Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart (top right) with US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference, 1943. (Photo via)

This month marks 100 years since Britain entered the First World War. That decision – like many similar decisions from various European countries during the summer of 1914 – preceded a bloody four-year massacre that claimed millions of lives. War is hell for everyone involved, and this war was no exception. But it may have been especially hellish for one British soldier in particular.

During WWI, Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart was shot twice in the face, losing his left eye, and once each through the skull, ankle, hip, leg and ear. He lost his left hand in 1915, tearing his own fingers off when a doctor refused to amputate them. Reflecting on his experiences once the Allied forces had all returned home and the full human toll of the conflict had set in, Carton de Wiart wrote, “Frankly, I enjoyed the war. Why do people want peace if the war is so much fun?”

The one-handed, eye-patched army officer sounds more like a Rowan Atkinson creation than a real serving soldier: an impossibly lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you see it – caricature of British resolve. But he was very much a real trooper, fighting not only in WWI, but both the Boer War and Second World War, suffering multiple gunshot wounds, surviving two plane crashes and escaping capture twice in the process. He also served as an emissary on some of the most historically important events of the 20th century and was branded a “model of chivalry and honour” by Winston Churchill.

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Born in Brussels in 1880, Carton de Wiart he was the son of Leon Constant Ghislain Carton de Wiart, an international lawyer who lived in Cairo – though some argue that he was really the illegitimate son of Leopold II, the King of Belgium. His early years were spent riding donkeys in Cairo and learning to speak English, French and Arabic fluently.

When his father married an Englishwoman it was decided that Carton de Wiart would be sent to boarding school in England once he turned 11. In his memoirs he recalls finding it tough to settle into British public school life, and engaged in as many sports as he could to ingratiate himself among the other schoolboys.

From school, Carton de Wiart went on to study at Balliol College Oxford, but he never excelled academically.  After failing his preliminary law exams he realised it was unlikely he’d be able to follow the footsteps his father had laid out for him, so the advent of the second Anglo-Boer War soon after, in October of 1899, came at the perfect time. “At that moment, I knew that war was in my blood,” he wrote. The young man enlisted under a false age and name, because as a foreigner he was ineligible to fight for the English in the Boer War.

During a battle in South Africa Carton de Wiart was shot in the stomach and groin, forcing him to return home to a father who’d now discovered he’d abandoned Oxford for the battlefield. But parental disappointment and two gunshot wounds wasn’t enough to put him off war; in fact, it just made him thirst for the frontline even more. After a brief spell at home, Carton de Wiart was commissioned with the Second Imperial Light Horse and returned to South Africa, before being posted to India with the 4th Dragoon Guards. There, he spent most of his days hunting, until war broke out in 1914 and his military career really took off.

A young Carton de Wiart (Photo via)

Carton de Wiart began World War One on the East Africa Campaign, but longed for action on the Western Front, referring to his initial posting as like “playing in a village cricket match instead of in the Test Match”. During a battle in Somaliland he was shot in the ear and the face. This didn’t stop him from continuing his attack after he was “stitched up”, but another bullet soon ricocheted into his damaged eye, leaving him in “bad shape”. Forced home to receive medical treatment, Carton de Wiart managed to persuade a bemused medical board that he was fit to fight in France.

In the trenches, a now eye-patched Carton de Wiart finally found himself where he wanted to be, ready for his body to be pummelled with a few more bouts of rapid-flying lead. During the battle of the Somme he was shot in the skull by a machine gun the second he moved his head over the parapet. Rescued by his beloved servant Holmes, he was taken to the surgeon, who told him the bullet had passed through his skull without “touching a vital part”. The doctor ordered a bottle of champagne and Carton de Wiart was back in battle three weeks later.

Later, at the Battle of Passchendaele, Carton de Wiart was shot in the hip; then, at Cambrai, in the leg; and, at Arras, through the ear. He lost his left hand to bullet wounds and was repeatedly hit by shrapnel – pieces of which surfaced decades later after another operation. In 1916 he was awarded the Victoria Cross, and throughout the war was promoted up through the ranks, until he was made a major in 1917.

A portrait of Carton de Wiart by the painter William Orpen (Photo via)

At the end of the war he was sent to Poland as second in command of the British-Poland Military Mission, spending the next two decades keeping himself busy with a set of remarkable diplomatic and military escapades. One of those was being captured by a group of Lithuanian soldiers, another was fighting off a group of Soviet cavalry using only a revolver. He retired from the army in 1923 and spent the next 15 years shooting on a Polish estate the size of Ireland.

When World War Two broke out he left Poland and, in 1940, was recruited to lead an Anglo-French force in the taking of Namsos, a small town in Norway. This mission was a catastrophe and Carton de Wiart’s troops were shelled by German destroyer ships, attacked by German ski troops and left waiting for German infantry to arrive, “sitting like rabbits in the snow”. Eventually a retreat was organised and Carton de Wiart arrived safely back on British territory on the 5th of May 1940, his 60th birthday.

Despite his unique take on bravery in battle, Carton de Wiart wasn’t promoted into senior command during World War Two. The award-winning British historian Max Hastings believes that was because he lacked the diplomatic skills required for such positions. “He was a warrior, and that’s what he liked doing best,” he told me. “And yes, his adventures were remarkable, but was he an important figure? No, I don’t think he was.”

For Hastings, Carton de Wiart was an inspirational “adventurer and eccentric who added hugely to the gaiety of nations and the gaiety of war”. But the historian feels the soldier was a little mad – admittedly, for good reason – and a relic of a former time.

A portrait of Carton de Wiart taken by the acclaimed photographer Cecil Beaton (Photo via)

“He would have done brilliantly under the Duke of Wellington’s command in the Napoleonic wars,” he said. “Churchill liked him for a time, because Churchill always liked these heroes and there was no question that Carton de Wiart was fantastically courageous. But people like him are a menace when you put him in charge of armies, because you never know what you’re going to do next.”

In place of being promoted to high command, Carton de Wiart was sent on a series of diplomatic missions for the rest of the war. Of course, that didn’t slow him down. In April of 1941 he was appointed head of the British-Yugoslavian Military Mission and sent to Cairo to negotiate with the Yugoslavian government, but his plane crashed into the sea off the coast of Italian-controlled Libya. He lost consciousness when the plane hit the water, but was able to swim ashore with the rest of the crew, only to be captured by Italian policemen.

Taken prisoner by the Italians, Carton de Wiart tried to escape a number of times, including one attempt that involved him disguising himself as an Italian peasant. He was eventually brought to Rome when the Italians made plans to leave the war and wanted him to help negotiate a peace treaty. After two years overseas, he was finally repatriated on the 28th of August, 1943.

Carton de Wiart at the Cairo Conference, 1943 (Photo via)

Back only a month, he was called to spend a night at Winston Churchill’s home, where the prime minister asked him to go to China as his personal representative. On his way there he attended the Cairo Conference, which outlined the allies’ plans for post-war Japan. He spent the next four years on diplomatic missions, reporting back from the headquarters of the Nationalist Chinese Government in Chungking. 

According to Hastings, it was here that demonstrated how he really did lack any of the diplomatic skills needed to progress in the army. When he met Mao Tse Tung at a dinner party, for instance, he had no qualms “cutting short” his speech on the success of the communist organisation. To round everything off, Carton de Wiart was involved in one more plane crash during his time in China.

The soldier retired in 1947, with the honorary rank of lieutenant-general. He lived the rest of his years out peacefully in County Cork, fishing and hunting. He died on the 5th of June, 1963 at the age of 83.

Despite all the brutality of warfare he saw during his time, seemingly nothing could drive him away from his main passion in life: being shot at in a field. Writing in his memoirs, he affirmed: "Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose."

@JackGilbert13

More stories about the wars:

Why I'll Be Wearing a Poppy This Remembrance Sunday

The British Soldier Who Killed Nazis with a Sword and a Longbow

Unexploded British Bombs Are Still Hidden Under Berlin

The Islamic State, a hardline Sunni jihadist group that formerly had ties to al Qaeda, has conquered large swathes of Iraq and Syria.

