Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

The BC Supreme Court Has Ordered Health Canada to Let Addicts Access Prescription Heroin

0
0



Image via Flickr user stevendepolo.
Despite a major setback last November, a small group of entrenched drug users in Vancouver recently secured a legal victory against the federal government. Last Thursday, the BC Supreme Court ordered Health Canada to quit obstructing access to prescription heroin for these patients. 

The ruling is a small step forward in a larger legal battle about whether or not patients have a constitutional right to legal heroin. Chief Justice Hinkson said that “irreparable harm” is being caused to the plaintiffs by blocking diacetylmorphine-assisted therapy (prescription heroin) while they wait for their case to be heard.  

For a few of those with chronic opiate dependencies, traditional treatments like methadone don’t work. And withholding the medication is making them sick.

Dr. Julio Montaner, Director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, was exuberant. “We are delighted to see that once again evidence trumps ideology,” he told me. “The court recognizes that these are health issues... rather than the prejudices of the government of the day.”

Doctors are now moving to get the plaintiffs back into treatment with prescription heroin.

Lawyer Adrienne Smith from Pivot Legal, which is assisting with the case, was frustrated about having to go to court on “a medical issue that should be addressed by doctors, not police officers.”

“This isn’t a way to put heroin on the street,” Smith said. “This is a treatment for a small group of people who don’t react well to traditional treatment.”  Smith sees policies opposing harm reduction as “needlessly punitive to drug users. Punishing people for trying to be well is not a way of moving forward.”

Chronic Addiction

After four decades of chronic heroin addiction, Douglas Lidstrom’s health, family, job prospects, and housing had all deteriorated. He’d tried to quit; tried the methadone program six times; tried detox dozens of times. Nothing worked.

Then, Lidstrom joined a prescription heroin trial and everything changed. He got healthy. He got stable. And others did too.

According to Professor Martin Schechter, the founding Director of the School of Population and Public Health at the University of BC “[prescription heroin, or diacetylmorphine treatment] is not simply the administration of a drug, but the opportunity for patients to benefit from up to thrice daily contact with doctors, nurses and counselors; the breaking of their cycle of criminality, sex work, jails and hospitalizations, and the stabilization of their previously chaotic lives which made improved health outcomes extremely unlikely.”

But the Government of Canada is against prescription heroin. Last year, the Minister of Health blocked diacetylmorphine for those exiting the drug trial and seeking special access to continue treatment. So, Lidstrom and the other study participants took the government to court—and won. 

David Murray was another of the plaintiffs. Murray has been injecting heroin for 42 years. He’s spent time in jail. He has Hepatitis C, type 2 diabetes, and suffers from depression. Murray has often been homeless. He knew heroin was ruining his life, and tried the methadone program ten times. It didn’t work.

Prescription for Success

Then, like Lidstrom, Murray found the prescription heroin study. “I discontinued any criminal activity, and discontinued using any illicit heroin or other opioids. I reconnected with my family and began repairing those relationships,” he said in an affidavit. 

David Byres has seen these changes again and again. Byres is VP Acute Clinical at Providence Health, which ran the two prescription heroin studies: the Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness (SALOME) and before it, the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI).

“Prescription heroin is tightly controlled under the supervision of our medical and nursing staff. It doesn’t leave the clinic. Many patients have to come two or three times a day to the clinic. We monitor it and track it. We assess them when they come in. Our clinic has mental health counselling, addiction counselling,” he said.

But after patients finished the last study, they were cut off.

Lidstrom worried about going back to a life of chaos—about getting robbed, assaulted, arrested and even overdosing. “I try not to think about what will happen if I cannot get access to diacetylmorphine. I am worried about my well-being and think I might have to turn to running scams… and will end up in jail.”

Byres was worried too. “People got sick again,” he said.

So doctors appealed to Health Canada to let them continue prescribing heroin to some of the participants that had moved through NAOMI & SALOME. At first, government officials said yes, but then politics got in the way.

Backlash

The Minister of Health intervened, stating that the prescription of heroin “is in direct opposition to the government’s anti-drug policy... Our policy is to take heroin out of the hands of addicts, not to put it into their arms." The government quickly drafted new regulations, blocking access to diacetylmorphine.

But it’s not just prescription heroin. The governing Conservatives oppose harm reduction generally, including North America’s only supervised injection site. At InSite, medical professionals oversee intravenous drug use, but no drug is dispensed or prescribed. The idea is to reduce overdose deaths and the spread of HIV & Hepatitis C. The government fought and lost a protracted court battle to shut down InSite. The party’s website encourages supporters to sign-up to “keep heroin out of your backyardeven the small crack pipe vending machine provoked outrage.

“What we see may be more ideology than evidence,” said Byres. “There’s some stigma around addiction, around heroin. For people with a long history of smoking, often how we begin to treat that addiction is with nicotine patches, or other substitution therapy.” Treatment with diacetylmorphine and methadone both operate on the same principle.

Withdrawal

After getting cut off, Douglas Lindstrom was soon injecting street drugs again. His health suffered, he lost weight and he became disconnected from his family. He was back to the cycle of dope sickness and scrounging money for heroin. And he wasn’t the only one.

Deborah Lee Bartosch, another of the plaintiffs, said in her affidavit: “heroin addiction has taken a large toll on my life. I am tied to the drug. It feels like a monkey on my back, and I cannot go without it.”

“When I do not have heroin, I feel 100 years old,” she said in her affidavit. “I cannot do anything—even walking feels painful. Without heroin I feel pain deep in my bones.”

The Struggle Continues

Murray, Bartosch and Lidstrom all want to improve their situation and to access the only treatment they have experienced that will let them do it. Ultimately, Lidstrom wants to give up heroin entirely.

“We’re pretty happy,” Byres said of the decision, “It’s been a very distressful time for [clinic staff] trying to treat these people, seeing them not doing well, knowing there’s an effective treatment and telling people they cannot give it to them. [Now] they’re going to be able to treat people effectively.” 


@garthmullins


VICE News: PTSD from Gang Violence in LA

0
0

There's an epidemic of PTSD in American cities, and it has nothing to do with the wars being fought abroad. Homegrown violence and a sense of impunity in America's urban war zones are leaving thousands of teenagers with severe psychological trauma that stunts their emotional and cognitive development.

VICE News travels to the front line of this epidemic in Los Angeles to speak to the kids who are suffering, and the adults trying to save them from being destined for the fringes of society.

How Many Crystals Do You Have Left Inside You?

0
0

Crystal Eaters, the latest novel by Shane Jones, is not about people jacked on crystal meth, but instead is itself a form of drugs. “I don’t do drugs, I am drugs,” Salvador Dali famously said. This is a book inspired by that same sentiment, comprised of such a fantastic and constantly deforming set of characteristics that it feels designed not of this world, but as a way through it.  

What crystals are—at least to those surviving in the landscape of Crystal Eaters—is a measurement of personal mortality. Each body and object has within them a set number of crystals, and once those are depleted, you will die. One can only extend their lifespan by gathering more crystals, as if this were a video game about death. Thus, all of the characters in Crystal Eaters are installed from the beginning with a strange sense of desperation and fervor, one quite unlike plain characters on a page. And when we realize that with each page turned inside this book the page number is going down rather than up, it becomes clear that this experience has a half-life like drugs sent through the bloodstream. The window is closing the deeper we press in.

What erupts under this strange and magical premise is hypercolor in its range. The narrative shifts through an abstruse but consistently potent range of styles and perspectives—a young boy named Remy; Remy’s sick mother, whose crystal count is deathly low; a prisoner named Pants McDonovan, brother of Remy; various omniscient voices that crop up through the text like gods—each of whom, in addition to the concern over their crystals, simmers under pressure in the world, as everywhere the heat is high and a nearby city is growing over their village’s landscape. Jones demonstrates a tightrope-like eye for finagling between Pynchon-esque quasi-science-fictional feelings and the book’s physics, allowing almost anything to happen at any time, wrapped in a Wallace-like grip of childlike awe.

The result is a novel that, paragraph to paragraph, is alive with imagination. Black as its subject matter is, the magnetic flair with which Jones turns any dreamlike will he wishes into the reality at hand is as charming as it is terrifying. There is a physics and a feeling to this book that exists exactly nowhere else, and yet seems not so far at all from where we’re headed. All throughout it there is the tone of what it feels like to wake up from an insane and vibrant dream, knowing that within minutes of being awake you’ll have forgotten, and never experience that feeling again. In this way, Crystal Eaters is the rarest of kinds of objects, one that replenishes its readers’ crystal counts by simply being read. Here's a choice excerpt, below.

Dog = 40

Ant = 3

Bird = 10

Mold = 678

Baby = 100 

Mother’s tear = half

Plant = 230

Remy = unknown

Cat = 39

Spit = partial

Cloud = 88

Horse = unknown

Moon = 4,000

Frog = 12

City = infinite

Village = always falling

Tree = 480 

Fly = 4

Sun = 10,000

Rabbit = 8

Mirror = reflective of object

Dirt = infinite

Pinecone = 7

Lamb = 22 

Air = infinite

Flower = 1

Crystal count is depleted gradually over time but can be drastically decreased by events. Getting hit by a truck would most likely erase a baby’s one hundred. If the baby survived, wrapped in a tiny full-body cast, her count would be similar to a rabbit’s. Her count would no longer be a shining triangle of one hundred perfectly stacked crystals inside her body because it would resemble scattered shale.

The village survives on myth.

There is the story of Royal Bob, a myth so old it is easily dismissed today, but a story that is still told. Royal Bob is the first person to find a black crystal. He boiled it down into dark syrup that he sipped for decades. Seen running at night in blue shorts, mouth open, grinning, head tilted back with his gray hair stretching twenty feet behind him, dogs weaving in and out. Royal Bob rarely spoke, never entered daylight, but the myth says he preached several times at night, in a mine tunnel, about the black crystal to the elderly. His body was never found. All the glass tubes were empty inside his home – the elderly slowly walking the halls, picking up the glass tubes by thumb and finger and dropping them into burlap sacks. Some say Royal Bob lives inside the mine where he runs endlessly through the tunnels. You can see his hair. Some say Royal Bob will never be zero because he’s forever filled with black crystal. Some say his soul is tethered to the gravity of all village dirt. Others say he escaped into the city so he could destroy it. But no one knows because a myth is a myth.

