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All illustrations via Drew Shannon.
If you think about it, there’s something distinctly surreal about an airline flight. They pack hundreds of nervous strangers into a conical hallway and launch them full speed into the air, where the miracle of human invention collides with the most temperamental of social conditions. Hundreds of sweaty, cranky, exhausted people breathing the same recycled air have to obey a new, unique set of rules and norms.

There are rules about when to sit or stand, when to use the washroom, when to eat, and how to leave. Arguments are settled sophomorically by airline staff, and any actual laws that are broken are dealt with through a combination of the airline Marshall and vigilante justice.

At the epicenter of this surreal airplane universe sits the flight attendant. Ever professional, ever presentable, ever patient, ever prepared, ever scapegoated, and often overlooked.  But behind their rehearsed, chipper replies and glossy smiles they’ve been cataloguing a lifetime of stories from having to deal with people behaving strangely in a strange place. Here are their stories, in their own words.

A Leaky Revenge

Before arriving to a destination, the last service is to sell duty free items. One passenger was especially excited about it. When the cart reached his seat, he was told his item was no longer in stock. All seemed fine—he even said a polite hello to the flight attendants he saw as he left the bathroom, which was next to the galley where work was going on as usual. Suddenly, a rancid smell started to fill the galley and the floor was covered in a smelly liquid. When the leak was found to come from the bathroom door, they opened the door, and found that the unhappy but rather polite seeming passenger had purposefully pissed all over the floor in spite.

Don’t Go In There

When I worked at Sun Jet, there wasn’t a week that went by when passengers weren’t being kicked off our flights. One such fool locked himself in the bathroom moments prior to departure.

“Sir, are you OK in there?” A colleague asked, knocking on the door. “You need to come out now, we’re about to take off!”

When he didn’t answer, she did as she was taught in training and unlocked the bathroom door from the outside. As she pushed open the door, the guy jumped five feet in the air, causing the needle in his arm to pop out, blood splattering everywhere, including all over my colleague, who immediately ran off the plane. The airplane got pulled out of service, and the passenger probably ended up enjoying a beer with the inbound crew, I’m sure.

A Wrinkly Escape

Some passengers suffer from a fear of flying, and you often see it during takeoff. This one elderly woman I had on a flight makes everyone else look completely tame, though. Right after takeoff, she got completely naked and started shouting:

"Get me off the bus!"

She wrapped her wrinkled fingers around an emergency door handle while screaming:

"Let me off this thing!"

I’m not sure which scared the passengers more, the fact that she was so frail and naked, or that a young male colleague was wrapping himself around her exposed, ancient ladybits in attempt to pry her fingers off the door. In any case the door can’t be opened in flight no matter how badly an elderly nudist wants to get off. She was eventually subdued and put back in her seat.

Good Gravy

Right after dinner had been served, a passenger in one of the middle seats got up suddenly to use the bathroom and knocked his tray all over the woman beside him. He threw his hands up in frustration as if she’d gotten in his way or something. She was covered in mashed potatoes, gravy and corn, and looked like she was going to kill him. She grabbed a handful of mashed potatoes and flung it back at him, but it went sailing over his head and landed on the little boy in the next row, who started crying. I tried to intervene but it was useless. The boy’s father came over, poured his entire cup of gravy over both of them and sat back down. The two sat panting silently, drenched in their own food. We apologized to the boy and his family and tried to suppress laughter as we handed towels to the two passengers.

The ‘Mile High’ Dungeon

Every few flights, a couple will sneak off to the bathroom to try to join the ‘mile high club’. We, of course, notice, and try to make it there in time to stop them before they begin. During boarding of one particular red-eye flight, I noticed one couple in business class being very affectionate—making out, holding hands, rubbing each other—and made a note to keep an eye on them. When the flight started they appeared to fall asleep like everyone else, so I stopped monitoring them and made myself busy with other things. About half an hour later I heard a rustling and walked over to investigate. It was fairly dark, but I could still see shadows moving around.

Excuse me, I said, standing right above them.

They didn’t hear or notice so I turned on the reading light. They reeled around and stared at me like deer caught in the headlights. I gasped at the scene before me. They were both done up in full-on leather dominatrix gear and she was kneeling on his back with some kind of club in her hand. He had a facemask on and an orange ball in his mouth.

We’re so sorry, she said as they scrambled back into a more appropriate position.

I thought about making a fuss but nobody had woken up and they looked genuinely sorry. Just get some rest, I said.

"Don't Go In There" and "A Wrinkly Escape" are paraphrased from Heather Poole’s Book, "Cruising Attitude," about life in the sky as a flight attendant. Here is her website and Twitter.
 

@keefe_stephen

The latest Marvel release, the relentlessly quirky space epic Guardians of the Galaxy, was a massive box office success in its first weekend and has received nearly unanimous praise. The critical and audience reception has been so deafening that few have considered the inconsistencies, plot holes, and generally illogical shit that every blockbuster film suffers from. Here are just a few of the unanswered questions that caused us to dial the Nova Corps FAQ hotline for advice.

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS

–Why is that orb on that planet at the start, and why was it so easy for him to get? Presumably, this thing is a big deal, and someone that the movie spends a lot of time later establishing as kind of a doofus is able to break in and steal it pretty easily. Even Indiana Jones had a harder time stealing relics.

–Did you guys see the letter the director of this movie posted to Facebook? Where he was talking about how amazing it was that a movie about a bunch of "oddballs, outcasts, and geeks" was so well received? Where the fuck are there any oddballs or outcasts or geeks in this movie? The main character is an objectively attractive, muscular frat bro who's really good at fighting and using weapons and is, generally, a giant badass. And a super attractive alien warrior who is terrifyingly competent. Which of these guys are outcasts meant to be relating to? I feel like, if I went to school with either of these characters, they would have definitely bullied me.

–Is this CGI really the best we can do in 2014? All the scenes on Glenn Close's planet looked like cut scenes from Final Fantasy VII. 

–Is this really the best we can do for a female lead character in 2014? A stern-yet-sexy ninja-gymnast badass who just needed to find a man to lighten her up? Isn't that character in every movie now?

–How long did that chase scene on Xandar really take before the Nova Corps showed up? For an intergalactic police force, their response time was pretty poor.

–This Thanos guy is supposed to be a real badass, but why does he spend the whole movie sitting on his throne fucking around while that orb is switching hands faster than a rolled-up $20 bill at a coke party? He came off less like an universe-dominating facist dictator and more like a dad who hasn't had his morning cup of coffee yet.

–Did nobody during production or in any of the test screenings point out that having the character say, "I am Groot" is not funny? It's supposed to be funny, right? It didn't get a single laugh in the theater I watched it in. Not one of the 500 times it was said. 

–Why is Benicio Del Toro cosplaying as Mugatu from Zoolander?

–Why was Benicio Del Toro even in this movie?

–What does Star-Lord use to power his tape player? AA Space Batteries? A flux capacitor? 

–How is it possible that that blue dude from Walking Dead looks so much like 50 Cent?

–How does Star-Lord know about Jackson Pollock? He appeared to be between eight and 13 when he was abducted. He really amassed a lot of pop culture knowledge in a very short amount of time. I guess he was one of them latchkey kids, what with his dad being in space and his mom being sick. Still, unless he was watching PBS, he probably doesn't know shit about art (or much about anything that isn't animated and on cable).

–Is Chris Pratt saying, "What the f—" before being interrupted by a sound really the best we can do in 2014?

–Why did the prison guards do a countdown before opening fire on the windows? Why not just shoot them before they have any more time to do stuff?

–Also, why not just shoot all of the missiles at the same time, instead of slowly firing one at a time? All those missiles would surely kill our heroes and end the riot. Are these security guards just into theatrics?

–Why did taking away the gravity neutralize the threat? Do guns not work in zero G?

–Am I the only one who felt bad for all the prison guards who got killed during their escape? Poor dudes were just trying to make a living. 

–When the raccoon and the big muscle dude get in a fight in that bar, why do Star-Lord and Zoe Saldana give a shit? Why not just let them kill each other so they can be a couple of billion credits richer?

–Are the laws of physics different in this universe, because Gamora and Star-Lord should have died (or at least suffered serious internal injuries) when exposed to the empty void of space for almost a minute... unless one of Star-Lord's alien powers is being able to hold his breath for a long time and not die in a vacuum.

–When Zoe Saldana is floating around in space, why didn't they just grab her with the space-arm things and take her back into the big space-head thing?

–How is there not room for two people in that space pod? It looks pretty roomy. 

–The slave girl at Mugatu's lair presumably saw that backstory exposition projection where it shows all those guys dying after grabbing the Infinity Stone. Was that suicide? Was she hoping to kill Mugatu? Because she fucked that up too. He survived long enough to meet Howard the Duck. Was she just really stupid?

–Why did Mugatu even spend a second explaining what the Stone did? Why didn't he just give them the money and tell them to fuck off.

–What's up with those indestructible pods on Knowhere? If an almost indestructible metal exists to build spaceships out of, wouldn't the Kree use that same metal for their spaceships? What were the pods for, anyway? Construction? 

–If Ronan was such a sadistic bastard, why didn't he snap Drax's neck instead of throwing him in that weird rice pudding lake? That was a soft move.

–At the end of Star-Lord's dramatic speech at the end of the second act, he tells his friends to "give a shit," and Drax is all on board with that. If he's a completely literal thinker, wouldn't he take a dump in his hand and try to give it to Star-Lord as a gift or something? Seems like he figure out that particular euphemism.

–Why did they all have to wear the same cool red space uniform in the third act? Just because it looks cool to see them all wearing the same thing? The lil raccoon fella even had his own uniform. Do they have lil raccoon uniforms laying around on the pirate spaceship, or did Yondu have one of his underlings sew one for him in a space sweatshop?