Windsor, Ontario is Canada's southernmost city. It’s a working class town that borders Detroit, and much like Detroit, Windsor is known for its automotive manufacturing industry. Unfortunately, the recession hit Windsor hard, leading to economic downturn and high rates of unemployment. 

However, in spite of its bleak and vacant landscape, Windsor's nightlife continues to flourish. On any weekend of the year, the downtown core becomes littered with boisterous club goers fervently anticipating the night's spoils. Ouellette Avenue, Windsor's main drag, becomes a sea of sloppy fistfights, hot messes, and Axe Body Spray. It is on these nights that a river of alcohol and shawarma induced vomit runs through the streets. Windsor is a city that lives for the weekend and its downtown is a testament to that lifestyle.

I draw some inspiration from Windsor's debaucherous nightlife, but my work is equally influenced by its industrial landscape and its proximity to Detroit. I try to capture the city and people that I know so well through candid snapshots that help me perceive my hometown anew. To me, Windsor is hell, purgatory and paradise all bundled into one, and I like to think that my photos accurately portray this.

To see more of Sean's photos, visit foxsean.tumblr.com.

Thumnail screencap (image of a whale) via YouTube user Euro News. Other photos by Mike Pearl

Your average graveyard or mausoleum worker would, under normal circumstances, expect to find everything back in it’s place between shifts. In fact, I have a hunch that people who work at cemeteries aren’t very fond of surprises, especially when they involve exploding corpses. 

And yet, every now and then there are news reports of just this happening. There is no data on how frequently this occurs, but it affects the subset of bodies that are placed in caskets above ground in mausoleums.

Is this a feature or a bug? Is there a way to stop it from happening? Are there other funeral practices we need to watch out for? In order to find out I spoke with Josh Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit watchdog organization that bills itself as the equivalent of Consumer Reports for funeral services. 

Tell us why corpses are exploding.
Take leftovers in your refrigerator. Everybody knows what happens when you put a piece of meat in Tupperware and you let it sit for a long time. Takes a little longer in the fridge because it’s cold, but if you leave it to sit out, I’m sure many of us can remember some time when we pop open this Tupperware and cringe when this nasty smell comes out. Human beings are meat just like all other animals are meat. When you seal up a body in an environment that locks up heat and humidity, anaerobic bacteria take over. You’re gonna rot regardless, it doesn’t matter if you’re sealed or not. But the problem is how unpleasant the consequences can be when you seal it up and you deprive the body of air circulation and dehydration.

How unpleasant?
Basically, the casket becomes a literal pressure cooker. It reduces the body to a disgusting chunky brown slurry. It’s horrendous. I have not seen this in person with my own eyes, but I have seen many photographs of families who called in with complaints and lawsuits that I’ve consulted on. Imagine a casket coming out of the mausoleum with what looks to be gallons of thick brown muck flowing down the front of the mausoleum and onto the sidewalk, [then] opening up that casket, and seeing little inside but wet fabric and a vague human shaped stain. Nasty. 

How does the explosion happen?
We know that decomposing remains of any sort produce gas. That’s composting, that’s the smell of road kill. This is just the normal decomposition process. When you bottle that up so that it can’t get out. I think there certainly have been cases where the pressure was sufficient to blow that little square front off the front of the crypt. I think mainly, more commonly rather than a “boom” explosion you get the lid popping and then fluid and gas coming out or running out. It’s disgusting, but know this right up front: it is not disease-bearing. 

I guess that’s a small consolation for the people that work at mausoleums?
Yeah. But I often visit cemeteries, [and] I can tell you instantly when I go to a mausoleum whether that place is properly vented. 

Is there an actual reason to seal caskets?
Don’t ask for logic or rationality here. What you’ve got is a crazy system where the funeral industry is trapped by a mythology of it’s own making, and it can’t come clean about it to the public.

What are you supposed to do instead?
Reasonable mausoleum owners know that you want ventilation, and not to have things sealed up. This is why you see the occasional lawsuit where a cemetery operator has surreptitiously gone into the mausoleum and propped casket lids open a couple of inches to facilitate dehydration. That’s because they know what happens. 

Why is that lawsuit-worthy?
They went in there and did that after the family bought this sealed casket that was labeled “protective” by the funeral home. The whole thing conspires in this strange way. A well-designed mausoleum will have the crypts themselves inclined very slightly to the rear, to a drainage pipe so that fluids that come out will be drained away discreetly. And it will be designed in such a way so that fresh air exchange is constantly coming through the crypts themselves facilitating dehydration out of a discreet vent in the back of the building. 

Good mausoleum architecture prevents explosions?
Some aren’t designed very well, and in still other cases depending on how tightly the casket is sealed or screwed down, you may have problems anyway. 

Will a sealed casket always have this problem?
Likely, but not always. The largest manufacturer of caskets claims that its caskets "burp." They’re meant to allow excessive gas to burp out of the casket so that pressure doesn’t build up. And I’m sure that that works sometimes. But sometimes it doesn’t. 

How can someone who wants a mausoleum burial avoid all this?
Big cemeteries owned by big corporations are likely to have these shoddily constructed mausoleums and make all sorts of promises about them that may not be true. But it’s not confined to corporate behavior. If you actually want a clean and dry mausoleum burial, your best bet is to be in a plain Jane simple coffin that does not seal, that can allow air circulation, and in a well-designed mausoleum. 

Has this always been a problem with mausoleums?
I was in Baltimore a couple of months ago and went to a famous historic cemetery. There were a lot of above ground mausoleums. Old school ones, these were nineteenth century burials and they were made out of brick. They were one story high, they weren’t buildings. They were just mounds outside that you just had to kneel down to see the inscription. And in the cast-iron doors there were large holes, which I assume were for ventilation. I looked in there, used my flashlight to see what I could see, and you’d see what you’d expect: old pieces of wood coffin broken down, some bones, very dry. It’s what people think of when they think “old skeletons found in the cave” or something. They’d just put folks in there in a cloth, or shroud, or in a coffin and let nature take it’s course. This is very different from what you see in a modern mausoleum. 

What should people keep in mind if they don't want their loved one to become an exploding corpse?
Nothing that happens to dead bodies is pretty. There is not a damn thing you can do that’s pretty. Decomposition in the ground is gross. Decomposition into a slurry is gross. People probably wouldn’t want to watch the actual process of burning someone at 1600 degrees that takes place during cremation. Anatomical dissection is also gross. This is just life. So if you find yourself having emotional twinges about the condition of the body, I strongly urge you to step back. Stop for a minute, and remind yourself: Whatever happens to the body is not going to be aesthetically pleasing, but it’s something you can’t control very much.

What are the sales pitches people should look out for?
You can’t stave it off, and if anybody’s trying to sell you something that they call “preservative” or “protective” you should immediately stop the conversation. You are being lied to and you are being taken advantage of. If you were in an ordinary frame of mind, does this make sense to you? That you could “protect” your husband’s body from something? Most people would say, “No, that does not make sense to me,” when they are not in the throes of grief. 

Why do you think people aren’t making informed purchases?
The biggest problem—aside from the fear—is that most everything that people think they know about funerals is wrong. We have mortuary mythology that we carry around in our heads, that unsurprisingly works out to the favor of the undertaker’s pocketbook. Many people believe, for example, that embalming is routinely required by law. False. Most people believe that coffins in vaults are required by law during burial. False. People think that sealed caskets can preserve a body. False. 

How did these myths proliferate?
Mortuary schools around the country were started by the embalming chemical companies 130 years ago. There is an entire century of culture in which the mortuary school students have been indoctrinated into a false idea. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s scientific nonsense. The idea that embalming disinfects the body and protects public health is utter bullshit, but they believe it. The only health related issue that comes from embalming is from exposing the embalmer herself to formaldehyde and to bodily fluids in great quantity that would not be there if they weren’t mucking about opening up the corpse. 

Americans are also weird about seeing bodies, right, exploded or otherwise?
We’ve all grown up in this culture with this set of ideas too, that to see the body embalmed and with lip coloring and all this sort of stuff and it shocks the hell out of people to hear that most of the rest of the world doesn’t do it. And it shocks funeral homes to consider showing unembalmed bodies. I’ve seen disclaimer forms that they make people sign that say they won’t be held responsible for emotional distress and all sorts of bullshit. 