The oldest books advise worshiping the crystals excavated from the mine. Today these practices are limited, deemed antiquated and pointless by many. Most crystals, especially red and green, are for selling now. The yellow are melted and poured through machines. Red crystals become knick-knacks displayed on tables and mantels. Few believe in their healing powers. But the mining still continues at a high rate, day and night, because it’s what they’ve always done and they need the yellow (YCL) for their lamps, refrigerators, and generators.

Discussing your count in the village is like discussing the weather in the city.  

Count is not a city belief. They want to take over the village. Those in the city have little understanding of the village and are comfortable with destroying it and capturing the crystal mine because it’s all so different from their way of life. The city believes in the new ways of progress, not the old ways of tradition and simplicity. Many use The Bend not only as a curved road to jog, but to look in at the village and wonder why they live the way they do. They bring binoculars and get drunk and stare. Legislation has been passed to install high-powered stand-alone “binocular stations” costing taxpayers fifteen thousand dollars, including the salary of a part-time “binocular attendant” and not one complaint to date has been filed. The city lives like it will never die.

Remy spends hours touching her stomach, trying to predict her count. She wants a hundred crystals shining like a campfire. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror she only sees the dark and wonders if she’d be prettier if she lived in the city, had lipstick, dresses, shampoo infused with rose oil, sunglasses that cover her face.

Once, she saw green crystals in the corner of her eye. Four of them hung like beads of water from her eyelid and when she ran downstairs to show Mom they broke into a pea-green pool clouding her vision.

“I swear they were there.”

“I know,” said Mom, inspecting Remy’s eye. It wouldn’t stop blinking. “I’ve seen them before.”

“Really?”

“As a baby they blinded you.”

“Scary.”

“The body is small then and the crystals are everywhere. Sometimes, they come out.”

“And now they’re gone?” said Remy. She blinked and touched her eye.

“And now,” said Mom, pulling Remy’s hand from her face, “they’re gone.”

She thinks about her parents, and Brother in prison, and wonders who is closest to exhaling their final crystal. Who will become a husk? Who will become zero? She thinks Definitely Mom. She thinks Then Dad. She thinks Then just me filling up their space.

Mom’s illness diminishes Dad because he is helpless against it and is forced to fall back on vague coping mechanisms of, “She is sick and losing, and it’s natural. Let the process be the process.” He crushes everything inside. Emotion comes in outbursts, the occasional closed eyes and biting-his-bottom-lip while standing over the kitchen sink, washing dishes with the sun seeping in hot and ugly. Remy hates the way he moves through the house – slowly and with caution – as if he knows, selfishly, egotistically, that he’s the one who will hear her last breath.

Dad shouted about count through every wall, floor, and ceiling in the house last night. “Doesn’t she understand you start with a hundred and then you lose them,” he said. Mom sat in bed, covered in dandelion-print sheets and used the spitting cloth to expel the color red. “It’s simple,” he said.

You can pre-order the novel here.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

I Didn't Even Take My Purse

0
0

Photo by Tim Freccia

The events that led to the recent instability of South Sudan culminated on December 14 and 15, 2013. At the December 14 meeting of the SPLM’s National Liberation Council (NLC), amid mounting tensions within the government, President Kiir lobbed thinly veiled accusations of treachery at Machar, who was sitting next to him.

“In light of the recent development in which some comrades have come out to challenge my executive decisions, I must warn you that this behavior is tantamount to indiscipline, which will take us back to the days of the 1991 split,” Kiir was reported as saying at the council meeting by the independent news site SouthSudanNation.com.

The following day, leading opposition members Machar, SPLM Secretary Pagan Amum, and the late John Garang’s wife, Rebecca Nyandeng, publicly boycotted the second day of the NLC meeting. Kiir immediately classified their actions as an attempted coup and called for the arrest of several cabinet members who had been removed from their positions the previous summer. He then ordered that all members of the Tiger Battalion presidential guard in Juba be disarmed, after which Nuer members were rearmed. A bloodbath of infighting would ensue, quickly spreading throughout historically troubled regions like Bor in the months and weeks to follow. Political alliances became tribal as Nuer commanders aligned themselves with Machar for self-preservation.

On December 19, Nuer commander Peter Gadet attacked Bor and seized control of SPLA bases there in apparent collusion with Machar, even though the two had feuded in the past. No one could deny it now: South Sudan was officially at war. Traditional peacekeeping mechanisms like the UN, African Union, and Intergovernmental Authority on Development did not have the resources—or gall—to take action.

Two days after Gadet’s attack on Bor, a massive evacuation of foreigners began when a US rapid-reaction force attempted to enter Bor, where they immediately found themselves taking fire from Gadet’s rebel troops. Expats, members of the UN, and NGOs were now under attack from those whom they had worked so hard to save.

In January 2014 organizations like the UN and the International Crisis Group estimated that, over the first ten days of fighting in Juba, Dinka combatants had massacred some 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Nuers. At first many considered the estimates to be exaggerations, but the sobering reality became apparent with the UN’s report that more than 500,000 had been displaced by the conflict and with UNICEF’s warning, on April 11, that the region was at serious risk of famine that could result in the deaths of up to 50,000 children.

By January 10 Mayom and Bentiu had been torched and looted by rebel forces. Malakal had been razed a second time, and an influx of mortars, gunships, and heavy fighting had flattened Bor. In late December Uganda dropped cluster bombs on the masses of rebel fighters outside Bor. The Ugandans insisted they were preventing ethnic cleansing, while the Nuers attacking the towns also insisted they were preventing ethnic cleansing. It was a new, even darker epoch for South Sudan. When everyone is committing genocide, things tend to get confusing. The country wasn’t just at war; it seemed hell-bent on annihilating itself.

The Juba government reclaimed Bor on January 18, with the help of the better-trained and better-equipped Uganda People’s Defense Force. Five days later, a ceasefire was signed that effectively locked down government troops inside the city, allowing the rebels outside to amass and hone their points of attack. The US-trained and -supported Ugandan soldiers were suddenly the bad guys after the UN confirmed their use of cluster bombs in February. At first they denied their presence inside South Sudan, but they finally owned up to it when they ran out of funds and were forced to ask the Ugandan government for additional support. Kiir promised to pay back the $48 million Uganda had spent to keep him in power.

The Nuers trapped in refugee camps and the thousands of rebels poised outside the towns had every reason to fear an oncoming slaughter of immense proportions.

In early February Machar announced that the seven SPLM party members detained by Kiir were not part of the “new rebellion” he was leading, further complicating matters. In the same month, to make sure Machar knew this was personal, Kiir commanded his forces to destroy Machar’s hometown of Leer, in Unity state. In a depressing moment of déjà vu, civilian oil workers were then attacked on Block 5A in Unity.

Short of a miracle, there was nothing that could save South Sudan now.

Things weren’t going so well for Machar and his Nuer sympathizers, either. By the time I arrived at Machar’s secret headquarters, the rebels—or “resistance,” as he prefers to say—had lost control of Bor, Bentiu, and Malakal, and they could not enter Juba for fear of triggering another massacre. Somewhere around 60,000 people, mostly Nuers, had been sheltered in UN compounds, straining the resources of the world’s largest intergovernmental organization. Machar’s only hope, or so he thought, was to seize the oil fields by force and try to bargain his way back.

In the peace talks set up by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, it was clear that Machar was being outmaneuvered by Kiir—not in the hotel rooms of the Addis Ababa Sheraton where the diplomacy was happening, but in the media. The government of South Sudan had successfully portrayed Machar as a desperate fugitive, on the run and hiding from retribution in the bush.

President Salva Kiir of South Sudan, center, giving a televised address on December 16, 2013. Kiir claimed the military had foiled a coup orchestrated by soldiers allied with Riek Machar. By December 19, South Sudan was at war. AP Photo/South Sudan TV

When I talk to Machar’s wife, Angelina Teny, the war doesn’t seem so large and confusing. Despite her education and political background, she takes pleasure in cooking and serving food to those in the camp. Even though she’s a former minister of energy and mining, her view of recent events is more personal than political.

She and Machar are dressed in matching green uniforms. The sight of the happy rebel couple chatting side by side creates a photogenic Mr.-and-Mrs.-Che-Guevara-in-the-bush look. But the truth is, she has only one dress with her; as she told me earlier, the oversize uniform is her only other outfit, the one she fled in. Teny’s polite English upbringing shines through, even in her descriptions of the events that forced the couple to seek refuge in the bush.

“I didn’t even take my purse,” she says and starts to tense up. “We drove, and there were people in front of us fighting at the roadblocks. One man was shot right in front of me.” She measures her distance from the shooting with her hands, her face pained and wincing.

“People called from the house, terrified because they were using a tank to break down the back wall. They killed our people in the house.” She pauses and begins to choke up. “Over 500 people were killed. Hunted down and murdered. Mostly Nuer.”

She is at a loss for words. The small generator sputters to a stop.

“We are out of petrol for the generator,” she says. “They will go to town and see. There is irony in the idea of a fuel shortage in an oil-rich country.”

Both “Dr. Riek”—as he is called by his people—and his wife are at once completely Western and completely African. But under their professional facades and their larger agenda is something ancient and mysterious.

Just outside the compound is an elder giving a passionate speech. He, like Machar’s fathers, is a spearman. A man who has more than simple political influence. A man who has the undivided attention of his peers. A man who has the power to forge steel with fire. A man who has spiritual influence over his brethren.

Dressed in traditional garb, the spearman has brought out a beautiful skinned bull. His fiery speech is translated from Nuer for me. He is chastising the gathered soldiers and tribesmen fleeing Juba, Bor, and other strongholds, running away from Kiir’s advancing troops.

“This retreat was a problem,” the spearman says. “From today on, no more retreating! It’s time for Kiir to get out. God is on our side. We praise God for getting Riek out and leading us to victory.” He waves the spear as he exhorts the crowd.

“This month is a good time for fighting. When was the last time we ran from the Dinka? You look like a bunch of little babies. You will be slaves if you give up your country.”

To make his point, he severs an artery of the tethered animal, and the bull slowly bleeds out in a torrent of bright red.

