students who study on-reserve are graduating high school, was clearly unacceptable for the First Nations chiefs.

Shawn Atleo, the former national chief who headed for the hills after vocally supporting the bill, played a pawn of sorts in Harper’s most recent gambit as he proved to be the first piece to fall in a heated debate over on-reserve education that never really involved the government. This point was made apparent as more than 250 chiefs from First Nations across the country tried to come to a consensus on whether to support, amend, or kill the bill that would have seen $1.9 billion in much-needed funding directed to that cause. An early sign that discourse would be a challenge was evidenced when the chiefs couldn’t even agree on an agenda for the day.

Chief of the Assembly of the First Nations of Quebec and Labrador Ghislain Picard, who has served as the AFN spokesman since Atleo’s resignation, found himself in the role of mediator rather than moderator. Picard urged the chiefs to draw a unified decision. Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus used an interesting example to illustrate the challenge of coming to a resolution with so many people. "First of all, if you asked all of the mayors in Canada to come to consensus, would you expect them to?” he questioned. ”That's what we need to ask: why wouldn't you expect them, but you expect us to?"

Perry Bellegarde, who is reported to be in the running to replace Atleo as national chief and is head of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, had come out on behalf of the 74 First Nations in the province as an opponent of C-33 in early May. However, at the meeting many of the First Nations represented by Bellegarde’s organization, including the Meadow Lake Tribal Council, Battleford Tribal Chiefs, and the Sweetgrass First Nation, proved vocal proponents of the bill. In the view of those Saskatchewan chiefs, it was better to get funding flowing into reserves than bicker over matters of political difference.

Others still, like the chief of the Onion Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Wallace Fox, were appalled by the bill, but also by the willingness of others to want to negotiate with the government. Fox was reacting to a resolution drafted by the executive committee of the Assembly of First Nations aimed at the development of education reforms in tangent with the government. He accused the committee, which is made up of ten regional chiefs from across the country, of being too closely tied to Ottawa on education and trying to influence the decision of the gathered parties. “I cannot accept this because it was put before me five minutes ago,” he said of the resolution. “I’ve been instructed by the people at home to reject this bill entirely… You people out there—the executive—aren’t you supposed to speak for us? The top down system is alive and well today.”

Jody Wilson-Raybould, AFN regional chief for British Columbia, found herself on the defensive as she introduced the motion to amend or withdraw C-33. Several of the chiefs, including Fox, headed an offensive that started with her and snowballed into harsh criticism for the executive committee in general. For her part, Wilson-Raybould said that, while she didn’t feel the executive committee was in cahoots with Ottawa on the file, she stressed the importance of engaging with the federal government to ensure educational solutions to ongoing issues at on-reserve schools. For that reason, said she, a resolution was of utmost importance to the day’s discussion.

“Coming out of our executive meeting [held in advance of the special chiefs assembly], we had unanimous support for putting forward a recommendation in terms of a resolution. And we decided to bring that to our chiefs so that we could have a discussion about it,” she said. “When I introduced that resolution I spoke about the agreement among the executives, and it was my hope that there would have been some substantive dialogue around that resolution. That was the intent. It was a resolution that certainly did not support Bill C-33 in its current form; it supported the need to have substantial amendments.”

While members of the committee were not permitted to vote, the opinions were split even within those ranks. Most, as was previously reported in VICE, showed up with instructions from the First Nations they represent to reject the bill. Some were told by their people to investigate amendments and see to it that C-33 went ahead in some form. Others, like Morley Googoo, AFN regional chief for Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, travelled to the capital to support the bill. Reached by phone for comment after the meeting, Googoo expressed “cautious disappointment” over the way the say unfolded.

“I understand how people felt they needed more involvement in the bill. And there’s no denying that didn’t happened,” he said. “At the end of the day, we still have to figure out what strategies we have to take the next steps. There’s next steps regardless, but what they are is too fresh to tell you. It can’t be number one priority for the federal government and First Nations for two years and not still look and hope for a way forward. You’ve got to let the dust settle from the meeting and map out what’s going to happen next.”

Despite discord and heated debate, the end result saw Bill C-33 unanimously rejected by the chiefs. Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt subsequently killed the bill, keeping his promise that if the AFN did not support the legislation, it would not be passed. What was left in the wake of that decision was uncertainty. When the axe fell on C-33, more problems were triggered than solutions rendered. While a motion was passed alongside the final verdict to negotiate a new education agreement with Ottawa, it was unclear how the chiefs would cross that broken bridge. One certainty is that the decision means a rough road ahead from both the government and First Nations on the education file.

