Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the kings of kooky programming. Their shows Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule are wildly successful, bizarrely beautiful odes to the absurd. Their latest, Tim and Eric's Bedtime Stories (premiering September 18 on Adult Swim), is a bit of a departure from the weird territory that's served them so well. What makes it different? In a word, its normalcy. Which is not to say that it's genuinely normal—far from it. This is Tim and Eric, after all. A parody of psychological horror dramas like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, it contains more of a traditional narrative and darkly comic tinge than any of their previous works do. We recently caught up with them at their offices in beautiful Glendale, California, and chatted about Bedtime Stories, their storytelling influences, the underlying terror that lies beneath the surface of the everyday, and... boys!!!

VICE: So, I watched the first two episodes of Tim and Eric's Bedtime Storiesand noticed that the humor is subtler—less slapsticky—than the special that aired last year. Is that going to be consistent throughout the series, or does that just happen to be the first two episodes?
Tim: Yes. The show is much more like the first two episodes than it is the pilot. The pilot was like, “Let’s just get started doing something.” We had Zach [Galifianakis] available, and when we do something with Zach, it’s usually in the characters of these three stooges. That’s the way that went. But then when we actually started writing the series, it kind of drifted toward more cinematic, dark short stories and not so genre-based. So most of the episodes are like the first two.

I noticed in the second episode, you guys don’t appear at all. Is that going to be consistent too?
Tim: That’s the only one that we’re not in. There’s another one where we’re in a much smaller role, but that’s the only one where we’re not in it at all.
Eric: We really enjoyed that opportunity to just sit back and direct it. It was actually amazing.
Tim: You put on less makeup when you’re directing.

OK, so this is some armchair analysis from yours truly, but the common thread I noticed in the episodes is the underlying fear that exists below the surface of the modern suburban existence. Am I just up in my own ass about that, or was that intentional?
Tim: I think it’s there for sure. I think our ideas are products of our environment and our life, and we’re white boys: suburban, middle-class people. So I always think about that. We’re way close to the edge of everything falling apart. It feels like that every day. How has this not turned to total shit? How are people still working at TJ Maxx and not throwing garbage cans through windows? So the relationships that characters have in our shows are generally relationships that feel like they could turn into murder at any point.
Eric: Yeah, I think one thing we’ve connected—even back in college—was that we’ve always seen the undercurrent of what was happening. There’s society, and then there’s like, you can’t believe what is really happening. I recall this one image of this poor guy who was a sign twirler at this big real estate development. It was just a guy holding a sign, and across the street, at another development, was a motorized guy with the same job. That just blew my mind—that this man had to sit there and look at that motorized version of himself the whole day. Those are the kinds of themes that we look at, and we’re like, “That’s a real fucking nightmare existence.” That’s what we’re trying to do in this new show.
Tim: Once we started making the show, and we saw what we were actually doing, I sort of thought, Well, this show is not going to make you feel good. And we shouldn’t be feeling good! We’re shit people. We’re a shit culture. This is like punishment for being horrible. There’s so much feel-good stuff that comes out, especially in comedy now, where things are very cute and very clever and sort of like everybody’s in on the joke and winking. I feel like our show tends to try to be like a little more reminding of how awful things really are in the world.
Eric: My favorite films or art or music are when you feel something from it, and we want these episodes, even if you’re not laughing at the end of it, we want you to go away with like, “Whew, that was something.” That’s what we’re interested in now. A little different than the sketch show.

How do you think that people work at TJ Maxx without throwing garbage cans through windows?
Tim: That’s maybe not the best example, but yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to sound like an elitist, but it seems like we all put up with a lot of crap. It’s amazing how much crap we put up with.
Eric: We didn’t start our lives making TV shows. I worked at Burger King for many years. I used to just make Whoppers for myself and put them in my pocket and go into the bathroom and eat them. I was such a hungry teenager, it was disgusting.
Tim: Growing boy.
Eric: I had to hide the trash. So I’ve been there. I’ve been on that level of life. I used to shoot Bat Mitzvahs for rich people. I think all of those life experiences add up.
Tim: And he's anti-Semitic, so it was very challenging. [Laughter] 

Oh, the blogosphere’s gonna love that anti-Semitism. I’ve been asked to ask you: Who are your storytelling influences?
Tim: Oh, I heard that was an idea for this story. Well, Dostoyevsky.
Eric: Who’s the guy that does the Giving Tree? Shel Silverstein? [Laughter] I mean, like, for me, it’s things like David Lynch. Recently, we were watching his old stuff, like Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, which are almost like traditional stories—which we’re trying to tell here—but there’s this perverted nature of everything. It’s really interesting.
Tim: For me, the Coen Brothers, where there’s always characters who are on the verge of going through some kind of meltdown. Normal people who are complicated and having trouble, and being shit on by the world. Especially some of their later films—like, A Serious Man I just rewatched—goddamn it. Hell is lived through. You know, all the greats.
Eric: We also try not to be egomaniacs, but I mean, we try to live in this universe where we create stuff trying not to emulate anything. I feel like that’s the way we started. Even when we came to LA, we tried to really not get into the sitcom scene. We just wanted to stay in this universe.
Tim: The sitcom scene is a pretty cool scene.
Eric: It’s very hip.

You create completely original content, but while still operating under traditional dynamics. This is kind of like a Twilight Zone type of show.
Tim: Well, yeah. When we were writing this, we thought… a lot of times, on Awesome Show and other stuff we do, there isn’t so much of a concern about the narrative. It’s not like, “How can this wrap up and be satisfying?” You know, a lot of stuff just kind of ends where a baby explodes out of our heads. It doesn’t matter. So for this show, we’re like, let’s tell real stories that have an ending and generally kind of conclude and wrap up in a way. That was an exercise for us and a new kind of thing we decided to care about, for the sake of making something feel different than what we’re used to seeing.

Are there any other tropes like that you would be interested in tackling?
Tim: You know, I think sci-fi is something we want to try to do more regularly. More science fiction.
Eric: Or something like The Shining. Real psychological horror, which I think we’re almost there in some of these episodes. Like, true horror. Not gore, but true really-fucking-frightening.

That segues flawlessly into my next question, which is: What genuinely terrifies each of you?
Tim: I’d say that VICE News special on ISIS.

Yeah, that’s terrifying shit.
Tim: That’s the scariest shit. All that shit really does frighten me. Today, I was driving back from an interview, and there was an Enterprise rental truck in the furthest lane. It was like, in the middle of the highway, just parked, with the hazards on. No driver. So obviously it had broken down, and the guy was on the other side, but my head immediately was like, “That’s a bomb!” Then I started thinking, well, if you’re terrorists, you could do that at the 10 freeway, the 5 freeway, and the 101. You’d need five guys, spread them out, time it right, and LA goes down. So that’s what I think about all the time. I make sure I have enough water in my home, and that kind of stuff. I’m this close to becoming one of those lunatics.
Eric: Do you have a survival kit?
Tim: I have a shitty one from Home Depot from a few years ago.
Eric: My biggest fear is having a daughter, and she turns into a fucking nightmare teenager slut.
Tim: Anal porn?
Eric: Yeah. I don’t know why I think about that a lot, though. I think about having a kid that hates me. That’s my biggest fear.
Tim: Shit. I actually have a daughter, and that’s not my biggest fear.
Eric: I know! I don’t know why I think about it. I see kids sometimes, and I’m just like, “They hate their parents.” They just want love.

What’s the least terrifying thing you can think of?
Eric: The least terrifying would be… My little cats, sleeping. Snuggling with my kitties.
Tim: I don’t think that’s a legitimate question. That’s a very strange Seventeen magazine question. Not up to VICE standards.

OK, so what do you think about boys?
[Laughter]

I was going to ask, “Do you remember the last time you were ever scared?” More on that Seventeen magazine tip, you know.
Eric: I would say that I did have this dream that included my first girlfriend, of 11 years, Tim, my parents, my friends, everyone turned on me. My girlfriend was fucking one of my friends and doing heroin, they killed Tim, and my sister and my family disowned me. I remember being so horrified for months because of this dream. It was really bad.

Like you couldn’t shake it?
Eric: Yeah! It was one of the heaviest things that’s happened, and it wasn’t real. It was like, classic horror ideas all rolled into one. Weird.

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Ken Burns visiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. Photo courtesy the FDR Library Presidential Library and Museum 

If you ever went to this thing called school, chances are you’ve watched a Ken Burns film or three. You all know the deal: 12 hours of celebrities waxing nostalgic over old photos while you stare at a cute classmate across the room until you zone out and forget you’ve been glaring right into his/her eyes for 20 minutes straight. Then, ashamed, you turn back to the Ken Burns movie about whatever Americana thingy.

You might think that you no longer have to sit through that kind of thing now that you’re a grown-up. The truth is that Ken Burns is a difference maker in our country. I don’t care if you think his style is dated compared with Austrian miserabalism or Yugoslav black wave or whatever other cool film genre you’ve been getting into lately.

He’s really the only artist in our country doing these kinds of effective and ambitious tomes on our culture, and his movies are screened in public schools thousands of times a day. Our kids will be growing up on Ken Burns. Get used to it. Burns recently completed a seven-year project on the Roosevelt family, unsurprisingly titled The Roosevelts, that captures Teddy, FDR, and Eleanor as a single narrative. It will be airing September 14 through the 20 on PBS, and will be available streaming on September 15 through PBS.

Ken Burns, the dude, is also a laser-focused, encyclopedic firecracker of an interview. I got to catch up with him at the Telluride Film Festival. (He cusses once, so get ready.)

VICE: How do you think your type of filmmaking fits into today’s world? I mean someone can just look up the Roosevelts on Wikipedia. Do you still think people want to watch a 14-hour piece?
Ken Burns: I actually think it works extraordinarily well now. I was told in 1990, when The Civil War came out, that nobody would watch. Back then I was told we lived in an MTV generation of quick cutting. It was the highest-rated program in the history of PBS. Then, 17 years later, we did a history of World War II, The War, and people said we live in the YouTube generation now and nobody would watch it. It’s a huge thing. All meaning accrues in duration. That doesn’t mean we can’t be distracted by little flies on the wall all the time. The important thing now is that people have so many platforms. People binge-watch all the time now. I feel completely vindicated. People think nothing about digesting half a season of House of Cards or Orange is the New Black or half The Roosevelts. Let's not forget that the people that are supposed to be the worst at this, kids, actually line up and stay up all night to get a Harry Potter book, of which there are seven. All of them are "longer" than any film I’ve ever made. All meaning accrues in duration.

You said on Letterman that you feel there is a clutter of information. Do you think that makes it—or will make it—more difficult to sift through a topic and make a film out of it? Like say you were going to make a piece on Ferguson. Would that be impossible?
I’m in the history business. Usually that means you need a couple of decades of triangulation. I don’t think it’s that. I just think there’s so much clutter that we tend to default to accepting conventional wisdom. If I say the 1920s, a couple of associations come to you and that’s it. Well, I’ve gone through the 1920s in about seven or eight different films, and each version of the 20s is entirely different and entirely complex and interesting. If you have an avalanche of information, all you can do is, you know, go to the Huffington Post and just sort of scan for a while. What did you just look at?

You won’t know.
You won’t know. So how do we not only access information but curate it in a way that’s beneficial to us, and in a way that will stick? What we’re finding as the antidote to all of that is these longform things. They want to be involved in things that offer continuity—like reading a book by fireside or candlelight. It may seem anachronistic and romantic to us now, but it’s not. We crave this kind of self-sustaining stuff. When you watch a third of a season of House of Cards in an evening, what you’re doing is you’re saying, “I wish to be alone with myself.” As opposed to what we were doing with an iPad, and a call coming in, and also watching TV. We’re not there. We want to be there.

You also once said that my generation suffers from a “poverty of spirit.” What did you mean?
We don’t have shared sacrifice anymore. We all feel like that we are independent free agents. And we’re not. We’re bound to each other in ways that are obvious and ways that are more subtle. I think that as a country we’re able to get things that when we feel like we have a connection to each other than when we don’t. I’m very much interested in those moods like the New Deal, or World War II, where we have all our oars pulling in the same direction.