The elder invokes the White Army, the force that rises out of the ether whenever the Nuer are threatened by other tribes. A force that exists only to do violence. A force that is linked to God via prophets, who live fewer than two hours away by a giant mound that was once considered the holy center of Nuer culture.

What I discover from Machot is that Machar has been sitting in intense meetings with the latest prophet, a man who has visions and instructs Machar and his generals on the correct movements and timing for attacks. Machar’s military strength is puny compared with the power of the hordes of armed Nuer minutemen who will pick up weapons and burn down villages at a moment’s notice. Their impetus for and methods of killing do not come from a Special Forces counterinsurgency manual but rather from the predictions of seers and ancient war songs.

According to embassy cables published by WikiLeaks three years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005, Machar secretly met with the government of Khartoum to discuss what might happen if Salva Kiir were “assassinated.” The classified cable describes a meeting in which Machar and Sudan’s second vice president, Ali Osman Taha, agreed that Machar would assume the presidency of South Sudan if Kiir somehow met a violent end. Machar also tentatively secured funding for militias in Equatoria, Upper Nile, and Unity.

Peace had blocked Machar from taking control of the oil and emboldened his desire to loot his country. If democracy and reason would not work, then Machar would try war.

Previous Chapter | Table of Contents | Next Chapter

Why Was the FBI Investigating Michael Hastings’ Reporting on Bowe Bergdahl?

0
0
Why Was the FBI Investigating Michael Hastings’ Reporting on Bowe Bergdahl?

Here Be Dragons: Don't Blame Slender Man for the Schoolgirl Stabbing

0
0

A chalk drawing of Slender Man (Photo via)

On Saturday morning, Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser—two 12-year-old girls—lured a classmate into the woods near their homes and stabbed her 19 times. Or, as Geyser reportedly described it, “Stabby stab stab.” The kitchen knife penetrated the victim’s liver, pancreas, and stomach, but somehow she survived the attack. Crawling out of the woods to the pavement, she was found by a passerby, soaked in blood and fighting for her life. Currently, she is recovering in hospital. 

The case has made headlines around the world, in part because the details are so frighteningly surreal. Geyser is said to have shown no remorse when interviewed by detectives, describing the child she butchered as "gullible" and her crime as "probably wrong." Her lawyer swiftly told ABC that she may have unspecified "mental health issues," which seems to be more of a convenient legal assumption at this stage than a medical diagnosis.

The most bizarre aspect of the case by far, though, is the involvement of Slender Man, an internet phenomenon that's sent journalists around the world scrambling for their Google machines with predictably miserable results. The girls told detectives that they were sacrificing their victim to Slender Man in order to become his "proxies," with Geyser convincing her friend that the only way to achieve this would be by killing children, then walking to a nearby mansion where they believe he lived. According to the Chicago Tribune: “Geyser said Slender Man would watch her and could read her mind. He can teleport, emits radiation that makes you sick, and doesn't use computers because they don't work when he's around.”

Slender Man has generally been described by news reports as a "meme," and naturally held responsible for "inspiring" the incident (though one enterprising news outlet blamed iPads). The term "meme," however, doesn’t really do justice to the complexity of the online sensation that the girls had apparently become obsessed with.

Slender Man appeared on the forums of Something Awful in 2009 as part of a spooky Photoshop competition, a freakishly-tall, dark-suited figure lurking in the shadowy backgrounds of photos taken near murder scenes—black tentacles writhing behind his back and a blank featureless face. The character was so compelling—the perfect blend of horror and mystery—that he inspired the creation of an entire mythological universe, with hundreds of other people producing further photos, videos featuring "found footage" and sophisticated stories, and "news" reports building up a complex in-world history.

Slender Man appearing in the background of a vintage photograph (Photo via)

Over time, the Slenderverse became something more than a meme, transforming into what the Slender Man Wiki describes as an "Alternate Reality Game." Where most games, movies, or novels take the reader into another world, ARGs blend fantasy into reality, building up a universe that’s just a step to the left of the participants’ own, influenced by their actions. YouTube channels and blogs provide the main entry points for these experiences, which can also involve email, live streams, and social media like Twitter.

Most importantly, Slender Man AR gamers treat the mythology as real in all community interaction. Most pose complete ignorance to the pop-culture or internet awareness of Slender Man, not even aware that such a being is so widely researched. As such, many ARG characters refer to Slender Man as simply "That Man" or "That Thing." Few ARGs reveal having previous knowledge of Slender Man. Those who do are usually aware because of pop-culture references and will refer to him as Slender Man accordingly.

The idea of "proxies" apparently came from the DarkHarvest00 ARG, a series featuring a character called Kind Von Der Ritter, who apparently worships the Slender Man and wants to become a proxy himself. According to the Slender Man Wiki, “The theory behind the name is that Proxies are entities or people who are under the influence or control of Slender Man (or the same force that influences Slender Man), and act based on its wants/needs. Hence, Proxies serve as an in-between—a proxy—for Slender Man. It is suspected that Proxies do the actual, physical work for Slender Man, such as creating and manipulating objects, destroying and leaving evidence, creating videos and responding on Twitter, and influencing victims as needed.”

ARGs are a new beast; complex multimedia experiences very different to a simple meme or the ghost stories we used to tell each other before the internet and the fact-checking, myth-busting brigade came along. With this in mind, it’s tempting to draw the obvious conclusion: two vulnerable young children went onto the internet, got involved in something their under-developed brains couldn’t process and tried to kill another child as a result of this corrupting influence.

A bunch of photos where Slender Man has appeared in the background

Naturally, parents and schools have responded aggressively. The Milwaukee Journal heavily criticizes the local school and highlights their provision of iPads to students: “While school officials supplied iPads at the beginning of the year and promised to monitor them periodically, they never did.” The devices have apparently since been confiscated. The Journal goes on to point out that, "Psychologists say parental monitoring of electronic devices is essential to the safety of children. Parents need to know what their kids are viewing and discuss it with them.”

Fox6Now.com reports that numerous schools have banned the CreepyPasta website and a number of others, but quotes school district Superintendent Todd Gray pointing out that there’s actually nothing about the sites that would have raised any red flags prior to the attempted murder. Gray adds, "We can write all the policy we want, but the fact of the matter is we have no control over students when they’re out, off school grounds.”

The problem with all of this is it misses the big picture. The most popular Slendervlogs have viewer counts well into six figures, many of them likely to be old children or young adults, and we don’t see hundreds of kids taking to the woods with kitchen knives… or at least not outside of the fevered imaginations of Daily Mail hacks. Whatever happened to these two children to make them into killers was almost entirely unique to their particular circumstances.

Nothing on these sites told them to kill a child; they decided that for themselves, and the truth is we have absolutely no idea why. We may never know, and that’s maybe the most surreal and difficult mystery in all of this.  

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter

South Korea’s Not-So-Subtle Racist Hiring Practices

0
0

Illustration by Jonny Negron

Every year, hundreds of young English speakers drift into East Asia, looking to while away a couple of aimless years between college and the inevitable round of grad school applications that await them back home. Korea is an especially popular destination: The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education alone plans to hire 655 foreign teachers in 2014, a fraction of the 22,000 expat educators working in the country. But if you want to teach English in Korea, it’s a lot easier if you’re white.

For most would-be instructors, the racism begins before the even get through the door, thanks to the standard South Korean practice of requiring applicants to submit photos alongside their resumes. Some employers are more blunt: A recent Craigslist ad for English teachers from TalknLearn, a Seoul language academy, simply states, “Need: White” on its list of required qualifications. When black teachers do make it into the classroom, they’re often passed over in favor of their white counterparts.

“I’ve had kids pulled from my class and placed in Caucasian teachers' classes due to the request of the parents wanting their child to learn from a white American and not a black one,” said Megan Stevinson, an American English teacher in Seoul, whose parents are black and Korean.

Selin Jung, a Korean middle school student, laid out the logic for me: “Many Korean students like white teachers more than black teachers,” Jung said. “They think white teachers are more clean and have better pronunciation.”

Discrimination against foreigners has long been rampant in ethnically homogenous South Korea, where more one in three people say they would not want a neighbor of a different race, according to 2010 data from the World Values Survey. The country’s relative isolation, coupled with sporadic subjugations by its more powerful neighbors, have infused South Korean nationalism with a sense of ethnic identity and racial purity, and those perceptions are only now starting to shift as Koreans adapt to globalization, said Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean studies at Columbia University.

“Koreans’ nationalism is a modern phenomenon with roots in Korea’s history of relative isolation and self-enclosed identity in the face of powerful threats and occasional invasions from China, Japan, and more recently Europe and the US,” Armstrong told me. “Until recently, Korean identity was very much bound up with the idea of ethnic community.”

This might explain a certain amount of ignorance when it comes to foreigners. But Koreans’ racism toward black teachers is confusing, as they welcome white English speakers with open arms. “Koreans tend to distinguish between real, or white, foreigners, who are treated with some respect, and people of color who tend to be looked down on,” Armstrong explained. As a result, he said, “there is definitely a preference for white, and male, teachers of English.”

Just in the past year, a sketch comedy show on state-funded TV had actors donning blackface, and a Korean cigarette company ran an ad that featured monkeys dressed as reporters shouting, “Africa is coming!” to promote a line of cigarettes containing African tobacco. (That ad was later pulled after accusations of racism.)

“I think many Koreans are fearful because someone has given them incorrect information,” said Patricka Hogue, a former professor at Soonchunhyang University in Asan, South Korea. “Then they have ignorance because they're happy perpetuating that information and stereotypes.”

Whatever the reason for the racism encountered by English teachers, blatantly discriminatory hiring practices are a black eye for South Korea as the country struggles to adapt to its growing role in the global economy. A 2011 survey conducted by the Joint Committee with Migrants in Korea found that out of 931 foreign migrant workers, 78 percent said they had been verbally assaulted.

To combat this and other abusive workplace practices, Korean lawmakers drafted anti-discrimination legislation in February 2013 that would have prohibited employers from discriminating against applicants based on ethnicity, skin color, age, sexual orientation, and other factors. But the bill faced heavy opposition from corporations and conservative Christian groups, who attacked it as pro–North Korean and pro-gay, and was killed in April. For now, those “Need: White” Craigslist ads are going to stay up.

