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Jean-Francois Hamelin Takes Beautiful Photographs of Rural Quebec

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Montrealer Jean-Francois Hamelin has been capturing the essence of rural Quebec for many years, most recently in his project titled “Temiscamingue”—named after a region of 10,000 square kilometres in north-west Quebec that goes by the same name.

Hamelin first visited Temiscamingue in the winter of 2010, and was surprised to feel like he couldn’t grasp the physical boundaries of the land he was exploring. So Hamelin took several more seven-hour drives from Montreal to Temiscamingue beginning in the fall of 2011, to photograph the landscape and try and get his bearings.

The project, now in a state of near-completion, can be seen on his personal website, and was recently picked up on the Boreal Collective online gallery. (The website is Canadian-based and aims to document social and environmental injustices via photography.)

Much of Hamelin’s work deals with the lives and the land outside of our the city centres. His last piece, “Harvesting the North”, documents the immigration of Latin-Americans to southern Quebec for the harvest season. In “Temiscamingue,” Hamelin’s images stir up nostalgia for a time when the land was cultivated and filled with migrants moving away from the cities during the Great Depression.

I called up Jean-Francois to talk about his curiosity for the Quebec landscape, his style of photography, and the people he captures in his work.

VICE: Hey, Jean-Francois! Can you please tell me about your fascination with rural Quebec?
Jean-Francois Hamelin:
We live in a huge country, but we think everything that happens, happens around the city. I find it strange. My fascination was to travel the land and try to see the actual country. Some people in Montreal think of going north and they think of going to a maximum of two and a half hours away to visit a ski hill. The fascination is trying to comprehend the land we live in.

So is it a fascination with the land itself, or with the people who live on the land?
It’s both. I’m quite interested in landscape. But it’s also the way people live. This is something that we can relate to. What you see in the Temiscamingue series is that you go there and you wonder why people live there. There’s nothing special about the region. But it’s the relationship between the people and the land.

About three years ago I was working on a project called “Harvesting the North” in southern Quebec about the asbestos and the mining. This is really where I started to question this. This region was alive because of the mining and now it’s shut down. This is what happened with Temiscimangue. For 30 or 40 years there was an industry there. But, now the kids have left the towns for the city.

So it’s sitting in a sort of immobile limbo right now?
Yeah.

What were you trying to achieve with the symmetry in your photos?
I like when things are straight and square and centered, you see them and they seem really peaceful. So that’s why you will find subjects that are dead center.

Are you saying that you find peacefulness in the symmetry?
Exactly. When I do these essays I really try to, first of all, have a really straightforward approach to the images. Not too much artifice, no fancy effects. For me, I really like to have a straight approach to the subject. I find it something to be very quietening, I like to take the time to find the subject and find a way to frame it.

When you go out and shoot, what catches your eye?
It depends on the project. Before the Temiscamingue project I did one about South American workers coming up for the harvest. I wanted to shoot the people and I wanted to shoot them in the field. For Temiscamingue, it’s a completely different state of mind. There’s not a lot of action going on in the project because there’s not a lot of action going on in the region.

I realized there are two states of mind I’m in when I take the photos. By driving a lot you get bored, because nothing happens. So if there’s something in a field and the light is hitting it at the right moment, I stop and take a picture. The boredom helps bring details up in the landscape that makes me stop and shoot them. Alternatively, sometimes I go to a location and find it super beautiful but the light is not super great. I take my notebook and I write this place down and if I’m able to I will return at a better time.

What about the way you take pictures of people? You capture some very intimate photos. How do you accomplish this?
When I started the project, it was supposed to be only a landscape project with as little traces of humanity as possible. That was the very first idea. But things evolved and humans started to become important in the story. One thing I thought about was the ratio of people to landscape photos. I wanted to keep a balance where you don’t have many people but you have a lot of landscape; because that’s the way I saw the place when I was there. If I go into an interesting place, I will put the camera on a tripod and walk around to see if I meet someone interesting. Sometimes I meet someone on the road, they ask what I’m doing because they don’t think there is anything to shoot out here. But, they’re taken that I’m interested in their region. So maybe I’ll take a picture of them.

How do people react when you ask them about the landscape?
People are attached to this landscape. There were a lot more people than there are now. But they quickly come into discussion saying it’s not what it once was. Old people will say, “If you had came 25 years before, this land was five times bigger and we’d have a couple of restaurants and gas stations.” So there’s a lot of nostalgia.

Does it make you sad to think about the lack of life and appreciation in places like Temiscamingue?
Yes, I definitely find it sad. It's not the same sadness people from there will have considering their attachment to the land, their town, and their region. They are also more sensitive to every economic or social downturn the region can experience (whether it be, something that seems trivial for people from the big cities, like the closure of the only restaurant in a certain village) due to the fact that they are living their all of the time.

 

 

Follow Ken on Twitter: @kjrwall.
 

Other Canadian Photo Essays:

Tree Planting Is Really Awful

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I Want to Bone Justin Trudeau

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I’ve been following Justin Trudeau for a while now, and recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that I dig the guy. Actually, I don’t just fancy him. I want to fuck him real bad. But I don’t want to feel his hands down my lace panties for the same reasons, let’s say, my mother would. I’ll admit to his undeniable charm, and to the dreaminess of his piercing blue eyes. His hair is perfect, from his luscious brown locks to his thick eyebrows. It’s all very nice. Plus, when he carefully forgets to shave for a few days, his scruffy face reminds me of a young revolutionary leader who’s about to start a love-making war across the country—one that would render the Canadian soil so damp and oh, so wet. The truth is, my sexual impulses don’t give a fuck about his good looks. My pussy quivers for Justin’s profound desire, and failure, to be cool.

I understand how difficult it must be to follow in his father’s footsteps. Pierre-Elliot Trudeau was the ultimate Canadian stud. He was genuinely hip and had celebrity friends. There was even a time where Trudeaumania was a thing, and women would feel compelled to throw themselves at PET. I know Justin is just trying to be just as cool as daddy Pierre.

The problem is that Justin goes to great lengths to show Canadians how much of a relatable and edgy guy he is, and it’s often a huge fail. Last year, he willingly took off his shirt, showed his small yet firm physique (OMG, is that a tattoo? I must masturbate right now) and challenged a former Canadian Conservative senator to a boxing match. He told people it was for charity, but in my opinion, he just wanted to prove to Canadian women what a tough guy he is.

Then there was that one time where Justin kissed a gay talk-show co-host on national French-Canadian television. It was very endearing. Perhaps he meant it as a big fuck you to conventions. Maybe he was just saying, “I’m not gay, but I’m not afraid to kiss another man. I’m a liberal.” But all I saw was a cry for attention, a giant “Have you seen this? I kissed a guy on TV. That makes me a cool dude.” I don’t know if it ever crossed his mind that, maybe the co-host didn’t want to kiss him. But then again, we’ve all seen Justin’s face, and let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want to hit that?

There’s something so off about everything he does, and that’s what makes me want him. I know that boning Justin would be one of the weirdest experiences of my life and I would probably never climax. However, I know it would be fun. He’d probably show me some of his “special moves.” I’m hoping he’d try to execute a monkey face on me or try anal on our first date, simply because he heard that’s what young Canadians are into these days.


Justin Trudeau, tumbling down a staircase.