Another is that the only people who will really suffer in the face of this stalemate are the children attending on-reserve schools, where the educational environment pales in comparison to provincial standards nationwide. From its onset, C-33 was a lose-lose bill for First Nation people: fall in line with oppressive legislation or let your children continue to suffer. On the other hand, the Conservatives had everything to gain: pass a bill that gave them more control over aboriginal education or save over a billion dollars. Whether the bill was in fact crafted to cause division is debatable. But it did. To the detriment of innocent aboriginal children who deserve better. 

Meet the Artist Behind the BO-Scented Foldout in 'Harper's Bazaar'

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If you subscribe to Harper’s Bazaar, and if you enjoy the perfume foldouts, then there is a good chance you’ve smelled the body odor of artist Martynka Wawrzyniak. Along with ads for Salvatore Ferragamo and Lancôme, your May issue contains foldout perfume tabs of the enigmatic “Eau de M”: a fragrance designed to approximate the exact smell of Wawrzyniak’s BO. Art worlders might read it as an affront in the tradition of Lynda Benglis’s double dildo Artforum ad, but Wawrzyniak describes this as more of an ephemeral self-portrait; in 2012, she described smell to VICE as a “spiritual essence."

“There’s an aura of pheromones and smells around us that we emit to form a subconscious communication with other human beings,” she told us then. 

Last night, various media and fashion professionals immersed themselves in her aura at the SoHo launch of “Eau de M.” I stood over a table of magazines sniffing scent sticks amid racks of designer clothing by VPL (Visible Panty Line). The area emanated a faint but intoxicating smell. It may be due to the exacting organic diet and health regimen Wawrzyniak holds herself to, but this girl’s BO smells really great.

“I’m picking up sort of a coconutty, fruity scent,” a fellow smeller observed. I picked up watery notes of aloe and pine. It’s definitely more pheromonal-floral than rancid gym sock. The ingredients are all on the perfume foldout:

Eau de M is pure, radiant and seductive. Tropical coconut infused with cacao absolute, fresh grass and sumptuous passionfruit creates a unique and intensely addictive fragrance—wet, sweet and sensual like a hot, humid summer day. 

“The analysis of the exact odor... there were a lot of materials that are not available in the perfumist’s palette. So you have to recreate it with lots of pieces from [different elements],” observed perfumist Yann Vasnier of Givaudan. “We tried a musky smell, a milky smell, a sweaty fruity smell. It’s hard to recreate the exact molecules of her body.” Vasnier and scent director Dawn Goldworm of 12.29 collaborated with Wawrzyniak on the fragrance, after she spent two years working with Hunter College to harvest her sweat from her Bikram yoga T-shirts. “I think we were able to extract about 5 mils in total,” said a biochemistry student who’d spent a summer on the project. Based on her analysis, the scent is about “as close as they could have gotten.” 

The whole operation was financed by an art collector and spinal surgeon, who prefers to remain anonymous. He also collected a bottle of Wawrzyniak’s tears, which she’d produced by crying while watching films about Soviet Russia. 

The odor is an extension of Wawrzyniak’s ongoing project to build an aromatic essence of “essential oil," composed of tears, sweat, and hair, which was experienced in 2012’s Smell Me at envoy enterprises. 

"Just from a medical background, scent is processed differently from sight and sound,” he observed. “You filter those senses, but scent doesn't work like that. It’s more emotional.”

Wawrzyniak at last night's event

After he learned more about contemporary art, Wawrzyniak’s benefactor began to think that Eau de M was a piece that needed to be dispersed. “This isn’t a showpiece,” he told me. “This is an interesting, and important, piece, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I needed to make this thing happen.”

Apparently, Harper’s Bazaar thought so too. 

“Harper’s knew about the project, and they were excited. They think it’s wonderful.” 

“Barney’s has been calling,” Wawrzyniak told me. “People have been asking where they can get it; they can’t find anything like it anywhere else.”

So this year, keep an eye out for Eau de M at Barney’s. But for the time being, you’ll have to hit the newsstands. 

Whitney Kimball is an NYC-based art critic currently on staff at the blog Art F City.  

The Canadian Government Has Forbidden Meteorologists to Discuss Climate Change

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Screenshot via.

One of the strongest hurricanes in recent memory slams into the east coast. A journalist on deadline phones up the Canadian Meteorological Service on its 24-hour hotline for a quote. The weather forecaster the journalist reaches is gregarious and knowledgeable—that is, until the journalist asks whether the recent hurricane can in any way be linked to the carbon emissions us humans pump unceasingly into the atmosphere. “It’s not appropriate for me to answer that,” the forecaster replies.

