All photos courtesy of Catherine Chalmers

Catherine Chalmers isn't fazed by death. The New York–based visual artist recently created a photography series called Food Chain, which unapologetically showcases the circle of life. For the series, Chalmers placed a predator beside its prey and photographed the inevitable: a caterpillar nibbling its way through a tomato, a praying mantis slaying a caterpillar, and a toad eating a praying mantis. Chalmers's accompanying series, Pinkies, works similarly. The first photograph in the series features a litter of just-born mice; the next, we watch one swallowed by a snake, and then another devoured by a toad.

Chalmers sets her subjects against a clean, white background. Quickly, the sterility of the scene becomes littered with blood and guts. She shows the way in which animals thrive—which, she argues, shouldn't disturb us so much. It's what they do. It's what we do. I spoke with her about her project and the impetus behind Food Chain.

VICE: In regard to Food Chain, what got you interested in this subject matter? How did the idea come about? 
Catherine Chalmers: I had just finished a black-and-white photography series called Houseflies. Not only was it the first time I had used a camera for my artwork—I started out as a painter – I had never raised animals before either. I was intrigued that this insect, the housefly, whose very name uniquely connects us, lives a parallel life in our own home. The dramas of its existence play out in front of us, yet they are outside of our awareness. We swat them dead and sweep their little corpses off the windowsill, but what did I really know about my fellow roommates? I raised hundreds of houseflies, thousands actually, and photographed them flying around and doing weird and wonderful things in a glass terrarium. Because they ate, and eventually died, at the bottom of the cage and my camera was pointed up in the air, I randomly missed photographing two essential parts of their life: eating and dying. As I imagined what project to work on next, those two words jumbled around in my head, and it finally dawned on me they were not randomly related, but intricately, and often violently, bound to one another. I saw that they were flip sides of the same coin and a key ingredient of the ecosystem. I thought, well, there it is—I’ll recreate a food chain.

Was there any hesitation, or did you pretty much jump right into it? I imagine there'd be some initial doubt going into this, right?
I was horrified. Really, you’re going to raise an animal specifically to photograph it dying? The thought of it gave me a stomach ache. But the more I considered it, and probably because I was so disturbed, the more I realized its power. How is it possible—and isn’t it a bad sign—that an educated person could be so detached from the processes of life on earth?

That brings me to my next question. What kind of reaction are you expecting people to have, or rather, want them to have?
The reaction people could, should, or might have doesn’t figure into the creation of my work. The visual arts are a toolbox I use to investigate what intrigues me and I utilize whatever medium best suites the expedition. The resulting work is a record of my discovery. I hope what tugs and twists me into a project, which take years to complete, will also be the things that people take away from it. How satisfying if my work could function like a flashlight illuminating what I think is important. My interests, though, are informed by the time in which I live. Two hundred years ago, maybe less, most people were farmers or ranchers and raised a good amount of their own food. They were intimately connected with the processes of nature. Food chains were obvious. No need to make art about them.

That's a really good point. 
Today, most of us live an urban existence and the grocery store is one of the few links we have to a food chain. When nature and culture meet today, they often collide in a nexus of confusion, and fear. For example, without insects, we would all be dead. Plants wouldn’t be pollinated, the soil would rot, and the ecosystem would collapse in a matter of months. And how do we repay them for supporting us? By hating them.

I'm extremely guilty of fearing spiders. So you're trying to change our minds about insects?
My work aims to give form to the richness, as well as the brutality and indifference that often characterize our relationship with animals. My ultimate wish is to broaden the cultural significance of the non-human world.

You mention that these projects take years to make. I'm curious, how long did it take to get each picture for Food Chain just right? Were there more than one of each insect or animal used?
Raising, feeding, watering, and cleaning up after my growing zoo—those things consumed the majority of my time. As in the natural world, I only had a few top predators compared with a large population of species at the bottom of the food chain. Predators need a varied diet. Many of the insects I raised never appeared in the work. The issue wasn’t how long it took to get each picture just right, because in my mind there was no preconceived right, but that it took many months to coordinate the timing of each species’ development. I went through several generations of caterpillars before the praying mantis egg cases even hatched. The predator/prey relationship can reverse itself depending on size. A large praying mantis will readily eat a small frog, and one of my large caterpillars killed a small praying mantis, much to my dismay.

Since you are dealing with the death of some living creatures, I'm wondering—have you received negative reactions from animal activists or the like?
I was threatened at a book signing. A local NPR station was picketed after broadcasting my interview on This American Life. I’ve received hate mail and “I hate you” emails. But these extreme reactions have been lone individuals. Animal-rights organizations fully realize that a snake doesn’t eat tofu and that predation is a basic part of the natural world. I’m not killing anything. I’m only raising one thing to sustain another. Either the mouse dies, or the snake dies of starvation. There is no way around that. The mouse wants to live, the snake wants to eat, and we come along with a third, highly subjective judgment, which often slants these days toward rooting for the underdog. Why should we go by our opinion? If anything we should be rooting for a healthy ecosystem.

This might be a silly question, but what's your take on eating animals? Are you a vegetarian? 
The project grew out of a desire to be more engaged with the natural world. Over time, I became fascinated by the strange disconnect between what people seem to want to believe happens in nature and what actually does. Humans are incredibly efficient killers, yet we are remarkably queasy at facing, or acknowledging, what we do. I’m an omnivore. Eating a chicken running around the yard is an ecologically sustainable thing to do. But supporting the industrial feedlot system of mass produced chickens, for example, is gross and distressing. I try to eat in a way that is easy on the planet. Unfortunately, though, there is really no innocence in eating. Something dies for us to live.

Are there more food-chain examples you're working on?
No. After Food Chain, I raised Periplaneta americana, the American cockroach—a.k.a. the dreaded waterbug—for a multimedia project. I wanted to investigate the part of humanity that hates nature and to look at the adversarial side of our relationship with animals. I could think of few species more loathed than the roach.

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Photo by Bobby Viteri. Clothing courtesy of Steelos.com

Sons of Essex is the kind of SoHo restaurant where high-powered New York City publicists host celebrity press junkets, but I didn't visit the place a few months ago to interview a pop star, actress, or athlete. I was there to speak to a man who makes his fortune spreading gossip about celebrities like Beyoncé and The Real Housewives of Atlanta—Fred Mwangaguhunga, the founder of MediaTakeout.

For those of you who aren’t one of MediaTakeout's reported 16 million readers a month, here’s the dirt: It’s a gossip site focused on black celebrities that has become notorious for its ugly (but charming) homepage design and salacious headlines filled with exclamation marks, ellipses, and allusions to celebrities’ dick pics. Headlines like “NUH UHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Some School In New York Is SO RATCHET . . . . That They Hired ERICA MENA From Love And Hip Hop . . . As Their GRADUATION SPEAKER!!!”

But Mwangaguhunga is nothing like his headlines. When I met him, he wore a sleek black shirt and trendy glasses, and his life sounds more like a Horatio Alger success story than that of a gossip columnist. After growing up in Queens, he studied law at Columbia University and then worked as a lawyer on Wall Street for a few years. He saved his earnings and used them to open an online-based laundry service with his wife. The business succeeded, he sold it, and then, in the mid 2000s, he used the profits to create MediaTakeout because he saw a huge business oppourtunity. 

“There was no one that would give a real interview at the time. Other than Wendy Williams, there was no one on the radio that would give real interviews and just really going in,” Mwangaguhunga told me. “This lack of authenticity just got kind of left this huge hole in the market. I wanted to [create a site that sounded] like you and your friends are sitting around having a conversation about Beyoncé.”

Since the site has transitioned from small blog to competitor of TMZ, Mwangaguhunga has been accused of being anything but authentic. A notorious GQ profile showed him socializing with celeb and MediaTakeout subject LaLa Anthony. Last month, the Dirty accused Mwangaguhunga of stealing their content. The site’s owner, Nik Richie, who published Anthony Weiner’s dick pics, claimed Mwangaguhunga stole leaked screenshots that showed Jennifer Lopez’s then boyfriend Casper Smart flirting with Sofie Vissa, a transsexual model, on Instagram.

“We reached out to [MediaTakeout], and we asked them kindly, ‘You know there’s a code of conduct—there’s an unwritten code that you know—if someone breaks a story, you give that person credit,’” Richie told me. “You don’t steal their story and try to take credit for it thinking it is what it is.”

I sat down with Mwangaguhunga to learn more about the drama with his rivals, the site's connection to black history, and Kanye West's dick pics.

VICE: How did the laundry business give you the idea for MediaTakeout?
Initially it was really slow, but we got a bunch of good PR and some celebrity clients and the business really took off. The celebrity clients were the key to getting the press, and the press was key in getting them. We had all these celebrity clients, and our publicist was cool with a bunch of other publicists, and so she’d call up like Mariah’s publicist and say, “Hey, can we say that we did Mariah’s laundry?” And she’d be like, “OK, great.” She would send us one piece of Mariah’s laundry, and we would do it, and then we’d be able to say that we did Mariah’s clothing. The whole thing was kind of a manufactured process. I was just like, “Wow. This is how it’s done,” because before that I was a total novice to everything.