Speaking of American peculiarity, one thing that I was surprised to find out is that in Greece where I grew up (and presumably elsewhere), "mortician" is not a certified profession. It’s just handed-down knowledge. Do you think the US approach even serves a purpose?
Burn it to the ground. The licensure and legal restriction of undertaking to a certain guild has been an absolute disaster that has done nothing for consumers but drain their wallets. It’s horrendous. I would far sooner see a system like what you describe. The only thing funeral directors in this country can do that we can’t is embalming. Mortuary school is a two year degree. Nine months of that two years is spent on embalming which is extraordinarily excessive considering our cremation rate. The rest of it you get a smattering of marketing caskets, small business administration, and some very very poor psychology. 

So do you agree that it's the living we should be concerned about, because even a sludge-corpse is just gone?
You cannot do anything for your dead grandmother. You can’t insult her. You can’t canonize her. You can’t get her into heaven faster. You can’t do anything to her or for her because she is gone. What you can do is something that is meaningful and appropriate to you, your family, and everybody else. [...]The first thing to do is to stop apologizing to yourself and to the rest of the world for treating this transaction for the business transaction that it is. 

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

The sight of a woman's breasts has long been one of the most taboo images in American culture (next to driving a Japanese car in Detroit and a black president, though we seemed to have moved past both of those issues in the last 60 years.). Breasts are the predominate female sexual organ in the popular imagination, even more so than the precious vagina.

I'm not completely sure why that is. It could be due to the fact that they're round. We love round things, don't we? Donuts, automobile tires, cookies, hula-hoops, yo-yo's, Shaquille O'Neal, bongos, and cake are all very round and very loveable. It could be because they protrude out at eye level. Breasts are a bit like the logo on a superhero's costume. You kind of can't help but look.

As society advances forward into an ever more liberal, progressive state, verboten female body parts eventually lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of the more conservative among us. That whole "showing your ankles" thing eventually became completely acceptable, and by the 1960s, men were generous enough to let women wear jeans and cut their hair short. Thank God for that, otherwise the nation might have been deprived of Jean Seberg and half the cast of the movie Aliens. Contain your horror, if possible.

Breasts lingered in the "naughty" column for a lot longer than ankles. Remember how edgy Janet Jackson seemed when Justin Timberlake popped her titty out at the Super Bowl? Her nipple was totally covered, but the uproar was still deafening. You still can't walk around with your shirt off as a woman (despite my best efforts to get that law overturned) but from what I can tell, mammary glands have finally escaped the body part ghetto and now can claim full acceptance in popular culture alongside such timeless classics as arms, legs, eyeballs, and teeth.

We've basically hit "Peak Breast" here in America, a condition in which breasts are as ubiquitous as they possibly can be. Boobies are everywhere—on billboards, in TV commercials, all over the pages of comic books, in magazines, and my every waking thought. It seems as though there are no further instances in which we can display breasts logically in this country. This is as much boobage as we can ever hope for. We've hit capacity. The ceiling has been reached, and now we're just bumping our head over and over again. But is that even a good thing?

Olivia Wilde photo via Flickr user 2 Top

The point at which America finally hit Peak Breast was just last week, specifically while I was staring at Olivia Wilde's breastfeeding photo in Glamour magazine. There was actually a moment in this great nation where people became very, very upset that Demi Moore posed nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. She had her arms over her nipples, and her vagina was completely absent from the proceedings, but it was still enough hot, bare flesh to raise the ire of America's prudes.

I should reemphasize here that she was pregnant. If you are turned on or repulsed by the sight of a woman about to give birth to a sweet, innocent baby, you might want to take a moment to reflect on the nature of existence. I mean, if pregnant ladies make you horny, Vanity Fair isn't the publication for you. Instead, might I suggest Field and Stream or Salon.com?

The Olivia Wilde Glamour photo wasn't nearly as polarizing as the Demi Moore picture—likely because it wasn't on the cover—though I guess there was some kind of generic backlash against her posing in full makeup and hair while her child nibbled on her nipple. Most women don't look quite that good when they breastfeed, and her glorious viasge surely inspired a decent amount of jealousy and unreasonable expectation. There's usually a lot more sweat, a lot less makeup, and twice the number of sweatpants involved when breastfeeding.

But for the most part, culture pundits lined up in favor of the picture, and felt it was empowering women to feel comfortable with the natural function of their bodies. Women can and should breastfeed in public, and finally, we're starting to accept it as a culture. It's natural, it's wonderful, and it makes for a great conversation starter at the airport. I see you're breastfeeding. That's great. Where are you flying to? Provo? Lovely town.

There are still brief flashes of the old modesty, but even those are half-hearted and lazy. A character poster for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For featuring Eva Green was banned here in America for being overly suggestive. On the poster, Green wears a silk robe, and what at first glance appears to be nothing else. Your eyeballs are treated to a heaping helping of side-boob, but absolutely zero nipple. When I can see side-boob any time a clip of a Beyonce concert is on the Today Show, I think a little bit on a movie poster isn't so bad.

Still, there were complaints, and the MPAA required the poster to be modified. By "modified," I mean they made the robe slightly less see-through, though still clearly see-through enough to suggest nudity. I've tried to figure out how to tell the difference between the two versions, but it's basically impossible. Despite a concerted effort to censor the poster, it still prominently displays breasts, and still gets its point across: Eva Green might get naked in this movie, so you should see it ASAP if you are into that kind of thing, which you probably are, right? Again, the lascivious among us reap the benefits of Peak Breast. 

Photo via Flickr user lifrita lifi

The only reason why Eva Green's breasts are so prominent in the ad campaign for Sin City is because horny people will go see the movie to check out her "goods." It's fun to think of breasts as purely sexual objects, but they aren't, and maybe that's why they've been seen as so shocking for so long. Sure you (yes, you) see them as round, fleshy objects to massage, rest your head on, or draw on the bathroom stall of your high school gym, but they are actually built for babies to use for nourishment, as we saw with Olivia Wilde's Glamour photo. These are not toys. They aren't the Super Soaker you got for Christmas in 1995. They aren't the industrial-sized bucket of Nickelodeon's Gak your parents promised you if you got at least Bs in all your classes. They aren't even a gift certificate to Cheesecake Factory. They're breasts, giver of life!

Peak Breast is sure to continue. As hooters become more and more available in the media, and less stigmatized, maybe we'll finally stop lusting after them. But the loss of the magic of boobs might be too much for society to handle. Where will pervy dudes direct their gaze? Are we finally out of things to be gross about? Will foot fetish sites explode in popularity? Is vajazzling going to make a comeback? Will Kate Upton be forced to get a real job? Only time will tell. All I can do is enjoy Peak Breast until the proverbial bubble bursts.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Unless you lack access to the internet, you’ve certainly seen the viral onslaught of Ice Bucket Challenge videos in the past few weeks. The idea is to dump a bucket of ice water over your head and “nominate” others to do the same, as a way of promoting awareness about ALS (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease). If you don’t accept the challenge, you have to donate $100 to an ALS association of your choice. It’s like a game of Would-You-Rather involving the entire internet where, appallingly, most Americans would rather dump ice water on their head than donate to charity.

There are a lot of things wrong with the Ice Bucket Challenge, but most the annoying is that it's basically narcissism masked as altruism. By the time the summer heat cools off and ice water no longer feels refreshing, people will have completely forgotten about ALS. It’s trendy to pretend that we care, but eventually, those trends fade away.

This is the crux of millennial “hashtag activism,” where instead of actually doing something, you can just pretend like you’re doing something by posting things all over your Facebook. Like the Ice Bucket Challenge, good causes end up being a collective of social media naval gazing. We reflected on our favorite social-movements-gone-viral and found out what happened to them after the fell off our Twitter feeds. Because, yes, social problems continue even after you stop hashtagging them.