The exact details of this exchange are hypothetical. But the strict rules preventing Environment Canada weather forecasters from speaking about climate change are not. “Our Weather Preparedness Meteorologists are experts in their field of severe weather and speak to this subject,” a federal spokesperson recently explained to investigative reporter Mike De Souza. “Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.”

Which seems reasonable enough, right? Well, until you consider the chain of events leading up to this latest revelation. Not long after Stephen Harper was first elected as Prime Minister in 2006, his Conservative government began restricting the access of senior federal scientists to journalists. Such scientists were now required to get permission from their political superiors before answering a media request. “Our scientists are very frustrated,” reads a leaked Environment Canada document.

That document also noted media coverage of climate science in Canada had, by 2010, dropped 80 percent since the restrictions came in. “Scientists have noticed a major reduction in the number of requests, particularly from high profile media, who often have same-day deadlines,” it read. “They feel the intent of the policy is to prevent them from speaking to media.” That opinion is shared by the scientific journal Nature, which in 2012 urged the Harper government “to set its scientists free.”

The situation hasn’t gotten any better since then. In fact, it may be getting even worse. “Rather than relenting under public scrutiny,” read a report this spring from the non-profit Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, which tracks in detail the Harper government’s apparent “muzzling” of scientists: “It seems that restrictions and the pace of cutbacks have only increased.” The report could cite “little evidence that conditions have improved since the first few accounts of muzzling in 2006.”

Which brings us right up to this week’s government revelation about Environment Canada weather forecasters. These meteorologists are among the few government experts granted relatively unrestricted access to the media. A 24-hour hotline allows journalists working on deadline to reach them directly without political supervision. So long, though, as such weather forecasters only “speak to their area of expertise,” the feds have now clarified, which means absolutely no discussion of climate change.

You might suppose these forecasters have important things to say about the climate. Especially given their expertise in the severe weather that fanned wildfires across Quebec, for example, or put Calgary underwater. Instead, to learn of potential links between such extreme events and climate change, journalists must contact a federal climate expert, and thus enter the “Byzantine” world of public relations described by Nature, where “message control” trumps “the free flow of scientific knowledge.”

Weather forecasters fear that speaking about climate change could even limit their careers. Or so suggested a 2013 survey of federal scientists. “With Meteorology we are in a somewhat unique position in that our availability to the media is relatively unrestricted,” one scientist told Environics Research. “We do have to be careful what we say and keep it to the weather however. I outright refuse to answer climate questions. It is an issue fraught with too many traps. Could be career limiting.”

The irony is weather forecasters are more likely than climate scientists to downplay links between extreme weather and global warming. A fascinating 2010 survey of American TV meteorologists suggested only one-third think humans are the main cause of climate change. The Weather Channel founder has even described such a conclusion as “the greatest scam in history.” Since it’s hard enough to predict next week’s weather, many meteorologists are skeptical of longer-term projections.

So when the US government released a landmark report this month on the looming risks of climate change, President Barack Obama did eight interviews with TV meteorologists to defend it. “If you want to try to side with the polluters and argue to the American public that climate change is not happening—today, tomorrow, and certainly in the future—that's going to be a losing argument,” White House advisor John Podesta told reporters at the National Climate Assessment’s release.

Now contrast that with Canada, where Prime Minister Harper rarely, if ever, mentions climate change, makes federal scientists obtain permission to talk about it, and bars its own weather forecasters outright from the subject. “Scientists should be allowed to speak openly about their research or anything else because they are people,” young Canadian scientist Stephen Buranyi wrote last year in VICE. People, that is, with the same right to free speech all other Canadians ostensibly enjoy.

Lady Business: Mandatory Californian STI Porn Star Tests, Canadian Military Sex Assault Denial, and #YesAllWomen

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This week in Lady Business: adult film actors are being put through the ringer when it comes to proving to the government that they’re STI free, which is causing privacy concerns in the porn world. Plus, the bros in the Canadian Military claim they don’t have an internal problem with sexual assault concerning their female members. And, a brand new women’s movement was born in the wake of a horrible tragedy: #YesAllWomen.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Screenshot via.
New Californian Condom Law Hurts Porn Star Privacy

Last week, the California State Assembly passed a bill that would force all porn performers to wear condoms during penetrative sex, while also seriously harming the performers’ rights to privacy. The bill, AB 1576, aims to put a government mandate on STI testing, by forcing producers to hand over performers’ STI test results to the Department of Industrial Relations.

It’s not hard to read this as: performers are losing their right to privacy simply because they have sex for a living.