At the time I sold the laundry service, I had been advertising on a bunch of different blogs, so I knew the industry. I was actually reading these blogs, and there was a big hole—all this African American gossip was just falling through the cracks. There were the paparazzi photos, and nobody even sold them. The paparazzi wouldn’t take the photographs, or even if they did, they wouldn’t have anybody to sell it to. I remember going up to a couple of paparazzi people early on, and I was like, “Any African American celebrities you see, I’ll buy all your photographs.” And they sold them to me for half price.

How much did you pay?
For a photo, it was like $25.

How did you create the site’s trademark headlines?
When you look at the way to build a website right now, everyone that does it, they put everything up in the cloud. Seven years ago, when we started, there was no real cloud that was there. So if you actually had a website, and it’s getting millions of people, you actually had to have enough servers out there—you had to have a database architecture. You had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it right, and sometimes even millions. Obviously we didn’t have the money, so we did everything on the cheap. We were able to have this site and had millions of people on it, which is incredible. But when we did that, there were a lot of bugs. It was basically being held together with chewing gum. People would just write in, “This site is so ghetto.” In the beginning this hurt me. I was like, “Oh, man. This is my baby, and they called it ghetto.” But then I was like, “Let’s just embrace that for a second. Let’s just be a little ghetto.” Yeah, they’ll say we’re ghetto, and we’ll just kind of accept that—and [that’s] kind of where the craziness of the site came about.

What’s the definitive Media Takeout Story?
Probably when we leaked Kanye West’s dick pics. That was probably pretty big. The reason why leaking dick pics is so good is because, with every other story, people will steal it from you. But nobody’s going to steal the dick pics because they can’t. They can’t put them up there.

You talk a lot about dick pics and authenticity, but at the same time, you’ve been accused of stealing photos from Nik Richie.
Accusations like this come about so frequently in the tabloid world. If I wanted to, I could claim the same about them and hundreds of other websites. Pay attention to how many times you see a story on MediaTakeout and find the same exact story somewhere else a few hours later or the next day. The fact of the matter is, the people who leak these items aren't likely to service just one outlet, unless they are under an exclusivity contract, and even then you run the risk of a “friend” getting a hold of it and sending it out as well. In this instance, we were sent text messages, without any company logo attached or imprinted, from a source. There is no way we could have attained the messages without a watermark, unless we received them from the same source that serviced it to them or someone from their internal team who had access to them. We actually ran the text in attachment to one of our original stories where we show a photo of Casper entering a gay strip club. We never claimed the post to be exclusive, as it had already been covered by numerous other outlets. We simply added facts, which we previously reported, to the speculation. As an attorney, I'd be insulting myself by taking part in what in this case is being called “stealing.” Smaller websites looking for exposure from ones with a high audience will usually try to latch onto ours in any way they can. Some would say it's a desperate cry for attention, but to me it's actually a compliment that means they understand our power and either fear it or desire it. The day people stop falsely accusing us or attempting to tie themselves into our press and visibility is the day I'll actually have a real problem to worry about.

Previous gossip tycoons like Perez Hilton lost prominence because they became too famous, befriended celebrities, or sold out. Do you worry about facing similar problems?
At the end of the day, especially as you get bigger, you get all sorts of opportunities—people tell you things. People say, like you know, “If you could just calm down a little bit it’ll be different.” And then you get celebrities that want to be friends with you too, which is another thing. I don’t really want to because I know all the crazy things that they do, and I’d love to be able to report on them, but I can’t if I’m friends with them. So you have all this other pressure that’s trying to pull you in. I think maybe Perez kind of fell into that.

That’s fair. Your site has become one of the biggest gossip sites. What’s the competitive business advantage of running a site that rarely speaks about white people?
There are very few advantages that you have being African American in this world, but the one thing that you do have is an understanding of black culture that nobody else really could have. You can’t take a couple of college courses and listen to some Wu-Tang albums and really understand black culture. You have to live it. It’s like if all of a sudden I was like, I’m going to run a gay website. Anyone who’s gay who reads it, they’re going to start seeing little holes and discrepancies. So this is the advantage that you have, and you’ve got to kind of use it. Also, there’s something about entertainment that, being African American, you can kind of get in that area.

Historically, white entertainers have appropriated black culture, though. 
There’s always that, but they’ll kind of let you in [the entertainment industry]. I was talking to a very senior guy at a tech company that we all know, and I was just like, “You know, I think it’s bizarre that you have no black people towards the top.” Of course, he’s talking to me about programmers and all the other crap that you hear from other companies. And I was just like, “Most of the people that you have that are really making a lot of money, they’re not programmers. You get your programmers from India or whatever. Then you got your business guys, senior guys.” My point to him was more that you’re running a website, and there are going to be black people on it—and you have no [black people] over there.

It’s a bad business decision.
It doesn’t make sense. You couldn’t run a business and say, “OK. I’m running a network, and I expect to have 30 percent women and then have no women there. It doesn’t work, and you lose a lot of people. I guess I thought it made sense [to create a gossip site focused on black celebrities], and we leaned on it, and we don’t run away from it. And that’s our competitive advantage. 

Special thanks to Sons of Essex. 

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Some friendly marijuana plants. Photo via Flickr user Mark

Last week, Washington’s recreational marijuana stores opened amid much excitement as it became the second state, after Colorado, to allow people who aren’t “medical marijuana patients” to smoke pot. But every time we take two steps toward finally ending the war on drugs, we take one step back—even as politicians talk the talk on not punishing people for getting high, it’s far too easy to come across stories of horrific injustices.

The July 21 print issue of Time has one such story, about Larry Harvey, a 70-year-old Washington resident who is about to go to trial for his family’s medical marijuana grow operation. Harvey destroyed his knees from years as a trucker, and also suffers from gout, conditions that marijuana has apparently helped with. He also had enough land to grow pot for friends who didn’t have the room to cultivate their own weed gardens, which is how he ended up with 70 weed plants. Then, in August 2012, local cops and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) came rolling in and now Harvey, his family, and a friend who helped him grow are facing up to ten years in prison. (Harvey’s legal guns were also a problem—since 2011, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has been in the business of taking away medical marijuana users’ Second Amendment rights.) Other medical marijuana growers have faced similar charges all over the country—the cruelest case, or at least the cruelest I’ve heard about this month, might be the Iowa man with rare blood cancer who had to be rushed to the hospital during his trial for growing bud.

You probably know this already, but there has been some good news on the drug war front lately: A majority of Americans support legal marijuana. A much larger majority support medical marijuana. A majority of adults also believe that the feds should butt out of states that have legalize marijuana. Politicians have begun inching towards tolerance of legal weed, or at least the medical kind, and in May, the House voted to defund the DEA’s operations against medical marijuana business in states where medicinal pot use is legal. The Obama administration has told the Department of Justice to stand down in Colorado and Washington too.

And yet this old war continues, running on inertia if nothing else. There are prosecutors and cops dedicated to busting people whenever possible. There are still law and order lunatics who talk about marijuana as a “gateway drug” and want to police what people put in their bodies. The war on drugs is still a morally bankrupt disaster; the biggest thing the activists fighting against it have achieved is that now at least it’s often recognized as such—we now need to actually end the war. Harvey told Time he’s likely to go prison for a long time, but “it just isn’t right.” It sure as fuck isn’t.

On to this week’s bad cops:

-On Wednesday at 7 AM, a family in St. Paul, Minnesota, received the full no-knock, SWAT raid special from local police. Camille Perry and Larry Lee Arman had their door kicked in, and before Arman knew what was happening, he told the media, his two dogs were being shot by police, one as she “was running for her life.” Perry said she was awake and in the bathroom when the raid began and was terrified for her children, who had been sleeping on a mattress with Arman near the front door. The raid was supposedly dangerous enough to require that the cops got a no-knock warrant, but the only thing police removed from the home was a bong and scraps of weed. (Arman admitted to smoking marijuana, not that this justifies anything.) Two dogs are dead, a family is freaked out, and kids were put in danger over bits of pot left in a grinder. A police spokesman told the local FOX affiliate that everything was legal, a judge had signed off on the warrant, and basically this is just something that happens.

-In more positive no-knock raid news, on July 8 in San Antonio, Texas, Adrian Perryman was found not guilty of the aggravated assault charges he faced after a 2010 early-morning narcotics raid on his home. Perryman shot one of the officers storming into his house—because, he said, he didn’t know it was busting through the door—then surrendered once he realized it was the cops. Perryman’s lawyer used this argument as a defense, and it was successful—as it should be. In a nation of people who have legal guns for self-defense purposes, it’s outrageously hypocritical of the government to send them to prison for using them to defend their homes.

-More good news: Durham, North Carolina police officers are now banned from lying to homeowners about 911 calls in order to search their houses. Wait, they could do that before? Well, whether it was legal or not, several officers tried to tell people they had received 911 emergency calls from their addresses as a pretext to getting them to open their doors. One officer claimed it was departmental policy to do this (!) but now the practice has been disallowed—probably because, as a judge said, “You cannot enter someone's house based on a lie.”