So when you see things like the ALS Challenge or something...
I just did it today!

Nice! Is that kind of Facebook activism an extension of the same idea?
It’s a kind of yearning for community that we have. Too often, the thing that stops is a great tragedy. Like a Ferguson. Or, worse, a 9/11. So we yearn for these things—that’s why cute cat videos are important, or “Charlie Bit My Finger,” whatever the current thing may be—we realize the emotion and the values implicit in our watching are shared by everybody else. And we’re drawn to that. It’s not a red- or blue-state, a rich or poor, a gay or straight phenomenon. It’s a human phenomenon. So the Ice Bucket Challenge represents a novel way—in a classic internet fashion—to have something exponentially radiate out, like a rock dropping in a pond. There’s now tens of thousands of people participating in it, and that can do only one thing: improve the ALS situation. But it also binds us back to each other. We’re too cool for shared sacrifice. And I love these things that interrupt our coolness. The idea that however we like to present ourselves can be completely undone by pouring ice over our head.

It’s paradoxical, though. Because without the media clutter you talked about before, none of that could happen.
It couldn’t happen. There were things back in the day like a kid getting stuck in a mine. And the entire media of the United States—telegraphs, newspapers, and radio—would contain it. We’re the same human beings. Human nature never changes. We just superimpose the randomness—in this case, whatever we’ve inherited technologically. So we still have these things where we think, let’s do this together.

The author and Ken Burns

Do you see any parallels between what’s going on in Ferguson and the Central Park Five?
Yeah, this has been going on since 1619 in the United States. And it’s fucking time that it stops. And that’s what the people in Ferguson are saying. It’s enough. You have 53 cops on your police force and 50 of them are white in a predominantly black city. They leave a body on the ground for six hours. I mean, this is what’s been going on to African Americans since this country was formed and before that. In 1619 the first slaves were brought to the United States. And it’s just absurd. I’ve been mining American history for my entire professional life, and race comes up all the time. And Ferguson is people just saying, “Enough!”

So it seems like Ferguson is an issue that we’ve all been able to rally behind. Do you think it’s just a trend and people are going to forget about it in a few weeks? Or will there be progress?
We have an African American president: there’s progress. But it’s not enough. When we base people on the color of their skin and not the content of their character, as Dr. King said, then we’re in big trouble. And we won’t be out of that trouble until we escape the specific gravity of racism. Which might be part of human nature. I hope not. But African Americans have spent too long in this country as second-class citizens, no matter what the law says. And now we have a Supreme Court very willing to roll back some of these things in terms of voting rights and civil rights stuff. When you combine that with the continual poison of racism in the air—whether it’s Cliven Bundy or Donald Sterling or just people threatening the president—it’s just enough.

Do you think Obama’s doing enough about Ferguson?
What is it that he can do? This is at the hearts and minds of human beings. If you look at a lynching photograph from the 1920s or 30s, you’re always drawn to the body and it just seems so impossibly cruel that American citizens could be doing this to other American citizens. And yet it happened 2,500 times over a couple of decades. But the people there: The white audience is smiling and laughing. There’s been a special train added so people can come down and watch this hanging or burning and mutilation of a human being. But there are children there, and they’re smiling too! Those children are alive today. And what are they teaching their children? And their grandchildren?

That question was kind of stupid. I meant to ask if Obama should have acted earlier to replace the police with the national guard.
No, I don’t think so. And it was actually the governor’s call for the National Guard to come out. He has to walk a very fine line. He has to be the president of all the people. He can’t just suddenly look like he’s only interested in African Americans. It’s a dicey thing. But this is one in which it should be the rest of us. It should be our outrage. The old thing from the 60s Civil Rights Movement—you don’t want to keep your boot on top of people just because you can. We’ve got a new Jim Crow. We’ve filled our prisons with as many young black men as we can. Just to keep them away from us. We live in our own gated communities. We scare ourselves to death through the media, which heightens the sense that it’s all around us when it’s not. Our drama often portrays African Americans in really menial or criminal positions. It’s self-fulfilling. If you leave someone impoverished and with no way out... are you surprised that bad things happen? You don’t hear about white people with their hands up in the air being shot several times.

In Miami, there was just a thing where Ray Allen’s house got broken into by a bunch of kids, and the cops didn’t even arrest them because they were like, “Meh, didn’t try to steal anything.” And then Ray’s lawyer was like, “Wait a minute…” I mean if those were black kids...
They’d be dead. And if he’d shot them, Ray Allen would be on trial. We’ve gotten to the point where we have to say enough. And if we say that we want liberty and justice for all, then we’ve gotta mean it.

Are you at all disappointed in Obama’s presidency?
Not at all. I’m disappointed in our inability to compromise.

I watched some of The Roosevelts. My favorite part was when Teddy told his political opponent he was going to kick him in the dick.
Kick him in the balls.

Do you wish there was more of that in modern politics?
Teddy’s a little bit hot and unstable. And no, I don’t think that gets anything done. I think what you’ve seen is the polarization of that. Stuff happens at the level of local legislators that we don’t hear about and filters up once that person gets more prominent. What we need are people pointing toward what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature,” which is taking the high road. It’s not assuming that the other is bad. Figuring out what compromise is. That’s the genius of America, and we’ve forgotten how to do it. It’s like we’ve lost our keys. When it broke down before, the Civil War happened, and we murdered 750,000 of our own people. If you want that again then just keep not compromising.

Where do you think a country’s moral compass comes from?
I think it comes from an essential fairness. It comes from a sense of individual freedom—and how everyone parses that a little bit differently. Some people see it in an absolute, Old Testament kind of way, which means no government. These are the people who are going to die in 9/11 and when their house is on fire. And then they want the government to come in. They want their government to be bombing ISIS right now, and this, that, and the other thing. I made a film on the Dust Bowl. It was a very conservative area of Oklahoma and North Texas, and it got so desperate that they begged the federal government to come in and intercede. Ideology goes out the window. Ideology is a luxury of convenience. When times are tough, you’ll be very happy to take a liberal democrat as your president to buy back your dying cattle. If you’re starving, and your kids are starving, then it’s not a bad deal.

So you’re close friends with Werner Herzog and Errol Morris.
No, not Errol. I know him, but I’m friends with Werner.

That’s three very different styles of filmmaking.
I love Errol’s stuff. I don’t know what he thinks about mine. I adore Werner. I think he loves my work. We sometimes take our show on the road. We did something last fall at Dartmouth. Where we traded choruses, like a jazz band, showing bits and pieces of our work.

Do you ever have the urge of doing a film like that, where it’s far more subjective?
Everything is subjective. I don’t know how Werner would describe Errol. He’s always said that the truth he is seeking is an ecstatic truth. He then said that I am after an emotional truth. Not sentimental, not nostalgic, but emotional. And that’s true. We have to go for whatever is true. And style is the authentic application of technique. And so when people say: “Would you do this just for the sake of it?” You say no. I’ve got my own work. He’s got his own. And it’s totally different. And yet we’re both after some ineffable transfer from one person to another. Which is called art.

Werner seems like a guy that would make fun of or heckle a movie while you were watching it. Does he do that?
He’s vociferous. And dramatic. And opinionated. And I’m not those things. He would not do the discourtesy of heckling a movie, but if he didn’t like something he might not hesitate to say it. I might be a bit more polite and circumspect.

Photos courtesy of Bruce LaBruce

Liza Minnelli once said that three types of love stories exist: “The guy meets the girl, or the guy loses the girl, or the guy gets the girl.” This summer, another gay icon is adding a new type of love story to the canon—the story of a young boy who falls in love with an old man.

In filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s new romantic comedy Gerontophilia, an 18-year-old boy named Lake falls in love with Mr. Peabody, an 81-year-old resident at the nursing home where Lake works. Between sponge baths, Lake starts a sexual and romantic relationship with Mr. Peabody. Fans and critics know LaBruce for his explicit underground films, like LA Zombie, but Lake and Mr. Peabody’s relationship never seems creepy or shocking. Through hilarious scenes at the nursing home and at a gay bar, the relationship becomes one of the most moving cinematic romances of the year.

This month, I skyped with LaBruce—who was a VICE columnist for years—to discuss the movie, his new art show about celebrity perfume, and a real life teenage boy who dated two famous old men.

VICE: How did you come up with the idea for this movie?
Bruce LaBruce: A friend of mine—his name is Marcus Ewert—from San Francisco, when he was 17 or 18, he was lovers with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. I was always really interested in his story because he had separate relationships with both of them—they were kind of love relationships. He had so much respect for their wisdom and heart that it became a romantic and sexual relationship. That made me think, I’ve made a film about hustlers—you know, gay hustlers, gay for pay. It isn’t always that way. In my experience, [old men’s relationships with hustlers are] quite often much more complex relationships. They’re getting a lot from these old men. They’re taken care of, but they also get taken care of emotionally. In our society there doesn’t seem to be much reverence for the elderly, so why not sexual reverence?

Do you think there are negatives to being both young and old?
Absolutely. I felt myself identifying with both of [the characters]. I was projecting back to when I was 18 and what that was like. For me, it was very traumatic. I grew up in a rural environment, and my sexual identity was a big problem for me—there was a lot of homophobia. Projecting ahead to Mr. Peabody is what we have to look forward to in the future. It’s kind of scary: He’s been abandoned by his family, he’s been institutionalized, he’s being overmedicated, he’s being bullied, and he’s also vulnerable. There are hazards on both ends.

Why did you decide to make the young boy character, Lake, a lifeguard?
Somebody pointed out to me—which I didn’t really think about self-consciously—that the film is kind of like a reverse Lolita, with the old man in the Lolita role. This is a weird invert of pedophilia. Lake hangs out at school crossings, not for the children, but for the old men; he hangs out in swimming pools, and he gets a job at a nursing home. Some people kind of gloss over it and don’t accept [his attraction to old men as a fetish] because their relationship is so sweet, so natural. It’s a kind of perversion, but it’s still a fetish. There’s something a bit compulsive about it.

Did you purposefully make the film less sexual than your previous films? 
I wouldn’t say it’s less sexual. I’d say it’s less sexually explicit. This time I got government financing from Canadian governmental film financing entities—it was a bigger scale of production for me. The whole idea was to create a more commercial film. I wanted to choose a topic that was true to my other work—dodgy and kind of risky—but because I used professional actors, there was not really a question of it being explicit.

Your latest art project is a celebrity perfume called Obscenity. Where did that idea come from?
I do art shows frequently. I had a photo shoot in Madrid three years ago called Obscenity. It caused a ruckus; it was photos of well-known Spanish artists and personalities, and it was about the intersection of religion and sexuality. There was a protest. Somebody tried to throw a bomb at the gallery. I let that cool off for a while, but it’s always been in the back of my mind to make the Obscenity perfume almost as a satire of celebrity. I have a jeweler friend, Jonathan Johnson. We had been looking for a project to collaborate on, so I got him to design the bottle cap—which is a naked nun—based off 3-D imagery of his wife. I did a photo shoot with his wife and a black model with her dressed as a nun and [him dressed as] a priest.

Do you feel like celebrity perfumes are an example of bad straight camp?
They can be, but it depends on who is doing it. Alan Cumming had a perfume a few years ago called Cumming, [which was] like good gay camp. I always love the good straight camp, like the Chanel commercials, but some of it is definitely bad. Lady Gaga’s perfume is bad straight camp.

Catholics have protested your work in the past, yet both Obscenity and the new movie are filled with Catholic references. Were the allusions intentional?
I’ve been [referencing Catholicism] a lot in my movies. Saints throughout history have been very perverse. Some of them are very masochistic and sexual—kissing the feet of Christ, sucking the puss out of a leper’s sores. I just find it so interesting that they’re supposed to be super religious, and at the same time they’re super sexual. Most people wouldn’t think an 18-year-old boy who gets a job at a nursing home to fuck old men is a saint, but I do. 