I also remember seeing another interview he did on French-Canadian television a little while back. In yet another one of his attempts at showcasing his “party animal” side, Justin threw himself down the stairs—a funny act he regularly performs at parties to make people uncomfortable. It’s one of the most awkward moments in political television and it turns me on in more ways you can imagine. I love a funny guy, but if that jokester manages to perfectly combine creepiness, weirdness, and humor, I may just rip my clothes off and immediately throw myself at him. I want Justin to make me feel uncomfortable in the worst possible ways. My uterus is boiling just thinking about how weird our sex could get. The recurring image in my mind of his naked body is unsettling. I can picture the way in which he’d unbutton his shirt, while slowly tossing his mane with the artificial confidence only children of famous politicians can nurture (hey there Ben Mulroney, call me!). He’d probably attempt a few jokes to make me feel more at ease, but it would—without a doubt—have the complete opposite effect. Yet, that would not stop me from wanting to feel all of his Northen-Gateway-pipeline-hating, marijuana-decriminalizing essence inside me.

I recently noticed a post on the Liberals’ website, “Win a BBQ dinner with Justin.” The lucky winner would have the chance to meet the Liberal leader in person. I initially thought this was a weird thing to do for a national politician, but then again, it suits him. What better way to connect with voters than to stuff a couple weiners down your throat and drink beer. Unfortunately, the contest is now closed and so I lost my opportunity to finally meet the great sexy weirdo, Justin Trudeau.

But if you ever happen to read this, Justin, I want you to know that I appreciate your dedication to being hip—however inappropriate and uncomfortable it may come across. I may never vote for you, but I will throw my bra and panties in your direction as long as you can keep this faux-coolness up.



Follow Steph on Twitter: @smvoyer
 

More information about boning people:

Sex is Fashion

The Muslim Brotherhood Calls for Friday of Rejection

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The National Coalition of Legitimacy, which is lead by the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, has called for a “Friday of Rejection” demonstration, denouncing the coup and the mass arrests of its members. Friday prayers in Egypt usually lead to protests and ruckus in the streets, but this will be the first Friday since the ousting and arrest of Morsi.The Freedom and Justice Party—the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm—released a statement Thursday condemning “the terror of the police state through its arrests of Brotherhood leaders and the closure of satellite channels.” Many around the country fear that this will not be a peaceful protest and anticipate violence.

@justice22

Can an Atheist Church Make Nonbelievers Nicer?

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Photo via the Atheist Bus campaign in Canada

I became an atheist because I wanted to stay home on Sundays. Sure, later I read about a bunch of what I think are pretty good reasons to not believe in God and came to agree with them, but when I was 11 or 12 or whatever it was, I mainly wanted a trump card to play in my arguments with my mom over my getting dragged away from video games and comics to church. There was nothing worse than sitting for what felt like years in the pews while the hymns and sermon went on, unless it was attending the Sunday school, where the teachers and kids spoke a strange, Jesus-centric language I didn’t understand. So I said I didn’t believe in God, and eventually I got out of going to church.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I missed out on anything by not attending services. I’m not really worried about the lack of God in my life, since God doesn’t exist. But it’s possible that by skipping church, I was leaving behind a community and a support network I could have had. Since I’m an atheist, I’ll base this claim on data: studies have shown that those who go to church are happier, more optimistic, and healthier than others; attending religious services helps kids fight depression and by some (admittedly biased) accounts makes people more charitable. Obviously most atheists won’t have a very good time gathering at a church or synagogue or temple where everyone is devoted to praising and beseeching an imaginary being, but if you believe these studies, they could do with attending something like church.

A lot of people have been thinking along those lines, and the result has been a flowering of what for lack of a better term we can call atheist “churches.” There’s one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana headed by former Pentecostal preacher Jerry DeWitt, one founded by Korey Peters in Calgary, Canada, and—maybe most famously—the Sunday Assemblies run by comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans in the UK.

Nimod Kamer attends the first Sunday Assembly in London.

The Sunday Assemblies, which started in January with the let's-all-get-along motto of “live better, help often, wonder more,” have been growing like crazy in the atheist-friendly environs of Great Britain, so like many an evangelizer before him, Sanderson recently took his act on the road, and brought it to the US. This past Sunday marked the first-ever event the group threw in America, a get-together in the back of Tobacco Road, a bikini bar in Midtown Manhattan.

When I showed up a few minutes before the start of services, there were already a few dozen people lined up in front of the entrance to the back room. We could hear the band warming up from behind the curtain. The bartenders weren’t wearing bikinis, maybe in deference to the event, maybe because it was noon on a Sunday. There was a lone protester outside the bar holding some signs that said, “DEMONIAC HYPOCRITES HAVE SEIZED RELIGION,” and the atheists were pretty thrilled about this. If someone hates you enough to stand out in the midday summer heat and wave vague slogans at you, you must be doing something right.

By the time the service started—with the band doing a singalong version of “With a Little Help from My Friends"—there were probably 75 to 100 people crammed into the small space, most of whom had to stand. This being an atheist event, it wasn’t surprising that there were an awful lot of youngish white dudes there (including me) but there were several older couples mixed in as well. Everyone was into clapping and singing along with “Little Help,” but weren’t as into the apparently less-familiar “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Don’t Stop,” which got played later in the service.

The big question about atheist churches is what exactly do you do once you’ve brought the nonbelievers together? It’s great to talk about how churches foster community and connect people, but you can’t just sit a bunch of folks in a room and go, “Show of hands, who thinks there’s such a thing as a deity? Good, me neither.” If you like, you can see religious communities who use a shared belief in a higher power as an excuse to get together and hang out. So what’s atheists’ excuse?

Sanderson’s answer was to basically skip talking about the nonexistence of God altogether and focus on how wonderful life is and how great it was to be anywhere at all. “You are having the best time of any collection of atoms in the universe!” he said during what for lack of a better word I’ll call his sermon. He’s an exciting and excitable speaker—bearded, long-haired, going from jokes to earnest, passionate pleas about the importance and beauty of life in the same sentence while he paces back and forth in front of the audience.

Besides the sermon and the classic rock, there was a screening of a trailer for a documentary about priests and pastors who had lost their faith, a reading of the Teddy Roosevelt passage “The Man in the Arena,” a moment of silent, eyes-closed contemplation that was pretty much prayer, and a talk from Chris Stedmen, author of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious. Chris’s story is interesting: He grew up in a nonreligious home but became a born-again Christian in his teens only to discover that he was gay. After overcoming a period of self-hatred and coming to terms with his sexuality and his belief, he studied religion at a Christian college—then realized that he didn’t believe in God after all. Today he’s a “humanist chaplain” at Harvard, where he organizes weekly meetings and community-service projects.

Chris and Sanderson are both examples of what you could call “tolerant atheists”—nonbelievers who don’t necessarily see religion as an evil to be stamped out or religious folk as mouth-breathing morons. At the Sunday Assembly, when someone cracked a joke about liking everyone, “as long as they’re not Christian,” Sanderson took the mic to announce that everyone was welcome and that believers were perfectly fine people. It’s a long ways away from the nonbelief of “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have written entire books about how God doesn’t exist and you’re a fool if you think He does, and who have argued against the idea of God in public debates.