-VICE has a brand new documentary that focuses on how police exploit vulnerable kids like Jesse Snodgrass, a teenager with Asperger's and other difficulties who was entrapped by an undercover police officer posing as his high school buddy. Check it out, it’s guaranteed to make you so upset you punch a wall.

-A July 12 Washington Post piece relates a disturbing allegation about a Target employee being fired after he reported a Fairfax County, Virginia, sheriff’s deputy for shoplifting. Dallas Northington spent eight years working in Target’s loss prevention unit, and when he saw a man stealing through the security camera he did what he always did and reported the incident to the police—but two days later he was fired and the unnamed cop retired. Target disputes Northington’s account and says he didn't follow proper procedure... though he had been working there for eight years. Hrmph.

-William Binney, a whistleblower who resigned from the NSA after 9/11 because he felt the agency was moving the country toward becoming a surveillance state, recently claimed his former bosses are sucking up all of our information because they want “total population control.” Sweet Jesus, start making your tinfoil hat and stockpiling gold now.

-Last month, an Arlington, Texas police officer rescued a loose dog and returned him to his owner without anything bad happening! Hooray! Skittish people reported that the 11-month-old pit bull was aggressive, but Sergeant Gary Carter investigated and, having met a dog before, decided he was “trying to make friends” instead. Last week, the dog’s owner ditched him and sent him to animal control, so once again Carter stepped in by adopting the pup and renaming him Chance. Carter is our Good Cop of the Week for his double dose of dog rescuing. Other cops could learn a few things from him.

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

The interpreters who worked alongside American and NATO forces in Afghanistan are among our bravest and most loyal allies. They played an essential role in sourcing intelligence and educating Western troops about the local culture. Now they're in danger of being abandoned.

Download the full eBook from Ben Anderson's The Interpreters on PDF Download (Free), Google Play (Free), Kindle, and Kobo.

A fancy keychain, via Flickr user bastique.
We live in exciting times, where robots that operate Twitter accounts are trendsetters, and governments are held to a new standard of transparency—despite operating massive surveillance agencies that would make George Orwell have a panic attack while giving J. Edgar Hoover a major spy boner.

Last week, a string of Twitterbots made headlines for tracking Wikipedia edits coming from known government IP addresses. It started in the UK, with @ParliamentEdits, which then blossomed into a string government-tracking copycats after its source code was released on GitHub. The goal of these Twitterbots is to make sure governments aren’t drastically revising history on everyone’s favourite free encyclopedia, while gauging the amount of time our public officials spend grooming and altering Wiki pages in the first place.

It didn’t take long for Canada to get its own watchdog Twitterbot: @GCCAEdits. So far, GCCAEdits hasn’t caught Stephen Harper editing in phony compliments about his hairstyle, nor has it detected any nefarious change-ups from government agencies trying to rewrite history, but it’s caught some odd alterations nonetheless.

For example, an anonymous government employee (or at least someone operating within the Canadian government’s network) took offense to Quebec’s infamous Pastagate debacle being described as an “incident,” writing: “It seems to lessen the seriousness of all true incidents to describe this trivial bureaucratic mistep [sic] as something equivalent to ‘an event or disagreement that is likely to cause serious problems in relations between countries (webster dictionary).’”

That same IP address made an edit on the Wikipedia article for “July 9th,” an article collecting all of the notable events, along with famous or infamous births and deaths, that occurred on July 9th throughout history. An edit made from a government computer added “2014 - Canadian ATOs never forget” to the article. While I’m not totally sure what an ATO is, it could possibly be an allusion to an Ammunitions Technical Officer.

This all may be in reference to a memorial that the Canadian government unveiled on July 9th of this year to commemorate fallen Canadian troops in Afghanistan, which was criticized by family members of soldiers for being publicly revealed without “sufficient notice to attend the event.”

Other edits, like those by anonymous members of the House of Commons, are less meaningful. Some are simply made to revise the changing job titles of various politicians, while others intend to clarify the attendance count of a Buffalo Bills game in Toronto. Other revisions, coming from more generic government IPs, were logged to note the precise date when North Face pulled their sponsorship money from a “death race” through the Rocky Mountains, or to ensure the “Earth Defence Force franchise” was included in a list of PlayStation 3 games, while another was made to include the phrase “poopy balls” in an article about Pomeranian dogs.

As you can plainly see, many of the Canadian government employees’ Wikipedia edits are completely inane. If you had any doubts regarding the efficacy of our country’s bureaucrats, these edits should cement your doubts in a theoretical slab of concrete. I’ve been told Canadian government employees work behind a really strict firewall that prevents them from looking at anything fun on the job, so making poopy jokes on Wikipedia might be all these sad bureaucrats are free to do when they feel like trolling the internet at large.

@GCCAEdits will surely be a source of entertainment and illumination into the wacky world of government employees for as long as the bot’s source code is compatible with Twitter and Wikipedia. How else would we know that government workers enjoy editing inside jokes into the Wikipedia article for maple syrup or are adamant about adjusting the rankings of video game competitions without it? While it would certainly be a big story if the bot ended up catching a government employee trying to drastically rewrite history within a Wiki article, it’s more likely it will continue to catch bureaucrats doing what they do best: wasting time.

@patrickmcguire

Photo via Rehabilitate the Swastika Facebook Page

Last weekend, the Raëlians, a sci-fi religious group that believes aliens created the human race and therefore women should be topless, paid for an airborne banner promoting their quixotic effort to change the overwhelmingly negative perception of the swastika. Through the advertisement and their website, proswastika.org, the Raëlians are hoping to remind the general public that the swastika was used by multiple religions and cultures long before the Nazis appropriated it for their nefarious purposes. 

The banner seems to be having the exact opposite reaction. New York city councilman Mark Treyger told CBS New York, "I will not accept their twisted logic. And I am also going to speak out against sending chilling messages of fear and intimidation to residents." 

The swastika, like all symbols, is only a means with which to communicate information quickly and efficiently, are created with that purpose in mind, and are tightly controlled by their creators. A red octagon means "Stop" in most places. A white apple with a bite taken out of it usually refers to the tech giant, Apple Inc. When you see the familiar, comforting logo of the Chicken Shack in Hermosa Beach, California, you know you're going to get the "best 'Peruvian cuisine' but with a California twist and a fusion of 'International Flavors.'" When I lay eyes on that sign, I can help but think of all the flavor that's about to blitzkrieg my mouth. I can't control it, just like I can't control being reminded of genocide when I see a swastika. The Raëlians really want to make you forget about those dead Jews and/or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ruminate on peace and harmony instead. Good luck.

What they haven't realized is that peace is an inert concept. It's not sexy or exciting, because it refers to a lack of action. Symbols become intrinsically associated with the stories they tell, and the most popular stories are ones that are dynamic. No one goes to see movies about non-violent conflict resolution. They see movies about robot dinosaurs destroying tall buildings. Through the power of active marketing and storytelling, the swastika can shake its status as the most hideous symbol of them all. 

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Step One: Identify the Problem

The problem here is obvious: Nazis wore swastikas, and also fucked up the world in a pretty significant way. If Buzzfeed made a listicle called "Top 10 Celebrities to Wear Swastikas," I'm pretty certain Adolf Hitler would be somewhere near the top of the list—only slightly ahead of the dude posing in this picture with Taylor Swift. Hitler used the swastika as the symbol for his fascist movement because of its connection to the ancient Aryan peoples from which he believed his master race had descended. This shouldn't mean that every time you see a swastika, you must think of National Socialism. You'd think that if any group could be able to pull off this semiotic gymnastics, it's an alien sex cult that convinces people that Jesus was an extraterrestrial ambassador, kinda like John Kerry.

Despite its status as the symbol of the Republican Party, I don't immediately think of low taxes, the 2nd Amendment, and Ayn Rand when I see an elephant. I also don't think of free abortions and black people just because I see Bill Clinton. This script can be changed, but airplanes dragging vague signage that scares people isn't going to move the proverbial needle. More drastic action has to be taken.

Photo via Flickr user LearningLark

Step Two: Destroy the Evidence!

Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets in the way of a great PR campaign like knowledge. I'm trying my best to forget about this whole climate change thing, but people keep throwing all this data in my face. Cut it out, man!

Bill Cosby's publicist has done a fine job of making sure more people aren't talking about the allegations of sexual assault that keep popping about around him. Those allegations aren't widely reported, and most media outlets still claim that global warming deniers are "credible." Not so for the heinous crimes of the Nazis. We all know, and we are all completely disgusted by what they did. Only one way to solve this problem: Get rid of the information. Those who don't learn from history are destined to ignore it. I think a great man said that once, but I wouldn't know! *wink*

Photo via Flickr user Chris Short

Step Three: Associate the Swastika with a Product

The absence of meaning is not meaning, therefore it's time to start laying the groundwork for Swastika 2.0 (or as I'm fond of calling it, Swastika 2: Revenge of the Fallen.) People need to associate the swastika with something useful, something that works—as opposed to world domination and ethnic cleansing, which you know, don't work. No matter how persuasive your threats, the world just isn't buying it. What they will buy is swastika swim trunks. I can't tell you how many pool parties I've been to where the invite says, "don't forget to bring a bathing suit," and then I still forget to bring a bathing suit. I assure you that I won't be forgetting my swastika swim trunks. In fact, I may never forget.