Bruce LaBruce's Obscenity installation opens at 10 PM on Thursday, August 28, at Chez Priape (1311 rue Ste-Catherine E) in Montreal. The exhibition will be on display at that location through September 1. To order Obscenity, visit Jonathan Johnson's website.

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Bestiality is having a weird renaissance in Europe. Perhaps ironically, it kicked off when activists succeeded in banning the practice in places like Germany and Norway. In the background, something else emerged simultaneously: an animal-sex-tourism industry, which has been blossoming in Denmark. 

Denmark is far from the only place you can fuck a dolphin, horse, pig, or dog. In fact, more than a dozen US states and territories legally permit some form of man-bites-dog action, including Alabama, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Washington, DC.

But last year, Germany captured international media attention by actually legislating to criminalize sex with an animal—regardless of whether the creature is hurt in the process. Dr. Edmund Haferbeck, head of the Scientific and Legal Department at the animal rights group PETA’s Germany chapter, saw this as a mixed triumph—he claims other animal welfare laws were weakened despite his personal victory in barring sex with animals. Germany’s upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, passed the bill in February 2013 before it was signed into law by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

So attempts to criminalize bestiality as an act, regardless of evidence of physical abuse to the animal, were spearheaded by animal-rights activists. Makes sense, right? But the ripple effects of the law were numerous, and one was the vocal protests of a fringe zoophile group known as ZETA (yes, that's a play on PETA). Their members admit they have sex with animals, and many also have human partners who are aware of their proclivities. It turns out that Dave Chappelle was off base in his famous stand-up special For What It’s Worth when he said, “Y’all can keep fucking these people, more monkey pussy for me!” People actually fuck animals and people, too. ZETA, in fact, even tried to get incorporated as a registered entity in Germany but got shot down by the powers that be. 

Bestiality has few public defenders, but Oliver Burdinski is one of them. He is the shining voice of ZETA, with his gentle tone and fading sex life with his only remaining dog, Joey, a blue-eyed Husky. Joey is not that motivated to anally penetrate Burdinski anymore, but the man is only the bottom in the relationship, and says, “I am his bitch.” Burdinski attributes the change in their sex life to the dog's age. Either way, it's a far cry from his heady early days as a zoophile, when he had three dog-partners all living with him. Burdinski says the group of dogs sometimes fought each other over the prize of sex with their human master. 

ZETA's problem with the law is its validity based on the German constitution, or Basic Law. The group claims that if an animal is not harmed, then this legislation is in fact a "moral law." This is a major issue in Germany, where human rights were strongly safeguarded after World War II because of the atrocities Adolf Hitler managed to commit using moral pejoratives. ZETA asserts that because of this, the ban is not constitutional. But Germany's government refuses to formally recognize ZETA.

Meanwhile, with Norway, Germany, and other European nations recently changing their bestiality laws, Denmark has been thrust into an animal-sex limelight that some residents of the country would just as soon be rid of. Reports of animal-sex tours in Jutland began to emerge for the first time in 2007. 

Journalists like Margit Shabanzadeh, currently a reporter for TV2 News in Copenhagen, were on the cutting edge of exposing this burgeoning problem. She found a woman that trained dogs to have sex with other women, and says that despite claims the dog was healthy, it did not appear particularly happy upon her arrival. "The dog was injured and seemed to be limping, and to have an aversion to humans in general," Shabanzadeh said.

Increased reporting of these incidents, which included barns being raided at night by animal rapists, sparked a public outcry. It drove the debate into the Danish political sphere, with activists demanding the government live up to the German standard and pressuring the former minister of agriculture to change the law. But he took no interest after a report by Peter Sandøe, the then chairman of Denmark's ethics advisory body, indicated that if no harm came to the animal, no crime had been committed. Sandøe, currently a professor of bioethics at the University of Copenhagen, conducted a study wherein he concluded that some animals could actually enjoy sex with humans.

This appeared to be the death knell for activists like Karoline Lundstrøm, who has been trying to penetrate the underground networks of practicing zoophiles for years. She peruses websites they use to organize meet-ups, such as Beast Forum, and has become a sort of country farmer turned vigilante cyber warrior, targeting zoophiles and beasts. The distinction is an important one to people who fuck animals: Zoophiles love their animals and care for them, whereas beasts just fuck and run.

Beasts tend to inspire the lurid imagery of zoophilia, like mutilated horses with condoms strewn at their taped-together legs, as described by veterinarian Dr. Lene Kattrup. Kattrup offers a wellspring of horror stories about atrocities committed against animals in Denmark, and is despondent about the way the country is failing to protect animals.

Activists anticipated a new day for animal protection following the arrival of Dan Jorgensen, Denmark’s new minister of agriculture. Longtime advocates like Peter Mollerup see him as a friend of the animal rights movement and their best chance to finally change the law. However, Jorgensen doesn't seem all that bothered by bestiality. He's made no statements regarding the practice, and hasn't publicly acknowledged it at all since he took office.

Danish fringe groups are now latching on to the issue in hopes of gaining seats in parliament. The most prominent example is Christian H. Hansen of the FOKUS party, who previously served in the Danish People's Party for a dozen years. 

Hansen suspects that Sandøe opposes the law because he's into fucking animals himself. FOKUS brands itself as “the greenest party” in Denmark, and is outspoken on environmental issues as well. It was created largely in reaction to the DPP's overwhelming focus on immigration law—and very little else—according to its founder.

The battle over the ethics of animal-human sexual relationships is far from over. Mythology surrounding bestiality dates back centuries and includes Greek gods, such as Zeus. Hysterical discussions and inability to face this issue head-on are the true enemy in this situation. If you're afraid to acknowledge a problem, then it's impossible to fix it.

Werner Herzog at his home in Los Angeles (Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

It’s only since dropping Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss that Werner Herzog became a staple of conversation between you and your friends. Before that, he was just the award winning, critically acclaimed father of modern European cinema—the man who lugged a 320-ton boat over a hill in the Peruvian rainforest and cooked and ate his own shoe for a short documentary. 

This month, Faber published A Guide for the Perplexed, a compendium of conversations between Herzog and the writer Paul Cronin. As a testament from one of the world's most prolific filmmakers, it reads almost as self-help. "Get used to the bear behind you." he tells us, ostensibly referring to the ambition and drive to create, but equally evoking images of Timothy Treadwell, AKA Grizzly Man. I’m putting my neck out and saying it’s the best book I’ve read all year.

I caught up with Herzog on the phone last week, and we spoke about films, football, WrestleMania and the loathsome trend for children’s yoga classes.

Werner Herzog at his home in Los Angeles (Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

VICE: I’ve just finished reading A Guide for the Perplexed. Have you had a chance to read it?
Werner Herzog: Yes, I did when we were looking through the entire text for corrections. We left no stone unturned.

Is it strange reading yourself back?
I took a professional distance to it because I think it is unwise to stare at your own navel. Now it’s out for the readers. I’m plowing on with a lot of projects, so don’t worry about me.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m finishing Queen of the Desert, I’m preparing three feature films and I am doing my rogue film school at the end of this week.

Can you explain a bit more about the rogue film school?
I can explain it easily. For 20 to 25 years there has been a steady avalanche of young filmmakers coming at me who wanted to be my assistant, or who wanted to learn from me or be in my team. And this has grown rapidly in numbers. For example, a few years ago, when I did a conversation on stage at the Royal Albert Hall—which has something close to 3,000 seats—it was sold out in minutes. And of these 3,000 people there were at least 2,000 who would have liked to work with me. So I tried to give a systematic answer to this onslaught. The rogue film school can happen 50 times a year or once a year. I just need a projector. I could feasibly do it in the middle of the desert.

What do you make of this younger generation of filmmakers?
Kids who get in touch with me are very often around 15, 16, 17. Whatever you call this generation, I don’t know. I don’t care how you call them. One thing I find missing is the culture of reading. I mean, reading books. And this is one of the things I demand from the students at the rogue film school. There’s a mandatory reading list.

Film theory?
No, no, no. That would be the last thing. Film theory will be thrown out instantly. No, it's Roman poetry from Roman antiquity. Or old Icelandic poetry. Or it will be a short story of Hemingway. Or the Warren Commission report on Kennedy’s assassination. All sorts of pretty wild stuff.

Can you explain what it was like entering the Chauvet Cave—home to the oldest discovered paintings in the world – while making The Cave of Forgotten Dreams?
You know that you have a privilege that hardly anyone else has—that’s the first thing. Each day there are more people on the summit of Mount Everest. And the caves will probably be shut down permanently very soon. If you have a scientific project or a convincing reason, you might get a permit. But heads of states from other countries were not permitted to enter. Of course, we have to see the images as they were seen by Palaeolithic painters. There were only flickering lights, and this creates some kind of dynamic, some kind of movement. In front of one of the main panels there are sources of light—a row of fires—but they are behind the people. So they would cast their own shadows on to the walls as well. We do not know the meaning of all this; all we can say is there was a cinematic element, a movement of light and shadow.

The trailer for Cave of Forgotten Dreams

You seem to take a cynical stance on academia.
Well, academia has been the death—or the near death—of poetry, and academia is beginning to invade cinema and it tries to extinguish the flame. But it will not succeed. Whenever somebody comes with film theory approach to cinema I lower my head.

I take it you don’t consume much pop culture?
Not very much, no. Well, I look with great interest at phenomena like WrestleMania. Or I used to watch the Anna Nicole Smith Show because there was a very strange cultural shift there. I go to the football stadium, that’s a form of popular culture. 

Do you ever go back to Bavaria?
Whenever I can, yes. I miss the Bavarian dialect. Being all over the world, the thing I miss most of my home country is the dialect.

Your imagination must have been able to run wild there. Did you look to figures like King Ludwig II?
Sure, of course. He’s a total cultural hero for Bavarians. He’s very, very important for understanding Bavarian culture. The sorts of dreams he realized and the dream castles he built – well, you see it all the way to Disneyland. The prototype of the Disneyland castle is actually King Ludwig’s invention.

Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria (Photo via)

A lot of your work depicts people in extreme situations; are you never fascinated by elements of the day-to-day?
Well yes, I have a very wonderful family life and I’m one of the very few men—very, very few men—who is really happily married. I find it most wonderful and most exciting. And I moved to Los Angeles because I fell in love 20 years ago.

Do you find it difficult to switch off and to stop observing people? Do your family ever just say, "Cut it out Werner, we’re trying to eat our cereal"?
[Laughs] No. I am used to movie making. Of course I know how to behave around my family—I don’t need to switch on or off.

Okay, just checking. Do you find yourself funny?
Well, I think there is a lot of humor in all of my films. Like I say in A Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin asks me if I have anything I would like to pass on to the world, to the future generations, and I was reminded of what hotel magnate Conrad Hilton said: “When you take a shower, don’t forget to put the shower curtain inside the shower.”

Cool, I’ll remember that. In Encounters at the End of the World you seemed very concerned about the crazy penguins. Were you actually?
Look, it’s a dark humor. If you look at films like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, people laugh more than in an Eddie Murphy comedy. Some of my films have a warmer humor. There’s a lot of humor in my films that people seem only to be discovering now.

How do you get the people in your documentaries to open up?
I allow a lot of space to the persons with whom I talk. And I go very deep inside, very quickly. But this is very difficult to teach. For example, Into the Abyss starts with the chaplain who has to assist with the execution 30 minutes later. When I first spoke to him he spoke back like a TV preacher, phony and superficially. He had mentioned going to the golf course earlier and how the horses and squirrels and deer would look at him. So I stopped him, and I said, “Tell me about an encounter with a squirrel,” and that’s where he came apart. That’s where he unraveled and we got to see very, very deep inside his soul.

Into the Abyss has been compared a lot to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Were you conscious of the similarities when you were making it?
We have to be careful because Truman Capote, in a way, exploited his subjects. I have always been very suspicious about Truman Capote, because for years and years he did not publish the book, claiming that it wasn’t finished. He just waited until both of them were actually executed, witnessed their execution and wrote a final chapter about it. That is kind of suspicious to me. The book is very well written, although, may I say something? My film is deeper and my film is better.