The bill, introduced by Isadore Hall, and sponsored by Michael Weinstein of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is problematic because it infantilizes grown-ass adults and gets involved in their personal business, threatening to out their sexual health records to authoritarian strangers. It also assumes the state knows what’s best for performers’ health and bodies—which is also not so good. The body is the only truly private property, and consent is key. The government is violating the very idea of consent. The bill is dehumanizing, it won’t make porn a safer work environment, and performers are fighting it.

Before I go any further, let me just say that of course porn performers, who generally have lots of sex with lots of other humans, seem like they would be at an elevated risk of contracting STIs. Because performers have so much sex some may think there should be stipulations in place on testing. But there are strict stipulations in place as it is, developed and instituted by the industry. Performers are required to be tested every 14 days, as Lorelei Lee explains here. The state is ignoring these industry-developed standards, and it’s pushing through its own solution without consulting pornographers and performers.

I have never been a porn performer, and so I reached out to a couple I’ve met in the past, but I didn’t hear back in time for deadline. These tweets should clarify how performers in both mainstream and feminist porn feel:

For the record, I’m not saying condom use on porn sets is a horrible plan. It’s likely a great plan, for some. The problem with this bill is that it doesn’t give performers the option to make their own choice. Condoms can cause chafing, which can lead to genital lacerations, making STI contraction more likely. The thing is, performers simply won’t abide by the stipulations outlined in AB 1576—even if it is passed. They will either be pushed underground, which would make their work far less safe, or move en masse to Las Vegas in neighbouring Nevada, which would rip a multi-billion dollar industry out of California—not to mention senselessly uproot performers’ lives. And I have to say, I don’t blame them: the language in the bill is disturbing as hell, as is the image of a pack of besuited legislators coming together to discuss the terms of other people’s “anal intercourse.” But it seems some people will go to any lengths necessary to regulate and patrol the bodies of others.

From the bill: “…Because a violation of the act would be a crime under certain circumstances, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program by creating a new crime.”

Yes, omitting condom use under any circumstances on set would be a criminal act.

Another quote from the bill: "The legislature finds and declares that the protection of workers in the adult film industry is the responsibility of multiple layers of government, with the department being responsible for worker safety and the county being responsible for protecting the public health."

The state has a responsiblity to protect the safety and well-being of child orphans, not lord over the career choices of grown adults. If the goal of the bill is actually to "protect" workers, the state would have them to find out what kind of healthcare they need, rather than dictate guidelines for an industry they know nothing about. Porn performers are highly engaged with politics, they have a seemingly endless capacity for study and activism, and they are fully aware that their sexual health impacts not only their personal lives, but their livelihoods as well.

Mike Stabile is a spokesman with kink.com, and he gave me a call from LA the other day. Kink was one of the sites to first get behind the push to stop AB 1576. While those behind the bill say it's for the stars' own good, Stabile, alongside many performers, says it's a morally-driven move to make the industry illegal.

“The group behind the bill has been opposed to the industry for a long time,” he tells me. “A liberal state like California can’t go after [the industry] in the normal way. In other places, you could say, ‘Oh, this is degrading, this is perverted.’ Here, if you want to lead an old-fashioned morality campaign, you have to disguise it in another way.”

He says that disguise comes in the form of concern for performers’ health, and in lies about the prevalence of STIs in the industry.

“You have to manufacture a crisis to get something like this passed.”

Last week, the internet exploded over the fact that 19-year-old Alyssa Funke killed herself after being “outed” as a performer at her university about a month ago. Everyone said the bullying she faced in the aftermath was the reason she committed suicide. As Emily Shire writes in a sensitive, thoughtful piece honouring Funke, this has become reductive, and ignores the fact that Funke was a complex, multi faceted human being, and not a “talking point about porn.” That said, Funke battled depression for years, and the jeers and bullying can’t have been a positive contributor to that. Bullying from teenagers is one thing, but from the government?

Ostensibly, the bill is to protect performers from HIV. Those in the industry say no cases of HIV have been contracted on set in the past decade. Some performers have tested positive, but they are said to have contracted the virus offset, in their own sex lives. HIV exists within the larger populace, obviously, not just in porn, and people contract it every day. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1,144,500 Americans have the virus. Therefore, it would be shocking if no one in porn ever contracted HIV, and further stigmatizing workers when they are already stigmatized for their choice of work, even by the banks, is sick.

People are assholes about porn because they want their “family values” to remain unchallenged. That means they don’t want their cis gendered, heteronormative, capitalist, neo-conservative power structures to crumble. Porn challenges the idea that everybody exists within the confines of monogamous, vanilla relationships—a type of cultural disruption that government normals can’t possibly deal with.