Step Four: Celebrity Endorsements

These ladies seem perfectly nice, and completely normal (besides their association with a UFO cult and interest in trying to resurrect a symbol that's strongly linked to dangerous hate groups). I'm sure the Raëlians thought it would be wise to get regular looking folks to wear their shirts proudly in an effort to normalize the swastika. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

This image is boring. I don't know who these women are, they're barely outrageous, and I don't know where they're in, but it's not my face. They're probably not even verified on Twitter. It's vital to remember that it's not enough to have a superior product. You need someone to explain why that product is necessary for me to go on breathing oxygen.

Imagine how powerful it would be to see Robert Downey Jr., the poster boy for fixing a reputation, sporting a swastika armband at the Oscars. RDJ used to be synonymous with drug use, prison time, and a general inability to be a reliable employee. Today, he's a huge star that's beloved by millions. I'm sure you're already starting to see the benefts of Iron Man joining your cause. 

Photo via Flickr user Christina Rutz

Step Five: Have Someone Wearing a Swastika Save a Baby from Drowning

We all love babies, which means we also hate seeing babies drown. Babies drown all the time because they haven't bothered to learn how to swim yet. This is an epidemic. I hope you're starting to connect some of these dots, and can predict where I'm going. You've already got a celebrity endorsement from Robert Downey Jr. The photo of him throwing up a peace sign while wearing a swastika on the red carpet has gone mega-viral. Getting him to rescue an infant from certain death is all you need to take this shit over the top. The Daily Mail headline, "Beloved Movie Star Saves Defenseless Child from Drowning... While Wearing Swastika Swim Trunks," is going to make #HitlerWho a trending topic in no time.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Vivid Vivka

Since it started popping up in the 80s, cosplay has become an essential part of geek culture events and conventions, with at least one costume contest or fashion show at every major nerd gathering. The cosplay scene also has its fair share of problems, including more and more reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault. Though official statistics don’t exist, reports have gotten so bad that in some cases, petitions have been brought to convention companies, asking them to help combat the problem. 

This month at Anime Expo in Los Angeles, a panel dedicated to this topic called Cosplay Is Not Consent was held by Cosplay Deviants, a cosplay modeling agency. We talked with Vivid Vivka, a Deviant model and cosplay enthusiast, about her experiences with the darker side of dressing up, the cosplay scene, and why she keeps doing what she does.

VICE: When did you start cosplaying? Why? 
Vivid Vivka: "When" is a hard pinpoint. I would say with past Halloweens. I’d always use that wonderful holiday as an excuse to dress up as my favorite characters. I remember my absolute glee when I found that not only was there a community that dresses up as often as they can, but that the community itself was wonderful and endearing. I’ve met the kindest, most wonderful, crazy, crafty people via the cosplay circuit. As per why, it’s this amazing transformation. You watch TV, movies, play video games. You see the characters. You get so wrapped up in their personalities, the details of the characters. Or hell, maybe you just think their clothing is awesome. But to actually put on the costume, finally finished, for the first time—it's overpowering. I always try to think about how that character would walk into a room, how they would answer the questions asked to me, and how they would pose for the photos. It's dress-up, yes, but it's so much more. 

Vivid Vivka as Belldandy from the anime Ah! My Goddess

When did you join Cosplay Deviants?

My first CD set went up in 2011. I was instantly hooked. I enjoy being naked, and already had a well-rounded nude-model career. I enjoyed cosplaying. And boy howdy, I found a company that wants me to do both. Fuck yes. Sign me up; I’m in. I’ve done many sets since, and been a part of their book, trading card game, magazine, calendars, and gone to conventions as part of their event team. 

Did you experience harassment from people as soon as you started cosplaying? Or was it something that you noticed more over time?
At first, my costumes were more along the lines of bloody horror themes: Pyramid Head from Silent Hill, zombies, etc. Mostly people just stayed away from me! But as I grew up, started my alt-model/nude-modeling career, and became much more confident and comfortable in my skin. I started to "dare to bare." I started cosplaying the characters whom I adored and wanted to dress up as, but before was too shy or nervous to. Its no secret that anime girls defy gravity, and super heroines usually wear too-tight spandex and not much else. I’m not perfect, and I don't have the ideal gym body. But I like my skin, and I wanted to play, so fuck all who try to stop me! 

The internet is a ruthless place, though. A photo gets posted, and everyone has an opinion that must be shared. If I had a nickel for every time I was called horse face, tranny, fat, ugly, I could buy the damned internet. Online harassment is a constant flow, and its downright nasty. In person, its a different story. People would ask for a photo, and "jokingly" grab my butt. Lewd, tactless, raunchy things would be said or asked of me, and followed by a "JK… unless you will." I feel like a lot of people don't realize they are overstepping their grounds, and they don't realize how hurtful, scary, and gross they are being. They see this character that they also know and love and I feel they forget that there is a person inside the costume. Cosplay is not consent. Just because I am dressed up, doesn't mean I aim to serve your fantasies. 

Vivid Vivka as the Joker

At every convention I go to, there are a handful of horror stories… both to me and that happen to my friends. The worst is when the harass-ee doesn't speak up about it. As I said, I feel like the majority of people don't realize what they are doing is bad, and if we don't speak up and tell them, then how will they know? I can't believe the change I've seen from when I was more shy and wouldn't want to stand up for myself verses now; I’m much more mouthy and can aggressively say "no."

And it's not just physical. Yes, sometimes a boob is "accidentally" touched, or a skirt is "accidentally" lifted. Or hell, someone is just picked up and carried away. That is scary. Don't do that. It's not cute. It's terrifying. But it's so emotional and mental. I’ve worn costumes I’ve worked months on, only to be called "slut, whore, skank" by other females. I’ve even been told I’m the "slutty one" by another girl who was cosplaying the same character, due to my bust being bigger. And there is the whole spectrum of body shaming. No one is built like cartoons. They are two-dimensional beings, without gravity or age. You should be able to dress up like whomever you want, even if your waist isn't that small, hips aren't that wide, legs that long, bust that big, hell, even if your skin color isn't "correct." Cosplay should be, and deep down is, about the love of the characters and the joy of the craft. But the spectators mostly just see the lighter, jovial side, the finished product and the smiles for the camera. There is a darker, hurtful side of cosplay. People get wrapped up and bogged down by the little details and this venomous need to rip the person down. 

Vivid Vivka as Mad Moxxi from Borderlands 2

Have there been any particularly outrageous things you’ve seen/heard about/experienced to a degree?
Once I was cosplaying a video game character, Mad Moxxi from Borderlands 2, who is a very ample busty character. A couple walked by, and the gent was very excited for the character, as he was a big fan of the game. He asked for a photo with me, and right before the camera snapped, I heard his girlfriend saying that he didn't need photos with "some gross slut. I thought you were into real women." I was crushed. It hurt. I didn't do anything. Why am I not "real"? Why am I slut? I'm character-accurate, and having fun! I think the girlfriend saw my transparent epic sad face. She fumbled a half-assed apology, but I could tell that she said it without even thinking about me, the girl in the suit, and how I would feel hearing such a remark spit into my face. Aside from that, I’ve been propositioned a multitude of times. Even to the degree that a hotel key was pushed into my pocket, as a random stranger hissed his hotel room number and a time into my ear. To note, I found the biggest, burliest cosplay gang I could find, told them the time and gave them the room key. I wonder what happened that night.

Have you ever felt like stopping cosplaying because of this kind of stuff?
Everyone has dark days. Sometimes there are just too many mean Facebook comments, too many pushy hissy remarks, and too many sleazy gropes. But I love this. I love doing this so much. There is a dark side and there are bad apples. But as a whole the cosplay community has given so much more to me that I ever could have hoped for. The majority of them are wonderful people, who are supportive and friendly. They share my passion and excitement, and I look forward to every con season. Hell, I even get the post-con-depression. I can't give this up. But I don't want to have to deal with the harassment as well, so I speak up about it, and hopefully enlightened others to their actions and options. 

Vivid Vivka as Fionna from Adventure Time

The education you and the others behind Cosplay Is Not Consent do is great. Are there any other tips you for combating abuse in cosplay scenes? Or any you think are more effective than others?
Speak up and stand up for yourself. No is a viable and powerful word— it's OK to say it! Don't let anyone push you down or pressure you into something you don't want to do. Someone is being a jerk? Fuck that person. You don't have to take a photo with them. Someone is touching you, or invading your personal space? Tell a security personal. We, as individuals, are powerful creatures. And most importantly: You are not alone. There are so many other people who are out here, and on your side. We can work together to educate, enlighten, and create a happier, healthier, more fucking awesome cosplay environment. Be most excellent to each other. 