The trailer for Into the Abyss

You chose not to play the sound recording of Timothy Treadwell being killed by a bear in Grizzly Man out of respect to him…
Yes.

Are there any moments in your career where you’ve regretted over-stepping the mark?
Not really, no. I'm on good terms with all of my films. Even the ones in which I'm acting, like when I played a villain in Jack Reacher. I enjoy what I do. And by the way, I am the only one who is really frightening in that film.

You are pretty scary in that film.
I am. I was paid handsomely and I was worth my money.

How was it working with Tom Cruise?
Interesting. What I like about him is his relentless professionalism. He’s a very generous, very kind man. You do not stay at the top for so many decades if you don’t have something special about you.

Are there any actors you'd like to work with still?
Yes, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson, Lillian Gish…

That might be a little tricky.
[Laughs]... Marilyn Monroe! No, I’ve had the privilege to work with the best of the best. Most recently Nicole Kidman, who is sensational.

Can you quickly explain to me your contempt for gyms, yoga classes and people who exercise in public?
And yoga classes for children. You name it. Let’s leave it at that. Just register that I have strong contempt for yoga classes for five-year-olds, yoga studios and things like that.

But you’re friends with David Lynch, and he’s into transcendental meditation. Would you ever do anything like that?
No. Period.

Thanks, Werner.

A Guide for the Perplexed is published by Faber and Faber and is available now. To find out more about Werner Herzog’s rogue film school visit www.roguefilmschool.com.

Follow Nathalie Olah on Twitter here, and Jamie Lee Curtis Taete here.

When was the last time you heard a voice even remotely similar to that of an opera singer on a hip-hop track?

Listening to Souls of Mischief’s latest album, There is Only Now, is like watching a 40-minute movie with your ears. It’s presented by composer and Ghostface collaborator Adrian Younge, stars Ali Shaheed Muhamad of A Tribe Called Quest, and has cameos by Busta Ryhmes and Snoop Dogg, but the appeal goes far beyond its stellar cast.

It’s that kind of experimental and grandiose approach to boom-bap hip-hop that gives There is Only Now a transformative feel. It’s transcendental hip-hop of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill standard and the kind of back-to-basics storytelling music needs right now. Over analog beats—that means all live instruments too—Souls of Mischief tell the story of a friend kidnapped straight off the streets of Oakland. But this album is not the story of the instigation, the fight or the boasts like most other hip-hop albums, but rather how the rappers react, fight back and seek justice for themselves that makes this a story speaking to and for America today. Like the people caught up in the murder of Michael Brown, Souls of Mischief are the confused and vulnerable victims, not the consequence-averse, clap-happy killers.

Ahead of the album’s release I talked to its composer Adrian Younge and then Tajai from Souls of Mischief. Here’s what they had to say.

VICE: Was it ever awkward between you and Souls of Mischief because you were such a superfan?
Adrian Younge: The awkward moment was me telling them how much I’m a fan of them and them telling me how much they’re a fan of me and us trying to figure out who was more of a fan. I’ve been so inspired by them for so many years, to have them telling me that they dig what I do and know my catalogue and all that stuff—that tripped me out.

I saw that you used to be a professor.
I have a law degree and I was a professor of entertainment law for about three years, so I kind of understand both sides of the business. As an artist I always wanted to have an educational side because I feel like it would help me in creating an enterprise.

What do you mean enterprise?
I just started a record label called Linear Labs that speaks to the people that I believe follow my music, which is the silent majority. These are the type of consumers that are looking for an artisan approach to music that’s hand crafted, bespoke, tailor-made, organic music that’s made for the type of person that pays attention to detail. I want everything in my enterprise to speak to these kinds of people with this kind of message.

How do you accomplish that?
Everything I do is all live instruments, all analog recorded. No pro tools, no plug-in, no nothing. It’s all recorded in a way that they would have done in the late-60s-slash-early-70s, had they been making hip-hop music. Just on that level it sounds good. It’s fresh and robust. We gave it life. You can hear the human error in it—that exudes feeling. All of the videos that we shoot are on 60mm film. Everything is real real shit.

That’s so incredibly different from all the 16-year-olds in their bedrooms making hip-hop beats today.
It’s not that the music is actually bad music, but it’s bullshit to the people that have sensitive ears. People don’t want to hear something looped on Pro Tools every two bars with no progression or deep chords. I started making music that is in competition with the music that Marvin Gaye first made or that Isaac Hayes, Tribe Called Quest, and Wu-Tang made. I strive to make music on that level. There are a lot of people that want to hear that kind of music that have settled for a lesser-cultivated brand of music. I just don’t settle for that kind of stuff.

Sometimes I think that music is moving towards hologram pop stars and the complete elimination of the human touch. I guess you’re fighting that.
Exactly.

It makes it seem lazy to not to do what you’re doing.
If somebody is inspired by the kind of music I create, then they should try to learn how to use analog equipment. I started creating my studio in about ‘96, but and I never really had money before to do it. I would just not pay my rent or not make my car payment to buy equipment because I believed in it so much. I never let money be a hindrance to detour and/or stifle my passion when it came to making this type of music.

What else is part of your enterprise?
My wife and I own a record store slash salon called The Artform Studio, which is an actual boutique record store and a boutique hair salon. I run the record store with my business partner Patrick Washington, so we focus on rare golden era hip-hop, rare soul and psych-rock to jazz. I only listen to old records to get inspiration and I go there to find records.

Why do you only listen to old music for inspiration?
New music does nothing for me. It’s not to say that there’s not great new music being made because you’ve got artists like Black Milk and Kendrick Lamar, but there’s not a plethora of great music that it’s easily accessible to provide you with that inspiration that records do. I love records that are created between ‘68 and ‘73, from classic rock to psychedelic jazz. That is what speaks to me, that is my foundation. That’s what I love.

This is Souls of Mischief’s first album in five years. Welcome back.
Tajai Massey: After being in the game 20 years you kind of need something to wake you up. This was the perfect project.

Why?
Look at hip-hop—look at what’s out here. Look at music in general. It’s time for something more refreshing to come out. Something live, something new, something that’s conceptual and the audio match the visuals. People look at music in general, but especially hip-hop, as sort of this cash cow and treating it, as far as the effort put into it, as little input as possible for as high output as possible. It’s cheapening the music in general. If the public eats mushy oats over and over again, I’m just going to make mushy oats. Why would I try to create some sort of crazy cuisine if we can make all the money off of mushy oats? That’s why it’s the perfect time. We got to wake things up and shake things up as musicians.

This album is all analog recording. Do you think music relies too much on the computer?
To get to the desired product you have to use the appropriate technology. In this case, we went for analog because it was time for a fresh approach. I want this record to be like a Johnny Cash record or a Bjork record. Not just these rap dudes.

How do you look at a Johnny Cash record differently?
Everybody has a Johnny Cash record and a Bjork record and I don’t care what background you’re from. Either your dad has one or your mom has one or you have one that you got from a friend in college. I want it to be judged on that scale—a universal music scale. I’m not trying to hype it up like it’s the most awesome thing created ever, however listening to it I think it’s a record that stands up to anything by anybody else, like a Portishead record or a Radiohead record or a Beatles record.

Have you felt stuck within hip-hop?
Sometimes hip-hop gets put in this little ghetto. I don’t mean ghetto in terms of socio-economic, but it’s crammed in this little corner. Well-executed musical masterpieces like Paul’s Boutique or It Takes a Nation of Millions transcend the genre. That’s what we’re trying to do with every record, I just think with this one we were actually successful, because of the creative approach—working with Adrian, doing it as a conceptual album, the way that the album moves. It’s like a soundtrack almost. It’s very visual. Some records within every genre transcend the genre and I’m hoping that we hit the mark with this one.

The album is about you getting kidnapped, but Souls of Mischief have always been the non-gangster guys of hip-hop.
Yeah, we’re just regular guys. In hip-hop there was the N.W.A-Compton persona, which was this hard, super-thug persona. Then there was De La and Native Sons as the sort of the hippie, crazy, trippy persona and I think when we came out we were in between those two, like oh, they’re just regular dudes. Going to jail every Wednesday and getting into beef with different rappers has fortunately never been part of our image. We don’t have to ride around and act all tough. I can’t imagine that being fun when you’re in your late 30s. 

How did you steer clear of that?
Just being regular, man. I got a 13-year-old and a 2-year-old. I went to Stanford, I got a masters. How thugged out can I be? At an age like mine, I’m 39, I can’t see it being helpful being hella tough. Unless you’re in the racketeering or extortion bracket being tough is not helpful. I learned that early on in life. We got homies that are dead—a lot. We got hella homies that are in jail for life and all that kind of shit. Every one of them would trade places. It’s not normal to have to live this kind of super tough hyper-gangster lifestyle that I think is how a lot of rappers and Hollywood and just guys in general act. I don’t see that as advantageous in any respect unless you are really going that route. If I was still running an extortion racket, having street cred would be an important part of our business.

Adrian actually wanted me to ask you this question: do you think that you’re part of a new golden era of hip-hop?
I was part of the original golden era and hopefully I’ll be part of a renaissance or some type of rekindling of the rules and regulations and standards and morals that were established during that era, but I can’t, as a person inside the times, define the era that I’m in. I didn’t know that I was in what was called the golden era until now and I’m like Oh shit! That shit was golden.

You’ve got to wait ten years to find out.
First off all you got to wait and then second of all I’m from the original golden era. We don’t stop being golden era because something new happened. Even during the platinum era and the ice age we still were golden era rappers. When it wasn’t cool to be golden era, when it wasn’t hip to have skills and have music with depth and not make party jams. We haven’t changed that approach, so that’s how it’s kind of weird for me to even approach talking about another era. I didn’t know we were in the platinum era or the ice age. Are we in the swag era now? You sort of notice it at a certain point because you start vomiting up all the shit that’s going on.

What were those golden era rules to you?
Hip-hop was created out of necessity, but also to be different from what there originally was. I don’t like how when there’s a hot producer every single song out is by the same production outfit, so the entire sound starts sounding like the same old overproduced bullshit. My rule now is about creativity. When I make music, it’s new music! I’m not trying to remix somebody elses shit. I’m not a fucking microwave—I’m a chef! That is what the industry created out of hip-hop—that we can regurgitate this product and repackage it so that people will buy it over and over.

Watch Souls of Mischief's latest video (above) and check out Linear Labs on SoundCloud.

Follow Lauren on Twitter

Image via CCTV on YouTube

Whether it's the costume dramas with bad production values, the scrubbed and censored documentaries, or the scripted talk shows, Chinese television can be really awful. After the millionth rehash of The Monkey King or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it's no wonder that producers at CCTV, China's state-run television broadcaster, are turning to other sources for inspiration. Taking a page from their American counterparts, reality shows have become a hit in China too. One particular variation of reality TV is extremely popular: prison confessions.

Naw Kham was a Burmese rebel turned drug kingpin. He was so effective in his land grabs and so loved by the populace of the Golden Triangle, where opium and heroin supported local livelihoods, that the Chinese authorities considered dropping a bomb from a drone to kill him. He earned the sting of Chinese public opinion when he killed a crew of Chinese sailors (who were probably drug mules working for one of Naw Kham's rivals). When he was finally captured, his trial was televised. The camera didn't pan away from him until he was led away to be executed by lethal injection.

Viewers at home, loved it, talked about it, and blogged about it, posting comments like the one above from China.com, which translates to, "Naw Kham needs to die. Thirteen Chinese sailors [who were killed in the Mekong River Massacre] can't rest in peace." The Naw Kham sensation struck such a chord that it paved the way for a new wave of popular television broadcasts.