Livestrong Bracelets

Before hashtags even existed, there were still ways to obnoxiously flaunt a social cause that you had no real connection to. Remember Livestrong bracelets? Those rubbery yellow bracelets were the brainchild of Lance Armstrong, who sold them through the Livestrong Foundation to raise money and spread awareness about cancer. Everyone from Lindsay Lohan to Johny Kerry sported one on their wrist; wearing them signified that you were both sensitive and stylish.

At least the dollar you spent on the stupid-but-trendy bracelet went toward funding cancer research via the Livestrong Foundation. Or at least, so you thought. In actuality, the Livestrong Foundation started phasing out its cancer research in 2005, and stopped accepting research proposals altogether just a few years later. Over 80 million of the bracelets have been sold. Where the hell did all of that money go?

#Haiti

The world was more than a little shook-up when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti, burying at least 200,000 people and destroying much of the country’s infrastructure. #Haiti became the second-largest trending topic on Twitter that week, and was the subject of at least 15 percent of tweeted links in the week afterward. Remarkably, many of those links directed people to donation sites. Even the Red Cross mobilized on Twitter, encouraging people to send donations and spread the word about #HaitiRelief.

Social media may have actually done Haiti a solid, helping to raise $8 million in relief funds. But, like all things on the internet, they lose their luster and their urgency, and we forget about them. It’s been four years since the Haiti earthquake and although those initial donations made a huge impact in rebuilding the rumble of Port-au-Prince, there are still at least 150,000 Haitians living in the plywood shelters in relief camps. Earlier this year, NPR reported that many of these people are living without water, electricity, or light. Why isn’t anyone tweeting about that? Because #Haiti is so four years ago.

#Kony2012

To be clear, Joseph Kony had been kidnapping children in Uganda long before his name was popularized in 2012. In fact, he was declared the leader of a terrorist group in 2001 and indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in 2005, which made 2012 a rather arbitrary year for the internet to collectively decide he was evil. For that, we can thank Jason Russell, the co-founder of Invisible Children. Russell created the mini-documentary Kony 2012, which exposed the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. Nevermind that Kony was pushed out of Uganda long before 2012—that shit went viral. It was shared over 11 million times, and clocked over 100 million views. Everyone from Bill Gates to Kim Kardashian endorsed the campaign.

The point of the film was to “Stop Kony.” Nobody knew exactly what that vague directive meant, so instead of actually doing anything, people bought “action kits” that cost $30 and came with Kony 2012 posters and bracelets. The revenue from these kits was well into the millions, but Invisible Children never disclosed where that money went. The Lord’s Resistance Army still exists today, despite concerted efforts from the African Union to hunt them down; Joseph Kony is still at large. The efforts to capture him were, by the way, underway long before Kony 2012 was made. The film didn’t stop Kony, but it definitely did make him famous.

The Red Equal Sign

With the Supreme Court’s debate on the Defense of Marriage Act looming last year, the Human Rights Campaign invented a way to show everyone that you were in support of gay marriage: the red equal sign.

Do you know how many people changed their Facebook profile pictures? Almost three million users. Public figures like Lance Bass, Beyoncé, and at least 13 members of Congress reportedly changed their Facebook pictures, too (who knew that politicians used Facebook?). Do you know how many of those people had an influence on gay marriage policy? The politicians did, I guess, but not the rest of you. As Brian Moylan put it, “you're just sitting there at your desk thinking that something you did on social media is freeing the oppressed.” Yes, DOMA was upended. No, it wasn’t because of your Facebook photo.

Photo via the FLOTUS Twitter

#BringBackOurGirls 

Back in April, the media exploded with news of 276 Nigerian girls who were captured from their school in Chibok by the militant group Boko Haram. The group has a long and violent history: they killed over 900 Nigerians between 2009 and 2012, and have carried out a number of bombings and kidnappings since 2011. This is to say that Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigeria for quite some time. Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in several regions in May 2013, in response to the activities of Boko Haram.

But it wasn’t until the kidnapping in April that the group became part of our collective consciousness, in part because of the excellent marketing of the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. (Whose girls? Our girls.) Even Michelle Obama posted a sad-looking selfie with the hashtag. But the campaign pretty much faded out a few months later, in part because the news cycle started dying down and because we’d moved onto more interesting things, like the Game of Thrones season four finale. Apparently, Nigeria lost interest in the case, too: the Nigerian government officially put an end to their investigation of Boko Haram, with at least 200 of the schoolgirls still missing.

#YesAllWomen

It was difficult to process exactly what happened when Elliot Rodger went on his killing spree in Isla Vista, California, in May. In the aftermath of the horrific events, we learned that his rage was motivated by some form of misogyny and a desire to “punish” the women who had rejected him. In response, women mobilized on Twitter with the hashtag #YesAllWomen, to trade stories of the sexism and misogyny that they experienced on a daily basis.

In many ways, #YesAllWomen overcame the flimsiness of most social media campaigns. It involved real women, real experiences, and real solidarity for a cause that they—the ones on Twitter—were actually affected by. This was the closest thing we’ve seen to a legitimate Twitter movement. But then, Kimye got married and the Twitterverse collectively shifted to talking about that (because yes, all women love celebrity weddings, right?).

#IceBucketChallenge

So here we are, back at ever-contagious Ice Bucket Challenge. The videos mimic the format of neknominations (those awful dare-you-to-chug-a-beer videos) but claims that they're for a cause. Except that cause is only loosely related, if at all. Most of the videos don’t even mention ALS, let alone do anything to support ALS research. Take Martha Stewart’s video, which described the Ice Bucket Challenge as a “viral internet sensation that calls for a person to dump a bucket of icy water on his/her head, then extend the challenge to someone else.” That is, in effect, what this has become: an opportunity to show off your bikini body while doing something hilarious. Wait, what’s ALS?

In case you didn’t take the time to Google ALS while you were waiting for all that ice to freeze, amyotrophic laterl sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that effects motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Over time, these neurons degenerate and die, which severely limits muscle movement. Because there is no cure for ALS, this eventually leads to full muscle paralysis, respiratory failure, and death. Only about 20 percent of people with ALS survive five years or more. If you want to make some fraction of a difference, consider donating to the ALS Association or volunteering your time with an ALS organization.

And I mean, you can dump a bucket of ice water on your head if you really want—but don’t try to tell me that you’re doing it for charity.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

A page from Sex Picnic

Last night, Broken Fingaz Crew—one of Israel's only existing graffiti collectives—launched a new hand-drawn zine at the opening night of Kartel, an arts space in downtown Haifa. Sex Picnic shows lusty girls locking lips with cave-eyed skeletons, amphibious women with reptile heads holding their legs apart and bony figures fingering a kneeling woman. It’s not really the kind of thing you’d stick up on your wall ahead of, say, your grandparents coming over.

“I have all these tripped out, psychedelic dreams, and kind of bring them alive in the work,” says 28-year-old BFC leader Unga, whose surname remains undisclosed for good reason (police generally aren’t fans of people spraying paint all over public property). “This one's literally a picnic that everyone’s invited to.”

BFC have spent their career appalling people; their fluorescent sketches are counted as among the first examples of graffiti culture in Haifa, a city known for clamping down hard on street art, despite its reputation as Israel's liberal culture Mecca. “To this day, as soon as our work goes out, within two or three days in gets painted over,” Unga explains. “You learn not to get too attached to it.” 

It’s not just the city council the four-man clan have come up against. When they formed in 2005, an event the crew were organizing in Tel Aviv to launch a set of art pieces was shut down because the flyer depicted a black woman performing sexual acts—scenes deemed blasphemous, and too explicit by venue owners. It’s likely BFC would have felt far less opposition in Tel Aviv than they do in Haifa; in 2011, City Lab reported that the Tel Aviv municipality was providing 40 percent annual funding for the city’s Museum of Art, an institution known for propping up homegrown street artists.

“Haifa buffs everything,” says David Hevion Melech, co-owner of Kartel. “Nothing lasts more than a few weeks. It sucks, because there are so many good artists here, but as a visitor you can so easily miss it all.”