Scientists Are Not Cool with the Northern Gateway Pipeline

0
0
Scientists Are Not Cool with the Northern Gateway Pipeline

The Truth Eats Your Salad Days

0
0
The Truth Eats Your Salad Days

A Few Impressions: James Franco Speaks with Frank Bidart About Poetry

0
0

Earlier this spring we asked James Franco to interview the poet Frank Bidart for our June fiction issue, which will be in stores Friday and online next Monday. Unfortunately, great work is cut from our print magazine every month, and this was one of the things we couldn't fit. So here's the interview published on the internet, where space is infinite, for your enjoyment.

VICE: You grew up around LA in the 50s, and so there are film references in your work. I saw in a review once that you used a movie reference—the thing it was referring to wasn’t the deepest movie—but the way that you used it in the poem, the reviewer was saying, gave it a new kind of weight.
Frank Bidart: That’s nice.

Do you remember what I’m talking about?
I don’t remember the review. But the quality I would very much like to have. I hope that’s true in the "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman" poem, which is not a successful film exactly, it’s a fascinating film.

Tell me about the poem a little bit.
Well it’s called “He Is Ava Gardner,” but it talks about identifying with one of the characters in the Professor, who fixes pots, Greek pots, who restores Greek pots. And his attachment to the Ava Gardner character, how the Ava Gardner character, all the men in the film want to marry her, she’s quite skeptical about love, refuses all of them. One of them kills himself over her refusing. And the professor knows that there’s no point in being one more suitor. He does become her confessor. And, you know, keeping alive these fantasies of—of more. Then she meets the Dutchman, and he’s this character who has been alive for centuries, who has to keep returning to his ship and sail the world seas. He committed the sin in relation to his wife centuries before and is, until he finds a women who is willing to die for him, he can never rest and he can never die. And he wants to die; he wants to get off the wheel. She, rather than being terrified of this, is attracted to it.

So this—I’ve never seen the film—is a film version of this legend?
It is but what it does is add, I mean the women in the opera is called Senta and is not, is not like Pandora in the film. What it does is it joins the Pandora myth, you know Pandora’s Box and, with the Flying Dutchman myth. And it’s this weird amalgam and some of the art direction is by Man Ray. 

Do you know who directed it?
Albert Lewin. He’s the man who made Portrait of Dorian Grey. I mean he was somebody who was very—art. That kind of, you know, almost 40s and 50s art film that was a little stiff, very referential. And he would hire Man Ray, and they’re striking, beautiful images. But, it’s this kind of mash of things, mash of the Pandora legend, of the Flying Dutchman legend. But the poem is about having identified, because I found I did, identifies with one of these characters. And Pandora, rather than being turned off when she learns that whoever loves him, the Dutchman, will die with him, and in fact that’s exactly what he wants. She’s turned on by it. And my line in the poem: ‘She who does not believe in love is going to perform an act of justifying, proving it’s existence." And she wants to throw her life away, you know she’s sick of her life. She’s sick of all these men that just want to marry her and make her you know an adjunct of their life. There’s a racecar driver who’s famous, there’s a poet. And she’s sick of the whole scene of men constantly buying her drinks. And so the professor figure has to watch her become attached to the Dutchman. And he says at one point, I mean he becomes the narrator of the poem, that watching this, you know "we who love the proximate and partial" or "attached to the proximate and partial, loath the hunger for the absolute."

That was originally going to be the title of the book?
Exactly, and that’s how it bears on the whole book being in some ways the opposite of so many of the poems that are full of the hunger for the absolute. It’s also about appall at watching people who are filled with the hunger for the absolute.

When and why change the title to Metaphysical Dog?
Well, there was a long period when, when I was writing under the idea that it was going to be called Hunger for the Absolute, and for me it was generative. But at a certain point, maybe six months before I finished the book, it wasn’t generating poems anymore. It felt like I’d gone as far with that theme directly as I could. As I looked through the book the only possible title I could find was Metaphysical Dog. I had that, the oldest poem in the book.

Talk about your life or talk about kind of own inner workings or whatever.
Absolutely. And I found when I was watching the film, I identified of course with this professor. I mean I wasn’t identifying with the Dutchman; I wasn’t identifying with Ava Gardner; I was identifying with finally this professor.

I would have assumed The Hunger for the Absolute was your own hunger?
Of course. But at the end of the poem, he says, “What she doesn’t realize is that I, I am the Dutchman. I look to her like this fuddy-duddy professor and she doesn’t ever think of me as a suitor, but in my mind I am this adventurer, you know, risk taker, that I’m not in her mind.”

In some ways you’re like the metaphysical dog because if anybody knows you, your life is, you know, lived among books and things and art.
Exactly, exactly.

But your inner life is very rich.
Yes.

On the outside you’re the dog, on the inside you’re the Dutchman?
Absolutely. Inside I am this risk taker, but from the outside I don’t look that way at all. And, so, but on the other hand, when I watch the film, you know it’s that peculiar thing I think many people have. I’m sure you’ve had it. Where you find your mind is taken up by some constellation of elements in a film that may not be a very good film.

That is interesting. What do you think of the film itself, probably dated?
Well the film is very arty; it’s sort of stiff and not satisfying. I think it’s characteristic of Ava Gardner that she would want to do such a film. And she got very unhappy with what MGM was offering her and she was very rebellious. It’s not exactly that she was a lover of art films, but she wanted something outside the norm. And, you know, I think she saw herself in that role.

But that being said, you still have actual readers, who read all of your stuff. You have certain friends that read all of your stuff. But maybe they only read it after a certain point after you’ve generated enough of it.
Absolutely. I only show people things that I think at least are passable. And sometimes the readers will say things: “This doesn’t work. This doesn’t work.” And then I will go back and read it and I will agree with them. And sometimes I don’t agree with them. I’ve published many poems, which people didn’t think were finished. I mean, you have to finally answer to your own internalized reader. I try very hard to read the thing as coldly as possible the next day, a week later, two weeks later and I think you have to train yourself to be both inside it and outside it. And to keep a sense in one’s head of your purposes, what you want it to be, those sounds and emotions that you want it to possess and measure that all the time against just what the words on the page, that you’re reading as coldly as you can, are doing. You’re constantly trying to get those two things together. I think that being a writer and being an artist is an incredibly weird thing. You can only generate it out of your inner life and vulnerability. At least, I can only generate it out of that. But you also have to have some sense of what you’ve made and whether you’ve really made something that corresponds to all those purposes and emotions you had. And made something that doesn’t need you and is tied to you as an umbilical cord.

The Navy’s Elite Flying Squad Is Obsessed with Porn

0
0

An internal Navy investigation blames Capt. Gregory McWherter for encouraging sexual harassment and general lewdness among the Blue Angels, the Navy's iconic stunt pilot squad. Photo courtesy of the US Navy

When it comes to patriotic displays of American jingoism, it doesn’t get much more red, white, or blue than the Blue Angels. Formed after World War II to keep the public interested in the Navy’s aviation programs, the elite fighter jet squadron are essentially show ponies, existing for the sole purpose of pumping up the US military with flying acrobatics meant to remind audiences at NASCAR races and Fourth of July parades that their tax dollars still fund the world’s most expensive and aggressive fighting force.

But a new internal report from the Navy has found that underneath the barrel rolls and national ego stroking, the Blue Angels are also emblematic of the darker traditions of the US military, typifying the pervasive harassment, homophobia, and over-the-top lewdness that continue to plague the armed forces amid a sexual assault epidemic.

“The command was rife with inappropriate humor and sexual commentary, chauvinistic behavior, homosexual slurs, and demonstrated a complete lack of professionalism internal to the Ready Room,” Adm. Harry B. Harris, commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, wrote in the report. “Through an exclusive and elitist ‘boys club’ mentality, many of the demonstration pilots established, fostered, and perpetuated this hostile climate, marginalizing the support officers, the Chief Petty Officers, and the junior enlisted."

The 63-page report paints a picture of a squadron obsessed with sex and porn (and penis imagery in particular, it seems). Harris’s investigation found that, under the leadership of Captain Gregory McWherter, who served as commander of the unit during two stints between 2008 and 2012, the Blue Angels lost any sense of personal boundaries or workplace decency. Crew chiefs posted photos of naked women in their cockpits (for “motivation,” according to witnesses), shared dick pics and sex jokes in the unit’s online group chat, and videotaped babes in the crowd at their air shows for later viewing. During hazing rituals, the report claims, new members of the squad were sometimes forced to wear “foam penis hats and mechanical ‘dog humping’ hats.” (It’s unclear what exactly the latter entails.)

At one point, according to the report, the squad drew a blue and gold penis on the roof of the Blue Angels’ training facility that was so enormous it could be seen from space, and subsequently Google Maps. So pervasive was the Blue Angels’ fascination with the human anatomy that even the pumpkins put out for Halloween were carved with pornographic stencils.

At first blush, the revelations don’t seem all that surprising, nor even particularly offensive. Distasteful, maybe, but these people enlisted in the Navy, not a monastery. In fact, it seems downright un-American to begrudge our fighter pilots their pinups—an unfair rejection of a national military ritual that dates back to the Memphis Belle and the WWII bombers. So Blue Angels like to ogle cute girls in bikinis—is that really so bad?

Naked lady nose art on a B-24 Liberator, an American heavy bomber jet used in World War II. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Except all that smuttiness eventually, perhaps inevitably, led to real people—both male and female sailors in the Blue Angels—feeling sexually harassed and degraded. McWherter, Harris wrote, “witnessed, accepted, and encouraged behavior that, while juvenile and sophomoric in the beginning, ultimately and in the aggregate, became destructive, toxic, and hostile.” The report goes on to describe how officers posted a Facebook photo in the “Ready Room” of a female Blue Angel in a bikini (women can enlist in the Blue Angels unit, but there has never been a female pilot on the squad). Witnesses also described a party in which “newbies” tried to tape another female sailor to a chair.  According to witnesses, when members of the Blue Angels tried to raise concerns about the climate of sexual harassment, they were usually criticized for going outside the chain of command or for putting “their own selfish needs above the ‘needs of the team.’”