“I don’t think the whole debate about whether there isn't a God or not is constructive, personally,” Chris told me after the Assembly. “I just never know what's being accomplished or what the goal is. I find oftentimes with these debates both sides come and they cheer on their side, and it's like a sporting event.” Chris does a lot of interfaith work (which he has been criticized for by more militant atheists who want to stamp out religion entirely), and for him, if someone’s “belief in God inspires them to care for other human beings more, to engage in social justice work, to me that's a positive thing… I don't see the benefit in trying to persuade someone like that to not believe in God.”

Sanderson struck some of the same notes in his sermon. “I think atheism is boring,” he said. “Why are we defining ourselves by something we don’t believe in?” For me at least, that message is more exciting than the prospect of hanging out and singing classic rock every Sunday. Atheists forming communities among themselves is nice, but atheists getting over themselves and finding a way to proclaim their nonbelief without jeering at religions is even better. Righteous anger at injustices perpetuated in the name of religion isn’t misguided or wrong, but you don’t build friendly communities on a foundation of antiGod rage and smugness. And if the core doctrine of Sunday Assemblies and other atheist churches can be boiled down to, “Be nice, because the world will be better that way,” there are plenty of worse ideas.

The New York Sunday Assembly was a resounding success. People came, they had a good time, they donated when the collection plate was passed around (like a church, these events cost money to put on). There’s supposed to be another one at Tobacco Road on July 28, but it’s unclear how well it will do sans Sanderson, who will be back in the UK by then. And there’s the issue of the novelty wearing off—going to an atheist church once is a fun jaunt, and an excuse to be in a bar drinking in the afternoon. Giving up one Sunday a month is more of a commitment.

But making a commitment is the whole point. That’s how things are built, and it’s kind of exciting to imagine that by attending one of these early atheist gatherings, you’re getting in on the ground floor of something good. At one point, Sanderson spoke to the crowd about how he wanted people to see the Sunday Assembly as a second home, a place where people would assemble for weddings, funerals, the christening of children… “Not christenings!” he corrected himself. “Force of habit, sorry. Naming ceremonies!”

@HCheadle

More on atheism:

New Atheism’s Nasty Streak of Islamophobia

Hey Atheists, Just Shut Up Please

Atheism – sexism = Atheism +

Gigi Ibrahim Discusses What Happens Next in Egypt with Tim Pool

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Egyptian blogger, journalist, and activist Gigi Ibrahim joins VICE's Tim Pool to discuss what happens now that Morsi is no longer president. Watch below and be sure to check back for photos, dispatches, our live stream, and more.

Gigi Ibrahim is an Egyptian journalist, blogger, and socialist activist. She has been credited as being a part of a new generation of "citizen journalists" who document news events using social media. For this she was featured on a cover of Time magazine as "one of the leaders" of Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution in 2011.
 

Showering with Riff Raff

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Showering with Riff Raff

This Lady Thinks the Centre of the Earth Is Hollow and Full of Alien Humanoids

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Dear Earth, are there aliens in the centre of you? via Flickr

Who doesn’t love a good ol’ fashioned conspiracy theory? I’m not talking about boring shit like shadow governments or Bigfoot. I’m talking about hollow Earth. Upon discovering the theory that the Earth is hollowed out and full of highly evolved alien humanoids, my interest was at an all time high, but when I actually researched this conspiratorial concept further, I discovered its believers make up a huge community of those who oppose the scientifically-sound belief that the Earth is not full of superior, human-esque aliens. There are a number of books on the topic, a metric fuckton of websites filled with Hollow Earth information, and there’s even a society called the I.S.C.E. (International Society for a Complete Earth) based in Ontario who will be having their first convention in Ohio sometime in the near future (just in case you’re curious).

People have believed in the existence of a subterranean colony for a very long time. The most famous early believer of a hollow Earth is undoubtedly a dude named John Symmes. Johnny “Doughnut Hole in the Earth” Symmes wanted to bring a team to the North Pole to find one of the openings, that he claimed, led to the center of the Earth. Although this expedition was never realized, Hollow Earth fanatics have named the North Pole’s supposed porthole “Symmes’s Hole” in his honour.


via WikiCommons.

One of the only semi-notable first hand accounts of a hollow Earth emerged in 1947 from an American Admiral named Richard E. Byrd after he flew to the North Pole. After saying that the North Pole was a “"land of Everlasting Mystery" hollow Earth conspiracy theorists have inferred that the “everlasting mystery” he was referring to could only possibly mean that the Earth is hollow and, again, full of alien humanoids who are better than us in every way.


The Admiral. via Flickr.

Anyway, after reading through all the hollow Earth information I could dig up, I was still curious as to what life in the core of our planet is like and why people believe the Earth is hollow in the first place. So I called up Dianne Robbins, author of Messages From Hollow Earth and Telos, two books based on conversations she’s had with the Hollow Earth humanoids to find out more so I could expand my puny, surface-dwelling mind.


A map of Agartha. via Flickr.

VICE: Can you tell me more about the hollow Earth theory?
Dianne Robbins:
It’s not a theory. The Earth is hollow. It is hollow and in the center of the Earth is a central sun that is held perfectly in place by gravity. All planets are hollow and they all have a central sun. There is much more land than ocean in the hollow Earth. That's how planets are created. About 400 miles down is where the gravity changes, so we stand on the surface, but when you're in the center the gravity changes so you're also standing on the surface down there.

Wow, okay. Your book talks about a place down there called Agartha, what is it like and what are some of the different life forms down there?
Agartha is a network of 100 subterranean cities. There are about 120 of them all together. They are the Agatha network.

Telos is a subterranean city and the other Agarthian cities are like Telos, if you read my book Telos you'll learn all about the Telos network. They are physical humans like we are, but they live in peace, isolation, and seclusion and through this they have gained their immortality. Because you can only evolve in peace. That's why we have been isolated on the surface.

Have you had any contact with them personally?
Yes. I'm telepathic, all these messages are dictated to me by Adama the high priest in Telos. All the messages are in my books. Then I've been in touch with Mikos who dictated with me from the center of Earth. All of his messages are in my book Messages From Hollow Earth. So yes I am in telepathic contact with them.

That’s interesting, how do you receive these messages? Do they come randomly?
I hear them word for word like how I hear you now. I never change the words just add punctuation and paragraph breaks. I write it as I hear it.

They always tell me when they want to make appointments to deliver these messages. When I'm writing my books they're about an hour every day, or every other day. But it's all made by appointments so they know when I'm ready and they're right there.

They sound organized, are they friendly?
They're just like we are only very evolved. They are human and physical, like we are, but very conscious.

Why would they choose to inhabit the center of the Earth?
Because it's beautiful. It's a paradise. In the center of the Earth there's everything they could possibly desire, like clean air and pure water, and the water has pure consciousness. There's no duality, everything is perfect.

Are these extra terrestrials native to Earth or did they “invade” from outside of our planet?
They came from another star system. Every being and every species came from other places. After Earth was created it started to be populated.

Okay then. I’m assuming that the Hollow Earth folk are way more advanced than us, scientifically, mentally and spiritually. Is this true? What are some of the differences between us?
They have everything we don't. They have inner sight. They can see anywhere they want to see on the planet. Just like if you have bifocal glasses where you can see near and far, their eyes can adjust anywhere on the inside and surface and when they dictate their messages to me they're looking right at me.