Mexico's narcocorrido music genre and subculture openly celebrate the most extreme aspects of the country's drug war. The songs are filled with catchy, detailed narrations of beheadings, executions, coked-out nights and a strangely consistent obsession with Buchanan's whiskey.

With lyrics like "We're bloddy and a little twisted / We love killing / Mass kidnappings are the way they should be done / All my crew with gold-plated AKs / Shooting up their bodies until they fall to pieces / A sharpened knife on hand for beheadings," the movimiento alterado—literally the "altered movement"—is more of a "We're-fucking-crazy-and-we-will-cut-you-up" movement.

The music scene originated in the old cartel citadel of Mexico's western Sinaloa state, and it's an open secret that most of the artists identified with the genre are tied to the local cartel.

VICE went to Mexico to talk to some of the genre's major producers and see if they're as hard as their songs suggest.

Via Youtube user thetrolllife

DashCon, a weekend convention organized independently of Tumblr by some enthusiastic fans, has already secured its place in history as a nerd catastrophe. The organizers, who have taken endless amounts of shit online, hit a snag with the venue on Friday night, when the hotel management demanded upfront payment of $17,000 they apparently didn't have. The situation worsened when the money snafu triggered a no-show from the event's most popular speaker. Attendees lost some faith in their hosts' competence, and soon a sad photo of a ball pit that was nothing more than a pretentious kiddie pool (See below), became the context-free symbol for the all-around failure of the event.

But was it really that bad if you were there? I spoke to Sarah Fetter, office manager of Sanshee a branded merchandise retailer that operated two vendor's tables at the event. She experienced the problems firsthand, and yes, they're hilarious, but in her estimation DashCon was a bumpy but worthwhile ride.

VICE: What’s the “dash” part in DashCon about?
Sarah Fetter: I didn’t understand that until this weekend when someone explained it to me. So on the Tumblr homepage, you’re on something called the “dashboard.” So originally the convention was going to be called something like “TumbleUSA” or something, and Tumblr evidently said no because it’s not officially affiliated with Tumblr, and so they changed it to DashCon because you’re on your dashboard on Tumblr.

What was the first major thing that went wrong?
When I arrived, nobody could direct me to where I could get my badge, which was the only way I could enter the exhibit hall, which is the only way I could set up my stuff for the con that opened in two hours. And when I walked in to get my badge, the lovely woman that was working it couldn’t find my company. And that was the first inkling—everything else went wrong that morning, but that was the one thing where I went, “Oh God, just... Oh God.”  

And it just got worse from there?
Well, essentially you have some really lovely people, you have some people who are a little more... I’m trying to think of the most polite way to say it... They’re a little rude. I had a person trying to steal from my table. You have people who haven’t really done these kind of things, so they don’t really know how to interact and not be rude.

People were trying to steal from your table?
There was this kid who I guess was pretty sneaky because he started reaching for the Pokemon badges and trying to pocket them and I was just like, “Dude, dude, no. Don’t do that here.”

What was the average age at this convention?
Probably 15 or 16. I would say I met very few people my age—I’m 24—the people next to me were in their twenties, the people on the other side of me, Novus Magic, they were probably 30s. I’d say that the higher ages came from the exhibitors and then the parents who brought their children.

So what happened when the shit really hit the fan?
We attended Tumblr prom, which is hilarious, as you can probably imagine. We were sitting there and this girl ran in and said, “They’re gonna shut us all down if we don’t get $17,000 right now!” and then ran away. That launched everyone into this mass hysteria like “oh no the con’s gonna be shut down! Why would this happen?” 

What we were told that night was that the hotel was used to a different level of people—that apparently they were used to model train conventions. So originally we were told that the hotel didn’t like us and were looking for a way to boot us out, which is where the $17,000 was from.

Later we were told—this was all the same night—that the hotel had gone back on their problem on accepting payments in short amounts throughout the weekend as they gained more people through gross sales. Then even later on we were told that basically they just wanted their money up front because they weren’t sure if they were gonna get it. 

But the money did materialize, and that issue was resolved?
Well, they had someone start announcing stuff and they had a little paper bag, like the kind you get when you buy candles and stuff, and said, “We’re taking money right now!” People literally ran at them and dumped money into the bag without thinking about it. I had a friend who dumped $400 into it, but there’s no tracking of any of this. The original announcement was around 9pm, so a little after 10, supposedly the deadline, the con was saved and everything was kosher.

One hour between initial shakedown and actually coughing up the cash? That’s a pretty short period of time.
Yeah, it was pretty insane.

What was the hullabaloo surrounding the ball pit?
It didn't last long. We went to go see the ball pit on Saturday night, and it had apparently died—it was laid to rest on Saturday night because it was no longer there. And there were swimmers talking about things that had happened in it, apparently some people got too rowdy and it began to deflate, and evidently someone else peed in it? I have no idea if that actually happened—I want to believe it didn’t, but a couple of my friends who went into the ball pit said they believe that was true.

Note that the maker of this video wrongly blames Tumblr.

I read about offers of extra time spent in the ball pit if you donated certain amounts of money? Or was that just completely BS?
No. The whole reason the ball pit has become popular was because Welcome to Night Vale was used as a main draw for DashCon. A huge amount of people that I know went specifically because they wanted to see Welcome to Night Vale. I was told later that there were some verbal agreements and poor planning, and the shakedown happened.

Welcome to Night Vale apparently wanted their money at the start of the show, the con claimed they showed up 15 minutes late and then wanted to meet with a specific person from the hotel, and there was this huge delay and everything kind of collapsed from there, and ultimately Welcome to Night Vale decided that because the money wasn’t there—they wanted 3/4 of it in cash and the rest of it in PayPal—right then, they weren’t gonna do it.

After that happened, a swarm of people came into the exhibit hall super mad because Welcome to Night Vale wasn’t performing. And then I saw a notification on Tumblr where DashCon said “oh we’re really sorry this happened, but as a consolation, you too can have an extra hour in the ball pit. And that was supposed to make up for the fact that a lot of people came specifically to see them. But hey, at least there’s a ball pit.

Did anything go wrong after that?
The vendor hours given once I arrived were very different from what I thought I was going into. So Saturday, our hours were 9am-8pm, which is fine if it’s San Diego Comic-Con or something like that, but in those long vendor hours your first three hours are dead and your last two hours are dead, so essentially you’re sitting there shooting the shit with other people around you, which is not good for making money.

I’m not gonna say that they lied about who were going to be there—they estimated a much higher number of people were going to be there than what actually happened, I believe. I don’t know if they did a final count yet. But the number of people we were expecting and packed for was greatly higher than the number of people who were actually there. So I think that people were expecting to make a little more money than they did, but it’s a different client base. 

So you took to social media. How'd that go?
I tried to keep it as separate from the company as humanly possible. I started tweeting it and tumblring it for fun, not because I was trying to get attention for the company, so I was surprised by the attention that it got, and it’s been crazy ever since. 

So I noticed on Tumblr, someone at one point called you out for being transphobic? That was you, right?
Yes, that was me.

How come you’re transphobic? What’s your problem?
I was very very careful with pronouns that weekend, but I feel like everybody walked on the edge that weekend, because it’s a Tumblr con, you know? I sat next to someone who preferred she/her/etc, and I sat next to somebody else who had different pronouns, and so like, I’m not transphobic, but I made some comments about how someone threatened to stab someone else for not adhering to their preferred pronouns and I was like “that’s a little ridiculous!” I understand wanting to be called your pronouns but stabbing somebody is not exactly the most valid response. And that didn’t make me any friends. 

But there was another comment, a tweet that I made, about how I overheard someone wanting to talk to the girl at the front desk about how they didn’t have bathrooms for every gender. And my response was, please don’t do that, please please don’t do that. The hotel staff has no control over any of that. 

Screencapped from 4chan. 

You mentioned “anon-hate.” Was that a topic at the con?
Friday night as everything was going down, I was chatting with a few people at the prom, and someone said 4chan did it. I said “I don’t think it’s a case of 4Chan, I think it’s a case of DashCon kind of hurting itself.” And then the moderators were like “No this is not 4chan,” and explained what happened. 

4chan has been known to do things—I’m trying to think of a recent example, I haven’t been keeping up with shenanigans—I know they did something with scientology. Basically when they want to band together and do something, funny things usually result. Sometimes it’s less than funny. Sometimes it’s a little more malicious. 

(Ed. Note: The Know Your Meme page about the ongoing 2014 Tumblr-4chan Raids is a good read.)

How did the organizers do after all this went down?
The Q&A with the organizers was pretty funny in a terrible way, just because I don’t think they were ready for some of those questions being asked and they didn’t have answers.

Questions about the con itself?
Yeah, questions like “Are volunteers gonna get reimbursed for this that and the other? What happened with Welcome to Night Vale?” and they kinda tried to explain things, but I think they were also kind of blindsided by all of it. And they have not had an easy time with all this. I think they got blindsided with a lot of what happened, and to have that Q&A afterward was just kind of rubbing salt in the wound, as it were. 