The findings of the investigation are another big blow to the Pentagon, which has struggled to dispel the military’s growing reputation as a cesspool of abuse and degradation. To make matters worse, the Blue Angels are a deeply mythologized symbol of the US Navy—a PR tool used to boost morale among the public and lure in new recruits with fancy fighter jets. "In a way it shows how oblivious much of the command is to sexual harassment," said Helen Benedict, a Columbia Journalism School professor and author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Despite the heightened media scrutiny and Congressional pressure, she added, commanders “carry on anyway because they have a sense of immunity and because it's so much part of the military culture."

“It’s more of the same problem that pervades the military—the behavior of that commander is the behavior of many men in the military in many offices,” she said. “The pervasiveness of pornography, of homophobia, of sexual harassment—that's part of the culture and it has been for a very long time.”

As Benedict points out, the Blue Angels’ indiscretions are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to workplace hostility and sexual abuse in the military. In recent months, the Pentagon has been racked with a series of high-profile sexual assault cases, including the court martial of Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair, who was accused of sexually assaulting a subordinate female officer over the course of their three-year affair. (Sinclair pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in March.) Last week, pretrial hearings began for Army Staff Sgt. Angel Sanchez, who is accused of sexually assaulting 12 female soldiers, and of using his position as drill sergeant to threaten some of his alleged victims. And on Wednesday, female soldiers testified in the hearing of a Fort Hood sexual assault prevention officer accused of recruiting financially troubled women on the base into a prostitution ring.

There were 5,061 reported sexual assault cases in the military last year, according to a Pentagon study released at the end of April. That number is up 50 percent from 2012, but the military did not estimate how many sexual assaults occurred overall in 2013, so it’s difficult to know whether the problem is getting worse, or victims are getting more comfortable making reports. In 2012, the Pentagon estimated that 26,000 service members were sexually assaulted, although just 3,374 were reported. 

In the case of the Blue Angels, there are signs that the tide, however glacially, may be turning. On Tuesday, the Navy announced that McWherter had been found guilty of “fostering a hostile command climate, failing to stop obvious and repeated instances of sexual harassment, condoning widespread lewd practices within the squadron, and engaging in inappropriate and unprofessional discussions with his junior officers.” He was given a punitive letter of reprimand, usually a career-ender in the military.

“This would have hardly been noticed as anything unusual not very long ago,” said Benedict. "That this guy is being called on to the carpet for this, it’s a sign of the new attention that is being brought on the military, and of the light that is being shined on this issue. It shows that some of them are at least trying to do something about it.” 

Photo Lab Workers See Some Crazy Shit

0
0


All illustrations by Drew Shannon.
The online takeover of photo-sharing sites and the fact that every phone can now act as an album for everything from prom pics to creepy Snapchat screenshots has made it pretty unnecessary to print off physical pictures. At least that’s what I thought before I took a job as a photo lab technician a couple of years ago. From people desperately hanging on to their 35mm point and shoot, to teens printing off shitty pixelated Instagram pictures (seriously), the small town photo centre I worked at processed over a thousand 4x6 prints each day on average. While my experience was slightly less thrilling than Robin Williams’ in One Hour Photo, I did see my fair share of unexpectedly bizarre shit. What really stuck with me during the year I spent there and stays with me now is how little people seemed to care about what was on their photos and who saw it. Just to be clear: Photo lab employees see your photos. They probably aren’t purposely checking out each one, but we did have to flip through all orders for a quality check. Though the majority of the prints I saw were the standard birthday, graduation, and embarrassing vacation pics, there were a few that really stood out.

Private Dancer



I was working alone when two elderly customers came in to use the self-serve printing kiosks. It was extremely rare for any customer at the self-serves to not need assistance navigating the menus, let alone two people who appeared to be well into their 70s. After a few minutes of seeing them struggle through the different printing options without asking for help, I walked over and asked if I could assist them. They both immediately became frazzled and rudely informed me that no, they did not want my help. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to be impolite, but it did seem strange that they were so obviously freaked out by my presence. I went back to work but occasionally looked over at them to make sure everything was OK. I noticed that the man seemed to be making quite an effort to stand directly in front of the computer screen, blocking it from my view.

Their photos started printing from the kiosk, falling out into the clear plastic collector, and it struck me as even weirder that he crouched down to grab each picture as it came out, rather than just letting the full order print before collecting them. Were his pictures really worth busting a hip over? My initial curiosity was now in full Criminal Minds mode, so I did my best to discreetly look over from behind the counter at what was on their pictures in the seconds before he could snatch them up.

The first image I saw looked like a close-up of a woman’s crotch in underwear with her legs parted in full stripper pose. I didn’t want to believe that these oldies were here printing anything other than snapshots of their bridge club, but these naughty nana pics would explain their strange behaviour beforehand. The next photos played out like every grandchild’s nightmare; the pair was posed with a lovely young lady, who I will assume was a call girl, in their home. Right there on the kitchen table was grandma, arms around a woman in a PVC string bikini. As I reeled in shock, I watched as they collected their photos—which I’d like to say didn’t violate the store’s “no nudity” policy, but to be honest I wasn’t about to go through them and check. They left without a word, as did my innocence.

 

Cake Boss


It wasn’t unusual for us to print photos for small businesses promoting their work—everything from overly teased hair stylists to roofing and paving companies. During one of my shifts, a woman placed an order of about 200 prints, all of them photos of her cake-decorating business. Being the type of person who often ditches Friday night plans for a Next Great Baker marathon on TLC, I felt it would be cruel to stop myself from looking at the shots as they came out of the printer.

The order started off with the usual novelty wedding and cartoon-themed birthday cakes, but things took a turn when a cake in the shape of two very heavily spray-tanned breasts with upsettingly small nipples fell from the printer. I had my very own That’s So Raven moment, and immediately knew what would be next—a penis cake, the ultimate achievement in novelty baking. This bachelorette cake, however, was not what I expected. Having attended a liberal arts college with a fairly active Pride Alliance, as far as half-assed fundraising goes, I had seen my fair share of penis-shaped baked goods. I think there’s a point in one’s life where every penis cake is a sad penis cake, but this was the Sia – Breathe Me.mp3 of all penis cakes. One could argue that technically and gravitationally speaking, all penis cakes are flaccid, but you could just tell looking at this one that even if it were possible for a cake to have an erection, this one would never. As wide as it was long, nothing about this cake said “put me in your mouth, you drunk bride.” It was impossible not to wonder if the woman behind this masterpiece had perhaps modeled the cake after a real-life disappointment. Was it created in the likeness of her husband or boyfriend, the only penis she’d ever known? Was she completely unaware of the all-too-real disappointment she delivered to her client? This was not the penis cake the bachelorette party wanted, but probably the penis cake the bachelorette party deserved.

Reeling from the disappointing dick, I stayed glued to the printer like an addict, knowing full well it would only get uglier from here. The next novelty confection was one I could have never prepared myself for. Judging by the writing on the cake, I can only assume it was for a doctor’s retirement party. The cake itself was shaped like human buttocks, with a hospital gown falling just above the crack in that flirty sort of way that says, "I’m incredibly ill." Though an ass cake would startle anyone, it was the insane amount of detail that branded the image into my mind forever. Just underneath the red icing, which so eloquently stating, “Now you’re retired, stick it up their…,” the cake included a butthole. A very brown butthole. Whether this was at the client’s request, or the artist’s own interpretation, I will never know. But I sleep better knowing several old white people ate ass at a retirement party that day.

Fair Game




Living in a small town where getting to the nearest airport requires a four-hour bus ride, you can imagine there wasn’t a lot for people to do in their spare time. Hunting was, therefore, not only an acceptable hobby, but more common than having all your front teeth. At least 75 percent of the photos we printed during hunting season were covered in camouflage and deer carcasses. It was a full family affair, and the number of photos we processed (over a thousand each day) of smiling families gathered around a deer strung upside down in a shed like they were just chilling around a Christmas tree was, frankly, pretty fucked.

Looking to put a positive spin on things, I set out to find the best hunting picture of the season. The shot I chose as my favourite showed a man standing next to his pickup truck with a massive deer thrown in the back. The man’s son, probably about six years old, was standing next to the truck, posed and pointing at the deer in what can only be described as a tribute to the Lynndie England Iraqi prisoner abuse photo of 2004. It was horrific, disturbing, and perfect, and embodied everything I both hated and loved about the job, the town, and possibly the universe as a whole.

You Only Punta Cana Once

During the winter months it seemed like almost every order was filled with vacation photos from families, high school grads, seniors—basically everyone in town was going on an all-inclusive except me. At least 90 percent of the photos were from Punta Cana, which I knew based on the “Punta Cana [insert vacation year here]”-written-in-sand pic that literally everyone takes (you can even Google it). It wasn’t uncommon for the resort photos to overlap, with at times other families from the town actually appearing in the background of people’s pics. The average order was pretty boring, half of it being blurry underwater shots of strangers’ feet, the rest being hotel towel swans and families decked out in American Eagle shirts and plaid shorts (the #1 choice of North American dads).

One order, however, offered a lot more than shitty Hawaiian shirt selfies. Both in their 50s, the couple had visited a resort I didn’t recognize from any past orders. This particular one came through while we were having colouring issues with our system, so I had to watch every picture as it left the printer. It started off innocently, but I soon noticed that the couple, who were openly all up on each other in their pics, were also all up on another couple as the order went on. They were, quite clearly, swingers, and they had opted for a swingers resort. With the overly tanned skin of a well-used baseball mitt, the wives had no problem making out with each other’s husbands, and each other. Though surprising, I wasn’t completely put off my game, and honestly welcomed the change in the usual vacation pics. The poolside portion of the order, however, revealed itself to be a real treasure… if treasure was a horrible thing that gave you secondhand embarrassment and made you sad. As the camera fell into the husband’s hands, the photos included multiple attempts at underwater dick pics and hairy-ass selfies (literally). Had this man never seen the George shrinkage episode of Seinfeld? Was he unaware of the fact that another human (me) would be subjected to the blurry water snake? I tossed the pics that violated the lab’s nudity policy (as sad and unerotic in nature as they were). If I were a person who didn’t feel like a disgusting creep while winking, I might’ve thrown one to the wife as she came to pay for the pics, in an “I’d be swinging in Punta Cana too, girl,” kind of way. Instead, I went about business as usual, ignoring the urge to stand with my face in the chemical eye-wash station for the remainder of my shift.