Despite that setback, Melech and Ghost Town Crew—the 20-strong music and installation art collective he belongs to—were able to convert an old port-fermenting factory into the vast arts and live music venue it is now. Opening today, Kartel aims to become the Haifan creative community's first and primary meeting place. “Everyone in the area’s arts scene knows each other here,” says Melech. “It’s a small and local crowd. We want to host exhibitions for three days at a time every two weeks, and screen films from nearby emerging artists.”

I met Unga under the arch of an abandoned railway in London. Like the rest of the collective—who all bounce back and forth between London and Israel’s third largest city—I'd been finging Unga almost impossible to keep track of. “None of us own mobile phones. I haven’t had one for about three years,” he said. “People can’t really reach any of us, but that’s how we like it. I hate Instagram and the selfie culture, too. It’s disgusting because it teaches 16-year-­old girls that it’s OK to be fake.”



Unga met BFC co­-founder Tant when they lived as children in a tiny, 40-person­ commune in the foothills of Mount Carmel, northern Israel. With their artist parents, the pair stayed in small pods once occupied by the British Army during the First World War’s Battle of Megiddo. After ten years at the camp they took over a squat in Haifa with fellow BFC members Deso and Kip.

There, inspired by copies of influential France-based journal Graffiti Art, art nouveau printmaker Ephraim Moses Lilien and painters like Albrecht Dürer and Gustav Klimt, they began peppering the city’s back­-alleys with the doodles they’d cultivated from childhood. “I think we were the first generation [of graffiti artists in the city],” says Unga. “Or at least we took over directly from NRC [Nuclear Rabbit Crew], who started slightly before us.”

A page from Sex Picnic

“When we started writing back in 2001, there was pretty much nothing on the walls,” Kip told City Lab. Nudity, comic book gore and liberal use of color were staple traits; in one mural there was a scalped, bearded man with lasers for eyes sitting next to a luminous pink-skinned cross dresser with a Hitler mustache. “I was going out in the night and seeing the drawings from the bus on the way to school the following morning,” Unga remembers.” No one knew what I was up to the night before, and it felt good. As a teenager, you have this urge to do something illegal.”

In 2012, 

after a stint in the Israeli army at 18—“I wasn't a fighter or anything; I made sure I wasn’t. And yeah, I hated it”—Unga and the rest of BFC were contacted by London curator Charlotte Janson (of independent arts label NO WAY) about putting on a retrospective in London, their first ever show outside Israel. “It’s generally a nightmare to find them—no­ one has a phone and everyone has multiple names,” says Janson, who was introduced to the crew’s work by a friend.

Ahead of the show later that year, Janson rented an apartment in London's Bethnal Green for the four main members to stay in. “Fifteen of them showed up,” she says. “They all got sick, and this tiny place turned into a kind of refugee incubator, with friends from their hometown sleeping in the bathroom and on the kitchen floor.”



“When we came to London, we wanted to draw everywhere,” remembers Unga. “But there’s a feeling of acceptance here; graffiti is safe and part of the furniture. Where we’re from, graffiti is a punk movement, and we wanted to bring that energy to the show.” How did they do that? “By showing orgies, frogs raping fat men—that kind of thing.”

Since then, the collective have shown in galleries around the world,­ from Vienna’s Inoperable Gallery to the annual Art Beijing fair. 

A wall in Hackney Wick while BFC were in a spat with another graffiti crew



Flicking through Sex Picnic’s pages, it’s clear that the group’s work has gained focus over time. Gone are the scalp-less laser warriors and Hitler fetishists; its focus is now on playful sexual deviancy and pulpy necrophilia. Some of the zine's characters were first painted on the banks of the Regent’s Canal in Hackney Wick, ­the scene of a graffiti battle back in April, when the crew were visiting Janson to plan the zine’s launch.

“We had a person painting over them every night,” says Unga. “One of the spots was insanely hard to get to. You had to climb over a bridge, through a factory and then a window. We nearly got arrested a few times getting to it, but every morning it was painted over.” The back and forth was fairly sinister: drawings (“patterns of girls fucking skeletons and people with frog’s heads”) were defaced and marred with slurs. “KILL ALL MEN,” was one; “KILL YOURSELF,” the clan’s response. 



Walking back from the railway arch, Unga periodically stopped to eyeball a nearby tag he recognized, or to take me through the concept of a mural we spot by a guy he knows. I absorbed as much as I possibly could, turning my voice recorder off only to change the batteries. Under a week later, he and Charlotte will fly back to Haifa on a one-way ticket.

Sex Picnic is currently available to purchase at ghostowncrew.com and will be on show for three days at Kartel, Israel.

Follow Jack Mills on Twitter.

Professors Robert G. Jahn and Brenda Dunne of the Princeton Engineering Anomallies Research Lab.
No matter how boring and unimaginative you are, you’ve probably fantasized about having superpowers. The idea of rising above it all and being able to fly, or control objects with your mind, firmly squishes everyone’s universal daydream g-spot.

This collective childhood fantasy culturally manifests itself in everything whether you’re talking about comics, television, religion, folklore, or film. Unfortunately, if you start believing you have superpowers IRL, people will think you’re insane.

That’s exactly what people think of Brenda Dunne, a researcher based out of Princeton University. Along with her team of researchers she’s been testing (and according to her, finding evidence for) parapsychological phenomena for 35 years. She joined the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research—PEAR—lab in 1979 with the intention of testing things like “human/machine anomalies” (basically mind control of computers) and remote viewing (visualizing things from separate locations).

The lab, which turned into International Consciousness Research Laboratories in 2007, reported finding something fascinating. The results from millions of trials at PEAR showed a slight, but statistically significant effect. That is, with a 4/1000 chance of coincidence, the population they tested showed a small ability to control computers with their minds, and visualize things in a different location.

Perhaps because the premise and the findings of PEAR seem so ridiculous, nobody in the scientific community has really ever taken them seriously. But when I read about the project, I was intrigued. People have brought up some possible methodological flaws, but with the Ivy League pedigree these researchers have, I can’t help but wonder if some of the criticisms are unwarranted. Wanting to find out more, I reached out to Brenda to chat about her hard-to-believe research.

VICE: Hi Brenda. Could you tell me a little bit about how the PEAR Lab started, and how you got involved with it?Brenda Dunne: At Princeton University in the late 1970s, an undergraduate student created a computer that made random numbers and began experimenting with it for a class project. The project, which tested the influence of people’s thoughts on the computer, was supervised by distinguished aeroscientist and professor Robert G. Jahn. Prof. Jahn saw some interesting things that he couldn’t ignore as an engineer. So he set up a small research program in a storage space at Princeton University. He interviewed a number of people, finally hired me, and PEAR Lab was born. My background is in psychology and the humanities, so along with Professor Jahn, we brought a multidisciplinary perspective to the whole thing.

What exactly were you testing?
The basic question we asked was: does consciousness, does the mind, the spirit, life force, have the ability to influence the underlying probabilities of physical systems?

There were two main bodies of experiments. The first was called Human Machine Anomalies. People interacted with various devices that were based on a random process, to see if the human operators’ intentions could affect the way the device produced its output. So the computer would be producing some random sequence of numbers or patterns and we’d say, “We want you to try to try to influence it this way, to alternately produce higher or lower numbers, or to make the balls bounce in this direction just with your thoughts.”

The second component was a body of experiments which we called remote perception. This was where people attempted to describe the surroundings of another person at a far away location.

Experimental Room II inside PEAR Lab, with “pendulum, fountain, and robot equipment."
What were your findings?
With the human/machine anomalies, we conducted thousands of experiments with millions of trials along these lines. Overall the result was that there were small, but consistent, shifts in the means of these output distributions that could not be attributed to chance.

With remote perception, we were impressed with the results, but we were concerned with the reliability of the analytical program that was being used. Rather than having some human judge saying, ‘‘Hey that looks pretty good to me,” we worked on standardizing it a bit more. In the course of this, however, we did some 650 trials and the bottom line showed beyond any chance probability that people were acquiring more information in this process than you could possibly do than just by guessing.