But putting aside my judgment and your own, the fact remains that trying to instigate rules for the penetration of other people’s literal assholes is creepy. It’s just none of your fucking business, Cali conservatives. Thx.



General Tom Lawson, during his swear in ceremony last year. Screenshot via YouTube.
Sexual Assault Not A Problem in the Canada’s Military: Canada’s Top Military Bro

Back home in Canada, General Tom Lawson, the chief of defence staff, is being called to task as questions are put to him regarding sexual assault and violence in the military. The Commons defence committee is seeking answers from him after a Maclean’s and L’actualité report unveiled horrifying statistics about the prevalence of sexual assault within the institution. Apparently, five individuals in the Canadian military community become victims of sexual assault every day.

From the report:

“According to statistics obtained through Canada’s Access to Information Act, military police have received between 134 and 201 complaints of sexual assaults every year since 2000. That’s an average of 178 per year. Most specialists agree that hundreds of other cases are not reported. Statistics Canada estimates that only one in 10 cases of sexual assault is reported to authorities. That means a total of 1,780 sexual assaults per year in the Canadian Forces. Or five per day.”

While Lawson sent his condolences to those who spoke out, and said he was disturbed by the allegations, the CBC reports that he also said “he does not accept the notion that sexual violence and harassment are part of military culture.” He cited a recent internal survey, which suggested harassment has been declining in the military for the past decade.

1.)  Just because you don’t like something, or it disturbs you, doesn’t mean it ceases to exist. (see: the “#notallmen” campaign, for men who say not all men are sexual abusers; or the “#yesallwomen” campaign, for women who say all women have been victims of harassment and/or abuse)

2.)  People are unlikely to report sexual assaults because they will not be believed, and in this case, they are doubly unlikely to report, IMHO, because their jobs are on the line. Hence, internal surveys are a horrible method of measuring the prevalence of sexual assault within any institution.

Weeks prior to the release of the Maclean’s and L’actualité report, Major David Yurczyszyn was convicted of sexual assault after groping a woman’s breast. And Corporal Derrick Gallagher was arrested and charged with eight counts of sexual assault and two of voyeurism in March. No fewer than 18 additional charges were tacked on later. Ontario Provincial Police are still looking for another 50 women they believe may have been assaulted, as well.

An internal review has already shed light on the fact that there are indeed some barriers standing in the way of sexual assault survivors, but, happily, an external one has also been organized for the near future.

As Women Finally Mourn The Realities of Our Daily Lives, a Movement Is Born

Everyone on the internet has written about this by now, so I’ll keep it short. When I found out Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree because too many “entitled” women had denied him pussy, something wholly unfamiliar happened to me. I couldn’t write about it, and I couldn’t even really engage with it. I couldn’t even bring myself to #yesallwomen for the first couple of days, even though I already knew of its painful realities. I found myself completely silenced.

Rodgers’ mass hatred of women and the discussions around it made me feel too small to write. Every time I’ve been unwillingly groped, squeezed, touched, cat-called, harassed, stared at, or propositioned—came rushing back through the testimonies of so many women. All women. But I couldn’t be one of the women who found power in the massive uprising that is #yesallwomen, because for a few days, and for the first time, I allowed myself to feel damaged by the way men have treated me.

A lifetime of being sexually harassed and implicitly threatened by men has made me feel, at times, stupid, worthless, filthy, and teeny-tiny. These shootings and the public unveiling of just how lethally misogynistic our culture is really illustrated just how fucking hard it’s been, for all of us.

I’ve written about being sexually assaulted before, and how I barely let myself notice what its effects might have been, at least at the time. But aside from those sexual assaults, every blatant leer and sexually suggestive comment directed at me over the years came back to me this week, and settled upon my psyche in layers. It’s been hard to shrug them off. I’ve been reminded of all the times I catch a man sliding my clothes off with his eyes (women can tell when you’re doing this, guys), and it makes me want to be invisible. Or to be a man. Or to have a hard, impenetrable plastic shield for genitals, like Barbie. I get scared. But the feeling only lasts a few seconds, and I shake it off and move on with my life. Because dwelling on it, for me, turns into self-blame, and that’s something I don’t have time for. And, after allowing myself a couple of days of sadness, the power of the uprising that is #yesallwomen is nurturing me back to health.

If you haven’t yet, read about #yesallwomen, and #yesallwhitewomen. Do not ignore stories and statistics about how women of colour, trans* women, Indigenous women, and women with disabilities are all at a much greater risk of violence than straight, able-bodied, cis white women.