–What did they do with those uniforms after the battle? They weren't wearing them when they flew away from Xandar at the end. Did they keep them as souvenirs? Give them back to Yondu? Sell them for credits? Burn them in a purging fire?

–Did Drax really call Gamora a "whore"? Whoa, dude. She hasn't fucked anyone in this movie yet, not even the rogue-ish hero. Seems unfair TBH.

–When Yondu did that whistling thing with his pocket spear dealie and killed like, ten people and took down a ship, why didn't one of them just shoot him?

–Why does Groot keep revealing these new powers? So much of the movie would have been easier if he'd busted out his killing-20-people-simultaneously or creating-an-impenetrable-cocoon move sooner.

–Why would you store the orb on Xandar? Their entire military was just defeated by someone driving a large ship at the planet. Surely there must be somewhere safer than that?

–What was Chris Pratt's end plan when grabbing the Infinity Stone? He saw what it did to the girl who grabbed it at Mugatu's place. She got disintegrated and the stone remained intact. Was his plan to just kill himself and leave the stone for Ronan to pick up two seconds later? 

–Why were people in the theater I watched this in laughing at the Howard the Duck cameo? Did I miss something? Or was it that Family Guy humor where it's like, "You recognized a pop-cultural reference! Congratulate yourself by having a chuckle"?

–His mom called him "Star-Lord"? I get that she fucked an alien and had a half-alien baby, but that's weird. That's a horrible nickname for a ten-year-old.

Follow Jamie and Dave on Twitter.

Over the past week, the Ukrainian military has recaptured a number of cities across eastern Ukraine. In this dispatch, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky heads toward the MH17 crash site, as the Ukrainian military has successfully recaptured the cities surrounding it. On his way there, he visits a former separatist checkpoint and dugout, where he finds artillery the separatists used—some of which dates as far back as World War II.

Chasing Amy screencap via YouTube user Movieclips. Other images via Google Books.

I'm not a romance reader, and you probably aren't either. Most of my experience with romance novels comes from pulling them off the shelves in a coffee shop and reading excerpts out loud with my friends. Romance authors know exactly what they're doing when it comes to hair tugging and florid descriptions of the first moments of old fashioned, penis-in-vagina fucking. However, they have a serious blind spot where fisting is concerned. They don't seem to know that "fisting" means putting your whole hand in someone's vagina or butt.

The first few examples are the most common mistake: using "fist" instead of "grab." This just isn't used in modern parlance, except when someone places something pointy in their fist to make a weapon, as in, "When the assailant got close, she fisted her key, preparing to strike." Outside of clueless romance novelists, that's literally the only time people fist things other than butts and vaginas anymore, and it's still pretty rare and weird.

Romance authors tend to use "fist" during sex scenes, so they seem to have the idea in their heads that "fist" is a sexy word. Men do a lot of relatively implicit "fisting" of women's hair or the fabric of their blouses and skirts, so in these cases they mean "grasp." Sometimes people just "fist," or a character will "fist her fingers." 

Here are a few other ways to say "grasp," thanks to the good folks at Thesaurus.com who did not include fist as a possible synonym.

• clutch
• grip
• seize
• snag
• glom
• grapple
• catch hold of
• get one's hands on
• take hold of

Those are the tame examples. It gets weirder.

You might think this is just some sort of anachronistic 1950s slang. I took the liberty of looking into this possibility. It's not mid-century slang, but fist has meant a lot of things over the centuries. In Shakespeare's Henry IV part 2, a character says, "And I but fist him once, and ’a come but within my vice,' " which wasn't anywhere near as good as the line from Tennyson's 1876 play Harold: "The Boy would fist me hard." Tennyson was dirty as hell.

OK, so maybe very authentic characters in a period romance might use the word this way. But most 21st century romance novels have contemporary settings, and the writers still throw in the fisting in this way, as though they learned it from old bodice rippers. 

This is probably because a lot of writers of romance don't watch much porn.

The porn vs. romance debate is one of those big, heady grad student problems. Evidence suggests there's a range of readers, some of whom dig porn—some of whom, it should be noted, want actual fisting in their romance novels, and get it—but most of whom just aren't interested since they get the majority of their jollies from the written word. It seems plausible that they don't know that "insertion of the whole hand" is even a thing.  

What's funniest is when the author genuinely has no idea what it even means to make a fist, let alone stick it in someone. Sometimes they just seem to think it's a powerful-sounding word and throw it in for no apparent reason.

How does one's heart just fist? I looked the term up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and this just doesn't work in any way. Fist isn't exactly an SAT word, but it still seems to trip people up from time to time.

The above author, Chris Marie Green, is sometimes a writer of romance, but Break of Dawn is more of a Twilight type of book. If you'll forgive me for venturing outside of romance completely, you'll get to enjoy the moment this fantasy writer has a character fist her own eye sockets:

Overwhelmingly though, only romance authors use the term in this way, which is what fascinates me. I'm not saying that romance novels are dumb or worthless. The idea that romance novels are for stupid people is bullshit. Stupid people don't read romance novels. They read nothing.

Still, most romance novels are formulaic, making sure the reader gets the exact fantasy or fetish they're after. I'm not being cynical about this phenomenon. The publishers are very open about it. Here's an excerpt from the very specific guidelines for submitting your manuscript to the Harlequin "Blaze" series of novels. I wish Hollywood anticipated the whims of its audience this precisely:

A Blaze heroine is usually between 25 and 33. She knows what she wants, and isn't afraid to go and get it. She's confident and has a good idea of who she is. She doesn't need a man to fulfill her, but she'll happily take advantage of the situation if the right guy comes along.

Romance readers can really be steered wrong, though. If you're anything like a "Blaze" protagonist, who "knows what she wants, and isn't afraid to go and get it," you might want the experience described in the above passage. You might cry out, just before the big moment, that you want to have your thighs "fisted apart."

Unless you're having sex with another romance reader, that'll get you a lot more than you bargained for. 

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

The Humongous Fungus Among Us Issue was primarily sponsored by two competing children's whiskey brands. The other one was Country Recess.

A gold buyer in La Pampa displays a recently purchased flake of pure gold extracted from the mines. All photos by the author

Peru has the second-largest amount of rain forest in the world, but swaths of it are rapidly disappearing. Illegal gold mining—farmers digging up ore and selling it on the black market, so that it may eventually end up wrapped around your fiancée’s finger—is one major cause. According to former environmental minister Antonio Brack Egg, gold mining has devastated nearly 370,000 acres of the Peruvian Amazon. That’s an elevenfold increase since 2000. Because of the devastation, criminality, and profits that have risen in tandem with the illicit trade, some analysts have started calling gold South America’s “new cocaine.”

This April, during a turbulent thunderstorm, I arrived in the city of Puerto Maldonado, a hub of the industry located in the southwestern Amazon jungle. With no taxis in sight, I asked a woman selling snacks outside the airport for directions. She pointed east, toward the city. I began the soggy trek along a jungle road, my feet sinking in mud.

Within half an hour, I began to see streets filled with people and shuttered businesses, storefronts draped with signs reading: “Viva El Paro,” or “Long Live the Strike.”

Because of the environmental devastation (and international pressure to stop it), the Peruvian government has tried a variety of approaches to put an end to illegal mining. On March 25, a month before my visit, the government began reducing gasoline supplies to the region—depriving the miners of fuel for running the pumps and excavators they use to extract small bits of gold from the ground. In response, miners blocked traffic on the Interoceanic Highway for weeks, staged hunger strikes, and marched through the streets of Puerto Maldonado and nearby Mazuco. One miner died, and 50 were injured in clashes with police.

Now, just before my arrival in town, the government had declared that they were going to officially end all mining in the region—by military means or otherwise. But the 30,000 gold miners in Madre de Dios are some of the poorest people in Peru, and mining is their only source of income. They weren’t going to stop digging for gold without a fight. That’s what I was here to see.

A hunger-strike protester in Puerto Maldonado

In the city’s center plaza, I met Antonio Fernandini, an anthropologist who has been living in Madre de Dios for 22 years. Squeezing through a small metal door, we entered a restaurant that was serving coffee in secrecy, the scene reminiscent of a speakeasy. (All businesses were banned by the illegal miner’s union from operating during the strike.) Smoke crawled through the room while groups of old men hunkered down at small tables, sipping their steaming drinks, playing cards.

Antonio has been working hand in hand with both indigenous groups and miners in the region. He began to explain exactly why people were so upset about the government’s decision to cut off the region’s gas supply.

“Every day, ten to 20 trucks carrying 5,000 gallons of gasoline are used by illegal miners,” he said. “The miners need the gasoline to operate their machinery.”

Paco, a man at the table to my left who runs a local restaurant called Amazónica, said the strikes have been hurting business for everyone in Puerto Maldonado. Nonetheless, he sympathizes with the miners.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking,” he said. “Why attack gold miners? Why not focus their energy on cocaine producers in the Ayacucho region? That’s the real problem in Peru.”

But some analysts think illegal gold may be more important—and more dangerous—than cocaine.

Since illegal gold mining intensified 13 years ago, miners have not only razed the rain forest—they’ve also released 30 tons of mercury into the country’s rivers and lakes, according to the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project.

Luisa Ríos Romero, who works for the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, an NGO, says the mercury, a highly potent toxin, is contaminating the local fish and entering the food chain.

“The mercury is detrimental to local wildlife and, more important, the miners and their families living near the mines,” she said. “Most of the people here suffer from mercury poisoning.”

An aerial view of the Tambopata reserve

Just before dawn the next day, I waited near the market with a few others until a local driver had enough passengers to fill his car. The taxi took us an hour outside the city on the Interoceanic Highway, to an area known as La Pampa, part of a nationally protected reserve called Tambopata. But the Tambopata National Reserve had been invaded. Stretched alongside the road, a small shantytown had sprung up at the entrance to the mines. The town bustled with motorbikes and street vendors; wood shacks draped in blue and black tarps lined the dirt streets. Small markets, mechanics, pharmacies, and brothels were among the many places of business.