Miss New Booty


A very polite, seemingly demure couple in their 30s came in asking about our photo books—which are basically just pre-made photo albums so you don’t have to fuck around with those plastic inserts. They asked if I’d be working later that day, saying they’d prefer my help over a male employee when they returned with the pictures. It wasn’t uncommon for people to ask that a specific employee work on their pictures if they had to be edited or restored, but it was strange that they didn’t want a guy seeing the content of the book. I assured them I’d still be there and waited to see what this gender-specific photo book mystery was all about. It did not disappoint. In a variety of effects and filters (black and white, high/low contrast, and the definition of class: sepia) were photographs of the woman’s buttocks. Close-ups, high angle, low angle, shadow play, you name it. Her ass was the star of this photo book, and it was finding its light in ways Tyra herself would approve of. One shot in particular—a black and white extreme close-up of one cheek from the side, backlit for an artistic touch—could easily find itself in a motivational poster alongside sand dunes and baby dolphins, and nobody would think twice. To be completely honest, it was probably some of the best amateur photography I’d seen pass through the lab, though I resisted complimenting the man on it for fear that he’d take it the wrong way and ask me to sit in on the next session and hold up a reflector.
 

@fatti_smith

Maureen Dowd Freaked Out on Weed Chocolate Because She's Stupid

0
0

Maureen Dowd, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, might have asked a few more questions before biting into that edible. Photo by Bob Daemmrich/Corbis

Many people have overdone it on marijuana edibles and lived to tell a harrowing tale, including yours truly, a guy who now writes a column for VICE about cannabis cuisine called The Weed Eater. So if I've personally fallen victim to THC-infused food, how can I possibly justify calling Maureen Dowd stupid for stepping into the very same pothole?

Because the night I bit off a bit more brownie than I could chew, I obtained the cannabis confection in question from a well-meaning hippie outside a Grateful Dead show who made them way too strong and never warned me about the delayed onset of effects when you digest pot in your stomach instead of absorbing it through your lungs. And so, I initially ate only a quarter brownie, per the nice hippie's recommendation, but then, ten minutes later, when nothing happened, I chowed down on the rest—assuming one of Jerry's Kids had just scammed me out of $5 in exchange for a stale, high-less treat.

And what happened next? Well, let's just say we all make youthful mistakes, and I'm lucky I took such a large dose of a drug with incredibly low toxicity or I might indeed be dead. Around 1,500 people die from accidental alcohol poisoning every year in America, after all, even though booze is perfectly legal and sold in bottles clearly labeled with all relevant potency information.

Which brings us to Ms. Dowd, who, in a New York Times column published Tuesday, described departing from her typical “drug of choice,” chardonnay, in order to sample a cannabis chocolate from one of Colorado's new recreational marijuana stores.

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more... For an hour, I felt nothing... But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

Let me start by saying that I sympathize with her very genuine discomfort, even if I smirk a bit when I think about how much her story reminds me of Lil Dicky's “Too High” video.

I also find it interesting that she's totally consumed with paranoia by the thought of her own rich white ass getting arrested for the fake crime of not being “able to handle” her candy, but seems largely unconcerned with the very real fate of the 800,000 Americans who will be arrested this year alone on marijuana charges. (Later in the column she describes becoming “convinced that I had died,” without ever mentioning that there's no such thing as a fatal marijuana overdose.)

Meanwhile, my aforementioned feelings of compassion don't change the fact that she largely suffered her fate due to an overdose of stupidity. At least, that's how I'd diagnose a 62-year-old “reporter” who walks into a retail marijuana store to purchase and consume a drug for the first time but asks no questions of the state-licensed store employees who've been trained to offer their advice. Who does no research regarding a proper dosage of THC for a novice user, the amount of time the drug will take before you begin to feel its effects, or even the overall potency of the product she selected—which might have been listed on the label, though she neglects to say.

Dowd also provided her readers with exactly no advice on how to avoid an unpleasant edibles experience, or what to do if it happens. So I thought I'd offer my own insights.

How to Avoid an Unpleasant Edibles Experience

When Marinol, a synthetic form of THC sold as a prescription drug, was tested for FDA approval, researchers determined that for novice users, 2.5 milligrams was barely perceptible or imperceptible, 5 milligrams was clearly perceptible to most participants, and 10 milligrams was significantly noticeable to most recipients.

Novice users should stick to these low doses until they become familiar with the drug's effects. That's relatively easy in Colorado, where lab-tested cannabis-infused products sold in retail stores include the product's THC content right on the label. But it can be a lot more difficult when making pot food at home or buying it on the black market.
           
Also, always remember that eating decarboxylated marijuana produces a far stronger effect than smoking the same amount of raw plant material, largely because of a reaction that takes place when THC moves through the liver. The digestion process also means that instead of coming on almost instantly, as when pot smoke is absorbed through the lungs, the high of edibles may be delayed up to 90 minutes, particularly on a full stomach. So wait at least that long before going back for more.

And never drive while impaired on marijuana edibles, or try to do your taxes.

How to Deal with an Unpleasant Edibles Experience

Dim the lights, lie back somewhere comfortable, and try to relax, keeping in mind that while your present condition may be both psychologically alarming and physically debilitating, it will definitely pass in time and will not result in any lasting damage to your body or mind.

So put on familiar, soothing music, watch a favorite movie, or talk with a trusted friend. Stay hydrated and, if possible, eat some non-marijuana-infused food, as this will slow the onset of any remaining THC that's still in your stomach.

Definitely don't think about your leading role in reducing our national political discourse to the level of high school gossip. Or the time you got caught plagiarizing but inexplicably kept your highly paid position at the nation's most influential newspaper. Or the time you got caught fabricating a quote but inexplicably kept your highly paid position at the nation's most influential newspaper...

High Anxiety

I have a long standing theory that certain people don't like marijuana because they've got a guilty conscience. I can't cite any science to back this up, but I do believe that cannabis—in high doses and for novice users—allows you to see yourself with a piercing clarity and a depth of honesty that's not always flattering, particularly if you're a total fraud.

According to the Zendo Project, an onsite harm-reduction service providing compassionate care for individuals having difficult psychedelic experiences, it's important to avoid the “bad trip” mindset in these circumstances. Instead, try to use the experience as a chance to ask yourself hard questions and investigate new ways to approach your life with a greater sense of balance and harmony.

“Difficult psychedelic experiences can be frightening, but they are also potentially among the most valuable experiences someone can have,” according to Zendo's official Harm Reduction Manual. “By working with these experiences, rather than trying to 'talk someone down,' together the sitter and the psychedelic user can make a difficult psychedelic experience a chance for personal growth.”

I know that I've certainly learned a lot from pot in my life, including that frightening night way back when spent wandering around Shakedown Street in a haze. Mainly, I've learned not to indulge my mean streak.

So Maureen Dowd, if you're reading this, I'm sorry about the headline. You're surely not stupid—you just acted stupidly on this occasion, which happens to really smart people all the time. That's why, as you mention, “Governor John Hickenlooper and the [Colorado] Legislature recently created a task force to come up with packaging that clearly differentiates pot cookies and candy and gummy bears from normal sweets—with an eye toward protecting children—and directed the Department of Revenue to restrict the amount of edibles that can be sold at one time to one person.”

Still, with this and every other drug, humans will continue to occasionally make stupid mistakes, no matter what efforts society makes to protect them. Which means the real lesson to learn from your unfortunate incident is one about personal responsibility. Though a careful reading of your column finds you ready to blame everyone except yourself.

So perhaps a second cannabis chocolate is in order, this time with a carefully measured dose of THC and an experienced guide on hand to help you make the most of the experience.

Follow David Bienenstock on Twitter

Epicly Later'd - Season 1: Keith Hufnagel - Part 1

0
0

Part one of the series is a look back at Keith’s formative days in early 90s New York City. Before HUF, and before everyone and their grandma had a pair of weed socks, he was just a kid, busting his ass to get sponsored.

To make this episode we sifted through a treasure trove of Hi8 and VHS tapes, including raw Keenan Milton and Gino Iannucci footage and an (almost) never-before-seen Fun Skateboards video. We hope you like it.

Canada’s New Prostitution Bill Is Far from Perfect

0
0



Justice minister Peter MacKay called the bill a "uniquely Canadian response." Image via WikiMedia Commons.
It was in 2007 that a case challenging Canada's prostitution laws as unconstitutional was initiated. After the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the laws criminalizing pimping, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and running a brothel, the federal government was given a year to come up with new ones.

Bill C-36, The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, was unveiled on Wednesday. Justice minister Peter MacKay calls it a "uniquely Canadian response" that understands prostitution to be "a very complex social issue."

Indeed women's groups and advocates have been debating the issue of prostitution and the best way forward for years.

A key aspect of the proposed legislation is that it addresses demand and targets those doing the exploiting. MacKay said in a press conference that "the emphasis is on targeting the consumers while at the same time helping women exit prostitution."

The new legislation would criminalize buying sex as well as profiting from those who sell sex. It also prohibits advertising sexual services unless a person is advertising their own services. The bill responds to concerns brought up during the Bedford case in ensuring that those with "non-exploitative" relationships (meaning family members, spouses, cab drivers, etc.) to those selling sex will not be criminalized.

Despite what could be viewed as a positive step forward in terms of addressing the way in which the prostitution industry impacts vulnerable women in particular, some advocates are disappointed with the approach.

Hilla Kerner, a collective member at Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter told VICE over the phone that while "it's useful that the proposed law begins to recognize the harm in prostitution, we are critical of the fact that it doesn't fully address the compounding inequalities of race, class, and gender in prostitution."

One aspect of the tabled bill that Cherry Smiley, co-founder of Indigenous Women Against the Sex Industry (IWASI), found troubling is that it would criminalize communicating for the purposes of prostitution in a public place "where persons under the age of 18 can reasonably be expected to be present."

Trisha Baptie, a prostitution survivor and activist, agrees. "I have guarded optimism," she says. "This is a huge stride in terms of criminalizing demand but if there's anything on the books that could mean prostituted women face charges, that's concerning."