Read why many men don’t know about the level of misogyny out there. Read about what it’s like for dudes who are nerds growing up in this culture that seems to hate us all equally, and read a plea from one of those so-called nerds.

It’s important.

#yesallwomen
 

@sarratch

The Chaotic Fashion GIFs of Luca Mainini

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I first discovered 31-year-old collagist Luca Mainini's art during a late night Tumblr binge. I'll admit, I was pretty stoned at the time. But no amount of weed would have generated the same potent effect his work had on my brain. The moment I stumbled across his GIFs, my computer screen exploded with body parts, lipstick, and pills. These unique fashion images instantly intrigued me and has become my new obsession.

Luca Mainini has been making kaleidoscopic art for the fashion world for the past three years. He created his first multimedia video instillation for Excelsior Milano in 2012. He's also made multimedia collages for Givenchy, Dolce & Gabbana, and Moschino's most recent fall/winter collection.

After months of being fascinated by the collage art of this mysterious character, I was eager to speak to the man himself and find out whether he was just as insane as his GIFs. I spoke with Mainini a few weeks ago and we chatted about old horror movies, his creepy doll collection, and his infatuation with Dolce & Gabbana.

VICE: How long have you been making GIFs?
Luca Mainini: At first I began creating collages, but in the last few years I've evolved to GIFs. 

How often do you create GIFs?
Depending on the day, between two and 20 collages.

What magazines do you like to use for reference?
Vogue Italia, Marie Claire, Elle, and Vanity Fair Italia are my favorite. I'll also go to Milan to the newsstand and choose magazines I like the best right now.

What are your favorite things you look for when cutting from a magazine?
I love girls, so I mainly like to use girls in my work. I like legs, lips, lipstick, high heels, wigs, hair, and dresses.

I notice the faces within your work are usually covered. Is this intentional? 
I don't like heads. I like using lips for the face and cut out random pieces for the body.

What is your process like?
I take the pictures I like from the magazine, make collages on paper, and then scan and import them into the computer. When I create GIFs, I always listen to music. The process is how watching a fashion show makes me feel: "BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!" 

What type of music do you listen to when you are making these GIFs? 
It all depends on how I feel and can range from Bach to Lady Gaga. I like 90s music a lot. Today, I listened to "King of My Castle" by Chris Brann.

Is there anyone you listen to specifically for inspiration?
Not really music as much as movies. I put on my favorite directors when I want to get inspired.

Who is you favorite director?
David Lynch is my favorite. Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway and that hair—very sexy! I'm also very inspired by Roman Polanski's films.

What is it about movies that's so inspiring?
I love the women of Lynch's movies and am also inspired by the vintage fashion.

Vintage fashion?
Yes. I like to collect vintage 70s dolls and telephones.

Wait, I want to see these dolls. What type are they? Like Barbies?
No, I've been collecting Barbies since I was 18 and then moved on to 70s dolls. I like creepy dolls. I have one that is like a Texas Chainsaw Massacre baby. And I have a Twiggy one too.

Do you have names for them?
No, that would be too creepy.

How many dolls and telephones do you have in total? 
In my home, I only have five or six—but overall, I have about 20. And I have a collection of about 30 vintage telephones.

So it's safe to say you're a 70s person? 
Yes, I'm a very 70s person. I like all things 70s—from the way I decorate my apartment to the things I collect and am inspired by—except for 70s dresses.

Clicking your site is like entering into a chaotic world. Is this your intention?
I want to create a BOOM-like effect when people look at my site. 

It definitely gives off a powerful feeling. Do you think this reflects your personality at all? 
I don't know, maybe part of my personality. I'm really quiet, not a crazy person like what is seen in my GIFs. But I feel that fashion gives off the same feeling as my site.

Which one of your GIFs best describes your personality?
Not sure, but would have to include wigs, telephones, and pills.

Follow Miyako on Twitter.

Congress Is Finally Getting Behind Medical Marijuana

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A marijuana dispensary in Denver, Colorado. Photo by Jeffrey Beall via Flickr

Late last night, when no one was paying attention, the US House of Representatives did something that Congress has never done before: They voted to lighten up on marijuana prohibition. In a bipartisan vote, lawmakers passed an amendment that would bar the DEA from messing with state marijuana laws, prohibiting the agency from spending any of its funding on targeting legal weed operations and users.

It was a shocking moment of clarity for an institution that has spent the past three decades propping up the federal government’s failing war on drugs. Even more surprisingly, the amendment passed the infamously gridlocked chamber on the strength of both parties, with a final vote tally of 219 to 189. Although Democrats predictably carried the measure, 49 Republicans also voted yes, reflecting the party’s gradual shift toward embracing more libertarian views on drug policy.