They have a spaceport in the center where starships that make no noise and no pollution come and go at North and South pole. They can leave the planet whenever they want and fly to other places in the galaxy. They have everything. They have transportation that's free of course and they have pure and clean systems for it. They have transportation that's like a very small vehicle—like a snowmobile—that levitates and makes no noise, causes no pollution, and uses no fuel.

They also have pure drinking water and the oceans have a pure consciousness. So when they go in the water they can't drown because they merge as one with the ocean. They can breathe underwater, and they never kill anything in the oceans, of course. They communicate telepathically with the life in the oceans and each other as well.


Conscious or unconscious? via Flickr.

That snowmobile sounds pretty sweet. So, wait, if we destroy the crust of the Earth, will it affect the center of the Earth and its residents?
I don't think it will go that far down, but it will affect many miles down. It affects the elemental kingdom that lives below. It affects the gemstones, gold, and diamond that grow and are created under the surface. It also affects the gas spouts that hold the tectonic plates. Oil and gas is actually called "liquid light" and that’s what holds the tectonic plates in place. When they shift they're supposed to shift easily without any bumping each other—that causes Earthquakes. There would not be any earthquakes because it's a lubricant for plates. So everything we’re doing is affecting what's going on beneath us. Like when bombs are detonated, they go through the whole Earth. Every being, plant, and element can feel it.

Some people believe that Hitler flew to the center of the Earth to escape his fate at the end of WWII. Do you think this is a possibility?
Yes. That's what I've read. I personally have yet to receive that information, but I did know he knew about Hollow Earth and that the Germans did go to the South Pole after WWII. From what I've read I'll say yes, but I have never personally asked.

Really? That probably would have been my first question... Moving on. We’ve visited the North, and South Poles many times and only a few people have reported seeing these holes. Wouldn't they show up on satellite pictures if they were actually there?
They do show on satellite pictures. But NASA keeps those satellite pictures a secret. Of course they show. The openings are huge, but they have force fields covering them so they can't be discovered easily… but they do show. I have seen many satellite pictures where they show but they are kept a secret from the people. You can see them clearly in the North and South Pole.

Are there any other entrances?
I don't think so. There are many tunnels and entrances all over the planet but they have all been camouflaged. They don't want anyone to come inside because it's their home. It's their domain.

I’m sure you realize that all of this will seem pretty outlandish to most. What do you say to people who don't take this seriously?
I don't say anything to them. I'm not here to convince anybody. You have to have inner knowing. Everything is a possibility in this world. I don't try to convince anyone, I don't say anything to people that don't believe in it. If people are conscious enough and open enough and then they ask me, then I'll tell them. Some people have belief systems that are programmed to think that we're the only ones in the universe and I'm not interested in talking to them, they are not conscious of world around us.

On a final note, is there anything that the Hollow Earth people want to tell us surface Earth people?
Yes, stop the wars. Just feel peace. Just call for peace for the planet because we can only evolve from peace. All people in the center of the Earth are ready to move into a higher dimension. They're waiting for the surface to find peace so we can all make our ascension together. They're waiting for us and we can only do it with peaceful thought to everyone everywhere.



Think aliens are real? Here. Go crazy:

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Trinity Bellwoods Needs Fewer Cops and More Toilets

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A riveting photograph of Canadian democracy in action, by Michael Toledano.

Instead of an angry mob of neighbours complaining about an orgy of drunken disorderly conduct in Trinity Bellwoods Park, a public meeting to address concerns about drinking in the popular downtown greenspace attracted an unexpectedly large turnout of people overwhelmingly against a police crackdown on public drinking.

Councillor Mike Layton told the gathering they had originally anticipated about a dozen people, and credited (or blamed?) the media for the approximately 150 that did show up. While the newspaper and news reports definitely raised the profile of the event, they were responding to an existing grassroots conversation emerging on social media, like this petition to formally allow public drinking in Toronto parks (currently at 2597 signatures).

One thing the mainstream media were responsible for was misrepresenting the cutely-named Project Green Glasses as a recent initiative, when it actually started a year ago, in parks all over the downtown. It's probably just a coincidence that it ramped up around when NOW Magazine ran a cover story last summer celebrating the party scene in Bellwoods, which quoted police openly talking about selective enforcement of drinking laws. There was widespread laughter around the room when one speaker suggested that media should have been more subtle when promoting certain aspects the park.

Given how unprepared they were for the large numbers, Layton and city staff deserve some kudos to how they handled the meeting. Rather that just letting people raise their hands to talk, the room was randomly divided up into small workgroups to discuss the issues, and then one member of each group spoke to the rest of the room to summarize what was said. Not only did this help prevent the louder and more aggressive voices from dominating, it also forced participants with opposing viewpoints to sit at the same table and address each other's concerns face to face.

Project Green Glasses came about in response to community complaints about noise, disorderly conduct, littering, and violence. However, the community that came out to the meeting made it clear that they didn't see the 115 public drinking tickets given out in Bellwoods over the past two months as being a good solution to those issues. Instead, most of the dialog was more along the lines of what would be better described as a harm reduction approach.

One of the most popular suggestions (based on the number of times it was brought up and the applause it garnered) was to keep the public washrooms open later to deal with the public urination issue. It was also suggested that erecting signs pointing to them could help, and at least one table brought up the idea of extra porta-potties in the summer months to help cope with the growing numbers of park visitors.

Similarly, the overall consensus on how to best deal with rowdy behaviour and noise was to increase police presence, and to ask them to focus on those particular issues while being more tolerant of responsible consumption. The idea of formally requesting a change to the laws was floated as well, but many also seemed to feel that the solution was just to be more subtle about drinking, like hiding your beer in a large coffee cup.

In response to the litter issue, the overwhelming answer was to put in more garbage cans. As it currently stands, there is a significant number of freelance bottle and can collectors circulating the park every afternoon scooping up the empties for profit, and one table suggested that formalizing that system might be worth looking at.

Some groups wanted to bring up non-drinking concerns, such as the noise from the baseball diamonds (“put up a treeline along that street”) and upping enforcement of dog leash laws outside of the off-leash area. The idea of emergency buttons connecting to police was floated in regards to safety, as well as less practical ones like individual drinking licenses.

At the end of the meeting, Layton thanked everyone for their input, and said that the parks and police representatives would take these suggestions under consideration. However, it's clear that as long as drinking in public parks is illegal in Toronto, the cops will enforce the law, even if only occasionally and at their discretion. Unfortunately, this puts it up to the individual officer, and means enforcement isn't necessarily connected to any alcohol-related bad behaviour.

115 fines over two months isn't actually very much, considering the thousands who are there on a typical sunny weekend afternoon. But if those fines aren't connected to any other charges, what exactly did they do wrong to deserve them, considering that the vast majority are getting away with flaunting the law? History tells us it probably has something to do with their appearance. It's easy for clean cut middle class white people to say “just be more subtle”, because it's generally not them that are targeted the most.

Unfortunately, loosening Ontario's legendarily paternalistic and strict liquor laws isn't an easy battle, and one that petitions and even polls have historically had little effect on. We're still fighting for the right to buy wine and beer at the corner store—legal park drinking is probably still at least a decade away.