While the communication aspect of the bill is limited to locations where children might be present, it remains a fairly broad definition. Janine Benedet, lawyer for the Women's Coalition for the Abolition of Prostitution, an intervener in the Bedford case, is worried that this will apply primarily to women on the street, many whom are Aboriginal.

"It continues to provide a hook for police to push them around to different neighbourhoods and to target the women," she says. If the purpose of the bill is to help vulnerable women, advocates say that offence should be dropped.

"If we really believe that women in prostitution are overwhelmingly exploited and coerced into prostitution through poverty, sexism, and racism, the location of where they are being exploited should not determine whether or not we criminalize them," Benedet says.

As part of the bill, the federal government has committed $20 million in funding to both grassroots organizations that deal with vulnerable women and to exiting services for those who wish to leave the industry. This is a central aspect of the Nordic model of law, which was successfully implemented in Sweden in 1999 and criminalizes pimps and johns while decriminalizing prostitutes. The Nordic model also works with police to reeducate them and teach them to treat prostitutes as victims rather than criminals.

Baptie says she feels hopeful that Canada's proposed legislation could enable prostituted women to develop better relationships with the police. "If prostituted women aren't breaking the law, there's nothing holding them back from approaching the police if they need help."

Benedet says what's good about the bill is that "there's a direct criminalization of sex purchasing which sends a clear message that buying women is not acceptable."

Smiley is disappointed that "the door is still left open to criminalize the most vulnerable" but says "what's great is that we can see the public beginning to shift in terms of how they view prostitution."

The bill has been tabled which means it will have to go through all the regular processes before passing the Senate and being proclaimed into law—all before a deadline of December 20, when the stay in the Bedford decision expires.

In the meantime, Benedet says, "it's very important for women's groups to make their voices heard—both in terms of what they'd like to see modified and also to pressure opposition parties to back those parts of the bill that advance women's equality and to oppose those that don't."

"Best case scenario is that the law is applied to the pimps and johns and the police really try to make violence against women and girls a priority," Smiley says.

The bill states that the Parliament of Canada "has grave concerns about the exploitation that is inherent in prostitution and the risks of violence posed to those who engage in it." It also "recognizes the social harm caused by the objectification of the human body and the commodification of sexual activity"—both of which are very positive steps forward in terms of addressing gender inequality and violence against women. But what happens next, Kerner says, in terms of how the laws are implemented, will be the real test.


@meghanemurphy


Cable Companies Are Astroturfing Fake Consumer Support to End Net Neutrality

0
0

Activists protesting outside FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, on May 15, 2014. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Consumer advocates everywhere are demanding that the Federal Communication Commission continue down its current path for shelving net neutrality and allowing a two-tiered internet. That is, if cable company-created front groups and other industry-funded organizations are to be believed.

The controversy, at the moment, rests on a legal distinction. A federal lawsuit filed by Verizon has forced the FCC into a corner by creating a standard under which effective net-neutrality rules­­—which ensure all internet traffic is treated equally—can only be reached, according to most analysts, by classifying the internet as a "common carrier," or in other words, a public utility. Such a distinction would allow the FCC to demand that internet service providers, like Comcast or Verizon, are not allowed to create internet slow lanes and fast lanes.

To the surprise of probably no one, ISPs are enraged at the prospect of being classified as a utility and are fighting back. But the attacks are not fully transparent. Many of the organizations protesting a move toward classifying ISPs as a utility, which is the only likely option for enacting net neutrality, are funded by the ISP lobby.

Take this opinion column by former Republican Senator John Sununu and former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford in the San Francisco Chronicle. The pair argues that reclassification would lead to "chronic underinvestment" in broadband services while threatening job loss. The disclaimer running under their byline says they are honorary co-chairs of Broadband for America, which the paper describes as "a coalition of 300 internet consumer advocates, content providers, and engineers."

A disclosure obtained by VICE from the National Cable and Telecom Association (NCTA), a trade group for ISPs, shows that the bulk of Broadband for America's recent $3.5 million budget is funded through a $2 million donation from NCTA. Last month, Broadband for America wrote a letter to the FCC bluntly demanding that the agency “categorically reject” any effort toward designating broadband as a public utility. It wasn't signed by any internet consumer advocates, as the Sununu-Ford letter suggests. The signatures on the letter reads like a who's who of ISP industry presidents and CEOs, including AT&T's Randall Stephenson, Cox Communications' Patrick Esser, NCTA president (and former FCC commissioner) Michael Powell, Verizon's Lowell McAdam, and Comcast's Brian Roberts.

Notably, Broadband for America's most recent tax filing shows that it retained the DCI Group, an infamous lobbying firm that specializes in creating fake citizen groups on behalf of corporate campaigns.

Another group leading the charge is the American Consumer Institute. The organization recently filed a letter with the FCC opposing reclassification, and argues that ISPs should be left alone. "The fact is that the broadband market is competitive and becoming more so," wrote ACI, which claims that consumers currently enjoy "increased choice." In January, ACI called the Verizon lawsuit that struck down the original FCC net-neutrality guidelines, "a victory for consumers."

Why would a self-professed consumer advocacy group not only oppose moving toward net neutrality but claim that America's broadband market—one of the slowest, most expensive in the industrialized world with fewer than three choices in many parts of the country—is so great?

Perhaps because ACI, like Broadband for America, is financed by an ISP lobby group. Annual tax returns show that a foundation controlled by lobbyists from the cell phone industry, called MyWireless.org, has contributed to ACI since 2010.

Other cable-funded allies have helped spread doubt about net neutrality. "If broadband providers want to start charging Netflix and Google for hogging all the bandwidth, that is their right as the owners of those networks," said Jim Lakely of the Heartland Institute, who called net neutrality regulations "a solution in search of a problem." 

Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank famous for shilling on behalf of corporate donors, show major funds from Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable.

The push for reclassifying broadband as a utility may be an uphill battle. As VICE first reported, the FCC is led by a former cable-industry lobbyist, and many of his chief staffers are also former Comcast attorneys. Several new FCC staffers previously lobbied the agency against net neutrality in the past. 

Still, the public is beginning to mobilize around the issue. Advocacy organizations focused on promoting a free and fair Internet, including Free Press, Color of Change, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Demand Progress, and others, are using the FCC comment period, in which the agency is soliciting outside feedback about the rule-making, as an opportunity to organize the public.

Last Sunday, John Oliver rallied viewers of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, to submit comments to the FCC in support of net neutrality. The response has overwhelmed the agency with thousands of comments.

Lee Fang, a San Francisco–based journalist, is an Investigative Fellow at The Nation Institute and co-founder of Republic Report.

Justin Bieber: Destined to Lose His Mind

0
0
Justin Bieber: Destined to Lose His Mind

I Went to a Support Group for British Alien Abductees

0
0

Various objects that had supposedly been in the presence of extraterrestrials

Last Saturday a bunch of alien abductees, Infowars subscribers, and new age knitwear enthusiasts assembled in a room in Hastings, England. They were there for a conference organized by the Anomalous Mind Management Abductee Contactee Helpline—the UK’s first support group for people who believe they’ve made contact with extraterrestrials—in hopes of pulling back the curtain on the galaxy’s darkest secrets. I've been wanting to have my worldview shattered for a while now, so I decided to join them for the day.

The first speaker, a former actor named Mark Windows, opened by saying, “There’s not that much difference between media people and complete retards.” After that shrewd observation he launched into a tirade about the significance of the Rh-negative blood type to aliens, the childishness of the Big Bang Theory, and something about the Swiss being a highly trained secret army.

Things didn’t get any more lucid as the day went on. One after another, speakers took the stage to share the disparate results of their own personal research. Several attendees had their take on the theories of revered crackpot David Icke. “The Queen isn’t a lizard—it’s not that simple,” said one speaker. Others explained the concept of “dowsing” for extraterrestrial activity, which works in much the same way as dowsing for water, only you point your sticks at stuff that’s supposedly been in the presence of aliens rather than dry ground that might be hiding a reservoir.

No one seemed to mind that the stories they heard completely contradicted one another. In fact, as the day progressed it became clear that the crowd was just buzzing to be in the company of like-minded individuals. For that reason I abandoned any plans of making sense of the conference and, instead, got chatting to some of the attendees.

Hilary Porter and her partner, Kenneth John Parsons, run the British Earth and Aerial Mysteries society (BEAM). Kenneth had a message implanted into his mind by aliens and was brought back to Earth to spread the word. Hilary has had encounters with a turtle-like being and a figure she calls the Dark-Clad.

VICE: Why do you think aliens find this planet so interesting?
Kenneth John Parsons: We’ve got information that they’re doing a genetic program. They’re taking eggs and skin and all that.
Hilary Porter: They’re making hybrids because there’s a problem with their species.
Kenneth: This is their chosen planet. Astronomers say that there’s likely to be planets similar to ours out there, but I think we’re probably the most advanced.

What message would you like to send to the aliens?
Hilary: Just, “Hi,” really. I don’t think they mean us any harm.
Kenneth: I’ve heard that we were planted here by aliens and all religion is a lie. All the biblical stuff was just their way of communicating with us in the only way they could. They don’t want to hurt us, just check up on us.

Attendees gather around a pair of trousers known to be involved in a UFO encounter.

Do you think science-fiction films ever get it right?
Kenneth: Certain people are privy to knowledge, like Steven Spielberg. Also, a lot of these films are military-backed, so they give us little glimpses of information to prepare us for the day they do the big reveal.

Are you into science fiction?
Kenneth: 2001: A Space Odyssey was very predictive, with space shuttles and that sort of thing.
Hilary: I like Taken.
Kenneth: Avatar was good.

What do you think of Labor Party leader Ed Miliband?
Kenneth: Well, there’s a government above the main government who are pulling the strings. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, like Reservoir Dogs.
Hilary: I’d be surprised if Ed Milliband knew about aliens.

Colin Woolford works as ground staff for British Airways. He has never had an alien encounter but has been investigating the subject for 25 years.

What's your take on extraterrestrial life?
Colin Woodford: I subscribe to the ancient-astronaut theory. I think we are their ancestors and they’re coming back to trace their bloodline, perhaps to check on their experiment.