One year ago, Vice reported on Eastern Lightning, a quasi-Christian cult in China with violent teachings and a mandate to defeat “The Great Red Dragon” (read: The Communist Party of China). In late May, Zhang Lidong, a member of Eastern Lightning, beat a woman to death in a McDonald's in eastern China, prompting national outrage as the cellphone video of the incident went viral. Within days, Zhang, along with four other members of the cult who were present at the beating, were apprehended by Chinese law enforcement. Zhang was put in front of a camera so he could confess his crimes, even though he went on delirious rants about his victim being a "demon and evil spirit." His trial, however, did not commence until August 21.

It's not just hard criminals who are put on TV while wearing orange prison vests. Guo Meimei was an online sensation, and has been dubbed China's Paris Hilton. She grabbed hold of national attention in 2011 when she uploaded pictures of her Maserati and Lamborghini, even though she claimed to be a manager of the Red Cross Society of China (RCSC). It was later revealed that she was not actually employed by RCSC, but was the mistress of a man whose business was a fundraising partner of the organization. As rumors of embezzlement were afloat, donations to RCSC plummeted, severely affecting the aid work that they do in the earthquake-prone Sichuan province, as well as relief provided in other areas suffering from drought or flooding. Unbothered that her vanity was stemming the flow of much-needed aid to families who have lost all their possessions and homes, Guo continued to post pictures of beds of cash and hundreds of thousands of dollars in casino chips used in her high stakes gambling in Macau.

Last month, Guo Meimei was arrested for placing illegal bets during the FIFA World Cup. She too appeared on air with a confession, again without a trial. On national television, she talked about her gambling and said that she made money by charging men to spend the night with them, never taking less than $17,000 per encounter.

Individuals who hit the Chinese government's political nerves are given the same treatment. Gao Yu is a journalist, press freedom advocate, and political analyst. As June 4 approached, marking the 25th anniversary of the Tianamen Square Massacre, she vanished. Having previously spent a total of seven years in jail for her writing—the charge was "publishing state secrets"—friends of the 70-year-old Gao knew that she was in police custody. Shortly after her disappearance, Gao Yu was seen on CCTV, faced blurred out but her identity revealed. She ”confessed” that her actions “harmed the national interest,” and that her actions were very wrong, though it is unclear what exactly she did was wrong. On air, she pleaded guilty and said she “accepts her lesson.” None of those statements reflect decades of democracy and press freedom advocacy, or the beliefs of a UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize laureate.

The internet lit up with replies, like the bloodthirsty comment above from Baidu, which translates to, "I strongly suggest that we execute this nation-crumbling bitch after she confesses. If she doesn't go, it will be disastrous. The key is that she sets an example for vain women."

Many other high profile inmates have been put on screen before their trials, all admitting to crimes and repenting their sins. Some have even been shown with marks on their bodies, prompting allegations of coercion and torture.

This type of public confession has its roots in a tumultuous period of modern China. When Mao was leading the country into economic ruin, struggle sessions were common. At these sessions, political rivals and capitalist roaders were publicly humiliated, berated, and abused before crowds of up to 100,000 until they denounced their capitalist ways, at times leading to execution. The struggle sessions were among the ugliest, most reprehensible things that happened to China under Mao, and sowed the seeds of unquestioning reverence that still plague the population today.

Fast forward to 2013, when Xi Jinping assumed the Chinese presidency. He barreled ahead in his fight against corruption, initiating a “criticism and self-criticism” campaign that targets government officials who took bribes, hunting both “tigers and flies” within the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. Taking down high profile criminals and rivals, and having them publicly denounce their old ways, also fits the campaign's designs. At the same time, state media has been promoting Xi's image more aggressively than any other leader since Mao. The cult of personality is back in vogue, and a strongman leader needs diversions from real problems like unsafe food, impossible urban real estate prices, and a rapidly growing wealth gap.

Last year, the Chinese Supreme Court ruled against extracting confessions through torture, but these broadcasts are telling a different story. Scapegoating is a common tactic of authoritarian regimes, but the blend of high profile confessions and repentance is potent. There is much power contained in the image of a well-known, notorious, hateable person placed in handcuffs, locked behind bars, denouncing previous beliefs and admitting wrongs, humbling herself within a cloud of prostration. Whereas the struggle sessions of the Mao era had thousands of attendees, the televised confessions of today are beamed onto the screens of over a billion people.

The schadenfreude that viewers express online is torrential, but if trial by television ever loses its popularity, the Chinese have a fall back: IS is giving them plenty of source material. The awful, unwatchable video of James Foley's execution just made it onto a massive public screen in Beijing, which perfectly fits China's desire to project a harmonious self-image to its own citizenry while portraying global chaos.

The distasteful has evolved into the surreal, and viewer ratings are only going up.

Earlier this year, Detroit's Water and Sewerage Department began turning off water utilities for overdue or delinquent accounts. Since April, the department has cut off the water for nearly 3,000 households per week—meaning roughly 100,000 Motor City residents are without water. Entrenched at the bottom of Detroit's current economic crisis, many of those without water are the city's poorest residents.

The city's shut-off campaign has garnered international press attention, and has been called "an affront to human rights" by representatives of the United Nations.

VICE News traveled to Detroit to see first-hand how residents are dealing with the water shut-offs, speak with local government representatives about the issue, and discuss possible resolutions with activist groups.

It’s not often you see a look of total devastation on someone’s face, but that was the expression Bassim Al-Shaker wore when I met him at a bar in downtown Phoenix on Tuesday night. Escaping threats for his life, the Iraqi-born painter fled to Phoenix in July of last year, eventually obtaining refugee status and becoming a permanent citizen earlier this year.

But Bassim woke up Monday morning to discover the door to his downtown studio smashed. Ten paintings were stolen August 18, as well as a couch and some power tools, from Bassim’s studio on Fourth Street and McKinley. Bassim was using the studio space rent-free before the whole block is to be demolished at the end of the year.

Formerly a barber in Baghdad, Bassim was once blindfolded, spat on, and beaten by loyalists of Iraq’s Mahdi Army militia, who left the painter so battered he spent the next two weeks in the hospital. But what had Bassim done to attract their violence? He had drawn sketches of the Venus de Milo as part of an entrance exam at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts.

Yeah, that’s right. Some tasteful nude sketches almost got this guy killed.

While his attackers were jailed for a few years, they were released last spring and quickly found Bassim. They chased him down the street, across rooftops, through alleys, and over fences. In a house behind an Iraqi Army blockade, the artist hid for almost a month in conditions he described as “like a prison.”

Rijin Sahakian, founding director of Sada for Contemporary Iraqi Art, once hired Bassim to manage the non-profit’s Baghdad division. When she heard where he was hiding, Rijin contacted Arizona State University's art museum director Gordon Knox, who helped Bassim join the university’s foreign residency program.

Bassim’s hyper-realistic oil paintings of bucolic life in southern Iraq have been exhibited internationally, including in the Iraqi Pavillion during the 55th International Venice Biennale in Italy last year. He would paint at night in Baghdad to avoid the chaotic roar of explosions, sirens, and traffic common to his war-weary hometown. He left one desert for another, falling in love with Phoenix, its blooming art scene, and his new neighbors, which is why the burglary has hit him especially hard.

The latest painting, created just a week before, was so fresh that no one even had time to photograph it. Featuring a red and green city landscape, it was also the first in a new stylistic direction for Bassim. “I love this painting,” he said painfully.

“When I come here, I know people in America are very good,” Bassim told me. “The city, amazing for the people, amazing. [They] help me, like me. I love these people… But when I saw yesterday for these people come in my studio, break my studio and [take] my painting, I know these are very different people.”

At the bar with Bassim was Greg Esser, director of ASU's International Artist Residency Program, who acts as a sort of mentor to the artist as he shifts to a full-time citizen. Greg tells me the 29-year-old painter has only been learning English since he came here, so he also works as somewhat of a translator, typing words like "suspect" into Google Translate.

Greg feels because of the stolen couch and power tools—things "that can be sold at a pawn shop or a second-hand store very easily"—the thieves didn’t realize the value of the stolen artwork, which is estimated at around $50,000. The burglars left Bassim’s art supplies alone.

“I’m not angry, I am just sad about that,” Bassim told me. “I don’t need anything. I need just painting, just I need relax, just I need sell my painting. This is my dream.”

I asked Bassim if he missed Iraq. His eyes watered. “It’s too much,” he said.

The Phoenix Police Department's Property Crimes Unit is requesting anyone with information to call Silent Witness at 480-WITNESS with any information.

Follow Troy Farah on Twitter.

On August 19, Kiev's Independence Square was cleared of the last remains of the Euromaidan protest camp. Despite the fact that the new Ukrainian government owes much of its power to the people that built it, the camp had lately become a thorn in the eye of the state, and so the tents were finally forcibly removed by the authorities. After former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's departure in February 2014, most protesters had returned home anyway. Those who remained in the camp were mostly activists who had grown too accustomed to the permanent state of emergency to go back to their normal lives.

A few days before the evacuation was supposed to take place, I found myself on Independence Square. I couldn't shake the impression that apart from random passerby and a few tourists, a lot of the inhabitants of the remaining tent cities were slightly dubious characters. Most were men in camouflage clothing, some of whom also wore flags of political organizations; many looked quite disheveled, as they might after living outdoors for months. My Ukrainian friends told me about nocturnal assaults and fights breaking out in the middle of the night on the square. After dark, the square didn't feel like a safe place to be in.

As the encampment was being cleared, the last inhabitants reacted by setting tires on fire and throwing stones at the city workers. Despite their opposition, the Maidan finally returned to its original state. The big Christmas tree, the flags, and posters will later be displayed in a museum dedicated to the events of the past year.

See more of Hieronymous's work here.

Twitch is getting acquired by the beast that is Amazon. Photo via Flickr user Roja Directa

Amazon is apparently about to shell out a shade under a billion dollars for Twitch, an interactive, YouTube-meets-ESPN platform for video-game streaming. But if Twitch is revolutionizing the gaming industry while ranking fourth in US peak website traffic behind traffic tycoons Netflix, Google, and Apple, many outside the gaming world had never even heard of it until now.

Twitch has created a new breed of internet celebrity: the gamer. It boasts an impressive 55 million unique viewers and 16 billion minutes watched per month, which reportedly ends up offering some of their most popular personalities an opportunity to make upward of $100,000 a year on streaming alone. Twitch bridges the gap between viewer and personality by giving users an opportunity to chat with the streamer instantaneously, an accessibility that promotes a unique intimacy. While the word has yet to spread throughout the mainstream media that video games are no longer the diversion of an underground counterculture, with these stats it's hard to argue that online spectatorship of gaming isn't about to blow up in a major way.

Still, I was initially confused by the fervor surrounding a website where people watch other people play games—especially when some fork over an extra $4.99 to avoid commercials. This hesitation reflects a nationwide resistance. Twitch user Matt Gebhart (a.k.a. Barenakedclown) said, “It is perfectly acceptable to binge-watch Netflix for 12 hours a day to finish the latest season or catch up on a show, but if you tell somebody who isn’t into gaming that you watched somebody play a video game for a few hours, you are treated like a weirdo.”

One of the ways Twitch is changing gaming in the US is through the tight-knit relationship it promotes between viewer and streamer, mostly via the chat box. Each channel has a chat field next to the video, where the streamer can see what their fans are saying about the game and respond second-by-second. I skyped with one of Twitch's most popular streamers, Brian Wyllie (AKA TSM_TheOddOne), to learn more.

Wyllie has more than half a million followers, a total of over 150 million channel views, and a tagline of "Come for the forehead, stay for the rage.” But he’s incredibly grounded and kind (the man is Canadian after all). He understands that his fans are instrumental to his success; explaining, "[Twitch's chat box] is a really great way to interact with your fans, your viewers, because it's basically real time. You can type back to them. It's like a chat room, but they can see you because you're live stream." Twitch has changed gaming into an industry that capitalizes on what makes pretty much every form of entertainment popular: the injection of personality. While Wyllie used to be a professional League of Legends player, he now claims to support himself live streaming on Twitch 62 hours a week. He laughs at my surprise over his long hours. "It pays pretty well,” he says. According to the International Business Times, streamers make $2.50 for every $4.99 subscription monthly—unfortunately, only the channel's owner knows how many subscribers he or she has—and $3 for every 1,000 non-subscribers who watch a three-minute commercial. Wyllie averages 155,964 views a day.