Would you go to another DashCon?
Yeah, I would. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, but after everything, I had a blast. Everything that happened was just utterly hilarious. As long as I had a good sense of humor about things, I had a good time

If you had the ear of the organizers of DashCon, what would you tell them?
Be careful of how you deliver bad news. If Friday night had been handled a bit better everything might not have just gotten worse and worse and worse. So how to deliver news would probably be the biggest thing, but I mean overall everyone in it was so nice, but you know, things happen.

Thanks Sarah!

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Nancy Dennard, president of the Brooks County Board of Education, faces 11 felony counts of voter fraud. All photos by Paul E. Leavy

On the morning of December 21, 2010, Lula Smart was preparing to leave for her job at Sears when she heard a firm knock at her front door. An array of law enforcement vehicles had amassed outside and armed officers were fanning out around her house. Before that day, Smart had no rap sheet to speak of, only a Master’s degree in criminal justice earned earlier that year. While she enjoyed her work in retail, Smart hoped to transition into a job more like that of her unannounced visitors, who would read her a dizzying list of felony voting fraud charges that amounted to more than 100 years in prison. Handcuffed, Smart soon met nine other incarcerated African Americans who had participated in a vigorous get-out-the campaign ahead of an election the previous month. Three of those jailed had been elected to the local school board.

Their efforts had helped to win the first-ever African American majority on Brooks County's Board of Education. But almost four years after that vote, dozens of felony fraud charges still overshadow the group, known locally as the Quitman 10 + 2 (two more were subsequently charged). In her living room, Smart points to the television where she first saw her orange-jumpsuit-clad mug shot on the nightly news. She is the only member of the group who has not yet seen a trial—or, more precisely, she’s had two mistrials and counting. Since receiving 32 felony charges, her hoped-for career in criminal justice has, obviously, stalled. She now works full-time at Home Depot and fills in part-time shifts selling shoes at the department store. Before the first trial, she contemplated suicide, but says her resolve has since grown.

Smart’s arrest was the result of a massive investigation initiated by a local district attorney whose senior assistant attorney sat on the Brooks County school board. Although this conflict of interest disqualified the DA from trying the case, it didn’t prevent him from compelling the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to launch an exceptionally large probe into the disruptive school board election.

Yet the massive investigation failed to produce evidence that Smart or any other member of the group had defrauded or coerced a single voter. With these goods lacking, the state built its prosecution instead on proving that she and others breached technicalities like carrying envelopes containing ballots to the mail for their close acquaintances without the proper authorization.

Even on these counts, the state is struggling to make its case. VICE spoke with several Brooks County residents state prosecutors allege are the victims of voter fraud at the hands of the Quitman 10 + 2. Each of them asserted that they successfully voted for the candidate of their choice without coercion or any impropriety. Similarly, court documents reveal that other alleged victims—called by the prosecution to testify against Smart—had little to offer the state’s case. Under oath, witnesses called by the state asserted that no fraud had taken place and said that, during interrogations, Georgia investigators had them sign personal statements that the agents had written for them.

In 2012, despite the case’s vulnerabilities, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal issued an executive order removing the three black women charged with voter fraud from the school board.

Next month, the state will once again try Lula Smart. Her third trial comes just over a year after the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, setting off a wave of fresh worries about equal access to the ballot box. In the name of preventing voter fraud, a number of states have since passed voter ID requirements. Civil rights groups allege that conservative politicians overstate the prevalence of election fraud to justify discriminatory ID laws. In Quitman, many residents believe that fraud allegations have been employed here as a cudgel to punish those who inspired their community to vote in droves. 

Debra Dennard faces four felony charges in connection to the 2010 primary. Two of the counts allege that she criminally handled the absentee ballot of her father, David Dennard, who she cares for. Mr. Dennard has no legs below his knees and is partially blind. He says that his daughter did nothing wrong, and that he successfully voted for the candidates of his choice. “All she did was help me—just as she helps me with almost everything,” Mr. Dennard tells VICE. “I knew who I wanted to vote for, and I signed the ballot myself.”

David Dennard in his wheelchair at home in Quitman, GA

In downtown Quitman, a person sometimes has to shout to be heard over 18-wheeler trucks grinding down its four-lane main drag, US 84. In either direction off the corridor, Quitman’s two-story, balconied buildings give way to a loosening grid of dusty residential streets lined with bright pastel bungalows and live oaks heavy with Spanish moss. These are the African American neighborhoods that were swept into the political fervor after Georgia changed its laws to allow the use of local absentee voting in 2006.

In the early spring of 2010, ahead of the July school board primary election, an unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort materialized in the hitherto politically quiet black community. For the first time, they saw a majority within reach at a powerful local institution where a number of issues divided roughly along racial lines. For instance, black candidates and their supporters deeply opposed a wave of teacher layoffs that the school board had initiated to prevent a local tax increase.

“We’d been bit by the Obama bug and we knew it was time for a change in Brooks County as well,” says Nancy Dennard, the president of the school board (David Dennard is her brother-in-law). “We knew people would be more apt to vote without the old stipulations on absentee voting.”

Dennard has close-cropped hair and a doctoral degree in education. She faces 11 felony counts of voter fraud. She speaks in rapid-fire blocks broken only by audible gasps for air, and has a schoolteacher’s tendency to make a person feel scolded when she’s asserting even the most neutral point. “We’d stop people in the grocery store or wherever we saw them and ask: 'Did you vote?' We went out in the housing projects and we had kids that ran up to us and said, ‘Can my momma vote?’ Getting out there and voting became the ‘in’ thing here for the first time ever.”

In the weeks preceding the July 20 primary, these efforts did not go undetected. Quitman’s local newspaper began noting the historically large number of absentee ballots that were pouring into the elections office. On July 19, less than 24 hours before the primary, a white school board member expressed concern about the election to the local district attorney, David Miller, whose senior assistant attorney also served on Brooks County’s school board. That very day, Miller sent a letter imploring the state agency to investigate the July election.

On primary day, it would be the absentee ballots—roughly four times more than the county had seen in history—that ultimately pushed the vote in the favor of the black candidates. The sheer volume of absentee ballots counted would be used for years to come as justification for investigating the election.

When Quitman’s get-out-the-vote machine again took to the streets ahead of the November general election, they were not the only ones pounding pavement in the town’s black neighborhoods: Gun-toting investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia’s Secretary of State’s office had arrived in Brooks County and came knocking at many of the same doors. It is widely believed in Quitman’s black community that the state investigators came less to enforce the law and more to chill surging electoral fervor.

Mattie Neloms, who lives in a neighborhood north of downtown that locals call “Slab” because of an old wood mill there, says the GBI interviewed her daughter-in-law, a recent immigrant, and demanded that she get in touch with Neloms’ son. “They told her that if she couldn’t get in touch with her husband, she could get him in some serious trouble and he could get locked up,” Neloms says. “She’s from Africa, where they don’t do all that voting stuff so she didn’t know what was going on. She was scared to death.”

Neloms tells me investigators then came to her place of work and interrogated her until her boss told the agents to leave, but not before the investigators asked her plainly why she had chosen to vote with an absentee ballot. “I told them it was because that’s my privilege—I can do that,” Neloms says. Neither Neloms nor her son were charged or named as victims in the state’s case.

Witnesses called by the state to testify against Lula Smart in the 2013 case also expressed concerns that the investigation aimed to intimidate. “When y’all came to my house…y’all just kept coming and harassing me. I know who I voted for, and I voted and I thought I was through with that.” Patricia Little, a longtime Quitman resident, told the courtroom in reference to the state’s investigators. “Y’all making me not even want to vote no more.”

Bessie Hamilton, Lula Smart’s godmother, was also named on Smart’s indictment as a victim of her alleged voter fraud. When called to testify against Smart, Hamilton said that GBI investigators actively intimidated her when they arrived unannounced at the doctor’s office where she worked. Hamilton told the courtroom that the investigators brought her into an unused break room and told her she had recently been in danger of incarceration, apparently in regard to the primary election. She then signed a statement that the investigators had written for her, even though she was too frightened to properly review its contents. “I was scared,” Hamilton said on the stand. “The doctor kept checking on me because I have high blood pressure.”

Nancy Dennard says that, by her calculation based on the GBI case file, the agency knocked on more than 450 doors, and that all but seven were located in heavily black neighborhoods. The agency refused to comment to VICE.

As the GBI began its investigation, a number of the town’s prominent whites publicly questioned the increasing use of absentee voting. “It’s the absentee ballots,” Claude Butler, a just-defeated county commissioner told a local news agency after the July primary election. “They have gone rampant here in our county. And it's unethical and it's unconstitutional."

On October 1, 2010, while state investigators were still making their rounds in Quitman, Larry Cunningham—the school board member whose concerns the local district attorney originally brought to the GBI—sent out a letter regarding the upcoming election. “There is a political group in Brooks County that does not share the values of the majority of the current board members,” Cunningham wrote. “In the July primary election they narrowly defeated two of our board members… by excessive use of the absentee voter ballot. The evidence of their voter fraud is so apparent it has prompted one of the largest GBI investigations in the history of Brooks County. The members of this party will risk going to jail to gain control of our schools.”