The entry and conference area at PEAR Lab.
People in the scientific community have mostly discounted the results, calling the lab an embarrassment to science, a joke, or an example of pseudoscience. How have you reacted to the criticism?
We ignore it. If it’s a legitimate criticism, and if the critic has taken the time to review the evidence and has a point to make about the data, about the statistics, about the design, then we take the time to respond as we always have. But usually it isn’t dismissed on scientific terms, it’s dismissed on emotional terms. The dismissals are usually quite illogical. As one critic put it very well: “It’s the kinda thing I wouldn’t believe even if it was true.”

What’s an example of a legitimate scientific criticism of your research that you have responded to?
Some people have accused our computer of not being truly random—that the effects could be due to faulty machinery. These accusations were based on a misinterpretation of the implications of its baseline behavior. The baselines, which were originally intended as a control condition where the operator was not trying to influence the device, did indeed occasionally display non-random behavior. But when the device was allowed to run in calibration mode, where no one was present or interacting with the REG, the output was consistent with chance predictions across many millions of trials.

So how can you explain these seemingly superhuman effects?
We have three models, but keep in mind that we are blatantly speculative. The first one we call the quantum mechanics of consciousness, where we demonstrate how quantum mechanics reflects human consciousness as well as the physical world. For example, using the concept of wave-particle duality, our view is that sometimes consciousness looks at reality from a wave-like perspective and sometimes from a particulate perspective, which can affect the nature of the thing being observed.

The second one we call M5, which is best described using a square.

You have the conscious and unconscious world on the left, and the tangible and intangible manifest physical world on the right. When you look across the two bottom domains, they are both dealing with probabilities. And indeed the deeper you look, the less of a distinction exists. Now the model suggests that the mind effects matter indirectly, by putting an intention into the unconscious domain that somehow merges with this unconscious potentiality of the physical reality, which then trickles up in the physical world. So basically we’re shifting probabilities in a subtle sort of way.

The final model has to do with filters—how we have psychological, physical, cultural, and emotional filters through which we experience the world out there. Those filters affect what we experience and how we might describe it. If we became conscious of these filters we might learn how to tune them, so that we could realize that reality does have a subjected component and can be affected mentally at least by some modest degree.

Experimental Room I in PEAR Lab, with “benchmark Random Event Generator” and “DrumREG equipment.”
Interesting. So did you find some people were better at producing these effects than others?
We found all sorts of fascinating things. There was this tendency to see a stronger effect the first time—sort of a beginner’s luck, there were differences in performance between men and women. Male operators tended to produce baselines that remained very close to chance expectation and had reduced variances. The females, on the other hand, frequently produced baselines with larger than expected variances and means that exceeded chance. Also, people working as couples produced larger effects if they were opposite sex couples who loved each other.

“Random Mechanical Cascade Apparatus” inside PEAR Lab.
Would you like to see a different theory of human consciousness to be taught in school?
I would like education to move in the direction of opening our minds to consider consciousness in ways other than what we’ve been taught in our formal education. To start thinking, to ask questions, and to be entitled to ask questions. To be able to carry out a real science of the subjective, where you can study those dimensions that science today ignores, but using scientific methods. Science is fundamentally a method, it’s a way of learning, of testing ideas. It isn’t a body of knowledge.

I think it was Max Planck who pointed out that you don’t change a scientific worldview by convincing people to think differently. You change it by waiting until a new generation grows up that has a different outlook from the beginning. So one of our goals is to encourage young people to think differently. Not to believe us but to be willing to challenge—to ask the tough questions.

Thank you, Brenda.


@keefe_stephen

On the fourth episode of The Jim Norton Show, Jim sits down with comedians Rich Vos, Sherrod Small, and Dave Attell, for a discussion that could never happen on a traditional talk show.

Gjon Mhilli doesn’t leave his house out of fear he’ll be killed. Photo by the author

Gjon Mhilli peered out through his curtains at the countryside near Shkodër, in northwestern Albania. Outside it was sunny, warm—bucolic, even. Clouds rolled off the mountains and drifted over farms scattered on the green hills. The weather had been like this on the first day he was almost murdered, he told me, scratching his short gelled hair.

Black Saturday, Mhilli calls it. Twenty-two years ago, the Albanian, then 16, was working his family’s wheat field when a father and four sons from a neighboring farm approached, shouting and swearing. They wanted Mhilli’s family’s land for their own and were willing to use force. As they punched, kicked, then stabbed the teenager as he fell to the dirt, Mhilli was sure he would die—then his brother arrived with a hand plow and bludgeoned one of the sons to death with it.

Mhilli’s brother was convicted of manslaughter in a courtroom, but the father of the dead man was after an older brand of justice: He announced publicly that Mhilli’s family should pay in blood.

Since then, Mhilli said, there have been more than a dozen attempts on his life. In 2003 he was set on fire. In 2006 two men followed him home and pistol-whipped him into a coma, and when Mhilli came to, the police ordered him to pardon his attackers. He’s become convinced that one day they will succeed.

These days Mhilli doesn’t leave his small rented cinder-block house. Neither do his wife, Valentina, and their three kids. Next door is an Ottoman mosque where old men sit outside and drink tea under the sun. Mhilli doesn’t dare join them, or he’d be killed. He stays inside, watching television, drinking coffee, and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes the size of cigars. The children stay with an uncle sometimes; living with Dad is too dangerous.

GJAKMARRJA is the social obligation to avenge a death by slaying a male member of the killer’s family.

Gjakmarrja, the tradition of blood feuds, has been a part of Albanian culture since the 15th century, when a set of laws called the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini held that a murder victim’s family could avenge his death by killing a male member of the murderer’s family.

The communist leader Enver Hoxha’s Party of Labor took over Albania in 1944. In the following decades it banned religion, beards, and many aspects of traditional life, including gjakmarrja, while transforming the Balkan country into one of Europe’s poorest and most isolated nations. When the communists were officially voted out of power in 1992, Albania had been reduced to a broke backwater. In 1997, several massive pyramid schemes collapsed at once, almost destroying the national economy, and in the ensuing chaos the populace stole massive quantities of heavy weaponry from the government, most of which was never recovered by authorities. In light of this history, it’s not surprising that Albania’s criminal-justice system is widely distrusted, and in many places the Kanun—and the blood feuds that come with it—has once again become a popular way of settling disputes.

In 2012, around 1,600 families were affected by blood feuds, which as of 2000 had claimed 10,000 lives since the end of communism, according to Albania’s Committee of Nationwide Reconciliation (CNR), an anti-violence NGO.

It’s fallen on private groups to stem the tide of blood, CNR chairman Gjin Marku told me, because the government offers very little help. Mhilli can vouch for this—during my visit, he pulled out a pile of letters he has written over the years to various officials. The few who have replied haven’t been sympathetic, and some even told him not to embarrass his nation with bad publicity and derail its bid to join the European Union.

In fact, when I asked Prime Minister Edi Rama about the feuds, he said that Albania’s tradition of violence could be mitigated by things like improved social services but also by EU membership. “This is something that can only be solved through integration, Europeanization,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Marku travels the country in an effort to resolve blood feuds through mediation and dialogue. “I’m confident in Edi Rama,” Marku said. “If the top of the state pays attention to the strategy of the CNR, as well as to the culture of reconciliation, then everything will go smoothly. But unfortunately neither [local politicians] nor the media are interested in that.”

I asked Marku whether he had any advice for Mhilli, and he said Mhilli’s only option was escape: “He should not stay in Albania for a minute more.”

Mhilli did flee the country for Sweden two years ago with his family, but they were deported after a year and a half in a Stockholm suburb. Now Mhilli feels trapped in a town and country where he doesn’t see anything good ever happening for his family.

“It’s a catastrophic situation,” he said. “[The kids] have never been to school. I don’t teach them. The older boy can write, but the younger son cannot. I have zero hope for their future. I feel so bad about that because I’m done for myself, and when I look at them I’m devastated.”

Click here for last week's episode.