Aside from channels with individual personalities, Twitch also covers live tournaments. Like televised sporting events, these include commentators, player profiles, and monetized, subscription-based viewership. Of course, because this is the internet, you can also can get involved in the lives of the players and teams as well as the intricacies of the game.

"”When you’re watching a pro game of League of Legends and one team makes a good play on another, the chat fills with chants for one team,” Gebhart explained, “It is sort of like being at a football game where everyone is cheering on their favorite team.”

Twitch has also become a resource for anyone who wants to break into the industry. As another Twitch user, Derek Richins (a.k.a. Lessthangood), said, "Twitch has changed my view of gaming by making me realize that there is a future in it and now I really want to be involved in games whether being a personality or making the games.” What was once an activity engaged in by the stereotypically nerdy, socially inept, and unmotivated in their basements when they had free time has now become a massive, incredibly profitable industry.

Although some channels revolve around competitive gaming, skill doesn't always take precedence. Like YouTube, Twitch allows anyone to create and profit off his or her own streaming channel. Some channels explore the worst games out there, and others run for charity. On nearly every type of channel, streamers discuss their personal lives, including relationships with other players, which contributes to the intimacy of the Twitch experience.

“I think American media is all about the football hero, but not all of us can be football heroes,” said Wyllie, who has over a half a million followers.

Trolls are an issue, but the vibe is generally positive, and in popular chats a moderator helps weed out some of the more obnoxious messages. “I really like how a bunch of people can join in on a conversation and share their opinions on what is happening or join together and mass spam or troll a stream,” Richins said. “In fact, a big pleasure of watching Twitch is seeing all of the jokes and trolling that people put in the chat!” Mostly the trolling is benign, but some Twitch celebrities have been victims of the celebrity "Swatting" prank. Four Twitch stars have been swatted between July and August alone, some during their live streams with thousands of people watching.  

Outside of the gaming community, few people seemed to know about Twitch until quite recently, but streamers I spoke to just before the Amazon deal went public suspected it was only a matter of time before the thing gained more traction..

“I'm pretty sure gaming will be more mainstream in the future, especially the US,” Wyllie said, while keeping one eye on his competing League of Legends team. “It's more mainstream in some of the Asian countries, like Korea or European countries, like, Sweden—it's more accepted there. Right now, it's getting more mainstream because there are more games on everything, like there's games on smart phones and obviously PCs and consoles, but now it's like everyone can get into it.”

Twitch’s appeal stems from the interactive component, but we all know that popularity based on social media isn’t the best business model. For every billion Mark Zuckerberg makes, there is a once-popular site like MySpace struggling to regain its popularity and reinvent itself. Right now, Twitch seems to have the market pegged—and Amazon’s massive reach won’t hurt—but who knows how long Twitch can maintain its edge? Considering its growing audience and the insane amount of money that could be made (Forbes estimates that streamers can make over 300k a year with streaming, sponsorship, and YouTube presence), competitors are likely to emerge and diversify the market. One thing is certain: For the first time in history, a gaming platform is transforming marginal users into a new kind of celebrity.

US Capitol Police. Photo via Elvert Barnes

On August 19, St. Louis police fatally shot 25-year-old Kajieme Powell, who was holding a steak knife and refused to drop it. Powell’s last words before two different officers opened fire with 12 shots were: “Shoot me already!"

VICE News interviewed some angry people, but unlike the unrecorded shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, the killing of Powell is considered justified by many, because he died on camera wielding a knife and refusing commands to drop it. As St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told CNN: Tasers aren't good enough, and “in a lethal situation, [the officers] used lethal force.”

Nobody disputes that knives can be dangerous—and that it’s OK to shoot a guy who is, say, holding one to a toddler’s throat.

But there’s armed, and then there’s armed. The shooting of Powell was almost certainly legal, particularly given the extra leeway law enforcement officers are granted under the laws they enforce. The thing is, legal doesn’t necessarily mean unobjectionable, as the following cases demonstrate.

In 2010, Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk fatally shot John T. Williams, a woodcarver who was deaf in one ear. Police said Williams was carrying a knife and didn’t respond to Birk’s commands. But the dashcam video showed Birk running after Williams; just six seconds after the officer ordered Williams to “put the knife down!” the viewer hears six fatal shots coming from off-screen. (Birk later resigned, and the shooting was eventually ruled unjustified, but he faced no legal punishment.)

The golf club-wielding Todd Blair was given about five seconds to comply with Utah police back in 2011, when a SWAT team busted in his door during a no-knock drug raid. In 2012, a Houston officer, ostensibly trying to rescue his partner, fatally shot a double amputee who turned out to be holding a pen, not a knife. Last October, deputies with the LA County Sheriff’s Department fatally shot a homeless man who was reportedly armed with “a stick.”

Last Saturday, police in Howard County, Maryland, fatally shot a knife-wielding suicidal man. Individuals shot while holding knives are often seen as trying to commit suicide by cop—and cops too often oblige. Police are not mental health experts, but they are tasked with public safety. Is killing suicidal, distressed, or disoriented individuals the best they can do? (Not to mention, the mentally ill have more to fear from police than vice versa.)

British police confront a man armed with a machete.

Compare these stories with two instances of UK police—only about five percent of whom are armed—handling men with knives in an admirably brave (and restrained) fashion: in one, an officer Tasers a man with two knives from just a few feet away, while in the other, 30 cops—the visible ones clearly unarmed—spend nearly six minutes trying to apprehend an aggressively unhinged man holding a machete. If folks with whittling knives, bats, and steak knives are given mere seconds before fatal shots are fired, this guy deserved a millisecond. And yet, the cops brought him in alive—and took him to a mental health facility.

Now, there have been a handful of police shootings in the UK in the past few years. And the rarity of armed UK cops doesn’t prevent 20 or 30 suspect deaths from happening each year. But maybe we should look to the UK. Gun control is what America needs—for the police. That way we can eliminate the cops who are just in it for the bang-bang thrill, keep anyone brave enough to actually want to help people, and then start figuring out just how dangerous Tasers are anyway.

Check out the rest of this week’s bad cops:

• Hot and fresh from The Intercept: The National Security Agency (NSA) has its own search engine containing billions of records that it shares with a dozen agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). More and more, it’s becoming clear that protecting our privacy means more than just reining in the NSA.
• First, a reminder that the Miami-Dade Police Department once choked a boy for giving an officer “dehumanizing stares,” and arrested Carlos Miller of Photography is Not a Crime, among other folks, for filming police on the job. Now, with cameras catching cops behaving badly all the time, what a damn coincidence that the local police union is fighting Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez’s $1 million plan to equip 500 officers with body cameras. This, according to the police union’s letter, “will distract officers from their duties, and hamper their ability to act and react in dangerous situations.” Considering that complaints against police also go down when body cameras are in use, there is no sensible reason—other than protecting bad cops—for a police union to object to this plan.
• On August 19, an LAPD officer and “professor of homeland security” published a disturbing editorial in The Washington Post about obeying police orders. Officer Sunil Dutta probably didn’t write the headline (“I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.”) but it does sum up what is a creepy piece. And it doesn’t bode well that a cop who wants to share his opinion seems to have the exact same opinion as the ones screaming at protesters and media in the streets.
• An ongoing lawsuit contains some disturbing allegations about one of the two Ferguson police officers who detained Huffington Post and Washington Post reporters as they sat in a McDonald’s on August 13, a day of continuous protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The civil suit accuses Officer Justin Cosma, then a deputy with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, of accosting a 12-year-old boy at the preteen’s own mailbox, accusing him of running on a highway, and then throwing him on the ground, choking him, and “hog-tying” him. The boy was taken to a hospital, but only the refusal of the local DA to prosecute prevented the officer from being charged with resisting arrest and assaulting an officer. Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly tweeted that “Officer Cosma was actually the nicer of the two cops who took me into custody.”
• Bystanders in a Greenville County, South Carolina, Walmart thought local deputies used excessive force during their arrest of Sandon Matthew Sierad, who was acting erratically and reportedly refusing arrest. Police Tasered him twice and then one of them hit Sierad 20 times in the back or shoulder, provoking angry cries from witnesses, some of whom spoke to local news afterwards. Video from the scene shows that the man does not appear to ever actively resist, though Master Deputy Jonathan Smith says that disturbing footage was the end of a half-hour confrontation with Sierad, who had been (presumably) drunkenly trying to break into a cash register in the store, and had also reached for a deputy’s knife. As of Monday, the deputy who punched Sierad is on administrative leave. Meanwhile Sierad is charged with “resisting arrest with assault/injury, assault and battery third degree, breach of peace, and disorderly conduct.”
• Two Fairfield, California police officers are accused of using a law enforcement database to check out potential lady-friends. Officers Stephen Ruiz and Jacob Glashoff looked up women on dating sites and then made sure the intriguing ones were kosher by checking the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System for criminal records. The officers did all of this while on the clock. They remain on active duty while the investigation takes place. 
• On August 21, Oklahoma City Police Officer Daniel Holtzclaw was arrested for reportedly sexually assaulting six different women.
• The blue wall also crumbles in the face of social media idiocy. On Friday, Glendale, Missouri, police officer Matthew Pappert, who has been serving in Ferguson during some of the protests there, was suspended for some truly disturbing Facebook posts about the people outraged over the shooting of Michael Brown. One post: “These protesters should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night.” Another: “Where is a Muslim with a backpack when you need them." And another: “Great, thugs and white trash all in one location.”
• Meanwhile, Ray Albers of the St. Ann, Missouri, police department was indefinitely suspended without pay last week due to the fact that he pointed his semi-automatic weapon at protesters in Ferguson and said, “I will fucking kill you.” More accountability which would have never, ever happened if the incident wasn’t captured on film.
• Speaking of small progress in policing, VICE’s good cop of the week is over in Hawaii. After watching the mess in Ferguson, Kauai Police Chief Darryl Perry wants every officer on his force to have body cameras. The only downsides to this plan are that officers will be able to turn off the cameras, and that they will be purchased with asset forfeiture funds. Nevertheless, any chief who is this adamant on bringing in body cameras is moving in the right right direction and gets to be our Good Cop.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

This is how a criminal botnet works, which is very similar to the kinds of botnets CSEC uses. Image via Wikipedia.

Glimmers of new information about CSEC, Canada’s version of the NSA, have recently been released through a variety of media sources, which has provided a slightly clearer picture of what Canada’s mysterious cybersurveillance activities actually entail.

The biggest revelation came from an unexpected report in c’t magazin, a German publication, authored by five individuals, including Laura Poitras, one of the few journalists to have met Edward Snowden IRL, and Jacob Applebaum, a hacker-turned-reporter with ties to the TOR foundation.

Their report, entitled “NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization,” focuses not on a Mexican ranch, but rather on a “covert infrastructure” of programs that have been designed to takeover the internet, by locating vulnerable computers around the world that can be hijacked and clandestinely repurposed into spybots for government agencies.

c’t cites leaked slides from the NSA, CSEC, and GCHQ, which are not credited to Edward Snowden’s leaks; this further fuels speculation that there is a second source leaking information from within the spy agencies to the press. A possibility that Snowden himself refuses to address on the record.

One key part of the HACIENDA infrastructure, however, is a Canadian program called LANDMARK, which looks for “ORBS” (Operational Relay Box) that were recently defined by Colin Freeze in the Globe and Mail as “computers [the Five Eyes spy agencies] compromise in third-party countries.” I spoke to Chris Parsons from the Citizen Lab, who explained that these ORBs are quite possibly the property of global citizens, and not exclusively intelligence targets:

"CSEC seemingly regards unsecured devices (their 'ORBs') as valid intelligence targets in order to launch deniable attacks and reconnaissance practices. We don't know whether there is some effort to ascertain civilian vs non-civilian intermediary computers to take over, but the slides suggest that civilians and their equipment can be targeted."