On a side street tucked behind a woman selling corn juice, I met Abel Quisper, 23, a laborer at the mines. He agreed to take me into the jungle where he worked. I gripped the seat of his motorcycle, and we ripped through a narrow dirt trail surrounded by lush trees. Shouting over his shoulder, he said we needed to move fast, because there were often thieves along this trail waiting to rob miners of their gold.

As the pathway came to an end we exited the jungle. For miles, mines stretched out, undulating waves of dirt forming a bleak desert landscape. We scrambled over dunes and scurried farther into the camp where Abel works. He told me he’d been in the mines for a little more than a year and works 24-hour shifts with a team of nine others, making 100 soles—$35—a shift.

“It’s hard work,” he said. “Most days I am tired and hungry, but I feel lucky to have money for my family.” Abel migrated from Cuzco with his wife and daughter. Like many miners here, he cited the worldwide surge in gold prices—more than 300 percent in the past decade—as a factor that drew him in search of the gold buried beneath the forest.

We parked the bike next to a dilapidated shack that he and the others stay in. I was greeted with gringo jokes from the other miners, who chuckled while eating a meal of rice and potatoes. With mosquitoes swarming around us, we moved over to a swamp, where Abel began to work. He wore no protective equipment, and sweat slickened his face. Abel jumped onto a large, floating machine that sucked dirt from the bottom of a vast, water-filled hole in the earth. I followed close behind.

“In Cuzco there were no jobs,” he said, screaming over the sound of the roaring engine. “I didn’t have a chance to go to school because I was working at a very young age to help support my parents. This is the only work there is.”

Abel Quisper, 23, a miner in La Pampa

Eventually we returned to shore, and I flagged down a motorcycle heading back into town. We breezed along the narrow trail to the shanties. The brothels that lined the road had become busier, with young girls sitting outside talking to men. I paced around for a minute before walking into a colorful shack draped in Christmas lights.

Every year thousands of girls under the age of 18 are lured into child-prostitution rings operating in the area. They are brought from all over the country to brothels such as this one, which have sprung up in the mining towns to service the workers.

Inside, men swigged beer while young women flitted about. The stench of sweat fell over me like a wet blanket, almost unbearable. Standing at the bar, a young woman named Mariana approached me with a smile. I asked her how old she was, and she said she was 18. “Really?” I asked. “No,” she said. “I’m 15.” She was from Puno and had been working in La Pampa for a few months.

“My family thinks I am living with a friend, working at a restaurant,” she said. “My father would die if he found out what I was doing.”

Behind the bar, a tapestry had been draped over a door. As I passed through the entrance, a makeshift dormitory became visible. About 20 small bedrooms were divided by blue plastic tarps, the rooms only big enough to fit a small bed and plastic lawn chair. These are the girls’ bedrooms and offices, where they take clients to have sex. Abruptly, I left the brothel. I took a taxi back to Puerto Maldonado, the red sun setting on the devastated horizon.

Young prostitutes sit inside a nightclub in La Pampa.

On April 29 the military entered La Pampa. As I flew over the region in a government helicopter, the environmental destruction was clear to see. The area looked like a desert carved out of the jungle. With few trees left standing, this vast void is one of thousands being chiseled away today in the Amazon.

On the ground, the sound of exploding machinery assaulted the ears. Smoke rose from the disassembled pumps, and the earth shook as people scattered. They said they had seen this coming but were enraged nonetheless.

“We are not criminals; we are workers,” a man named Humberto Ugarte screamed. “We are not drug traffickers. We are hardworking Peruvians. We are families.”

Ugarte, a tattered old man, was joined by a large group of people shouting at officers, who were dismantling shacks and piling up machinery to bomb.

“What will we do now?” Ugarte yelled at the crowd. “We need to work. We are going to starve.”

A Special Forces police officer stands and observes the destruction from the raid.

A pile of motors and equipment is ignited in the makeshift town known as Mega 13, a sector of La Pampa.

Kitchener is a moderately sized town in southern Ontario. The few things it's known for are brutal 80s band Helix, the world's second largest Oktoberfest parade, and lonely old men.

These photos are of Civic Square, a neo-Nazi concert I went to, filth, and Olympic boxer Chris Johnson. Huh.

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

It was the 20th anniversary of the Collingwood Elvis Festival—the largest Elvis festival ever—and over 100 Elvis tribute artists came in from around the world. Not in Memphis, but cottage country, Ontario, about an hour-and-a-half outside Toronto.

“We’re here to keep his memory alive,” they say, or, “if Elvis were here today he’d be overwhelmed.” And perhaps they’re right, but maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s just a bunch of people, and it’s summer, and the sun’s out, and the main street of a town of 20,000 is closed off, and there are hot dogs too.

I arrive just after 10 in the morning.

The first thing I see after the turn-off is a Dairy Queen, whose big white board reads, “Welcome all Elvises!”

“I’m not Elvis,” a man offers to me. “I’m not going to be him, nobody is going to be him.” And yet for 16 years, Bruno Nesci has been paying tribute to the King, singing and dancing in places as far away as China, doing something that he knows will never pay the bills. “I do it for the love of Elvis,” he says. Nearby a slightly shorter, jumpsuit-era Elvis adds, “It’s about feeling you’re him, not thinking you’re him.”

“People just have to experience it,” says a man from Pennsylvania, not even pretending to be Elvis. “I’ve been to Graceland nine times, I was born 50 miles from his last performance.”

For ten hours the main stage belonged to Elvises of all kinds—Mexican, Australian, German, Canadian—each one taking his (or her) turn; each one, at the end of their song, being offered a single, red, perhaps not-so-genuine rose. Hank Poole, dressed Vegas-era Elvis, doesn’t even crack a smile. “When I am on stage singing Elvis songs it comes from deep within my soul,” his bio reads, “I am 100% available for photographs anytime and I can’t wait to meet you.” He is eight years old.

Beyond the stage stretches an ocean of old people, six small-town city blocks deep. There are camcorders, Tilley hats, polite applause, and comfortable shoes. Each one sits in his or her own folding chair, brought in from home, and left there, to save their place, Thursday through Sunday. But between the stage and the first set of seats is an area just big enough for a little bit of dancing, followed by several rows worth of wheelchairs and the people in them. They’re out in strong numbers, and enjoying themselves.

Through the sidewalk crowd, making his way slowly moves one man, confident and radiant, pausing for photos. “Who are you?” I ask him feeling a little weirdly starstruck. “Past champion,” he says, “past multiple champion,” and it turns out it’s true (Non-Professional Division, Early Years Elvis). He’s about 65, good and fit, with uncomfortably wonderful teeth.

“I could tell you all the shit that they say,” he says, “that Elvis was the King, that his music will never die, and all that crap. But I'll tell you why I do this: I do it for the women.”

“What kind of women do you get?”

“Quite often much younger than I am—and I don’t chase women.” To me, dressing up like Elvis and pretending to be Elvis, and going up on stage in Collingwood and singing an Elvis song sounds like, if nothing else, chasing women, especially if that’s how you get women—but I keep it to myself. Also, there were no younger women.

“How did you get women pre-Elvis?” I ask. The answer is something about “mobile disc jockey” and “regional accounts manager,” but it’s hard to make out amidst all the smiling and talking. There isn’t even room to stand.

“Certain frequencies,” he says. “It’ll hit women with these certain frequencies. Elvis, his voice, one time I made a woman cum with a certain frequency.” He explains and then shows where the eeee and the oooo sounds come from, how he learned how to sound like Elvis from a simple recording of his speaking—“never from his singing”—and then makes clear yet again that he writes not only all of his own jokes, but his material as well.

He leaves with a wink and presumably much better things to do, and it feels like the time to head off to the Loblaws in search of some food and a bit of normalcy. Once inside, I run into two Elvises wandering together through the produce section. I stop three women my mother’s age and tell them about pick-up artist Elvis. “Is that sexy?” Would you sleep with one of those guys?” They laugh off the question—but how can it be denied? The voice, those hips, the curl of the lip, the rock n’ roll, the King. And yet, they feel what they’re feeling because they were there—they lived it. For everyone else, it’s hard to know just what’s being kept alive.

Security at the event is lax, and a police officer gives me a quizzical look. “It’s pretty tame.” A man sweeping the street, however, remembers one time when one Elvis got into a fight with two other Elvises. “They threw him in the tank and let him dry out,” he notes casually, “the next morning he got to his show.” The man wears his work gloves, a reflective orange safety vest, and fake Elvis glasses and sideburns.

A little while later, everything stops as Priscilla Presley takes to the stage, and I can’t help but feel a kind of awe and expectation. It’s her first time at any Elvis fest apparently (she’s uncomfortable seeing the Elvises a city counsellor tells me) and she ends up staying for only about five minutes. Demure, soft-spoken, and quite lovely at almost 70, she tells a story about how Elvis, as a GI stationed over in Germany, showed her a scrapbook of photos his fans had sent in of themselves, and how he’d felt his fans were the greatest in the world. Then she mentions the book about Elvis that she’s selling, says thank you and goodbye, and gets into a big black Chevy Suburban and is escorted off the grounds by two guys on ATVs. Later she would attend a $100 cocktail reception, hosted by the mayor.

In addition to the free-for-all street party, little private Elvis shows are held all over town. At The Olde Town Terrace Restaurant, about five doors down from the main stage, $38 gets you dinner, a show, and something called “feel,” tax included. It’s poorly lit inside and Hawaii Elvis sings what is, in fact, pretty pleasant dinner karaoke, while everyone else focuses in, head down, on their food.

At the end of the long day, just outside of whatever official areas, concert-years Elvis appears to be walking to his car, perfectly coiffed, full jumpsuit, knapsack in hand. Every two steps, though, he’s stopped for a hug, a signature (they sign their own names, not Elvis’) or a photo, all of which he appears almost too happy to give. He takes his time—patient, gentle, genuine, and sincere.