"The heart and soul of the Republican party is that pro-freedom, individual philosophy that Reagan talked about," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who sponsored an amendment, said at a press conference Friday. "I think that what we've got now and what we have here in the Republican vote last night were people who took a lot of those words and the philosophy of Ronald Reagan to heart."

Of course, the measure, part of a funding bill for several agencies, still has a long way to go. The Senate is likely to pass its own appropriations bill, which means that the DEA amendment will have to survive Congress’s reconciliation process—and then get a signature from President Obama—before it becomes law. And despite the growing conservative support for legalization, the amendment still faces strong opposition from Republicans lawmakers whose hatred of weed still trumps their disdain for federalism. "Marijuana is not safe or legal,” Republican Rep. Andy Harris warned his colleagues before the vote. “There is more evidence every day that it is not safe.” Medical marijuana, he added, “is the camel’s nose under the tent.”

Weird Middle Eastern metaphors aside, the amendment is a big blow to the DEA, which continues to terrorize legal medical marijuana dispensaries and their disease-stricken customers. The drug enforcement agency has spent millions of dollars cracking down on legal weed purveyors, reversing the Obama administration’s 2009 promise that it would not try to circumvent state marijuana laws. According to the medical marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, the DEA spent four percent of its budget on raiding legal cannabis dispensaries in 2011 and 2012, effectively shutting down more than 500 dispensaries in California, Colorado, and Washington. Not to mention, the agency is led by  Drug War neocon Michele Leonhardt, a Bush-era relic whose hatred of marijuana runs so deep she reportedly called the day the hemp flag flew over the Capital “the worst day of her 33-year career at the DEA.”

Although raids have reportedly subsided since last year when the DOJ issued new guidance discouraging federal law enforcement and prosecutors from going after the legal pot industry, the DEA remains staunchly against medical marijuana. In fact, a report issued by the agency earlier this month warns that “Organizers behind the “medical” marijuana movement did not really concern themselves with marijuana as a medicine—they just saw it as a means to an end, which is the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes.”

Thursday’s vote suggests that lawmakers, like most Americans, are starting to resent this zealotry, and the resulting encroachment on state drug laws. Medical marijuana is now legal in 22 states, and six more have legalized cannabis oil, which means that there are now hundreds of legitimate businesses—and even more customers—who live in fear of the DEA.    

"The conflicting nature of state and federal marijuana laws has created an untenable situation," Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer said before the vote last night. "It's time we take the federal government out of the equation so medical marijuana business owners operating under state law aren't living in constant fear of having their doors kicked down in the middle of the night."

It’s not clear yet how the Obama administration will respond to the amendment, or if the measure will even survive Congress’s labyrinthine appropriations process. Regardless of what happens, though, last night’s vote is historic, marking a major turning point in the national legitimization of the burgeoning marijuana industry.

“The last time a similar amendment came up it didn't come very close to passing but, since then, more states have passed medical marijuana laws and a couple have even legalized marijuana for all adults,” Marijuana Majority Chairman Tom Angell said in a statement Thursday night. “More states are on this way later this year and in 2016, and it's clear that more politicians are beginning to realize that the American people want the federal government to stop standing in the way. If any political observers weren't aware that the end of the war on marijuana is nearing, they just found out."


Motherboard: How to Hack a Car

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In this episode of Phreaked Out, we met some of the top security researchers at the center of the car-hacking world. Their goal isn't to make people crash: They highlight security holes to illustrate flaws in car technology, intended to pressure auto manufacturers to be a few steps ahead of their friendly foes. 

Information security researcher Mathew Solnik gave us a first-hand demonstration on how to wirelessly send commands to a car and remotely tell it what to do. With a little over a grand and about a month of work, Solnik found time outside of his full-time job to reverse-engineer a car's computer system to make it ready for a takeover. 

From his laptop, he was able to manipulate the car's engine, brakes, and security systems by wirelessly tapping into the Controller Area Network, or CAN bus network. Without getting too deep into the details—both for legal reasons and due to my own training-wheel knowledge of such things—he was able to do this by implementing some off-the-shelf chips, a third-party telematic control unit, a GSM-powered wireless transmitter/receiver setup, and a significant amount of know-how he's accrued over the years. 

The reason for such additional hardware was to make our older, mid-size sedan function like a newer—and arguably more vulnerable—stock vehicle, which these days often come with data connections. (We would have loved to tinker with the latest, most connected car on the market, but since we were on a shoestring budget and it's incredibly hard to find a friend who's willing to lend their car for a hacking experiment, our pickings were slim.)