A leaked slide showing CSEC's botnet operations. via c't.

In one of the leaked slides contained in the c’t report, which CSEC can neither confirm nor deny is authentic, there is a note about how the LANDMARK program is strengthened by the continuous acquisition of ORBs, a task that at one point was mandated to occur: “2-3 times/year, 1 day focused effort to acquire as many new ORBs as possible in as many non 5-eyes countries as possible.”

So in other words, if the slides that c’t has leaked are legitimate, then a few times a year, CSEC analysts would have an ORB party, where they spent all day looking for computers they can zombify and turn into robotic spy-slaves to do their cybersurveillance bidding. These computers are sought out in “non 5-eyes countries,” meaning they avoid any devices in the US, UK, Australia, or New Zealand.

Apparently, this task has since been automated through an analytics suite called OLYMPIA, which first became known to the public after documents showing that Canada had been spying on Brazil’s mining and environmental ministries were leaked to the press. This particular spying operation was, it seems, for economic purposes. Beyond this reported use of OLYMPIA, however, CSEC’s automation of computer-hijacking is fairly mysterious; though it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that it has significantly expanded CSEC’s spy network.

These operations are often referred to as CNO, or “computer network operations,” which John Adams, the former chair of CSEC, spoke about to the Globe and Mail in 2011 (in a rare display of transparency) in a previously unpublished comment: “We’ve got some bright young kids… Virtually everything–90 percent of what they do–is CNO now. It opens it up to where they can literally go out and target the world.”

These operations are also, however, well known to the criminal world. These kinds of botnets are typically used by spammers and various other forms of cybercriminals. I spoke to Christopher Parsons of the Citizen Lab, who told me:

“CSEC operates using the same techniques as organized crime and foreign intelligence services… CSEC uses these techniques for nation-state aims, similar reconnoissance techniques are used by criminals, academics, and interested internet sleuths. The tools of reconnaissance and offence are depressingly affordable, whereas secure code is expensive and hard to come by.”

Now, exactly what CSEC is doing with these spy networks is a whole other question. And, ethically at least, it is unsettling to think that our government is using international computers, presumably owned by innocent people, as hackable devices to repurpose for their own goals.

This is, however, the reality of an internet monitored by intelligence agencies the world over, and it’s certainly why the authors of c’t’s recent report chose to use the word “colonization” when describing the impact HACIENDA has had on the internet. Everyone, it seems, is spying on everyone else; but are the Five Eyes far ahead of the game? 

Chinese breaches of Canadian government systems are well-documented, with the most egregious incident that has been reported recently pertaining to Chinese attacks on Canada’s National Research Council, presumably to obtain science and technology research, that was so invasive the NRC completely shut down its computer network.

Russia’s Federal Security Bureau has its own answer to the NSA’s controversial PRISM online spying program, called SORM, which most recently made headlines during the Sochi Olympics. Given that Russia, China, or any other non-Five Eyes country has never had a leak of information tantamount to the Snowden disclosures, a comparably small amount of information is known about the power or reach of foreign spy systems. But in light of Ronald Deibert’s description of SORM as “PRISM on steroids,” one can imagine the Russians have some pretty serious spying firepower.

Evidently there’s a race to control the internet through hijacking computers, monitoring networks, and intercepting information en masse. From there, the game appears to be about organizing and sharing that information efficiently.

A report published yesterday on The Intercept shows that the NSA created an internal Google-esque search engine called ICReach for departments like the FBI and the DEA to access NSA records, of which there are, apparently, 850 billion.

ICReach is only available to American agencies, but there is reportedly an international version for the NSA’s Five Eyes partners, Canada included, called GLOBALREACH, which was designed to share the “vast amounts of communications metadata” that the agencies had obtained with one another.

Search engines like this indicate that the Five Eyes are quite advanced when it comes to organizing and sharing the information they are pulling from around the world, and the more each member of the Five Eyes contributes to the cause, the greater their reach becomes. Obviously there is a goal for complete, global surveillance here; which is as chilling as it is real. While the US and its allies are certainly competing for cybersurveillance supremacy with places like China and Russia, it’s useless to pick a “good guy” with so much evidence of innocent civilians being caught in the dragnet on both sides.

Plus, with armies of ORBs (or botnets) at an agency like CSEC’s disposal, plausible deniability can be attained if and when these computers launch an unsavoury or unjustifiable attack. The allegedly leaked CSEC slides in c’t refer to this as “a level of non-attribution,” meaning these computers cannot directly be attributed to CSEC itself.  

We know from a recent WIRED interview with Edward Snowden, for example, that the NSA accidentally shut down Syrian internet access after a botched attempt to surveil their national network, then tried to cover their tracks. It’s not hard to envision a similar fuckup being made via a botnet that would allow the offending agency to avoid any culpability or international consequence whatsoever, which is a disturbing amount of power for a government agency to wield.

Clearly there are legitimate national security concerns that Canada has to worry about—what with Canadians running off to join the Islamic State, and Chinese hackers pilfering our intellectual property—but our cooperation in the Five Eyes goal to achieve blanket surveillance of the planet’s communication networks, which becomes clearer with every new leaked document, is an unjust practice that creates ample opportunity for abuse. While Canadians might not be the intended targets, we should be wondering about whose privacy is being breached around the world, in the name of our national security interests?

@patrickmcguire

Photo via the VOSS Facebook page

Selecting a drink is no matter to be taken lightly. The right drink can bring even the most slumping, sauced-up, drunken fuckhead back to life, animating him through another dance, puke-free. Every beverage has its moment, and it’s on you to seize it.

When sparring with the fridge contents of a convenience store in an affluent area of Bristol, England, I set out to choose just the right drink. But I sensed an unfamiliar presence dealing me a look of thinly veiled disdain, like a distant, snooty relative silently judging my lifestyle choices.

I doubled back, looked down, and laughed at Voss looking right back at me, a bottled water with a superiority complex.

If someone had inexplicably set out to create a parody of a pretentious bottled water, Voss might be a little on the nose. The weighty, shimmering column is more farcically grandiose than this sentence. It's more of a silver-plated water feature than it is a bottle. The cylindrical glass tower could be an early-22nd-century hamster urn or a time capsule that a terminally ill, eccentric millionaire would demand to have his sperm cryogenically frozen in.

Photo via Flickr user Foodista

Here is a bottle that would think itself drastically overqualified to moonlight as a barroom bludgeon. A bottle that simply wouldn’t be caught dead playing host to a Molotov cocktail, for this is a bottle with aspirations. A Voss bottle daydreams of spending retirement filling the void water left with a miniature model ship, or an ornately scrolled haiku, as it bobs aimlessly upon the ocean. It's a receptacle designed to wet the whistle of gullible suckers whose money and sense have been distributed wildly unevenly.

Then there’s the title—Voss (or VOSS, if they had their damn way). It’s named after an unrelated Norwegian town, presumably because it’s a sleek and sexy-sounding syllable. The water itself hails from Iveland, in Southern Norway, where they say it's gently coaxed from the teat of some omniscient aqua-deity. Voss, Voss, Voss—say it aloud couple of times. It sashays off the tongue like it was walking into a party, like it was sauntering on to a yacht. It’s an almost painfully try-hard attempt to rebrand that everyday transparent fluid, vital to human survival, as something elegant, cool, and classy.

Voss, Norway. Which actually has no relation to Voss water. Photo via Flickr user Eric Østlie

Voss. It could be something exciting. It could be a pseudonym a cult European fashion designer might spontaneously adopt, enforcing its use immediately. It could be a slang term a Swedish tabloid has wrongly grabbed hold of to fuel hysteria around some rare, bizarre sexual practice involving liquid nitrogen. It could be the uglier third of a washed-up 80s synth-pop trio, who now props up a bar slurring his peak chart position at anyone who’ll let him.

But it’s not. It’s water. The soggy, see-through stuff that makes up 80 percent of our bodies. And don’t let the shameless marketing dupe you—it’s been shot out of a million potentially inflamed urethras before it reaches your dumb, parched yap.

The price tag is audacious for a few uppity gulps. It's upwards of $2.20 for 375 ml (just over a can’s worth) or $3.80 for 800 ml. As with all dumb fucking brands, the ridiculous pricing is contributing to its perceived exclusivity and worth. What could justify that price tag? Maybe I’d splash out that kind of dollar for 0.375L of the Dalai Lama’s used hot-tub juices, or Kathie Lee Gifford’s warm spittle, or water that would grant eternal life... or drown Carson Daly.

It is said that if you cup an empty Voss bottle to your ear, you can just about make out the faint echoes of the marketing team struggling to stifle their snickering at you.

Imagine the the concept of Voss being pitched to investors: "You see, VOSS isn’t just water. VOSS is a lifestyle. Think water, but think purity, think sophistication, think elegance. One does not simply drink VOSS. One experiences VOSS." (I wrote that in jest and since found it to be scarily close to the actual Voss "brand values"—purity, distinction, and responsibility.)

Who's swallowing this nonsense? Apparently, the world's sophisticates. “VOSS, with its iconic design, is served on the tables of the finest restaurants and lounges, in the rooms of the most distinctive hotels and in the homes of the most demanding water drinkers around the world," claims VOSS World.

The whole Voss "vision" is so laughably ridiculous, I could almost buy it every day as a shitty little inside joke with myself. I wonder what percentage of Voss’s annual revenue comes from ironic purchases?

Photo via Flickr user R.E. Barber

Anyway, back at the convenience store, I was blessed with a sip. It was wet, and it was cold. Maybe my palate has been dulled by the chlorine, fluoride, and cocaine that tainted my tap water, but I could taste no discernible difference. Oh, that “fresh, clean, quality taste,” of fresh, clean, quality, watery water. Drinking it left the regrettable aftertaste of a fortnight I spent smugly preaching the irrefutable benefits of Brita filtered water, before finding out the filter wasn‘t attached. I too, got caught up and deluded in the refreshment placebo matrix.

Voss boasts just 44 parts per million of Total Dissolve Solids—among the lowest TDS ppm in the water game. That said, I’ve personally never had an issue with water being particularly solid. Never has anyone stepped up to dislodge a clog of waterborne sediment from my windpipe with a timely Heimlich maneuver.

One of the details that Voss loves to harp on is how it springs majestically up from the earth via an artesian source: It rises naturally from a natural confined, underground aquifer and is naturally filtered, free of contact with the air or other pollutants, naturally. However, the documentary A Drop of Luxury, produced by Norwegian channel TV2, disputed Voss’s claims. After consulting with leading hydrogeologists, who said that Voss’s supply couldn’t possibly be artesian, they suggested that Voss water is identical to the municipal water supply, with which those lucky devils of Iveland are purifying their bits and bobs daily. The Voss overlords were a tad miffed and released a statement denying the allegations. Regardless, whether it's artesian or filling Norwegian baths, glamorizing the hefty markup of drinking water is a murky hustle.

Voss water is probably the same as the water in your bathtub. Photo via the VOSS Facebook page

The Voss Facebook page is a ritzy slideshow of scenes glossily exhibiting "the Voss lifestyle." It shows the upper echelon, these so-called “most demanding water drinkers around the world,” supping down Voss, brandishing Voss, foxtrotting with Voss in an array of glittering locations.

Then there’s a worrying, cultish swamp of impassioned Voss purists, devotedly commenting, fully wrapped up in the deluded vision they’re being tactlessly flogged.

“VOSS Rocks!”

“This picture is so refreshing, craving for a voss bottle right now. God bless voss. #GBV”

“Voss+summer=life.”

Worse still are the tacky images attempting to draw a connection between this prestigious tube of H2O and the musings of Leornado Da Vinci, Audrey Hepburn, and others.