Nevertheless, there are clearly a lot of people who feel passionately that public drinking laws belong in the last century, and that we're ready to move beyond that approach.


Follow Ben on Twitter: @benjaminboles

Previously:

Think of the Can Ladies: Don't Crack Down on Drinking in Trinity Bellwoods Park

Tim Hudak Wants Ontario's Corner Stores to Sell Booze


The Muslim Brotherhood Prepares for Its 'Day of Rage'

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Swathed like lissom crows in black niqabs, the girls hopped up and down in the sun. Bearing the burial shrouds they had brought to Nasr City, they sang in shrill unison about how they longed for death. The men by the barriers admired their enthusiasm from a respectful distance. “We are all ready to die,” said Mustafa*, the Morsi-supporting activist we were shadowing, “it is a wonderful thing for us to go to heaven.”

He smiled as his gaze followed his index finger to the blue sky above. Closer to earth, a military facility—an apartment block for army officers—loomed over us. The pool of blood beside its steel gates was dry by now. The night before, as we cowered from rifle fire behind nearby cars, a man had died here.

“He climbed on the gate and shook them—not to attack the soldiers, but just because he was angry at the army’s statement,” said a white-haired English teacher squatting in a makeshift tent opposite. All around us, men lounged barefoot in the cool shade. “And so they killed him.”

"Who shot him?" I asked. He looked at me like I was a fool. “The army, of course. But, you know, we think not all the army are with the rebels. The generals are divided. We think some support Morsi. We hope that they will save us and the constitution.” At a press conference beside the Rabea Adaweya mosque, Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad made a short statement to the world —but primarily to the army—expressing honeyed words of love and devotion towards the military that had overthrown them, the “heroes of the 1973 October War against Israel and the liberators of the Eighteen Days” (the Tahrir demonstrations that toppled Mubarak two years ago). The Brothers' hope, he said, is that the Army will side with the people and democracy against the rebels, preserving the unity of the nation.

It seemed an unlikely hope in the circumstances. Only an hour or so earlier, fighter jets and air force display teams had roared over central Cairo, streaming the colors of the Egyptian flag from their afterburners in celebration of the coup. One team divided in the sky and drew a love heart in the air above the Nile in a kitsch display of triumphant unity with the vast anti-Morsi crowds cheering from below in Tahrir. But the Brothers at Nasr City refuse to accept that the game is over and that their 90-year struggle to impose Sharia law in Egypt had failed. All we want is democracy, they all said—whatever democracy now means in Egypt—but Mustafa’s vision had already slipped from the ballot box towards a more radical solution.

“They say we are terrorists, then fine,” he said. “I will be a terrorist. I am ready to pick up a Kalashnikov and fight. In the south, we are already fighting against the coup,” he added, referencing the wild, unsourced rumours circulating among the crowd that parts of rural Egypt were gearing up for an insurgency. “And in Mersa Matruh, the police and the army have fled from there and a big picture of Morsi is hanging in the square.” He beamed with satisfaction. “In Sinai, the Bedu tribes have given the army 24 hours to release our president or they will start the war.”

Rumors swirl in crowds like this, intoxicating the dejected protesters with dreams of a kinder world. But a revived Islamist insurgency in Egypt is by no means impossible now that the experiment with democracy has failed. 

The pro-Morsi crowds cover a wide spectrum of Islamist opinion, from relatively liberal teens in skinny jeans and T-shirts to Salafists with chest-length beards waving the black banner of radical Islam and providing alarming sound-bites to a no-doubt gleeful television crew, declaring their willingness to launch suicide attacks and “burn the Christians”.

On to Sinai—a wild, long-neglected and barely governed peninsula on the eastern border where the only stable source of income is the smuggling of weapons to Gaza and African immigrants to Israel by the local Bedu tribes. The government has only recently quashed a jihadist insurgency in the area with attack helicopters and lavish spending on development. 

The video above purports to show Islamists declaring "a council of war" against Egypt’s new government. State media is now reporting a concerted series of assaults by unknown gunmen against military checkpoints and Sinai's main airport—attacks that jihadist forums had reported hours before to the Gaza-based Majlis Shura al-Mujahideen

But the overwhelming majority of the Nasr City crowds remain committed to peaceful protest, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership has declared repeatedly it will not be drawn into the trap of violence. Islamist protesters begged us to tell the world they are not terrorists—as the victorious, military-backed Tamarrod coalition frequently claim—but gentle, ordinary people seeking the return of their democratically elected leader by constitutional means, perhaps including UN intervention. The mood today at Rabea Adaweya was one of joyous celebration of the sit-in’s mere survival on this dusty roundabout, but Egypt remains a country divided between two sides who hate each other with all-consuming passion.

Morsi’s supporters say they are willing to die to return their deposed leader to the presidential palace, and in this current phase of Egypt’s messy cycle of revolution and counter-revolution, many already have. More than 50 Egyptians, mostly supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, have been killed since Sunday in unclear circumstances and by unknown assailants—a grim tally increasingly unexceptional in a country wracked by two and a half years of anarchy. And as the country holds its breath for today’s “Day of Protest,” announced yesterday by the Muslim Brotherhood as their response to the coup, many in the Nasr City crowd prepare themselves, through stirring chants and tearful prayer, to join the ranks of martyrs.

Follow Aris (@arisroussinos), Tom (@tom_d_), Phil (Phil_Caller)

Watch - Egypt After Morsi (Trailer)

We Saw the Egyptian Military Stage a Coup in Cairo Today

Egypt Had Their Biggest Demonstration Since the Revolution

Peter Hoffmeister Lived with Bears in Yosemite and Survived to Write a Book About It

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All photos courtesy of Peter Hoffmeister.

A group of people who call themselves Dirtbags have been living illegally in Yosemite National Park since the end of World War II. The Dirtbags sleep in caves, rock-climb all day, and steal food from tourists to live. Once in a while, a Dirtbag gets mauled by a bear.

Peter Hoffmeister dropped out of eighth grade in the early 90s to camp with the Dirtbags. He stayed for 100 days in a row before returning to school. By the time he was 17, Peter was living with the Dirtbags full time. He rock-climbed with them, dumpster-dove for his meals, and snuck into expensive Yosemite hotels to bathe in bathroom sinks. The whole time, Peter heard stories about a crashed Lodestar drug plane and how the Dirtbags beat the FBI to the cache of high-grade weed at the bottom of a frozen lake in 1977.

Peter’s new novel, Graphic the Valley, out in July through Tyrus Books, is set in the Dirtbags’ secret side of Yosemite. Peter embeds us inside the mind of an adolescent boy who grew up in a hidden camp inside Yosemite Valley, supported by the money his father made in the Lodestar weed score.

Peter has a straight job now, but he still dresses in his friends’ discarded clothing. When we spoke on the phone, he was eating sandwich crusts from his kids’ lunches.

I called Peter up to talk about bear attacks, stealing chicken wings with an underwear model, and the Dirtbag’s legendary drug plane. An excerpt from Graphic the Valley follows the interview.

VICE: Hey, Pete. Your book is great. Can you tell me a little bit about Dirtbag history?
Peter Hoffmeister:
There’s an old tradition of people living illegally in the Yosemite Valley. During the Great Depression, people started moving into the Valley and sleeping in their cars. There were so many fish in the Merced River that you could live endlessly, if you could handle three meals of fish every day. But there are Dirtbag sects everywhere, not just in Yosemite.