What would you say if they were to come back?
They should know that there are people here who do care about what’s going on with the planet, and who want to make peaceful contact. I don’t think the people who rule the planet have our best interests at heart.

Like the damage that's being done to the environment? What would you do about that?
I think we should have progressed beyond cars by now. I don’t believe that we still need petrol vehicles. In a lot of my reading I’ve found free energy is being supressed. If there are ETs, I think global warming is something they must be concerned about. It would be quite comforting to know that there was someone looking after us, because I don’t think we’re capable of looking after the planet.

This man asked to go by the pseudonym Yousef Latif because of the dangerous nature of his occult studies. Yousef believes a new type of hybrid being is going to hijack human consciousness and take over the planet.

What makes you think aliens want to take over Earth?
Yousef Latif: The djinn, who are one type of extraterrestrial being [that appear frequently in Islamic and pre-Islamic Arabian mythology], live for thousands of years in a dimension that isn’t particularly attractive. They don’t have much scope for breaking the boredom. Being in a human body is quite comfortable—it’s a nice place to be.

How do you identify a djinn?
Well, there are many different levels of djinn, and they’re shapeshifters, so they can impersonate dead humans, grays, UFOs—anything. You never know who you’re dealing with, so I can’t really say.

An attendee dowsing a pair of trousers known to be involved in a UFO encounter (the results were negative).

What do you think the link is between fictional depictions of aliens and the reality?
We get a very false picture of what things are really like. This is partly deliberate misinformation and partly because people don’t fully understand that there’s another dimension populated by billions of beings.

Are you into science fiction?
My interest in the occult came from studying Aladdin. I wanted to know if there was such a thing as a djinn. Once I found that there was I discovered links into a lot of other stuff as well.

What are your views on the conflict in the Middle East?
The ruling families in the Middle East know what the djinn are about; that’s for sure. And the conflict is certainly related to this. In the Qu'ran it says the djinn were here long before humanity. The mujahideens' wages are being paid for by one of the crown princes of Saudi Arabia, who has now left the country and lives in Russia. It all ties in.

Gaz Bruce, Ian Gunner, and "Scary Pete" have a radio show called The Asylumon Stafford FM, during which they discuss unexplained phenomenon. The gang have all seen UFOs near their Staffordshire homes. Gaz, however, remains somewhat skeptical. He’s also remarkably quiet for a radio show host.

What do you think aliens like about Staffordshire?
Scary Pete:
From the research we’ve done, it seems the place was a hotbed of activity during the mid 80s. A Freedom of Information request revealed our government was talking to the US about the testing of spy aircraft without permission, which could have something to do with it.
Ian Gunner: I dread to think what they’re up to.
Pete: A great deal, I’d imagine.

How close do you think science-fiction films are to the truth?
Ian:
I remember when I was about 15 I went to a UFO group and asked the speaker if Hollywood know more than they let on. Are they drip-feeding us information?
Pete: I think it’s just observation and deduction. If we were going to go to another planetary body and there was life on that body, what would be the most logical thing to do? Camp out on one of the moons and pop down when you need to so you don’t interfere with the life but can study it.

What do you think of the current state of the media?
Gaz: Well, they report what they think is sensational. It’s not about news as much as it’s about money.
Ian: And power.
Pete: And control.

Nigel Hughes making a presentation on "GILFs"

Nigel Hughes is an ex-pilot, though he wouldn’t tell me whom he flew for. He came to the conference as part of a biolocation team that has confirmed the existence of what they call “galactic intelligent life forms,” or GILFs. They made this discovery using a technique called dowsing, which involves magnetic fields, holograms, and what looked like a collection of unravelled coat hangers.

Why do you think aliens find Earth so interesting?
Nigel Hughes: These creatures can travel to many planets, so I don’t think Earth is that interesting. Obviously we’re an important resource, but to them we are just ants. If you want to empty a pond you don’t consult the frogs.

What message would you like to send to the aliens?
Oh, I wouldn’t even try. It’s too dangerous. We evaluate GILFs as being high-risk. They want us kept in the dark, so they wouldn’t take kindly to being spoken to.

Do you think there's an overlap between science fiction and real alien encounters?
No one in fiction is describing the technology we’ve seen. This is a unique discovery.

Are you into science fiction?
Oh yes, big time. I’m a bit out of touch with it now, but in university I loved Arthur C. Clarke, Huxley, H. G. Wells—all the old classics. None of them predicted the internet, did they? And no writers have predicted anything like the GILFs.

A slide from Nigel's presentation depicting a "P GILF"

I can imagine that a lot of the stuff I heard at the conference would elicit anger and derision, especially when the conversation turned to controversial figures like serial killer Levi Bellfield (framed) or tragic events like the Sandy Hook shooting (staged). But these people come in peace. No one was trying to hawk aluminium helmets or holistic crystal enemas. They were there because they held a passionate belief in something they felt was important.

As the hall emptied I shared a cigarette with abductee Mike Smith, who didn’t want to be photographed. It was from him that I got my first and final insightful statement of the day: “If I’m wrong in what I’m saying—and I might be wrong—at least I know I’m not lying.”

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter.

Signs from the Future

0
0

I was working on a blog post discussing how frightening some furturist predictions about technology can be when I found myself thinking about the header image more than the text. I am a visual thinker, so instead of going for a pre-existing image I decided to synthesize the picture myself—the results you can see in the gallery above.

The idea behind working with signs came from trying to figure out how new technologies would interact with society in the very near future. I didn't want the technology itself to be obvious—we’ve already seen many clear images of what certain innovations are going to look like. So I thought I would depict their presence using something we’re acquainted to: signage and a tiny bit of humor.

The goal of this project is to make viewers think about how far—and how fast—we want to go in this kind of technological race. I'm not an tech expert or a scientist, so to me, the chances of making costly mistakes are huge and a little frightening. 

See more of Fernando Barbella's work here.

Read more about Barbella's signs at The Creators Project.

Canada's ISPs Are Finally Revealing How Often the Government Requests User Data

0
0



Image via Flickr user Beraldo Leal.
Two Canadian telecommunications companies—Rogers Communications and TekSavvy Solutions—are the country's first to disclose the number of requests they receive from government agencies each year, and also detail what customer data they will and will not hand over upon request.

On Thursday morning, Rogers Communications revealed that it had received a total of 174,917 requests in 2013, but omitted the number of those requests the company had responded to. The night before, Chatham, Ontario-based cable and DSL internet service provider TekSavvy revealed that it had received 52 requests for subscriber information from government agencies in 2012 and 2013, and responded to 17—or 33 percent.

This is particularly huge news in Canada since there's been a cone of silence around all Canadian ISPs in the face of mounting evidence they cooperate with law enforcement agencies requesting user data. Last year former Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, wrote that her office understood the number of disclosures to be "substantial." At the end of April, interim Privacy Commissioner Chantal Bernier released a document indicating that three of nine companies representing a “substantial portion” of the Canadian telecom market received nearly 1.2 million requests in 2011 alone.

Academics, lawyers, privacy experts and politicians have all been calling on Canadian internet and wireless providers to clarify the types of subscriber information they collect and retain. They also wanted know the number of requests made by law enforcement agencies each year, since reports of wide-ranging U.S. and Canadian government surveillance first surfaced last June.

"Just being able to have this type of information out there is a really important confidence enhancing tool, because it lets people see what's actually happening. And it gives insight into what is currently completely shrouded in secrecy," said Tamir Israel, a staff lawyer at the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC).

TekSavvy's disclosure data was published in a letter to the Munk School of Global Affairs's Citizen Lab released late Wednesday evening, in response to questions submitted by Citizen Lab researcher Christopher Parsons and other privacy academics in late January. TekSavvy has promised that regular transparency reports are still to come.

"I’m hopeful that this will provide the clear rationale for other companies to come forward with equivalent responses," Parsons said in an interview. "This is especially the case for companies such as TELUS, which stated in their responses they were investigating how much information they could place on the public record."

Neither TELUS nor Bell have yet responded to a request from Motherboard for comment.

The Rogers and TekSavvy reports differ greatly, not only in the number of requests, but also the level of detail contained within them.

According to TekSavvy's 16-page document, 19 of the 52 requests were made by federal law enforcement agencies, with the remainder made by municipal and provincial forces. All were in the context of a criminal investigation and only subscriber information—the subscriber's phone number, email and/or postal address—was requested.

No requests for other types of data—including real-time interception or wiretapping, transmission data (such as the duration of a connection, port number used or communications routing data), and the names of sites visited or IP addresses accessed—were made.

It is worth noting that, of the 17 requests that TekSavvy responded to, 16 were voluntary and did not require a court order or warrant. TekSavvy has since changed its policies so that such disclosures will now be made "only in response to a warrant, production order," or in exceptional circumstances, such as a live bomb threat, where a warrant would likely be granted if time allowed.

Rogers's three-page document is considerably less detailed, but breaks down requests for data into six areas: customer name and address checks, court orders and warrants, government requirement letters, emergency requests, child sexual exploitation emergency assistance requests, and court orders to comply with foreign requests made under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.

Basic requests for subscriber information—which are made without a court order or warrant—make up half of all requests, with the government looking for a customer's name, address and listed phone number, but not his or her IP address. Court orders and warrants, meanwhile, make up over 40 percent of requests.

One of the worries regarding Bill C-13—a controversial cyberbullying law that also expands government surveillance powers and may soon become law—is that legal immunity would be granted to those who voluntarily disclose data to the government, opening such requests up to abuse. A complementary piece of legislation, Bill S-4, would prevent such disclosures from being made public.

Even under existing law, stipulations on what wireless carriers can and cannot disclose are still vague and open to interpretation, Israel explained.

For example, because TekSavvy does not offer wireless services, it is not subject to the Solicitor General's Enforcement Standards—a set of broad unpublished regulations that limit the types of requests that companies such like Rogers and Bell can and cannot discuss.

It may also explain why Rogers is willing to detail the number of requests it has received, but not the number of which it has responded to.

"A lot of the companies have said they're concerned about liability if they facilitate this type of public transparency," Israel said. "It seems like it's incumbent upon the government to step up and address those concerns.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images