A month later, on November 2, the black school board candidates who had won the July primary were again victorious in the general election, making certain the first black-majority on Brooks County’s school board. The state did not bring any charges in regard to this election, but weeks later would make the first arrests of the Quitman 10 + 2.

***

Nearly four years since the group’s mugshots became a fixture of the local news, many of the Quitman 10 + 2 still lack basic facts of the cases against them. For all but two of the accused, the prosecution has given no word as to when, if ever, they will see their day in court. (One member of the group, Latashia Head, died in 2012.) The state has, at times, made grand public statements about the case, but has rarely matched this with a straightforward explanation of the evidence.

Similarly, Nathan Deal, Georgia’s governor who removed the members of the school board for as long as he legally could, would not give VICE an explanation for his executive order. His press office refused to tell us whether any documentation exists regarding the order. “When local officials are indicted, the governor puts together a panel of peers—people who hold the same office—from other counties,” Brian Robinson, a spokesperson for Governor Deal, wrote in an email. “They review the case and recommend to the governor is [sic] he should remove the members pending the outcome of their trials.” Voter fraud is of particular interest to Governor Deal, who once said he pushed for Georgia’s voter ID law despite complaints of disenfranchisement from what he called “ghetto grandmothers."

The state prosecutor who has been trying the case, Joseph Burford, likewise refused to help us understand elementary facts of the project his office continues to pursue. He says state ethics rules bar prosecutors from speaking to media outlets about open cases. (Such code did not stop the previous prosecutor on the case, Joseph Mulholland, from appearing on Fox News to tell a national audience of the Quitman 10 + 2 “rigging the election.” Mulholland declined to speak with VICE, as did the local DA, David Miller.)

In response to questions about the case, Burford simply told me to review the transcript of the first mistrial of Lula Smart, the sole trial that has been transcribed. Yet the 678-page document does little to clarify the case against Smart. Key witnesses called to testify against her—the alleged victims of voter fraud—could not recall any clear wrongdoing regarding her role in the primary. One simply asserted that a man named “Virgil” mailed his ballot for him. For another equally useless witness, Burford abruptly dismissed an entire felony count in front of the court rather than allow the defense team a cross examination. Years had gone by since the 2010 primary, and other witnesses simply could not remember the details of their voting.

Lula Smart outside the house where she was arrested four years ago and still lives

Smart’s godmother told the court that, during the 2010 primary, Smart came by her house and picked up the envelope containing her completed ballot for her. The prosecution also got a husband and wife who are old friends of Smart to indicate that she may have carried completed ballots to the mail for them. The 2010 primary was the first election in which the couple voted absentee, and the husband asked Smart to come over and review their ballots for technical errors. This is another contention of the prosecution: that members of the group gave assistance to absentee voters without official authorization.

During both mistrials, a number of alleged victims waited a week for their turn to testify against Smart in a back room of the courthouse, but never got their chance. Robby Christian was among those who waited. An entire felony count against Lula Smart relies on the state’s assertion that she criminally handled Christian’s ballot. He sees things differently. “They got the wrong folks— these people haven’t done anything wrong," Christian says. “I know how to fill out my ballot and that’s what I did. Then I put it in my own mailbox—because that’s my right.”

Elvira Sims, a Quitman resident whom the state also relies on for an entire felony count against Smart, says that Smart did nothing improper with her ballot. “That girl didn’t do anything,” Sims says. “If she’d have been white, there wouldn’t have been all of this commotion, but she’s a black woman.”

“It’s bullshit,” Errol Cobb Sr., another witness called by the prosecution, tells me. He says he voted successfully—and without meddling—for exactly the candidates of his choice in the 2010 election. “I get a letter from the state saying I’m a witness against Lula Smart—for what? All I know is it’s a lie. Bottom line. She’s never brought me anything about voting. I’ve only seen that girl twice in the past five years. Racism’s all it is.”

***

In October 2012, the three indicted school board members resumed their posts. Having failed to win a conviction against any of the members, the state had no choice but to allow their return. Today, perhaps miraculously, the school board’s deliberations occur with efficiency and mutual respect, according to several members.

David Cunningham, who still sits on the school board, has softened his tone since sending the October 2010 letter that raised the specter of his opponents being incarcerated. He tells VICE that he would be “shocked” if any of his fellow school board members, or any of their supporters, saw jail time stemming from the prosecutions.

“In the scheme of things, I don’t think it’s the crime of the century, if it is a crime at all,” Cunningham tells me from behind his desk at the peanut buying center his family owns. Cunningham does still believe that the prosecution could help to discourage voting abuses by clarifying how just how active and aggressive candidates and their supporters can be in pushing absentee ballots on voters.

He believes that the rising popularity of absentee voting opens the door to mischief. “The issue is: do we want the ballot to become nothing more than a petition?” Cunningham asks. “It has the potential to remove the curtain at the ballot box—that symbolic curtain—which means when we vote, nobody but the good Lord and us knows how we voted our ballot. The proliferation of the absentee ballot can lead to someone being too persuasive in someone else’s home.”

Cunningham rejects any notion that the state’s investigation had a racial motivation.

Fatigue is perhaps the most universal response in Quitman to the prosecution. Cunningham expresses wonderment at the fact that Smart’s case has twice mistried and says that, whenever the case concludes, he would like to see Quitman move past the saga. Dick Mitchell—the school board’s former attorney who reportedly also pushed for the state’s investigation—refrained from comment, simply allowing his secretary to say, “He just wants this to be over.”

In April, the state prosecutor joined the indictments of Smart and Nancy Dennard, allowing the two to be tried at the same hearing. On August 18th, for the third time in two years, Smart will return to Quitman’s courthouse to hear the state’s case against her. This is the first time the state has given Dennard a court date.

The Quitman 10 + 2 have differing opinions on what force continues to drive the state’s prosecution. Some think local actors continue to urge it forward from behind the scenes. Others think it has taken on a life of its own, far beyond any control of little Quitman. “In the beginning, I think they just were trying to embarrass us so that people wouldn’t’t listen to us,” says Diane Thomas, Lula Smart’s sister who sits on the school board and faces several felony counts relating to the 2010 primary.

“I don’t think they ever expected it to go this far and for the state to get so involved,” Thomas says. “But once it got out of hand, it was like: Okay, this monster is going to grow.”

Follow Spencer Woodman on Twitter.

1967

A chick I met a couple of days ago lives in a garage with her boyfriend in Venice Beach and they’re letting me crash here, with my sleeping bag on the floor. Her name is Nance and his name is Steve. He tells me we are close to a Black Panther headquarters and a Hells Angeles chapter. I tell him that’s really groovy, man and he says no, not really. A few nights ago, he tells me, a couple of Panthers kicked open the side door to the garage and pointed a shotgun at his nose. He says he ducked behind the mattress and shows me the hole in the wall but I’m not sure I believe anything he tells me. I ask him why would they do that and he says because he was fucking a black chick. Nance laughs and says he better not be doing that anymore.

Steve and Nance shoot some smack, without offering me any, then start fucking like they forgot I’m here. I’m sitting three feet away, considering masturbating. Heroin is synonymous with limp dicks but Steve looks ready to fuck the shot-gunned hole in the wall. It’s after midnight when I go for a walk and the streets are dark and quiet. I can feel the ocean breeze and the thump of the waves. On a busted-up sidewalk I find a dead bird or maybe an old flattened shoe that missed the trash.

The moon is friendly and I’ve got the Doors’ Whisky Bar in my head. Closer to the ocean, a block of buildings up next to the sand, arches and pillars that look 100 years old. On a corner curb, two longhaired guys and a girl in paisley-patched bell bottoms. The girl says hey, you got a fag? I tell her yeah, sure, and tap a Kool King out of the box. She’s tiny and bone-thin and her hair is a mess. She’s wearing a bikini top and sandals. Her teeth are bright white and perfect and she smells of patchouli. I ask her name and she tells me Sparrow. She asks my name and I tell her Scotty.

“You got a light, Scotty?”

The two guys watch us with their hands in their pockets. They both have ratty sun-bleached blonde hair. I light Sparrow’s cigarette and her hands are dirty, her fingernails chewed. She asks me what am I looking for?

“Nothing. I’m not really looking for anything, you know. I was thinking I’d walk down to the beach.”

“This is the beach.”

“Yeah. I mean the water.”

“Hey,” one of the guys says. “You want to buy some shit?”

“I don’t really have any money. What kind of shit?”

“What’s it matter what kind of shit,” Sparrow says. “If you don’t have any money.”

"Yeah, well,” I say. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

I walk down to the wet sand and the waves and conjure rock-star fantasies on the dark horizon. Ten minutes later, back on the street corner, Sparrow and the two guys are gone. Up above, a noisy police helicopter hits me with a round beam and I raise my fist and flip up my middle finger. A block later a patrol car finds me. Two cops get out and throw me against the hood and make me empty my pockets. They look at my Missouri driver’s license and shine a flashlight into my eyes. The tallest one has a head shaped like a bucket. He asks me would I like to spend the night in jail. I tell him thanks, but no. He tells me he doesn’t want to see me around here again. He says next time he sees me he’s gonna put me in jail, or the hospital. As they drive away I flip them the bird and get ready to sprint through the alleyways if their brake lights start glowing.