The first Dirtbags showed up in Yosemite after WWII, realizing they could live in the most beautiful place on Earth, for free. They could hike in the mountains, swim in the rivers, and rock climb, without worrying about money.

How did the Park Service feel about that?
They didn’t like people living illegally on their land, obviously. The Dirtbags were living in the rock slate behind Camp 4 in Yosemite, but the Park Service’s Climbing Rangers slowly rooted out all the long-term campers. By the time I started Dirtbagging, they had relocated to the bear caves behind the Ahwanee Hotel. Tourists paid $400 a night to sleep in the hotel, while Dirtbags lived like cavemen right out their windows. At night, we would pillage the hotel dumpsters.

Where else would you eat?
There’s a pizza deck in Curry Village where every Dirtbag goes. I would slip in and finish the pizza, Pepsi, and beer that people left on their tables. I used to go with my friend who was an underwear model before turning to the Dirtbag life. Our longstanding competition at Curry was the search for a chicken wing. In 12 years at Yosemite, I’ve never found one abandoned chicken wing. The competition continues to this day.

You mentioned living in bear caves. Have you ever had some run-ins with bears?
The bears are crazy in Yosemite. I was backed into a bathroom once by a bear. It waited at the door for an hour while I cowered, terrified, with a random Australian man. It happens constantly.

Any bear attacks?
Once I was leaving to climb and there was a guy in the dirt, asleep, wrapped up in a blanket like a man burrito. For some reason, his food was wrapped in the blanket with him. He must have forgotten that bears have a sense of smell 2,000 times greater than humans.

I was on the other side of a boulder when I heard the screams. When I ran back, I found the guy, soaked in blood. His face was smashed and dented. A bear had come into camp and started eating his food. The man woke up, saw a 500-pound bear sitting next to him, and let out a tiny shout of surprise.

The bear lifted up its paw and patted the guy in the face to say, “Be quiet, I’m eating.” Bears are also three times as strong as men, so the bear’s pat broke the guy’s nose and sunk his cheek in.


Peter climbing in Yosemite's Camp 4.

Whoa. Can you tell me more about the Lodestar drug plane?
In the 70s, the rock climbing Dirtbags realized that, thanks to some new gear innovations, they could climb walls that had never been climbed before. The main Dirtbag ethic is time over money, so none of them wanted to waste their life working. Then some money fell out of the sky.

In the winter of 1977, a drug plane went down in a lake just outside of the Yosemite Valley. A Park Service Ranger mentioned it to one of the Dirtbags in Camp 4. It was still snowy in the high country, so recovering the plane was difficult for the Feds. They decided to hold off on an extensive recovery until springtime. The plane was sitting at the bottom of an iced-over lake, packed with pot.

The Dirtbags camped outside all year. I’m sure they were used to the snow.
Exactly. And they were all rugged outdoorspeople. So a group of Dirtbags hitchhiked into Fresno to rent SCUBA gear. They hiked up to the lake, smashed a hole in the ice, and brought up hundreds of pounds of marijuana.

The Dirtbags hauled duffle bags full of weed back to Camp 4 and dried it out around fires. The money they made by selling it bought them the best climbing and camping gear. The money changed the Dirtbags’ lifestyle a bit, but it allowed them to live in Yosemite almost indefinitely.

How much money did the Dirtbags end up with?
Nobody knew how much money anyone made on the Lodestar crash. And since I was born the year the score was recovered, I didn’t want to ask the people I climbed with. But I know a few world-famous climbers who supposedly lived for more than a decade off that money. Duffle bags full of good weed are worth big, big money.

I really like how you weaved the Yosemite Dirtbag world into Graphic the Valley. Are any of the characters real?
The narrator, Tenaya, a boy who has lived his entire life in Yosemite, dumpster dives with a Dirtbag named Kenny. Kenny is a real guy. He passed away while I was working on the novel. I wanted to somehow memorialize his spirit. He was one of those people who can never be replicated. He was the ultimate Dirtbag.

In what way?
Kenny was hitchhiking one time, and the car he was riding in hit a deer. Kenny got out and dragged the carcass into the forest. He gutted it, dried the meat, and ate nothing but the deer for a month. Only Kenny would have called it one full moon.

Kenny decided to go on an ultimate survival experience in Waimea Canyon in Kauai, Hawaii. He had a whole plan laid out. He knew what plants he could eat and how to catch the feral goats and chickens in the canyon. Kenny spent 77 days alone in the Canyon. He died a few weeks later, from drinking compromised water.

Kenny worried less about consequences and more about adventure. He was doing what he wanted to do. But it’s complicated. I know Kenny’s dad. What is it like to lose your son to something totally preventable?

That’s terrible. Owning nature, or the inability to do so, is a big theme of Graphic the Valley.
I’m constantly questioning whether any human should own anything. Certainly not anything as beautiful as the Yosemite Valley. That’s one of its great problems. For at least 1,000 years, people have been fighting to own it.

The National Park Service thinks they own Yosemite. They swear to preserve and protect it for the future enjoyment of everyone to come. But do they have the right to regulate everything? Maybe the Park Service should limit visitation to the Valley, or ban motorized transportation, and preserve it even more. I’m not sure how I feel about all of this, really. I don’t have any answers. But the questions are important.

Keep reading for the first chapter of Graphic the Valley, out in July. Pre-order a copy here.

I’d slept against the bear box, the iron food cache cold through my sleeping bag, and woke when it was dark. I couldn’t sleep a night without picturing her, eight years after, the way she lay against the river boulder, her right hand turned away, like it held a valuable.

I choked on nothing and sat up.

I leaned back against the box and looked out at the sleeping camp, the orange, blue, and red tents pieced together like cars in the Curry lot. I stood. Pulled on my wool hat and slid into my shoes.

Started to walk.

Low clouds hung in the Valley, the ends torn as wet paper. I crossed at the T near the Lower Falls, toward the meadow, moving south, spooking mule deer on the road, their hooves skittering against the asphalt like young horses’. Then they were gone. I had no headlamp to follow.

I stepped through the bracken fern and followed the dirt road up to the boardwalk, left across the meadow. Halfway into the open, I lay down, back flat on the fiberglass replacement boards that the ParkService bolted down the year before. Looking up at the sky, I couldn’t see anything but gray, the mist backed with massing low clouds.

I lay shivering, thinking of her at the river. Her body, and my mother. The stories I’d heard my whole life. I was 14 years old, and I would not make it back to camp.

I braided my hair, three feet. Pulled my braids tight. A long-haired boy, never a hair cut, I’d been confused for a girl when I was younger.

I rolled over and did push-ups to stay warm, a trick my father had taught me. He’d say, Lie back and wait for the blood to move. I pictured him pointing with that missing index finger. People who didn’t know him would just see a fist, no pointing at all.

I got up and walked the boardwalk, back and forth, waiting for the smell of wet granite and ponderosa, bark like puzzle pieces chipped into moving water. I slept away from camp now sometimes, but still I couldn’t sleep. My mind pounded the Upper Falls in spring. I would add to that now. This morning.

He came alone, in the haze, and I didn’t know who he was. I was pacing the boardwalk in the early light, near the Merced, no sleep, tired like two stones grating behind my eyes.