A Voss water bottle poses on Itacoatiara Beach in Brazil. Photo via the VOSS Facebook page

In Voss’s defense, they are carbon-neutral and have set up a charitable foundation, providing water to third-world countries, which can’t be overlooked (although the charity-water is presumably not Voss-standard). The advantage of globally fleecing dimwits for snazzy, well-traveled water (potentially of the tap variety) is that you can comfortably cover your mileage and hydrate some sub-Saharan kids while laughing your way to the bank.

They’ve successfully managed, it seems, to repackage a basic human right as a status symbol. Whose thirst for social elevation is this liquid pretentiousness quenching? Spare a thought for those poor, deluded saps, twisting that cap, breaking that prestigious authentication seal as if uncorking the last known bottle of 1787 Château Margaux. Picture them glancing around, showboating subtly, ensuring their grip isn’t obstructing the label, dying for an opportunity to bring it up. Fully loaded with, "Oh God, yeah, I made the move to Voss six months ago, and I just haven’t looked back. You know, you just can’t put a price on purity. You really can’t."


If you catch anyone non-ironically drinking Voss, laugh hard and true, right in their refreshed smirk. It could be tricky to distinguish, so probably best to laugh indiscriminately and spitefully, gauge their reaction and make a valid knee-jerk judgment on their human worth.

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Art from the Minoan civilization, which existed from ~2700 BC to ~1450 BC.

Terence McKenna viewed cannabis, psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as “catalysts of intellectual dissent.” He wrote in The Archaic Revival (1991) that his assumption about psychedelics had always been that they were illegal “not because it troubles anyone that you have visions,” but because “there is something about them that casts doubts on the validity of reality.” This makes it difficult, McKenna observed, for societies—even democratic and especially “dominator” societies—to accept them, and we happen to live in a global “dominator” society.

McKenna often used the words “partnership” and “dominator” to refer to types of societies and relationships. Riane Eisler, whose work McKenna often praised, coined these terms. In The Archaic Revival, McKenna wrote:

Recently Riane Eisler in her important revisioning of history, The Chalice and the Blade, has advanced the important notion of “partnership” models of society being in competition and oppressed by “dominator” forms of social organization. These latter are hierarchical, paternalistic, materialistic, and male dominated. Her position is that it is the tension between these two forms of social organization and the overexpression of the dominator model that is responsible for our alienation. I am in complete agreement with Eisler’s view.

To better understand why, in McKenna’s view, psychedelics are illegal, it may be helpful to examine why the world today operates on a dominator instead of a partnership model, and what exactly these terms mean. To do this, we’ll examine Eisler’s work, which (like much of McKenna’s work, I think) exposed egregiously overlooked and deliberately suppressed aspects of history and nature. In her book The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler argued that for the majority of at least the past ~32,000 years, humans lived in partnership societies, within a global partnership culture—a way of life that is almost unimaginable today.

The Chalice and the Blade (1987) by Riane Eisler

Eisler introduced the terms partnership and dominator via her Cultural Transformation theory, which proposed that “underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.” In (1) the dominator model, half of humanity is ranked over the other half. Because this bias involves “the most fundamental difference in our species, between male and female,” it then becomes the basis for all other relationships (and, I think, probably even experiences). In (2) the partnership model, diversity isn’t equated with inferiority or superiority; instead of “ranking,” there’s what Eisler called “linking.”

In Eisler’s view, the dominator/partnership dichotomy is not ideology-specific (both capitalism and communism can, and have, operated with dominator values) nor gender-specific—both women and men can, and do, embody dominator attitudes. McKenna praised this aspect of Eisler’s work in particular. He said in The Evolutionary Mind (1998):

I don’t see it as a male disease. I think everybody in this room has a far stronger ego than they need. The great thing that Riane Eisler, in her book The Chalice and the Blade, did for this discussion was to de-genderize the terminology. Instead of talking about patriarchy and all this, what we should be talking about is dominator versus partnership society.

While it’s often assumed that men have historically been the dominant, oppressive sex—which would potentially debunk Eisler’s gender-neutral theory—that is incorrect. Eisler showed that the dominator model that now exists globally, and which is arguably led by the United States, a country with 44 consecutive male presidents and vice presidents, is a recent development. From ~35000 BC (the earliest that “so-called Venus figurines,” as Eisler called them, have been dated) to ~5000 BC, humans exemplified the partnership model. There was neither patriarchy nor matriarchy. As McKenna wrote in Food of the Gods (1992):

Eisler used the archaeological record to argue that over vast areas and for many centuries the partnership societies of the ancient Middle East were without warfare and upheaval. Warfare and patriarchy arrived with the appearance of dominator values.

Evidence of this partnership way of life was discovered, among other places, at a site called Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. Excavations uncovered a period of time from ~7500 BC (at the time Eisler’s book was published excavations had only uncovered back to ~6500 BC) to ~5700 BC. The archeologists found “no glaring social inequalities,” a matrilineal and matrilocal social organization, and that “the divine family of Catal Huyuk” was represented in this order of importance: mother, daughter, son, father. More than 40 of the 139 rooms excavated between 1961 and 1963 seemed to have served as shrines; ”the religion of the Great Goddess appears to have been the single most prominent and important feature of life.” Eisler wrote:

It is also true that in Catal Huyuk and other Neolithic societies the anthropomorphic representations of the Goddess—the young Maid, the nature Mother, and the old Grandmother or Ancestress, all the way back to the original Creatrix, are, as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras later noted, projections of the various stages of the life of woman. Also suggesting a matrilineal and matrilocal social organization is that in Catal Huyuk the sleeping platform where the woman’s personal possessions and her bed or divan were located is always found in the same place, on the east side of the living quarters. That of the man shifts, and is also somewhat smaller.

Eisler added:

But despite such evidence of the preeminence of women in both religion and life, there are no indications of glaring inequality between women and men. Nor are there any signs that women subjugated or oppressed men.

Why, then, ~7000 years ago, when the dominator model came into existence, was it women—and not men—who were oppressed? The answer, Eisler showed, is in the observation that only women give birth. Prehistoric humans, noticing that new life entered the world exclusively from the female body—which then nourished and cared for that new life—apparently developed a religion/worldview that was centered around the worship of a female deity. Eisler used the word “worship” with the qualification that, “in prehistoric and, to a large extent, well into historic times, religion was life, and life was religion.” Women and men alike worshipped a female abstraction, which Eisler called the Goddess. This continued even after the development of agriculture and the creation of the first civilizations, ~10,000 years ago:

We find evidence of the deification of the female—who in her biological character gives birth and nourishment just as the earth does—in the three main centers for the origins of agriculture: Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, Thailand in Southeast Asia, and later on also Middle America.

For 3,000 years after humankind condensed into civilizations, people continued to worship the Goddess and live peacefully. Eisler observed that “practically all the material and social technologies fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society,” meaning that war is evidently not, unlike “what a Pentagon theorist will hold,” necessary “for technological, and by implication, cultural advance.” Eisler called this “one of the best kept historical secrets.”

It wasn’t until ~5000 BC that the dominator model appeared in the form of “nomadic bands” from peripheral areas that attacked the preexisting civilizations, which were all partnership societies. Defense mechanisms like trenches and ramparts—previously nonexistent—gradually appeared. “These repeated incursions and ensuing culture shocks and population shifts were concentrated in three major thrusts,” wrote Eisler, calling these “Wave No. 1” (4300-4200 BC), “Wave No. 2” (3400-3200 BC), and “Wave No. 3” (3000-2900 BC). "At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life," observed Eisler. As the dominators conquered, they also began to suppress the old way of living, which meant suppressing worship of the Goddess, which meant the marginalization of women in general. The Goddess, and women, Eisler claimed, "were reduced to male consorts or concubines. Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more 'effeminate' men became the norm." Eisler wrote:

After the initial period of destruction and chaos, gradually there emerged the societies that are celebrated in our high school and college textbooks as marking the beginnings of Western civilization.

The last partnership civilization was the Minoan civilization, which, Eisler observed, is usually not mentioned in courses on Western civilization. The precursor to the Minoans arrived on the island of Crete in ~6000 BC, bringing the worship of the Goddess with them. For ~4,000 years, the Minoan civilization thrived, showing “no signs of war” and “a rather equitable sharing of wealth.” They decorated their homes and public buildings with “an artistic tradition unique in the annals of civilization,” and had four scripts. In Minoan Crete, Eisler quoted a scholar in her book, “Wherever you turn, pillars and symbols remind one of the presence of the Great Goddess.” Based on her research, it seemed to Eisler that the mythical civilization of Atlantis, which Plato described in the 4rd century BC, was “actually the garbled folk memory, not of a lost Atlantic continent, but of the Minoan civilization of Crete.”

Minoan art focused on nature and did not depict glorifications of brutality or war.

By 1100 BC, Eisler wrote, “it was all over.” The dominator model, in the form of a patriarchy, had completely gained control. Women, previously equal to men for at least ~30,000 years, suddenly began to experience a lesser status. They were marginalized in Ancient Greece, whose democracy “excluded most of the population (giving no participation to women and slaves).” In Eisler’s view, “much of what was finest” in Ancient Greece—“the great love of art, the intense interest in the processes of nature, the rich and varied feminine as well as masculine mythical symbology”—could be “traced back to the earlier era” of Minoan Crete. Remnants of Goddess worship also survived into Ancient Greece, in the form of the many Greek Goddesses, but these were all subordinate to Zeus. Things deteriorated further until they reached a kind of culmination in the Bible, with the Old Testament explicitly proclaiming, Eisler observed, that “it is God’s will that woman be ruled by man.” Eisler wrote:

If we read the Bible as normative social literature, the absence of the Goddess is the single most important statement about the kind of social order that the men who over many centuries wrote and rewrote this religious document strove to establish and uphold.

The next ~2,000 years, until the present, can be seen as a gradual recovery—with increasingly dangerous setbacks, now that war involves massively destructive weapons—from the sudden infiltration of the dominator model, which has, since its appearance, been in a constant process of both consciously and unconsciously destroying and suppressing evidence of the original Goddess religion and its various revivifications throughout history.

*

Today, unless you’re a member of an indigenous tribe like the !Kung in southern Africa or Bambuti in Congo, you probably live firmly within the global dominator culture. Eisler wrote: “To us, after thousands of years of relentless indoctrination, this is simply reality, the way things are.” McKenna observed that, in dominator societies especially, people aren’t encouraged to question their behavior or why things are how they are—which is what psychedelics, among their other effects, reliably cause people to do. As McKenna said in 1987:

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

On that thought, I encourage people to get stoned and read The Chalice and the Blade. Or get stoned and listen to “Man & Woman at the End of History,” a multi-day discussion led by Eisler and McKenna that was serialized on the radio in 1988. In the discussion, McKenna introduces the role of psychedelics into Eisler’s theory. Eisler, at one point, compares McKenna’s oratory style to fireworks: “You illuminate so many things so quickly then pass from one to another.” I’ll end this week with an example of this, from the same discussion:

We are now being told that we are in the midst of a tremendous political crisis that goes under the banner of “the drug problem.” But the drug problem is an addiction problem. And the addiction, in my mind, is the addiction of intelligence agencies to vast amounts of untraceable money. This is the addiction which drives the global drug problem. But of course it is true that there are chemical dependencies. And this is a very interesting thing about human beings. Something—and I’ll talk about this a bit more tomorrow—but something about our ability to be omnivorous, to eat all kinds of things, has lain us open to, perhaps manipulation is too strong a word, but certainly to evolutionarily selective pressures that are not ordinarily present. Most animals eat a few foods. Many animals eat only one food. Our ability to be omnivorous has exposed us—over the last four, five million years—to a vast number of mutagenic and synergistic compounds that may have been responsible for such things as the prolongation of adolescence in our species, the way in which lactation occurs.

*

Next week will begin three weeks of posts on three of Terence McKenna’s immediate family members. I’ll examine his brother Dennis McKenna’s memoir, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (2012), whose Kickstarter raised $85,750 in 2011 despite featuring a precariously, comically half-assed (it seemed to me) video introduction. Then I’ll interview his daughter, Klea McKenna, and, the week after that, his son, Finn McKenna.

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