“It really brings back memories,” a woman says, looking over. “We think we’re 16. It’s very sexual. I’m going to go home and dance.”

“My grandma wanted to come,” says a guy maybe 30, “not much to do in Midland.”

And it begins to make sense.

“I wish there was a Neil Young.”

@davidheti

Sean Hannity (left) and Yousef Munayyer (right) on Hannity's Fox News show

On the 24th of July, an evil terrorist sympathiser appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show to try and justify the horror tactics perpetrated by the Palestinian people upon the state of Israel. At least, that seemed to be the perception Hannity was trying to push, sitting in front of a large screen bearing the words "sympathy for the terrorists", pointing fingers at interviewee Yousef Munayyer and not allowing him to get a word in.

Russell Brand picked up on this exchange in a segment of his Trews YouTube series, dissecting Hannity's "interview" technique as little more than shouting leading questions at Yousef, which he then didn't permit his guest to answer. Brand also alleged that Hannity uses this tactic to convey a preconceived narrative of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, as he'd like his viewers to believe it. This prompted a response from Hannity, then a counter-response from Brand; and the latest internet spat was born.

Yousef – a Palestinian-American political analyst, writer and executive director of The Jerusalem Fund's educational programme, The Palestine Centre – seemed like a calm, fairly reasonable guy, and it was a shame we were prevented from hearing what he had to say. So in an effort to right that wrong, I decided to track him down and let him answer the questions Hannity wouldn't. [This is an abridged version of the interview with Munayyer; to read the full transcript click here].

VICE: Hi Yousef. So did Sean Hannity’s people reach out to you, or did you approach them to be on his show?
Yousef Munayyer: No, they reached out. So that was last week, and then of course the Russell Brand thing was totally unexpected. I mean, I’ll be totally honest with you – the last thing I was thinking about in the last three to four weeks, when there were bombs dropping all over Gaza, was Russell Brand.

I'll get to Brand in a bit, but first I wanted to ask you about something Brand actually pondered on his segment. You weren’t in the studio with Hannity, but did you have access to a monitor? Could you see him aggressively jabbing his finger at you?
No. You’re sitting in a room, staring at the black box where the camera is. The monitor wasn't available, so I couldn't see anything that was going on. But I could hear, obviously. His tone was quite aggressive on the earpiece. I didn’t see him jabbing his finger at me, but it was very clear that he was acting in an aggressive way; I didn’t need to see it to understand that.

So you couldn’t see the graphics behind Hannity that read “Sympathy for the Terrorists” and showed two men in balaclavas – one holding a bazooka and the other an AK-47?
No [laughs]. No, I couldn’t see that, and I have to say I’m not surprised, because it’s Fox News, and they’re not interested in any serious journalism.

Do you think, generally speaking, Americans are misinformed about what’s going on between the Israelis and Palestinians? And, if so, do you think that’s because of the American media coverage?
Yes, I do think Americans in general are misinformed about this issue. But I think it’s about a couple of things. On a lot of foreign affairs issues, Americans are misinformed. You know, we were at war with Iraq for almost a decade, and if you asked Americans to find Iraq on a map, they probably could not. So that’s part of it.

But the other part of it is that the media coverage of this [Palestinian-Israeli] issue – when it is, in fact, covered – is covered in a fairly unfair and biased way. It has created this perception that the Israelis are somehow the underdogs and the Palestinians are somehow the aggressors, when really the entire world recognises that Israel, in fact, occupies Palestine, not the other way around. There is no Palestinian military occupation of Israeli territory.

A clip from Hannity's shouty interview

Yeah. I wanted to give you the chance to answer the question that Hannity put to you but wouldn't let you answer. I'm paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of: If you're Israel and thousands of rockets are fired into your neighbourhood and kids are kidnapped and a student is killed, what do you think the proper proportionate response should be?
I began to answer his question and said, “There is a military occupation here.” On the programme, I said that if I were in Israel’s place I would end the military occupation of Palestinian territory, and that if you deal with legitimate grievances of Palestinians on the ground then they’re not likely to continue fighting against you.

That’s not rocket science. If you deny people their rights, they are going to resist. The form that resistance takes is not something you can always control; it’s not something that’s going to be agreed upon by everybody. But it’s only human nature to resist oppression. And, obviously, the highly decontextualised question that he was presenting was a question that was not presented to actually get information or educate his viewers, but to try to put me in a defensive position and then follow it up with more attacks.

Okay. Another question, which he asked you 14 times but wouldn’t allow you to get a word in in response, is: “Is Hamas a terrorist organisation?”
I think that Hamas is a resistance movement that has used tactics that we all agree are terror tactics. But they’re not only a terrorist organisation; they’re a resistance movement, they’re a political organisation, they’re a social services organisation, and I don’t agree with the use of the word “terrorism” to just hijack conversations, because that’s the way it’s been used.

If you talk about the legitimate grievances of people that have nothing to do with terrorism, and then you’re asked to defend people who are also speaking about the legitimate grievances of these people – but who may be using illegitimate tactics in their aims – then somehow if you do that it’s as if the grievances themselves are not legitimate, and that’s where I feel like the conversation does not move forward. It becomes really unhelpful at that point. It’s used as a smear tactic. It’s used to silence discussion, not advance discussion about what we should be talking about. So again, on his show I gave him an answer and he didn’t like the answer that I gave him.

Sean Hannity sitting in front of some pretty neutral graphics (Screen grab via)

Hannity also said that you're “making a rationalisation for rockets and kidnapping and murder and blaming the victims”, in a way that implied Israel is the victim. Was he right?
There's a difference between explaining why things happen and saying that they’re morally justified, and I think people really don’t understand the difference between these things. You can say, “Well, this is why a murder happened.” But that doesn't mean you’re morally condoning it. Unless you understand that people make decisions because of interests and choices and preferences, you’re never going to be able to understand how to affect their behaviour.

And the reason that people in the Gaza strip are using rockets: there's a reason for that. I’m not justifying it on a moral level – I think there are plenty of things that, on a moral level, are abhorrent on all sides – but that doesn’t mean that there’re no reasons why they happen.

That was the next question he had: “Are you showing sympathy to terrorists?”
I don’t think I was showing sympathy to terrorists, no. I think that what I was trying to make clear from the very beginning, and in fact what I was trying to explain on his show, was that this is not just about Hamas. There are 1.8 million people that live in the Gaza strip. The siege that affects the people there does not discriminate between members who are carrying out acts of terrorism or children.

There was a child whose mother was nine months pregnant who was killed in these bombings, OK? That child was delivered in an emergency operation and ended up dying four days later. They were not even born yet before they were condemned to death. This is not about terrorism. This is about people getting blown to pieces, who have nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever.

One more question that Hannity put to you, yet wouldn't let you answer: “What would a proportionate response from Israel be” for the attacks by Hamas?
First of all, the presumption in that question is that a response is justified. But for a response to be justified, the actions could not have been provoked. The reality of this situation is that Israel have provoked this situation. So there’s no basis in talking about a “justified” response. What should be done – the right thing that should be done – is that the underlying causes which are provoking the resistance should be ended. That is the just thing to do here; the moral thing to do.

How did you feel when you saw Russell Brand’s response to your appearance on Hannity?
I mean, I absolutely was not expecting this. [But once I] saw the clip that he put together – you know, I think that him doing that had made people who had, first of all, not seen the Fox News interview, see that interview, but also expose the issue to a much wider audience.

Russell Brand's Trews segment discussing the Hannity interview

Yeah, his Trews segment dissecting your Hannity appearance has been viewed 2.6 million times now. Do you feel the attention he’s brought to it has changed anything?
The Fox News audience is largely right wing, and in the aftermath of that interview with Sean Hannity, the [amount of ] hate mail I [received was] huge, and they were largely Islamophobic and racist in nature, and had nothing to do with my argument or my perspective at all. But once the Russell Brand thing happened I got a deluge of positive comments and emails that far outweighed anything negative I'd seen. What that told me was that this clip that Brand had put together – it went much further than the Fox News audience. It reached people who were not already convinced on this issue – as many people in the Fox News audience might be – who weren't regularly bombarded with the kind of racist Islamophobic rants you hear on Fox News all the time.

So the effect that Russell Brand had was a very, very significant one, and it’s one I appreciate. And, you know, he obviously brings a unique and entertaining spin to this entire issue, and I think that a lot of the points he makes are very accurate. I probably wouldn't have made them the same way or with the same language, but because of who he is and what he does, he was able to convey some important points to audiences that maybe aren't going to be interested in watching cable news, so I think that was great. That was appreciated.

Anything else you want to add?
I would just add one last point, if I could, on this issue. Fox News: I think they have their slant – it’s very clear to everyone where they come from editorially – but not everybody on Fox News is Sean Hannity, and even within Fox News there are journalists who are trying to do a far more professional job in covering this issue. They even have journalists on the ground in the Gaza strip who are risking their lives to bring the scenes and images and the reporting of what’s going on there to American viewers, and I think Hannity's conduct was really disrespectful, even to his own colleagues, if he thinks what he is doing is journalism. Because there are people who are actually trying to do journalism and they’re not hiding behind their microphones, they’re not hiding behind their mute buttons; they’re actually trying to get this information – the same information that he’s trying to prevent his viewers from seeing – they’re actually trying to get this information out to those viewers. I think that what he did was very disrespectful to all people who are trying to do journalism in a decent way.

This is an abridged version of the interview with Munayyer; to read the full transcript click here.