1977

I’ve been back in California for a couple of weeks when I drive to Venice Beach. The sun is low and gorgeous, southern California light. The oceanfront is a thick party of sparsely dressed people. Marijuana smoke swirls in the open air and some of it is mine. This is life full of color and without restraint. I’ve got my Contax camera and 85mm lens. I make an exposure of a pudgy little kid by the women’s bathroom. I’ve got a roll of Kodachrome in my pocket and the tail end of a roll of Tri-X in the camera so I walk down to the water to finish it off.

A guy leaning on a cinderblock wall is meditating and I take a couple of shots. I take a picture of a little group of teenagers. A girl tells me I look like her brother except not as stupid. Back on the boardwalk I load Kodachrome and make a photo of a woman in a blue straw hat. I take a shot of a woman sitting alone with her shadow. I photograph a guy on his knees to a woman, pledging to be a better person.

I spy a cutie on roller skates watching the muscle guys lift weights. She’s got orange hair and freckles. She is older than I am with a twinkling of new wrinkles. I saunter up and smile and she smiles back. She’s drinking a beer and asks me if I’m a photographer. I say, yeah, you wanna be a model? She tells me she already has a job, working in a sperm bank and would I like to make a deposit. I’m asking her about penalties for early withdrawal when a drunk guy in a cowboy hat staggers over and says hey, dude, take my picture cause I’m more prettier ‘n this skank. Turns out the drunk and the roller cutie know each other.

His name is Jerry and hers is Polly. I back up and compose a picture. A German Shepherd walks into the frame. Jerry says he’s gonna tongue Polly’s asshole and then he tries and nearly topples them both. I take a couple shots, nudge Jerry out of the picture and tell Polly we should spend some quality time together, just the two of us. She laughs and waves bye-bye and skates away with the sunlight on her backside. Jerry says hey, I gotta piss, take a picture of me taking a piss.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

Vintage skirt, Topshop shoes, Gogo Philip jewellery

PHOTOGRAPHER: CHARLOTTE RUTHERFORD
STYLIST: CLARISSA BOWMAN
Make-up and nails: Holly Silius using Mac Pro and H&H nails
Models: Chiara Maura Mottironi, Lynn, Scarlett Lapidus, Kayt Webster-Brown, Holly Silius

Beyond Retro dress

Christian Cowan-Sanluis chaps, Topshop shoes

Beyond Retro bikini bottoms, Topshop shoes, Gogo Philip jewellery

Christian Cowan-Sanluis hat and shoes, Tommy Hilfiger shorts, vintage gloves

Kim West dress, Gogo Philip jewellery

Beyond Retro bikini

Kim West bikini bottoms

Obscure Rebellion shorts, Beyond Retro bag and sunglasses, Topshop shoes

Pamela Wallin. Photo via Wikipedia (ironically).
Yesterday I wrote an article about a new Twitterbot called GCCAEdits, which monitors revisions made to Wikipedia articles and tweets every time it catches an edit made from a Canadian government computer. In my piece yesterday, I focused on the more humourous edits I noticed government employees making—like adding the phrase “poopy balls” to an article about Pomeranian dogs. But after digging a bit deeper, I discovered a common, poorly hidden pattern of government computers making edits to Wikipedia pages in order to completely remove controversial sections from various entries about politicians.

The most glaring edit was made on July 10, 2013 to Pamela Wallin’s Wikipedia page—just shy of two months before Pamela Wallin had to reimburse the Senate for what was determined to be overspending. She has since been suspended from the Senate for wasting too much of the public’s money. The edit to her Wikipedia page on July 10th was made from a House of Commons IP address, and it removed an entire section of her entry entitled “Residency and travel expense controversy” that outlined, in detail, Pamela’s excessive travel expenses and subsequent resignation from the Senate.

The information about Pamela’s spending problem was added back to Wikipedia by non-government users—with a comment reading: ‘unexplained removal of content,’ tagged to it—while the July 10 edit was negatively rated for “section blanking,” a phrase Wiki uses to describe an edit that completely erases a particular section.

Pamela Wallin was unavailable for comment, as her government email (which is still listed on her official website) no longer exists.

Also connected to the Senate scandal is an edit made to Conservative senator Yonah Martin’s Wikipedia page on April 24, 2014, from a House of Commons computer, that completely removed any mention of Yonah’s involvement in having Pamela Wallin—along with Patrick Brazeau and Mike Duffy—suspended. In reality, Yonah “introduced the second attempt to suspend Patrick Brazeau, Pamela Wallin and Mike Duffy without pay,” but someone within the House of Commons doesn’t want that on her Wikipedia page.

That edit has stuck, presumably because her page is under much less scrutiny than Pamela’s, so currently Yonah Martin’s Wikipedia page does not include any mention of her involvement in policing the Senate scandal.

In a statement to VICE, a representative for Senator Martin confirmed that the senator did, indeed, “approve” the edits made to her Wikipedia page in April. They went on to say: “The statement in question was removed as we didn't feel that it was accurate.... The statement is not accurate as it says she ‘authored’ the suspension motions. The actual authoring is done in consult with the Leader of the Government in the Senate's Office as well as Table Officers and/or Senate legal counsel.”

When I asked why the statement was removed, rather than edited for accuracy, I received the following response: “We could have tried to correct it and explain, however, the decision ‎at the time was simply to remove it rather than add to an incorrect statement.”

So, a gametime decision was made, and censoring the information just seemed a lot easier than correcting it for the public...

Outside of the Senate scandal, other Conservative politicians are also manicuring their Wikipedia pages by removing their personal misdeeds. On the Wiki article for Patrick Brown, a Conservative MP from Barrie, an edit was made from a House of Commons computer on December 4, 2013, which completely removed his “Controversies” section that outlined his support of reopening the abortion debate, despite Harper’s suggestion that doing so would be for dummies. The section also made mention of a complaint lodged against him by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, who were concerned about his use of a House of Commons account to send out campaign mailings.

The “Controversies” section has since been readded to Patrick Brown’s Wikipedia page—abortion support and all. Patrick Brown did not respond by the time of publication to a request for comment from VICE.

Yet another Conservative, Shelly Glover, an MP and the Minister of Canadian Heritage, had her Wikipedia page edited yesterday from the House of Commons. That edit completely removed a section called, “Request for suspension by Elections Canada,” which contained information about a request to suspend Glover as an MP for failing to file proper financial documents pertaining to her overspent campaign in 2011.

A Wikipedia user who uses the handle DrunkenMonkey restored the controversial section minutes after Glover’s staff attempted to remove it.

According to a representative of Glover who spoke to VICE: “Part of the communications responsibility of an MP's political staff is to correct the record when false or inaccurate information is found in the public domain, in any number of ways. This could include writing letters to the editor or news releases, interacting with the media, or engaging in online communication.”

So, to Team Glover, deleting an entire section from an encyclopedia article is akin to bringing a factual correction to a newspaper editor, and having them revise their article.

The representative went on to write: “In this instance a political staff member from the MP's office was made aware of inaccurate and improperly sourced information on Wikipedia, and removed it. All relevant information about the issue in question is available on the Elections Canada website."

Glover’s representative did not clarify what about her boss’s suspension scandal was incorrect. Nor did she say why her office elected to remove the entire section about the controversy, rather than correct the alleged misinformation. While the Elections Canada complaint against Glover has since been resolved, mainly because she promised not to overspend in her next campaign, it seems excessive that her staff would remove all information about it from Wikipedia outright.

It’s not just the Conservatives, however, who are getting in on the fun of trying to remove embarrassing truths from the internet. On June 20th, 2013, a computer from the House of Commons edited the Wikipedia page for the Bloc Quebecois' House of Commons leader Louis Plamondon by removing a section that described his legal trouble from April 1993, when he was caught with a sex worker during an undercover sting operation.

Unfortunately for Louis, that information was added back into his Wikipedia article. VICE did not hear back from Louis before this article ran.

While it seems as if staffers are willing to hide behind the “it’s our job” excuse for editing Wikipedia articles, or simply that they were just trying to correct some misinformation, the idea that political staffers are using their work time to censor and delete information from the internet’s encyclopedia seems like a massive waste of resources at the very least.

Given that all of these edits fall under the “section blanking” category—meaning that information was removed en masse, in lieu of simply correcting facts—there appears to be a widespread tactic of censoring Wikipedia pages in order to improve the public image of predominantly Conservative politicians.

That kind of strategy is disturbing, though it is unsurprising in a political climate where robocalls and attack ads are the norm, and CSEC, our cybersurveillance agency, is made up of mystery, smoke, and mirrors.

Thanks to the transparency built into Wikipedia, however, these poorly executed censorships (which are usually reversed by the Wikipedia community nearly instantaneously) are logged for all to see. That said, you would think these staffers would at least be smart enough to make the edits at the closest coffee shop.

@patrickmcguire