He walked up in a full suit, expensive clothes, rare in the Valley. There were all-night gatherings at the Ahwahnee, and I guessed at that. But his suit had no wrinkles, the suit pressed, a white shirt starched clean, and the pants creased to the outside. He had his right hand in his pocket as he stared off, standing on the edge of the boardwalk while the sun struggled to rise south of Half Dome.

That was how it looked. The sun there as a slit. My mind the big falls, 2,000 feet above the meadow, pumping into the daylight elevation. Me walking toward him.

I stopped.

The man said, “It’s a beautiful morning, huh?”

I looked around. The mist was in and I couldn’t see the details of the south side: the Shield, the Sentinel, the triple pillars of the Cathedrals. I’d seen more beautiful mornings in the Valley, but I said, “Yes.”

He didn’t say anything else for a minute.

I didn’t know about his programs. I didn’t know about his new park plan. How he’d moved from the private sector to the National Park Service three years earlier. I would read all of that later in the newspaper accounts of what was about to happen.

A few feet from me, he was a man in a suit, nobody I knew, a man with a belly like something hidden underneath his shirt. He was tall above his paunch, as if three people were put together: A thin man, the heavier middle man, then a third person’s legs.

I smelled cologne and smoke. He brought the cigar up to his lips and pulled, the smell like two fingers snapping in front of my eyes.

The Valley was in me. The Valley yellow turning to brown, a thousand bears in late fall. I looked down at my hands, the dirty black fingernail ends, and I bit one off. Spit that into the blooming milkweed.

The man leaned down to mash out his cigar, marking a stain on the low rail. He flicked the butt on the same trajectory as my fingernail, following it into the green. Dark mud crawling up the reed stalks, black bottomed, waiting for the next rain.

He said, “Do you spend a lot of time in the park?”

“No,” I said, the lie that my father had asked me to tell when I was eight years old, when I first found out that it was illegal to live where we did. That no one else camped their whole lives off of the Northside Loop Road near the 120.

The man stood in front of me. The Valley rolling its shoulders, ten thousand years, after the final ice receded, boulders sitting as terminal moraines, the chambers of the ancient volcano exposed in white-and-gray plugs, flakes weakened by freeze water and the sloughed granite crashing, the Domes shrugging awake.

“Not camping, huh?” The man smiled like a forest fire. “It’s a beautiful place to camp.”

“No,” I said. I didn’t walk away. Didn’t explain. I was never good at saying what I was thinking.

He stepped toward me. That smile. I was 14  that day, but not small, never small, and my hands were like the rocks that they climbed.

The man was going to hit me or reach out to shake my hand. I didn’t know which one. His shoulder came up, twitched, and he started to move his right arm toward me.

But I pushed him before that happened. With two hands and hard. I didn’t know what I was hoping for. There was the Valley, and the Valley was in me, and the Valley was with me.

It was only a few feet down off of the boardwalk there, only four or five feet down to the ground, to the milkweed and the reeds, not far, but his shoe caught on the low rail near the cigar stain, and the rail flipped him. He went over, upside down, a scrub jay caught by a gust. I smiled as I watched him fall into the wet reeds and the mud, smiled as I imagined him scrambling back up, muddy and angry in his soiled clothes, yelling at me, chasing me.

But his left hand stayed down in his pocket, where it had been before he went over the rail. His right hand reached out in front of him, waving once, touching nothing. He hit a rock, a foot wide, with his head, and his face twisted around beneath him, under the weight of his body. His head turned six inches too far, and I heard something pop as his body rolled over the top.

I bit a hole though the front left corner of my tongue. Bit down, and the blood filled my mouth. A tongue can bleed, and fast. I coughed blood there on the boardwalk, spit and drooled it into my hand, my palm filling with blood before I dumped it at my feet.

But the man did not bleed. Not at all. His legs flattened and his arms twisted, limbs in the reeds like the loose limbs of an old doll.

Her doll. The way she dragged it, wet, that hand-sewn cloth doll, as it went through the pool above the rocks my father stacked to make a swimming hole at Ribbon Creek’s narrows. I found her doll months later, under a blanket in the tent, blackening with mold.

The man’s face was looking over his shoulder, his eyes open, and I stared down into those eyes. The mist came, new smoke above me, and soon there was nothing I could see farther away than ten feet. The man’s body and the boardwalk. The flash of green leading to the river, the dark-bottomed reeds, the tongue blood in my hands.

The man never blinked or twitched. His eyes open, and I didn’t mean that. Not at all. Like suffocating doves.

Check out Peter Hoffmeister's website for more Dirtbag stories and information about his upcoming novel.

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Rob Ford's New Music Video Includes Our Photoshopped Image of Him with a Pipe

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Things have been quiet over at Camp Robbie for the past couple of weeks as the Toronto Police's blitz on drug dens kinda put a cap in the flow of non-stop Rob Ford crack pipe controversy. Time will tell if Rob is actually implicated in the murder of Anthony Smith, or if that guy who fell off of a balcony in Fort McMurray has anything to do with the Fords, but until then, Ford Nation has been releasing some sweet tunes to support their beautiful leader's battle against truth.

Slight problem though, if you watch the video embedded above you'll be able to hear a triumphant new anthem to support Robbie on his non-stop quest to squash the rampant spending in City Hall. The poppy rock track is even going to be played at Ford Fest, Rob Ford's official party, that takes place tonight at some presumably drug-friendly park. But, look at the photos that the band has chosen. Does the one of him in a crown smoking a pipe look familiar? It should, because it's a VICE Canada original. And yeah, before you jump on us in the comments, we know we used a meth pipe and not a crack pipe. Sorry about that. We don't smoke rocks.

Now, we're not the type to go after people who take our (amazingly crafted) intellectual property and repurpose it for their own political agendas. Why bother? The internet is a free place, man! But it seems a bit strange that a song that is going to be played at an official party for Rob Ford, and has been covered in the mainstream media as a pro-Robbie anthem, is also showing our Photoshopped image of him sucking back crack smoke. Is this, once again, an example of one of Rob's supporters sabotaging him?

Only time will tell. But until then, you might as well light up your smoke of choice and blare this Rob Ford banger as you drift away into the weekend. See you at Ford Fest.


Previously:

Rob Ford Might Be a Crack Smoker

We Spoke to a Former Crack Addict About Rob Ford

The Facebook Comments Rob Ford's Staffers Don't Want You to See

Eritrea Has Failed to Realize Its Revolutionary Dream

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After the Eritrean independence war ended in 1991, Eritreans threw themselves into reconstructing the country's shattered infrastructure, with whole villages helping out to build small dams, terrace-eroded hillsides, and plant thousands of trees. Photos by Dan Connell.

Once a revolution is over, how do you judge its success? A victory for Mao's vision of the People's Republic of China was not exactly a victory for the people of China. A glorious, clean revolution isn't easy. Look at Russia, France, Cambodia, Iran. Look at Egypt today. In the coming decades, we will see the result of revolutions played out across the Arab world and, quite possibly, across Europe as well. Will they be deemed successes by anyone other than the victors?

A crucial, but little reported, example of a hard fought revolution and its troubling aftermath can be found in the Horn of Africa.