With that said, a car whose network system is connected to a cloud server and accessible by Bluetooth, cell networks, or Wi-Fi is potentially vulnerable to intrusion. 

VICE News: VICE News Capsule

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The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, Christian youth destroy a mosque in the Central African Republic, international medical workers travel to Sierra Leone to try to stop the spread of the Ebola virus, dozens of people die in Iraq during a series of attacks, and the husband of a Pakistani woman stoned to death by her family admits to killing his first wife.

Meet the Coach Who Fled Cuba to Train Cambodia's Next Boxing Legend

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Meet the Coach Who Fled Cuba to Train Cambodia's Next Boxing Legend

I Ate at Toronto’s Scuzziest Strip Joint and Didn’t Get Food Poisoning

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I Ate at Toronto’s Scuzziest Strip Joint and Didn’t Get Food Poisoning

Porn Stars Wants You to Stop Jacking Off for Free

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Photo courtesy of Wicked 

Pay for your porn—that’s what some adult industry members are asking consumers to do in a new online campaign. After Samuel L. Jackson called Redtube the biggest pop culture achievement of the past 50 years, porn stars and piracy experts teamed up to create the #payforyourporn campaign to fight back against the tube companies they believe are lowering porn films' profits and quality.

“[Tube sites are] taking money away from all different areas,” said Jessica Drake, the Wicked Pictures contract star who helped start the movement. “A lot of people don't realize there is a lot involved in making a movie beyond the two people they see having sex on camera. Behind those two people, you see a director, then cameramen, then lighting guys, and production managers, and production assistants, make-up artists, wardrobe people. You see the location, and the equipment rental, and the lubricators that are being put out.”

Drake believes that tube sites have damaged companies’ finances, forcing them to lower their films’ quality. A one-month subscription to Wicked Pictures costs $29.99, and the company needs this money to produce their lavish pornos. “There are companies like Wicked that are known for our bigger budget, high-quality adult entertainment, so we want to be able to keep on doing that,” she said. “I think it's important that we educate people, and I think it will make a difference in the long run.”

Mike Kulich, founder of Skweezme.com, an alternative to tube sites, agrees. “They just want to pull something up, whack off, and be done in five minutes,” he said. Launched this January at the AVN Awards, Skweezme.com hopes to become the Netflix of porn and a solution to Drake and other stars' problems with tube sites. “Streaming in HD, we have Twilight and all the pig parodies, and then we also have your regular gonzo stuff and your classic Debbie Does Dallas,” Kulich said.

If you love BDSM and anal, Skweezme.com is the place for you. The site offers viewers a diverse selection of titles and genres, unlike subscription sites that charge users expensive fees to watch a small selection of videos, and their payment plan revolves around a token system instead of subscriptions. According to Kulich, users must purchase a minimum of three tokens. (The company is introducing a new 99-cent feature, allowing users to buy three tokens for $2.97.) Once activated, a token gives users access to all videos for 24 hours.

“They can use it on their TV, iPhone, computer—we have a Roku channel. It's enabled on tablets, so we'll make it available on any device and make it at a price point where people won't mind paying it,” Kulich said. 

Photo by Damien Cain

Skweezme.com has yet to become popular, so for now porn stars are relying on campaigns like #PayForYourPorn to convince people to pay to masturbate. One such actress, the infamous Joslyn James, has felt the negative side effects of free content for years. James claims that tube sites have increased the public's awareness of porn stars, creating an influx of young, inexperienced newbies, like Belle Knox, who want to work in the porn industry.

Having these girls behind and in front of the camera has led to some awkward moments. “If you're doing an anal scene, you should know you don't eat a breakfast burrito in the morning! Use enemas, Imodium, and gummy bears,” James said, when discussing young performers’ lack of experience. “I am sympathetic and want to educate people if it's their first time doing things. I just don't want to be the one licking your butt if you don't know how to have anal.”

James acknowledged that porn distributors have business relationships with tube sites and receive traffic from tube sites. (The major tube sites declined to comment.) “It does make sense why [porn companies] are doing it because it's making us, the porn stars, more popular,” James said. “I don't know about more money, but it is giving us more notoriety and popularity.”

Thanks to social media, porn stars like James and Drake would probably have been able to boost their fame without the help of tube sites, considering both stars regularly interact with fans on Twitter and their personal websites. Unfortunately, no porn star can fully control where their fans see their work, and they can only urge viewers to pay to jack off.

“People are going to do what they want to do,” James said. “I can only control myself.”

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas on Twitter

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