Rokit hat, Umbro jacket

PHOTOGRAPHER: CARL WILSON
STYLIST:  ANNA CURTEIS
Hair: Rebecca C Amoroso
Models: Hannah, Ellie and Emma @ Models 1; Clary Moore, Ellie Crewes, Anu Ambasna, Emily Rose England

Roxy jacket, Rokit jumpsuit

Vintage top, Rokit skirt

Motel top

B.Tempt'd by Wacoal bra, River Island skirt

Rokit jacket, Wildfang top

Vintage T-shirt, River Island playsuit 

Image via Facebook.
After a man-made lake full of mining waste collapsed last week, BC Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett compared the disaster to an avalanche. (An avalanche potentially laced with 500 kilos of mercury, but close enough). He also denied the massive spill qualified as an environmental disaster, pointing to early water tests that passed Health Canada’s drinking water standards.

The breached Mount Polley tailings pond spewed millions of cubic metres of sludge into British Columbian waterways, sparking fear and anxiety around Imperial Metal’s sister projects. As long-term safety questions remain unanswered, at least two other mining sites are now facing eviction and blockades.

Yesterday Bennett and top officials from Imperial Metals traveled more than a dozen hours north of the spill to the company’s soon-to-be-opened Red Chris copper and gold mine near Iskut, BC. There, a group of Tahltan First Nation elders are maintaining a blockade at the mine’s two entrances.

“It’s intense,” said Annita McPhee, former president of the Tahltan First Nation’s central council. “Our people have a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear around this environmental devastation. The same type of mine and tailings is coming to our backyard, so we are very, very fearful.”

Last summer, the Tyee reported on gaps in the approved Red Chris plan, which will place a tailings storage facility across three watersheds known as Sacred Headwaters. The mine is scheduled to open later this year.

“We had intense meetings for three days,” said McPhee, reached yesterday by phone at a nearby Tatogga Lake restaurant. The nation requested an independent review of the tailings design at Red Chris, which McPhee said the company verbally agreed to carry out. “Some firm commitments were made, but we want to hold the government accountable as well,” she said.

Following a long history of resistance to energy and mining development, the Tahltan say they will hold the blockade until the province and company put commitments in writing. “One of the things Mr. Bennett said was ‘We’re prepared to shut it down until things are safe,’” McPhee added.

Image via Facebook.
Meanwhile Neskonlith Indian Band, part of the Secwepemc Nation, released an eviction notice to Imperial Metals. The Facebook statement orders the company to stay away from the site of its proposed Ruddock Creek zinc and lead mine, located about 150 kilometres northeast of Kamloops.

“Neskonlith has not signed any agreements with the province or Imperial Metals, we have not provided our consent to the proposed mining development,” reads the letter. “Notice is hereby issued to Imperial Metals owners, employees, insurers, and investors that Neskonlith will not provide access to our lands for the Ruddock Creek mining development.”

Last week, several First Nations near the spill closed fishing operations due to fear of contamination. Statements on Aug. 7 warned four nations including the Secwepemc to stop fishing immediately following reports of “salmon being caught near Lytton in the Fraser River with their skins peeling off.”

Murray Ross, director of the Secwepemc Fisheries Commission and author of one alarmed notice, said his commission did not intend to inflame “hysteria” by referencing a widely shared Twitter photo of sickly salmon which he called an “isolated incident.”

A spokesperson from the BC Ministry of Environment, who requested not to be attributed, confirmed the ministry was aware of the circulating salmon-peeling photo but denied links to the non-disaster. “As far as I know, any dead salmon are from temperature affects, not from the tailings pond breach.”

Fisheries and Oceans Canada banned salmon fishing in the Cariboo and Quesnel Rivers last Tuesday night, but lifted most ofthe ban Wednesday morning. “Based on the water quality testing results provided by the BC Ministry of the Environment, the salmon fishing closure on the Quesnel and Cariboo Rivers will be rescinded.”

While the results seem encouraging, First Nations’ trust in both Imperial Metals and the government continue to erode in light of more reports that the company made hundreds of thousands of dollars in political donations while mining inspections dropped over the same period.

“We’re still recommending caution,” Ross said, adding that University of Northern British Columbia researchers and other First Nations agencies are awaiting independent test results. “If there is some bioaccumulation, it’s way too soon to see that... there’s still a lot of unknowns, like what's in the sediment in Quesnel Lake.”

As the Red Chris mine blockade stretches six days, the Klabona Keepers show no signs of backing down.

“I’d say support is growing,” said McPhee of the surrounding community’s interest in the Tahltan protest. As British Columbians reel from the shock and uncertainty, Imperial Metals opposition appears to be building—just don’t expect Bill Bennett to call it an avalanche.    


@sarahberms

Photo by Charles Davis

"People are saying some pretty nasty stuff about you on the internet," I said. It was about as nasty as one could get, actually, with the employees of Liwan Restaurant & Hookah Lounge in Los Angeles accused of everything from anti-Semitism to molestation. One person on Yelp even claimed that they didn't have Wi-Fi, which I knew wasn't true because I was using the Wi-Fi to display the review.

I had come to investigate these claims after noticing that dozens of reviews of the lounge had been posted on Yelp alleging that the lounge was run by racists who refuse to serve Jews, which would both be outrageous and confounding as it's located in the heart of "Little Tehran," home to a large community of Persian Jews. But the claim soon found its way to Reddit, as bogus claims often do, attracting 61 comments from users shocked that such bigotry could be openly displayed at a business in the year 2014.

"I went to a Liwan Hookah Lounge in Westwood with a few of my friends," wrote the user "cantbelievethis1234" in their first and only post on the site. "They were wearing Jewish stars (Star of David) necklaces and we were asked to leave and told that they don't serve Jews."

Helpfully, the user linked back to the Yelp reviews, where one discovers that a similar story was first posted by "George H." of Beverly Hills. “Never coming here again,” he wrote on Yelp on August 10. “I came with a few friends, they were wearing necklaces of the Star of David (Jewish necklaces) and we were asked to leave,” he claimed. “We were specifically told to leave because we are Jewish. We were told that.”

I contacted both the Reddit user and the poster on Yelp. The guy on Reddit never got back to me. George, on the other hand—or "George," who may have recently joined Reddit—responded by saying that he did not want to reveal his identity to me. I then asked if he could at least offer some more details about the vile act of bigotry he alleged took place and which he definitely didn't just make up: "When did the incident occur? How big was your party?" He wrote back: "Hi, I would rather not answer those 2 questions."

Meanwhile, the negative reviews kept coming. George's post on Yelp was followed by at least 75 consecutive one-star reviews claiming the same thing (some have since been removed).

“One star is too much for this place,” wrote Nina N. “This 'lounge' KICKED OUT my party because we were JEWISH. Maybe they should go back to Saudi Arabia/Gaza/Wherever they are from and serve only Arabs.”

“THEY WILL NOT SERVE YOU IF YOU ARE JEWISH!!!” wrote Richard H.

Photo via Yelp

Staff at the lounge shook their heads when I showed them what was being said online.

“That just sounds nuts to me, to be honest,” said Mahmoud, who told me he'd been working at the lounge as a busboy for six months now. There are lots of Jewish customers, he said—Los Angeles is home to some 660,000 Jews, which is more than all but four other cities in the world, three of them in Israel—and he was pretty sure the two Iranian guys he worked with were Jewish too. It just wouldn't make any sense to open a place in the heart of Jewish culture in LA only to refuse service to Jews.

"We have many, many Jewish customers," my server told me. And, at least before this week, the hookah lounge had a fairly good reputation with them. It's a dark place that lends itself to hanging out; it's clean, if not sterile; and it smells like flavored tobacco. The mango juice I ordered was fine, but obviously was the same stuff you can buy in a can for a dollar. It is, in short, a hookah lounge, and it was rated accordingly. The only hint of evil that I got was what they charged for my mango juice.

But that George really started something. With the negative reviews coming at a feverish pace, the lounge's Yelp rating dropped from 3.5 stars down to 2 in a span of 48 hours. In two days, the lounge received more than two-thirds of all its reviews, all of them brutal.

“They are Jew haters,” wrote Tiffany N.

“I wish I could give this place ZERO stars,” wrote Vered B. “If you're Jewish, you won't be allowed in. Are we living in 1930s Nazi Germany?”