@michaelgrothaus

More on the Palestinian-Gaza conflict:

British Pro-Palestine Activists Are Sitting On the Roof of a Staffordshire Drone Factory

Furious Pro-Palestine Campaigners Are Attacking Jews All Over the UK

Racists Are Rampaging Through Israel

Luke-Kristopher Davis

Civilian to porn star; it’s a route most travel via casting couches and cum shots. However, for Luke-Kristopher Davis – a 21-year-old physics student at Swansea University – everything happened the fairytale way: while spending a year in Spain, he was whisked off his feet by director Erika Lust, who cast him in two of her films.

Luke-Kristopher’s now back in the UK, but besides his bio on Erika’s site – which says he “dances and attends university when he is not wowing us with his great smile” – I didn’t know much about him or his accidental foray into porn, so I gave him a call to talk it over.

VICE: Hi Luke-Kristopher. So how did all of this happen for you?
Luke-Kristopher Davis: I was in Barcelona on a night out with some friends, and this woman came over and asked me if I was a model or an actor. I said I was just a student. Then she asked me to do a porn film. 

Did she say what she found so alluring about you?
Yeah, yeah. Well, she thought I’d done modelling. She said, “Oh, you’re very good looking. Are you a model or an actor?” I do actually get it absolutely everywhere I go [laughs].

Really?
Yeah. Right now I work in a bar, and all my customers ask me. They come up to me and take pictures. It’s quite funny.

What went through your mind when she suggested it?
I wasn’t really shocked, to be honest. I just saw it as an opportunity to have a little – you know, fun [laughs]. I thought about it rationally: 'Would this be worth it?' I had to assess the risk and if it was safe. She described her company and it didn’t sound like a back alley thing. It’s very high quality. And it’s a feminist company, so I was impressed by that.

Had you ever done anything like this before?
Yeah, actually – I’ve done a bit of stripping. A woman once asked if I could strip for her friend’s hen do. I think they asked quite jokingly, but I ended up doing it and I’ve done a few more since. That was also quite fun.

Had you thought about being in porn before being approached by Erika?
Of course, it’s crossed every man’s mind. Every male – or at least 90 percent of males who watch porn – imagine being a porn star and what kind of life they’d have. The cliché life. So it had crossed my mind, but never seriously. If I was going to be in porn I’d never want to be in mainstream stuff like, you know, James Deen. I like the idea of the high quality cinema porn, that’s HD, that’s erotic. It’s not just sex on camera. There’s a story there, there’s chemistry between the performers.

Can I ask how much money you were offered?
I’m actually not allowed to discuss that. I can tell you it’s more than €500 euros – that's as specific as I can get.

Okay cool. So tell me about shooting the movie. Did you feel self-conscious at all?
No, no. I’m very comfortable in my body and in myself. I think a lot of my confidence comes from my intellectual view. I believe that we’re just humans. I went into it thinking that it’s literally just a bodily act – sex – on camera. It’s not that scary, you know? Some people might have been, 'Oh my god, they’re going to see me naked.' But it’s just the human body at the end of the day, and that’s it.

Was there a plot you had to follow?
Yeah, in the sense that there’s always an idea behind [Erika’s] movies. So in this one, Before the Guests Arrive, the idea is that there’s a couple who are hosting a dinner party and they have sex before the guests arrive. That’s the idea, and then there’s a script and lines I had to say. Although it’s not totally scripted. A lot of it is improvisation and the chemistry between the two performers.

Did you get direction for the actual sex?
There was. Again, there’s an idea – like, "Go in this position" – and then it’s up to the performers to make that natural and add different facial expressions for the camera. And then you do it over again. It’s very different from normal sex in that it’s directed, but not completely directed.

Were you imagining porn you'd watched before while you were doing it?
No, no, no. I’m not the biggest porn watcher. To be honest, I just became that character. The actress who was playing my wife, I just imagined she was my wife and I just got on the couch and literally just acted.

So you didn’t use any moves you’d picked up from watching porn?
I’ve become [laughs], maybe, a natural? The key is to not fake it and go with your natural body movement and do what you’d normally do in that situation. Any superficiality would get picked up by the director. So I just did what felt very natural.

Were you pleased when you watched it back?
They showed me a trailer as soon as it came out, and I didn’t feel awkward watching it. I thought I did alright. I thought I did the job well.

What have girls thought of you being a porn star?
I don’t tell girls straight away. I don’t go, “Hi, my name’s Luke, I’m in a porno.” Some girls actually feel quite intimidated. I think a lot of girls find me quite intimidating anyway, because I’m confident and physically quite intimidating.

What did they think about it when you went back to your bar job?
They don’t mind, you know. They know I’m a genuine guy. It’s just something that happened. They obviously find it surprising or shocking, but they don’t look down on it. Some people say I’m crazy.

Are you going to keep doing this alongside your studies?
Maybe. I mean, now I’m just concentrating on my studies and physics and stuff. But I might go back to Barcelona or anywhere where I might be able to do it again.

Would you do any porn in the UK?
Hmm. It depends what type of porn it is. The thing with Barcelona is that it was a very unique company. If someone approached me and it was a very well made film, or… you know, I don’t want to do anything amateur. I prefer good films.

Any other career ambitions?
I’ve been considering working as an actor, because I’m very confident on camera and I have some skills in acting, so maybe that. Aside from that, I’ll probably end up in academia or a researcher or in science, but I’ll always be open to other possibilities. I’m a very ambitious person so I’ll try to do well in whatever I go into.

Well, best of luck in whatever it is you choose. Cheers, Luke-Kristopher.

@hannahrosewens

More porn:

My Mum and I Make Porn Together

I Went to Porn School in Leicester and It Was a Disaster

I Tattooed Porn Websites On My Face So My Kids Wouldn't Starve

As public opinion regarding marijuana continues to rapidly evolve, nothing in the pop culture realm reflects this wonderful New Weed Order better than the grassroots success of DIY web series High Maintenance, which follows the adventures of an unnamed pot delivery guy as he pedals his way through New York City.

The show's first “cycle” of shorts was created and produced wholly independently by IRL cannabis couple Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, but now Vimeo has announced plans to fund a new round of episodes, marking the company’s first foray into original programming, and leaving Blichfeld and Sinclair in the admittedly enviable position of trying to satisfy everyone else's suddenly sky-high expectations. Not that you need to be high to appreciate this much buzzed-about tale of weed culture in the waning days of pot prohibition.

“We're selling characters, not cannabis.” Sinclair, who also plays The Guy, explains. “The temptation is always to write about the pot deal, and usually I'm the one who's trying to bring that in, but Katja has been very good about reminding us both that our whole weed thing is that it's not supposed to be a big deal. It's about people, and their lives, and why they use weed."

Married on New Year's Eve 2010, Blichfeld and Sinclair began writing the first episode of High Maintenance six months later (it premiered in 2013). Originally, they gave The Guy an elaborate backstory about failing his Ph.D thesis in psychopharmacology and dead-ending into black market marijuana, but it felt false and intrusive. Instead, over the course of 13 episodes (so far), we've learned precious little of The Guy's particulars. We don't know where or how he lives, who he works for, how he re-ups his supply, how he got the job, or anything about his origins, love life, interests, or friends.

Set free from all that, he's our transparent eyeball, providing a unique portal into the lives of his customers. Because while the Chinese food delivery guy never makes it past your front door, the weed delivery guy must be let all the way into your apartment. And so, through The Guy's often red eyes, we encounter a cross-section of New York’s various pot smokers that rings so true I often prescribe myself, from my adopted home of California, two or three episodes as a first-line treatment against homesickness.

VICE: Now that you've signed this deal with Vimeo, what does the future of High Maintenance look like?
Katja Blichfeld: Vimeo is giving us funding for at least the next six episodes, and the only condition, really, is that we need to produce them and release them by the end of the year. So our plan is to shoot in the summer, and release episodes in the fall. In the meantime, it's like we're sort of artists in residence here. Right now we're just hanging out in their office writing. And availing ourselves of the snacks that are everywhere.
Ben Sinclair: Yeah, there's a shitload of snacks. It's actually a big problem. I'm supposed to be bicycling around the city in this fictional world, and in reality I've got some handles on my body. You can really grab me from the side.

Is that a faster pace than you're used to? Writing, not cycling.
Yeah, it is. But to stretch the amount of money we have to work with as far as possible, we've got to shoot these six episodes pretty much back-to-back. It's been interesting to balance so many characters at once. I think some of the stories will definitely have a bit more overlap because of that. It might be a little more Altman-esque.
Blichfeld: This is also the first time we're actually charging people to watch the episodes, and I think we're both eager to see how it's received in that way. After Vimeo recoups their costs, we get 90 cents out of every dollar that we sell. Which for an artist is kind of unheard of in the distribution world. Really, we just want to keep doing what we've been doing. And if we are able to make any money at all off of this, then we can keep going. But if not, I don't know how many more episodes we'll be making. We've got to pay the bills.

I love the way you portray marijuana users—their diversity and complexity—without falling back on any tired, old stereotypes. Do you ever consider marijuana itself a sort of character on the show?
It's funny that you ask that, because on the way here we were trying to brainstorm some ideas for stories, and that was part of our discussion: how to regard weed and its usage in this new cycle of episodes. I think it's more on our minds now than it used to be. In the past we'd start with the characters and try to work in a way that they would use weed, or the reason they'd have it in their lives.
Sinclair: Yeah, typically we put in the interaction with The Guy last when we create our stories. The whole thing we feel about pot is that it just is. But people's reactions to pot are varied.
Blichfeld: We personally are both regular marijuana users, and I think the way we portray it is pretty much reflective of our feelings about it. And that includes times where we feel like maybe we're smoking too much, and not just for financial reasons. Perhaps we're smoking to avoid dealing with personal issues, or some adult responsibilities that we're not looking forward to having to face. But ultimately we use it as medicine, to relieve stress, and to enhance our creativity.
Sinclair: When I'm editing, I smoke—a lot. Because I'm stuck there at my computer for days on end, and weed helps me get into a flow zone where that time just disappears. And I can just let it go. For some people, I know pot can be distracting, but for me it actually increases my focus. Getting started can be tough when you're stoned, but once you're there, it's really fun to move clips around and explore the possibilities. I stop judging myself so much, and start to just play.

Would a show like this be possible even five years ago, given how rapidly society's view of marijuana has been evolving lately?
If we had the idea five years ago for a pot show that's not about pot, yeah, it could have existed, and maybe some people would have liked it. But I do think that because of the times we're living in now, more people like it. So we really represent the intersection of where web series are going and where weed is going. We just kind of hit that point where the two lines meet.

Blichfeld: Also, five years ago a lot fewer people would have been comfortable publicly saying, “Hey, I love this show about a weed delivery guy.” I don't even know if our parents would have been as openly proud of what we're doing. But now Ben's dad has actually been on the show. In the "Qasim" episode he plays the guy in Arizona who's channeling the alien.
Sinclair: And our niece was in the “Matilda” episode. She goes to this school in Arizona for gifted children, and they've all seen it. The school is really proud of it. So that definitely shows the big effect legalization in some states is having on our audience and the culture at large.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with friends and family?
The first 13 episodes were built on friendship and favors, essentially.The advantages of that are many. All of our shoots feel like a party, and we definitely have been very conscious of wanting to keep that going. That being said, the disadvantages are that we happened to get a multitude of press this past year, and the show became a bigger deal than anyone ever anticipated. Which adds an element of there being more at stake, and people get a little nervous because of that. So when you're working with friends, with that added pressure, it can sometimes get confusing emotionally between the needs of the friendship and those of the show.
Blichfeld: Still, the biggest advantage is that we know these actors as people, so we're able to write for them. Writing is always better when you know the voice of the person saying the words. Often we're literally in our friends' apartments, shooting with them, and I think that really contributes to the feel of the show in an important way. We didn't start with a big group of people doing this. The first few episodes we shot there were maybe six people in the room, but as things grew, the people we worked with would bring other talented people into the mix, and now all those people have become our friends.

Ben, do you ever get recognized in New York? Do people hit you up for weed?
Sinclair: No, they don't. But sometimes I'll be biking and somebody will ride up next to me, with a bag on, and say, “Hey, I love the show.” And I'll ask, “Are you doing it right now?”And they'll say, “Oh yeah!” That's happened to me at least half a dozen times.
Blichfeld: Or recently we were having weed delivered at a friend's place, and the delivery woman walked in and saw Ben and her head just short-circuited. She couldn't believe it.

Follow David Bienenstock on Twitter

Photos by Daniel Ross

The Homeboy Industries building in downtown Los Angeles is a many-roomed rabbit warren: a bakery, a shop, rooms for counseling, rooms for job training, rooms for schooling, rooms for all sorts of things, all contained within the glass walls.

But the most popular room at Homebody Industries, a rehabilitation center for former gang members and inmates, isn't any of those. A surprising number of those who arrive there pass straight through to a small waiting room near the back. Past the waiting room are two farther doors, behind which you can hear the slapping sounds of tattoo-removal machines.

“Colocio, Colocio,” the guy in the waiting room's reception desk muttered, half to himself, his eyes fixed on a computer screen. “You haven’t been here for a while, have you?”

“Maybe about four years,” Luis Colocio admitted, taking a form, then a seat.

That afternoon was the fourth time I’d hung out with Luis, who had been a security guard at Homeboy for about three and a half years and a part of the organization for nearly eight. He’s easy to like. His gray-tinged hair is slicked back with Murray’s pomade. At 38 years old, he uses the kind of slick talk that would charm a grandma. He says that he keeps to himself, prefers not to open up to others—an impression quite different from the one that I have of him, which is that he’s got a touch of a car salesman about him, smooth, unflappable.

Luis Colocio

But within a minute of taking a seat in the waiting room, beads of sweat started to appear on Luis’s forehead. He mopped his face with the back of his arm then with the bottom of his T-shirt. He got up, paced the room, sat back down, got up, left the room, came back, sat down to run his arm over his brow again, then rose from his seat, again.

I had an idea of what awaited Luis. A few weeks prior, I spent some time with Troy Clarke, a certified physician’s assistant and one of about 30 tattoo removal volunteers at Homeboy. Clarke flies in once a month from New York to volunteer.

“It’s like having an elastic band whack you in the same spot about 20 times a second,” Clarke explained to me about the process of laser tattoo removal. “The girls deal with pain better than the boys. They’ve got higher pain thresholds, for obvious reasons.”

Homeboy clients are told to have any gang-affiliation tattoos removed, as well as any that might prevent them from getting a job in the future, including tattoos from the neck up or the wrist down, and any concerning a family member or loved one. There are more than 1,200 different gang tattoos in LA, Clarke explained. It can take more than a year to remove if the tattoo is a large cover-up, or if it’s in color. Most importantly, he said, the process is symbolic.

“It’s like a rebirthing. People can’t keep them if they want to move forward with their lives,” Clarke said, before listing some methods of DIY tattoo removal: "Sandpaper, acid. Sometimes they’ll burn it off, or simply just cut it off. I’ve seen it all. And who are we to judge?"

But others talk about the sense of betrayal that goes with having a gang tattoo removed. Jorja Leap is a professor of social welfare at UCLA. For the past five years, she has shadowed the progress of 300 Homeboy clients throughout their time in the program and afterwards. She explained how gang members have to construct a new identity, “literally from the air.” But that change can often come with a sense of disloyalty.

“The biggest thing is betrayal, and that’s kind of the word not spoken. It’s a tough concept to put your arms around. Some of these young men and women feel as though they’re betraying their old way of life by coming in. And I think that that often undergirds the friction: ‘Well, don’t disrespect my homies, don’t disrespect where I came from.’ And internally, there’s a sense of betrayal when they wipe out a tattoo: ‘Am I giving up that old life?’ I’ve had people say to me, ‘In my heart, I’ll always be part of my old neighborhood.’ It’s understandable. You struggle to go beyond it—these young men and young women, it’s their history. They want to let go of it, but they also feel as though they’re betraying it if they do, selling out the old person.”

One patient who has stuck with me from that day with Clarke is a young guy, no older than 26, who was there to have a melted death head removed from the bottom of his throat. He had fallen in with a gang of neo-Nazis, had gotten into drugs. His mother, a tearful, God-fearing American with a helmet of white hair, was with him for support. She told the room that he had upset the rest of his family (an upstanding bunch, she said) with the decisions that he had made, but that he was making amends for it now—now that he was three months sober and living at home again. He wanted to work in fashion merchandizing, was going to college for it. He was polite, had an almost meek demeanor, and he sat motionless throughout the treatment.

Valli Cohen, a nurse practitioner and a volunteer at Homeboy Industries, performs tattoo-removal.

Luis grew up in Boyle Heights, one of three kids who were raised by their single mother. “It was drug-infested. It was territorial, and it became more territorial in '84, '85, when crack cocaine came out. With that came the power, and the killings. And growing up and seeing my family members addicted to crack cocaine and the lifestyle they ran, I just accepted that that was what life was. We had the highest murder rate in all of LA. Then you had the police brutality and all of that.

“At the age of seven, my mom burned both my hands on a gas stove because I was playing with matches. She couldn’t be the father, but she had to give structure and discipline, and she could only do so much as a woman, always working, then coming home, then putting up with three kids who had so much energy.”

Luis's brother gave him crack cocaine to sell on the street when he turned 14. “He told me, ‘You don’t use this; you don’t mess with this. You just make money with it.’”

In an attempt to escape the drugs and crime of Boyle Heights and LA, Luis’s mother moved the family to Sacramento. “But there’s drugs in every city, so I was right back on it.”

At 17, he tried methamphetamines for the first time. Soon after, his mother threw him out. “I started living in abandoned houses. But growing up, I’d always wanted to be part of a gang. They were always respected, like gods.” He returned to LA, back to his old neighborhood, where he joined the East LA 13. “I remember getting a gun and wanting to go and kill, get acknowledged that I was part of this gang.”

After nearly losing his life in a gang fight—“one of the guys pulled a knife on me; they were centimeters from puncturing my lung”—he turned from gang life to drugs. He moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was "doing cocaine, running the streets, stealing gold chains from girls, doing whatever I could to get money.” Then he moved to Tuscon, Arizona, stole a car, got caught, and did three years in prison. When he came out, he met his wife, then fell in with another gang.

“The addiction was still with me. I was a full-blown addict. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t hold down a job. I ended up losing my wife—she left me. I was living suicidal in the sense that I would put myself in different situations, and I wished the motherfucker would pull the trigger.”

Luis, having his tattoo removed 

Luis is now married to a woman named Alisha, who is also employed at Homeboy, where they met. They live with her daughter. He rarely sees his own kids, who are now 17, 18, and 19 and live in Tucson. “I’m bitter—I want to be part of their life. Every day is a struggle like that, you know.”

Echoing Leap's theory on loyalty, Luis said that he understands why people feel disloyal by removing tattoos tied to their past. “They don’t want to let go—they just want to stay in the same environment.” But in his case, he said that there was little from before that he needed or wanted to be reminded of.

“No one’s forced to come here,” he said of Homeboy. “People have to want to come here for it to work. I sometimes go back to my old neighborhood, and they still say the same old shit, drink, do drugs—still complain about the same old things. I see those guys I was in a gang with, and I’d much rather be in a shelter than go back to that.”

Back in the waiting room, the nurse beckoned Luis into the tattoo-removal room, lit by a tall window of sunlight. He removed his T-shirt to reveal a kind of Jungle Book–esque safariscape of tigers and lions and long grass across his back. He turned around to illustrate what he wanted removed: “ELA13” written across his stomach, a remnant of his former gang. One of his friends drew the tattoo in his home when Luis was 15, but it looks clean, professionally done.

Luis, silent, white from the neck up, gripped the beam above the doctor.