“Horrible place,” wrote Fabian B. They “only allow Muslim. If you are Jewish they won't allow you in.”

“Refuse to serve Jews,” wrote Liora K. “I thought we lived in AMERICA.”

“They refuse to serve Jews,” wrote Nate S., his only review.

“They kicked out people on the table next to me for being Jewish!” wrote Yoav E. “Is this America or Germany in the 1930s?”

A few strayed from script. “They do not have WiFi and when you ask for refills they scream at you,” wrote one user. “One of the guys that worked [there] tried touching me inappropriately,” the person added, and another time “I saw one of the workers touch their [crotch] and then touch my food. I was disgusted and I threw up.”

One user was kind enough to provide a suggestion—and, arguably, a clue. “Now that you're completely bummed that this place you heard about or wanted to go to SUCKS, I'll recommend a few fantastic hookah lounges and cafes you can better enjoy, all within close reach...” No, not on VICE you won't.

I basically like Yelp, which I write knowing that it could very well hurt my brand. When a place has lots of good reviews, it tends to be pretty good. When a place has lots of bad reviews, it tends to be bad. A year ago, however, I was stricken by sentimentality and thought to myself: Wouldn't it be nice to put away this phone, actually look at the world around me, breath in the fresh urban air, and just walk down this strip of restaurants and choose the one that feels right, like old times?

Romanticizing the past led to me to a pizza joint that smelled like moldy carpet on the inside and served pizza that didn't taste all that different. I checked Yelp later and learned that literally everyone said the same thing: this place... it isn't good. So I use Yelp, and I generally avoid bad pizza as a result, at least as much as one can in Los Angeles.

But while Yelp has to an extent democratized restaurant reviews, allowing us to choose our dining options based on the palate of not just one pretentious foodie at a newspaper, but the fussy tastes of thousands of pretentious foodies, it is not without fault. It can be gamed. In this case, it clearly has been.

Mahmoud, the busboy at Liwan, suggested that whoever is posting all these reviews is trying to play off perceived tension in the community concerning Israel's attack on Gaza, which seems like a good suggestion. Since the assault begin in July, hundreds of people have gathered every weekend a few blocks away at the Federal Building in Westwood to protest US military support for Israel. Someone, it appears, is seeking to exploit—or perhaps stoke—fear that those protesting Israeli actions cannot distinguish between a nation-state and the Jewish people (which, news flash to the genuine anti-Semites out there: All people who have lots of power and weapons tend to behave badly, regardless of ethnic or religious background). Indeed, the person who posted to Reddit implied as much: “I understand there is a war in Israel,” the user wrote, “but I can't believe this is happening in the US.”

Here's the good news: It's not happening in the US. Jews are deeply ingrained in American culture and the bigot dumb enough to deny service to people for being Jewish because they're mad about Israel would rightfully be run out of town—and it wouldn't take a hundred fake Yelp reviews to do it. It is the hookah lounge which is the victim of bigotry, its Syrian owner smeared as an anti-Semite for no apparent reason other than the fact that he is suspiciously Syrian—and such a smear just might work among those inclined to believe all Arabs probably hate Jews, which is a belief based in bigotry.

What can the much maligned people of Liwan do to clear their name, though? Reddit will be Reddit, with users there enjoying the freedom to be anonymously slanderous, but Yelp has clear guidelines: contributions “should be unbiased and objective,” which means they shouldn't be written by a business' “peers or competitors in the industry.”

Kayleigh Winslow, a company spokesperson, told me that users can flag reviews they believe violate those guidelines and that businesses owners can also "respond publicly to each review" and give "their side of any dispute." That seems inadequate. Yelp shouldn't require its users—or the victims of a bigoted smear campaign—to do the work Yelp should be doing itself. The reviews are fake, rooted in bigotry, and ought to be removed. By Yelp. Right now. In the meantime: If you happen to find yourself in Los Angeles, go to Liwan Restaurant & Lounge. Say Charles sent you. And if you enjoy yourself, maybe go to your favorite website and tell people that.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter.

All photos by Megan Koester

In much the same way that with great power comes great responsibility, with great exposure comes great narcissism. Social media has given us unfettered access to an entire world of possibility—our audience, both ever-present and endless, seemingly exists solely to validate our existence as human beings. It makes sense, given this new reality, that we as a people believe that everything we experience, every emotion we feel, every opinion we possess, is worthy of documentation. After all, there is always another soul on the other side of our overshare.  

Expressing one's personal take on the latest celebrity scandal, political issue, or social injustice is now considered a requirement for using the internet. Indignation, or at least acknowledgement, over hot button issues is the new norm. Every opinion is valid enough to be either echoed or ripped apart in a Facebook comment thread. We post, we comment, in order to make ourselves feel less alone in the complex, overwhelming jungle that is the modern world. We do so in order to prove that we exist. Sometimes, however, we are either too tired or too lazy to type words into the void. It is then that we take selfies.  

The concept of a selfie is nothing new. Photographers—actual photographers, not trust fund babies with digital SLRs they don’t know how to operate but know how to purchase with their parent’s money—have taken them for decades. But with a smartphone in everyone’s pocket, and a selfish song in everyone’s heart, selfies have now become ubiquitous by both the artistic and the artless. No situation, no experience, is deemed unworthy of documentation by these snap-friendly souls.  

Does a selfie deserve the same critical eye we give pieces of art? Is a selfie art, period? It is impossible to say. Capturing both the truth of life and the mundanity of the everyday carries inherent, undeniable weight. Art, of course, is the capturing of weight. It is an act of rendering the cosmically intangible tangible.  

Ignoring the universe surrounding ourselves in the interest of documenting our existence in said universe, however, seems gauche. We are constantly surrounded by things beyond our control, things that exist outside of ourselves that will remain standing long after we have fallen. Nature. Monuments. Great wonders of the world. These things are larger than us, and rightfully so.  

They are things larger than ourselves, with more permanence than the bodies we inhabit. Perhaps, when confronted with all of this permanence, we feel the need to document our existence in the impermanent moments surrounding these objects. Perhaps that is why we feel the need to photograph ourselves in front of these pillars of the past that have existed long before we were born and will exist long after we have died. Perhaps, we think when we take a selfie, we are making an artistic statement. Perhaps we are standing alongside these great works of art we are witnessing, and that we are works of art ourselves.   

On my most recent visit to New York City, I returned to the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, day after day, because I was entranced by the endless parade of people taking self-shot photographs on its roof.  

Every afternoon I would pay my entrance fee ($1, because the “suggested” fee was an untenable $25, and as long as I at least acknowledged the suggestion but chose not to fulfill it, I felt in the right) and climb five stories to the museum’s peak, a gorgeous view of Manhattan and the not-long-for-this-world greenery that is Central Park.  

I would sit on the roof, anonymously, in the largest city in America, and secretly document people photographing themselves for reasons I inherently understood and yet, in my heart of hearts, did not understand.  

What were they doing with the images they took of themselves on this magnificent roof? Why did they take them? Were they inspired by the beauty below them, the floors filled with names from art history syllabi, pieces people didn’t have the luxury of seeing in person needed to view via textbooks? Or did they not absorb the art at all? Did they find themselves more interesting, the act of sharing their existence more interesting, than a William Eggleston photograph? A Henri Matisse painting? An Egyptian statue? I could not say. The only thing I could say is that they would not stop.  

Person after person, patron of the arts after patron of the arts, they came. They saw. They documented. It was almost as if the documentation of their experience meant more than the experience itself, which begged the question: “If we were unable to live in the moment before people possessed the ability to document said moment, did we ever experiencing anything at all?” It was a chicken and the egg situation, but if the chicken had opposable thumbs and an unlimited data plan.  

The internet is a vast, endless wasteland of disposable content—meaningless lists, sensationalistic clickbait, and snarkily topical tweets that litter the online expanse. The amount of content we both ingest and create is overwhelming. One can, and many do, waste their entire lives in this digital void. Click begets click, status updates begets status updates. Lather, rinse, repeat. May as well add your face to the endless parade, I thought, because you are at least giving a human visage to this parade of nothing.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.