“Just going to give it a test shot,” said the doctor, holding the laser to Luis’s stomach. “One, two, and…” he let rip with the laser, sounding like a long rat-a-tat blast of firecrackers exploding.

It took less than two minutes for the doctor to pass the laser over the tattoo. One of the nurses watching from the side murmured in awe, as though watching an endangered species give birth: “He does not move. He does not complain." Then it was over, and the old Luis returned immediately.

“Is that hairspray?” he quipped when one of the nurses sprayed sunscreen over the tattoo. As we headed outside, the building had emptied out. The day was almost over for everyone but Luis, who stayed to lock up at around nine that evening.

He held his tTshirt up to show me the results of the treatment. The writing was barely faded, but all around the letters the skin was raw, the color of pink nail polish.

“It’s gonna take a long time to get rid if this one—probably about a year, I would think. I’ll go back in about two weeks.”

“What you gonna get in its place?” asked a friend of Luis's who works at Homeboy, as he leaned in to take a closer look at the tattoo.

“Frijoles,” Luis replied.

Follow Daniel Ross on Twitter.

David Brandt Berg. Images via Xfamily.org

The Children of God movement was founded in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, by former pastor David Brandt Berg, known to his followers as Moses David, Mo, King David, Dad, and Grandpa. Essentially a communist cult founded around banding together to proselytize the word of Jesus in the streets, the group maintained an “old world” idea of Christianity, which, at least in Berg’s view, centered largely around sex. By the time the organization changed its name to the Family of Love in 1978, Berg had introduced a process called “flirty fishing,” which involved the women of the group recruiting new members by fucking them.

The use of sex within the Family did not end at the recruiting stage. When the group changed its name again, for a second time, in 1987, to simply “the Family,” numerous allegations of abduction, pedophilia, and various forms of sexual abuse were leveled at the group, which by this time had locations in countries all over the world. In 1993, more than 70 percent of the group’s 10,000 members were under the age of 18, operating under a strict and insane set of guidelines laid out by Berg and his wife, Karen Zerby, the latter of whom still heads the organization to this day, under their current moniker, the Family International.

I have paraphrased 20 of the Family’s foundational ideas below.

1. God loves sex, because sex is love.

2. Satan hates sex, because sex is beautiful.

3. Incest is OK, because there’s no better place for a young man to learn about doing it than from his own mother.

4. Eleven-year-olds are capable of becoming pregnant, so why shouldn’t they be having sex?

5. Fucking your grandpa is awesome.

6. Everybody is married to everybody else.

7. Children should have at least an eighth-grade education, provided by their parents, and if the children want more education, it is “up to the parents to see if the Home can comply.”

8. Pictures of naked congregation members, referred to as “nudie-cuties,” make good bookmarks for the Bible.

9. It is OK to lie to nonbelievers in order to protect God’s work.

10. Men should not be gay, but it is hot when women are gay.

11.  Masturbation is having sex with Jesus. When a man is having sex with Jesus, he is no longer a man, but Jesus’s wife, so it’s not actually male-on-male anymore, and therefore OK because not gay.

12. When you are having sex with Jesus, he likes you to talk dirty. Pamphlets were created containing suggested “Love Words” to whisper to get Jesus hot, including (but not limited to):

–Hold me, I love You. Come fill me.

–I want You inside of me! Give me Your seeds.

–You excite me, Jesus, and I want to feel Your love. I want to excite You, too!

–Jesus, You're the Lover of all lovers.

–I want to enjoy You, Jesus, to look at You, to taste You, to feel You, to fuck You!

–I've got to have You in my arms. I've got to feel Your naked body pressed to mine.

–I want to suck Your penis. I want to suck Your seeds!

–I'm wild about You! I'm crazy about Your penis!

–My pussy is excited for You, Jesus!

–I'm juicy for You.

13. It’s not very Christian-like to say words like “dong” or “cunt,” but if you do, it’s cool, because through the instruction of the Lord they are clean. Just, like, don’t go around saying it all the time or anything.

14. The prophecies of Jesus are called “golden seeds,” and one good way to receive them is to suck on Jesus’s “golden rod” (or another man’s rod if you are a chick and can’t find Jesus’s). 

15. Jesus was supposed to return in 1993. When he did not return in 1993, it was because he wanted to give the Family more time to grow.

16. Rape provides a female the opportunity to witness to their rapist, and anyway she should have offered it freely, because providing free sex is a good way to convert people to the Family.

17. “Keys of the Kingdom” are powerful words you can use for extra effect while praying. These keys also power UFOs and can turn into swords to fight demons.

18. God allowed 9/11 to happen to “America the Whore” because the towers represent the ignorance of the fat, lazy, and rich.

19. Hitler was on the right track, but didn’t actually do enough, because Jews are subhuman demons. Also, the Holocaust didn’t actually happen.

20. Heaven is actually a “space city” that exists within a pyramid measuring 1,500 miles long, wide, and tall, and this pyramid either is traveling through space to reach Earth or is hidden inside the moon.

So how does one build and disseminate such a wide load of crazy, beyond just forcing one’s followers and their children to give away their bodies? David Berg’s primary method of communication within the commune was through the many pamphlets he wrote. He published more than 3,000 of them, some classified for Disciples Only (DO), some Disciples and Friends Only (DFO), and others for General Public (GP). Certain texts must be kept from the hands of the world at large, Berg claimed, to protect the family from the wrath of the non-believers who might not understand his inner teachings:

AS FAR AS GOD'S CONCERNED THERE ARE NO MORE SEXUAL PROHIBITIONS HARDLY OF ANY KIND, EXCEPT HE SURE SEEMED TO HATE SODOMY & I don't see where He withdrew that.—But whatever it is, there might be exceptions as long as it's in love. God's only law is Love!—And I'll tell you, it's dangerous because the System sure hates it, & the System's laws & everything are geared against sexual activities of all kinds & types, particularly having anything to do with children!

Alongside these tracts, the group produced illustrations to promote their beliefs, appearing often in the form of posters that perhaps manifest the tone of their philosophy more clearly than any prophecy or ranting ever could. The graphics ranged from political and religious propaganda aimed at the “ignorant masses” to prophecy of what the future must hold, and, more terrifyingly, comic-book-like visualizations of how a true believer must conduct himself, like so:

This cover headlines a tract describing the experience of a girl who, disgusted upon seeing King David coming out of an orgy wearing “nothing but a little loose linen loin cloth,” condemns David for indecent exposure. David gets very angry and insists he did it in glory of the Lord, who made him king of all, and says from there forward he will be even more vile. And then God smites the girl and makes her infertile, and she dies childless, serving as an example for Berg as to why you should never hesitate to fuck men of the Lord.

Here’s grandpa chilling out post-coitus with two of his daughters. Of course Grandpa is tan and has a Jesus beard and nice abs, because the Lord has taken care of him in return for spreading His love in the world.

This one is a little more light-hearted. This city actually looks kind of sweet, though I’m not sure what any of the buildings are supposed to be. I do like the guy wearing the girdle in the upper left corner pointing to remind you that the diamond-shaped rollercoaster structure is part of God’s mansion on Earth, where apparently humans are now able to fly. Of course, the world outside the wall of the fun park is barren and ripped to shit, which is perhaps the only realistic part of this vision of the future.  

“This is how God sees America!” according to this thing. “Get out of her, before she gets you!” I actually kind of like the idea of our country being one large human body, but it’s pretty weird to imagine God looking down and seeing this lady all spread-eagle, wearing, um, a turban made of dead snakes? Cars driving into America’s vagina is cool, though.

I guess this is meant to be like, “When there was only one set of footprints, it was then that I was in bed fantasizing about masturbating with you”? Either way, I’m not sure raising your arms up over your head like Jesus is how you properly use a dildo, but I guess it’s whatever works.

As funny as some of these images and ideas are, others reveal that beneath the thinly veiled tirade lurks something sinister and controlling in a way that is difficult for someone not already in a cult to wrap his head around. In this way one is reminded how language and image are each a weapon, one perhaps more often for evil than we remember day to day. Because the Family International still exists. They have a website, one that appears to represent a group whose mission concerns love and faith. Regardless of its current status, its foundation is a bizarre and dark one. 

Follow Blake on Twitter.

Image via WikiMedia Commons.
A new online database of missing and murdered Indigenous women, trans women and Two-Spirit people is aiming to not just record numbers, but to fight back by remembering the lives of the women who have been lost.

“The strength of the database will be from how it honours and remembers missing and murdered Indigenous women, Two Spirit, and trans women,” wrote Erin Konsmo, of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network (NYSHN), in an email interview with VICE. It Starts With Us – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, a collaboration of NYSHN, Families of Sisters in Spirit and No More Silence, launched in late July. The site already features the names of 72 women who have gone missing, were found dead, or were murdered in Ontario. Another 50 will be added soon. In the coming weeks and months, the names of the hundreds of other native women who have gone missing from other regions of Canada over the last several decades.

Calls for action and public awareness of the epidemic of violence towards Indigenous women has been growing since earlier this year, said Audrey Huntley, one of the organizers with No More Silence. She's worked to combat violence against Indigenous women for about 20 years, and since February, there's been media attention like she's never seen before.

She attributes it to a kind of perfect storm that has focused the media's attention on the topic. That includes the murder of Loretta Saunders, a pregnant Inuk woman doing her masters thesis in Halifax on missing and murdered Indigenous women in February. There was also last year's unsolved death of Bella Laboucan-Mclean, a young Cree woman from Alberta who had moved to Toronto to pursue a career in fashion who fell 31 stories from a high-rise condo in downtown Toronto under suspicious circumstances (the case is still open). Then came a United Nations report calling for action, and the release of an RCMP report this past May placing the number of MMIW over the past 30 years at 1,181 (previous estimates have ranged from 500 to over 3,000—some feel that the RCMP report still downplays the severity of the issue).

Even with all this, the federal government has refused to take action. Recently, the Conservatives once again denied calls for a national inquiry into the issue. And what little resources that were given in the past for Indigenous-led efforts, such as funding to Sisters in Spirit to compile a similar national database, have been cut. When Sisters in Spirit’s funding was cut in 2010, the information they had gathered was taken by the government, and has never been made publicly accessible.

It would be easy to assume that increasing awareness would lead to less violence, but it hasn't played out that way. The RCMP's recent study reported that the proportion of native women killed, as compared to all murders of women in Canada, has grown from 18 percent in 2011 to 23 percent in 2012. In 1980 it was nine percent. While they attribute this change to the fact that fewer women are being killed in Canada, this only underscores that Indigenous women face a disproportionate amount of violence. And over the 30 years covered in the study, Indigenous women accounted for 16 percent of murder victims, while they make up only four percent of the Canadian population.

Huntley says she's seen this continued increase in violence in her own work. While public awareness may have increased, she says, the causes of violence haven't changed.

“What hasn't changed is the fucking violence and the rapes,” she said over the phone. “Not that I thought [greater awareness] would make that big of a difference. But it is alarming to notice that even though more people know about this now, it seems to be just as acceptable as always. It goes hand in hand with the austerity projects that this government has been behind, making more women more vulnerable. Increasing their poverty makes them more vulnerable,” she said.

The terrible track record of the Canadian government doesn't surprise either Huntley or Konsmo. They both make clear that the creation of the database isn't based on some recent frustration with the Conservative government, but rather the recognition that since its founding, Canada has sought to settle the land at the expense of Indigenous communities. In light of that, the only solution is to create alternative, Indigenous-led services and structures.

It Starts With US is “very much about this idea of not looking to the state for solutions, and seeing this as part of a bigger resurgence of Indigenous people taking control over their own lives,” Huntley said.

So instead, they are building something they say will reflect the community itself. The three groups originally came together through a series of workshops dedicated to building resistance to violence against Indigenous women. It was at one of these meetings with all three groups present where they met Dr. Janet Smiley of the Keenan Research Centre who specializes in Aboriginal health and helped develop the methodology for the database. This led to more discussion and the creation of the database over the ensuing months. The three groups also put out a joint statement in March 2014 calling for a wide range of actions on top of the development of a database—from developing Media Arts Justice to teach-ins to supporting people in the sex trade—in order to “foster resurgence in everyday ways to respond to gender-based violence.”

“Collaborating with other grassroots initiatives like No More Silence and FSIS are long term relationships to work to shift all the ways in which colonial gender based violence affects our communities,” Konsmo said. “Working in collaboration for us is a way of nation-building and supporting one another.”

Part of that is honouring the lives—and not just focusing on the deaths—of the women who have been killed or have disappeared. It's that belief that gave rise to the tribute section of the website, where more in-depth profiles of the lives of missing and murdered women will be featured. The launch of the site was timed to coincide with one year after death of Bella Laboucan-McLean. Working closely with Bella's family, they created a memorial page celebrating her life and accomplishments.

“I think the family feel like they got some healing by being able to tell their own story in their own way,” she said. And other families have taken notice. “Other families have been in touch with me and they are in the process of collecting the photos and writing up the stories of their loved ones, because they really want to do the same.”

Konsmo echoes this importance, and emphasized that it can help prevent future violence as well: “When we are able to tell the stories about our own bodies, that they aren’t empty and conquerable, but full of history, culture, language, and legacies of resistance we are able to resist violence,” she said.

While putting together a tribute page is a rigorous process, so is entering each name on the list. The team of volunteers makes sure that they collect not just information about how a woman died, but also about their life, details like residential school history in their family, interactions with child and family services, and whether they spent time on the street. Each life is given context, rather than superficially documenting their death.

That kind of work isn't easy though. “It's daunting, it's overwhelming, it's incredibly sad. It's incredibly hard work,” said Huntley. Volunteers try to meet face to face to support each other in the difficult work of documenting these stories. They work with elders in ceremony to help them through the at-times troubling information they often need to gather. Huntley had two weeks off during the winter and took the opportunity to enter about 70 stories into the database. She got post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from it, she said. “I got pretty sick.” No one person can take on too much of the work without getting overwhelmed, explained Huntley, so they are always looking for new volunteers, who can sign up through the website. The difficult nature of the work, though, means it can be hard to recruit. But gradually, more people from across the country are getting in touch since the site was launched.

Just focusing on the numbers would help speed up the process and make it easier on the volunteers. But in this case, the database isn't just about pumping out numbers: it's about the community, the people, and the stories it can tell.

“It's just really important for us that when we're honouring these stories, to do it in a way that's respectful,” said Huntley. “Which may make it a slower process, and we just recognize that that is the way it is. It will take us as long as it takes us... We'll get there when we get there.” 


@timmcsorley

Image via Facebook.
Canadian tech firms may have their bottom lines to worry about if the government passes its surveillance-expanding Bill C-13. While the Harper government would like to think it’s only frightening cyberbullies and criminals with the unpopular law, it may in fact be frightening away business, thanks to warrantless disclosure provisions lurking within.  

I met with a few workers from the legal and management sections of a midsized, internationally active tech firm to talk about concerns their company has about the Canadian government’s ongoing offensive against digital privacy.

In the course of business, their firm deals with confidential, sensitive information for clients from around the world. Part of the attraction for these clients has been that Canada benefits from a reputation as a data-safe country. It also enjoys certification from the European Union as a country that “ensures an adequate level of [data privacy] protection by reason of its domestic law or of the international commitments it has entered into.”

This EU list of data-safe countries is a bigger deal than it might seem at first glance. By law, European firms can’t transfer personal data outside of the EU to any country unless it’s on the list. If Canada loses its status, we lose a whole lot of current and future business. Not good.

Bill C-13 offers service providers immunity for disclosing sensitive information to police and other authorities without a warrant. This isn’t just hypothetical, either—Canadian authorities have been making millions of these requests each year for quite some time.

It’s unclear whether C-13 could get Canada kicked off the European pro-privacy list. But it still poses a threat to people looking to send their sensitive information to Canadian companies or through Canadian servers.

As the legal team sources explained, “If I’m a customer, do I share my data with a company running the risk of data exposure?” If the risk is credible enough, as C-13 threatens, the quality of the business and its product are irrelevant. That potential customer may well choose to take their business to a country offering less risk of warrantless, unchecked data breaches.

This all sounds like an overly big deal about one little Canadian law. But let’s compare it with a current case that Microsoft is fighting against the US government. Essentially, US authorities want Microsoft to turn over emails stored in an Irish data center. Microsoft claims this data-grab is unconstitutional and they’re fighting the warrant in court.

As the Washington Post reports: “Microsoft and other tech firms also fear that if the government prevails and can reach across borders, foreign individuals and businesses will flee to their non-U.S. competitors.”

Let’s imagine that the US government wins their case against Microsoft. Any firm who doesn’t want their sensitive data sent into the giant NSA/FBI/DEA information-sharing combine is now wondering where to take their business. Would they choose Canada? Maybe not, if they knew that authorities here could have warrantless access to some of their data.

This is to say nothing of the other lurking threat to privacy in Canada: dubious controls over Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and the unknown extent of their domestic spying record. CSEC, Canada’s own NSA, are deeply involved with the Five Eyes group of intelligence agencies that’s collecting and sharing unknowable amounts of data every day.

Canada’s place on the European data-safe country list could in theory be threatened by this close relationship with the NSA. As we’ve learned, the American agency is hoovering up mountains of Canadian data and storing it indefinitely—a procedure that European courts have already determined to be a violation of basic rights. The NSA’s data collection is surely a worry no matter what country you’re in, but as the links between CSEC and the NSA continue to deepen, potential customers may not care to see the difference between Canada and the US.  

Down south, there are already consequences: businesses are losing trust in the security of their US-held data, regardless of any official data-safe status. As MOTHERBOARD reported, NSA spying has already cost US tech firms billions in lost business, with 38 percent of digital decision-makers already reporting that they’d changed their business plans in response to the Snowden disclosures.

It’s no wonder that the business people I spoke with were concerned about the sum total of the Canadian government’s actions on digital privacy. If the government carries on with their current agenda without reform, it would be easy for foreign business to get the impression that Canadian-held data is subject to intrusive surveillance by authorities.  

Ironically, it’s not alldespite bad privacy news coming from Ottawa. The Conservatives’ bill S-4, while flawed, proposes to mandate customer notification in the event of a business data breach. This would increase confidence in the data security of Canadian firms. The catch, of course, is that disclosures to the authorities don’t count.  

With Parliament off for its summer vacation, Bill C-13 is sitting in a strange limbo. Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, it’s likely that at least parts of C-13 are unconstitutional. This includes the provisions giving legal immunity to service providers who disclose customer information to authorities without a warrant and without the customer’s knowledge.

Despite the court case, the Harper government has shown no intention of going back to the drawing board, or even at least splitting Bill C-13 in two to allow for more debate and input from privacy advocates. This is troubling, since the government is refusing to listen to the privacy expert they just appointed by not even splitting the bill.

What does the future hold, then, for C-13? If Minister MacKay presses forward as he’s indicated when Parliament resumes, it’s likely that the government could find itself in yet another high-level court case about privacy. With lawsuits from civil liberties watchdog groups already on the books over unaccountable spying at CSEC, we could see a legal action from players in the tech-activist privacy coalition against C-13.

As the government keeps silent about making any changes to Bill C-13, it’s stubbornly signaling that it doesn’t care much about Canadians’ privacy. Given its track record, we shouldn't count ourselves as surprised. But we do know that the Harper government does care about its perception as pro-business. As mainstream outcry grows against this “cyberbullying” bill and businesses line up on the side of reasonable privacy protection, the government may finally change its tune. 


@chrismalmo