Twenty years ago, Eritrea—in the northeast of Africa—became a legally independent nation, having won its de-facto independence from Ethiopia two years earlier, in 1991. This independence was the end result of a 30-year war with Ethiopia. The revolutionaries who won the war were heroes, champions of freedom standing up against an oppressive, murderous Ethiopian regime backed by the Soviet Union and tacitly supported by the West. They had reestablished an independent Eritrean nation and the future looked bright. But revolutionary opposition and day-to-day power are two totally different things. Once you've gotten used to glorious victories, the thrills of red tape and responsibility may well be lost on you. As such, creating a free and democratic society is a total pain in the ass. 

Eritrea had been an Italian colony since 1890, Ethiopia since 1935. After the Second World War, Eritrea became part of Ethiopia but maintained a measure of independence. In 1962, and in contravention of a UN resolution, Ethiopia annexed Eritrea. The UN and other world powers looked on, unwilling to jeopardize their relationship with the strategically-vital Ethiopia. As John Foster Dulles, who would go on to be the United States’ secretary of state, said in 1950, “From the standpoint of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive consideration. Nevertheless, the strategic interest of the United States in the Red Sea basin and considerations of security and world peace make it necessary that the country has to be linked with our ally, Ethiopia.” Eritrea had been screwed.


An EPLF member outside Asmara, 1979.

When Eritrea gained its independence in the early 1990s, it was the Marxist revolutionary group The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) that took power in Asmara, the nation’s capital, having fought a long and hard guerrilla war against Ethiopia. With their ruthless discipline, encouragement of abstinence and collective focus, the EPLF were—in the words of one leading Eritrean historian—“the most successful liberation movement in Africa.” They were tough, and while their intolerance of dissent galvanized their fighting potential, it merely made them tyrants once they were in power.

Led by Isaias Afewerki, they continued their flair for strong, Marxist-sounding names by becoming the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). And, with Isaias front and center, the PFDJ has remained in power ever since independence.

Today, criticism of the government is not tolerated. Only four religions are officially recognized. Worship in any other church and you'll be persecuted. There is no civil society to speak of and, every month, kids cross the border to escape national service, which has no fixed end and is essentially a form of government-sponsored slavery. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates the number of fleeing Eritreans at 1,000 a month (it's worth noting that escaping means going through the Sahara into mine-strewn Ethiopia while avoiding being shot by border guards). Reporters Without Borders ranks Eritrea 178th out of 178 in the world for press freedom, which basically means anything approaching journalism is banned.


A UN-supplied refugee camp near the border of Ethiopia, accommodating some of the thousands of Eritreans who flee across the border every year.

By 2012, hundreds of thousands of young Eritreans had fled the country to escape the deepening political repression and to avoid what had become open-ended national service in both the armed forces and state and party-controlled businesses. Three hundred refugees were showing up in Ethiopia each month and being placed in UN-supplied camps near the border.

In May, to coincide with Eritrea’s 20th anniversary celebrations, Amnesty International released a damning report entitled Eritrea: 20 Years of Independence, but Still No Freedom. The report claims that there are, at minimum, 10,000 prisoners being held illegally without trial in Eritrea. The human rights organization’s Eritrea researcher, Claire Beston, told me that this figure did not include those people jailed for "avoiding national service or trying to flee the country." The report is littered with the testimony of people who have been affected by the actions of the government:

"I last saw my father at the beginning of 2007, they took him away from our house. I know nothing about what happened afterward."

"This generation, everyone has gone through the prison at least once. Everyone I met in prison has been in prison two or three times."

"Everybody has to confess what he’s done. They hit me so many times... Many people were getting disabled at that military camp. During the night they would take them to a remote area, tie them up, and beat them on their back."

There are many more like this. It’s not exactly light summer reading.


The 1984 to '85 African famine put Eritrea's war for independence on hold as the liberation front trucked aid into the country to prevent both mass starvation and a wholesale exodus from the contested areas. Ethiopia sought to isolate the Eritreans using food as a weapon.

Tesfamichael Gerahtu, Eritrea’s ambassador to the UK and Ireland, told me that while Eritrea have “some challenges in human rights,” there “are no people incarcerated on the basis of their political beliefs.” The Eritrean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released an angrily-worded response that rejected Amnesty’s “wild accusations.” The release concluded that Amnesty would ignore the 20th anniversary celebrations, “smug in its selfrighteous belief that it can, with impunity, attack and denigrate a young nation, which despite many odds, manages to progress and improve the lives of its citizens.”

Amnesty’s Claire Beston told me that Eritrea’s refusal to acknowledge its illegal detention of its own people was “incredibly disappointing for the families of those affected.” Additionally, she pointed out that Eritrea’s imprisonment of innocent people was in direct contravention with a number of international treaties it had signed up to. Drawing parallels with another country known for imprisoning innocent citizens, the human rights activist Khataza Gondwe has referred to Eritrea as "Africa's North Korea."

Eritrea, then, has not become the country many hoped for. “I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t believe that promises were betrayed,” Eritrean exile Gaim Kibreab—a university professor and author of Eritrea: A Dream Deferred—told me. Kibreab left Eritrea in 1976. For him, the actions of the current government “affect us all. I have relatives in Sudanese refugee camps. I have dear friends in prison in Eritrea.” The deferred dream of a free Eritrea was not just Kibreab’s, but one shared by many of his countrymen, though possibly not Isaias Afewerki and his revolutionary army.

Kibreab wishes for a pluralist democracy in which there is a free press and a flourishing civil society. But was this ever going to be a realistic proposition for a group of hardened guerrilla warriors at the end of a 30-year struggle? Decades of uninterrupted power is probably a closer approximation of Isaias' dreams. He’s said to be full of contempt for humanity, to be a big drinker and a mean drunk. He's a human rights violator and a petty thug who's known to break bottles over people's heads once he’s had a few.

As such, being boss probably suits him just fine. His former foreign minister, Petros Solomon, a key fighter and comrade in the revolution, was imprisoned in 2011 for speaking out against the government as part of the G-15 group of dissidents, who wrote an open letter to Isaias denouncing the lack of freedom in Eritrea. Solomon has not been heard from since his imprisonment. 


Petros Solomon in an underground bunker in the frontline town of Nakfa, in 1979.

Some ex-revolutionary fighters and other defenders of the Eritrean government are scornful of exiled, “so-called intellectuals" like Gaim Kibreab. They believe that the people who now talk about human rights in Eritrea are hypocrites, people who didn’t fight and stand up for the violation of Eritrean human rights in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There is still a significant amount of support for Isaias in the Eritrean diaspora. The Eritrean ambassador told me that “you must respect that we have had our human rights violated,” in relation to Ethiopia’s annexing of—and then war with—Eritrea, as well as the international support of Ethiopia.

Kibreab, in a way, agrees with him. He told me that when you talk about Eritrea, you have to talk about Ethiopia, which—secure in its importance strategically to the United States—has continued to run roughshod over Eritrea and, in doing so, has alienated Eritrea from the rest of the world. A world that now regards it as a small rogue state with a potential for Islamism, while viewing Ethiopia as a large, roguish, but vital state—a key ally in the “War on Terror."

“The international community,” Kibreab pointed out, “has never been charitable to the Eritrean government. But if they moved towards liberal democracy, they’d help themselves." However, this lack of support is worth remembering, particularly since it has been true ever since John Foster Dulles admitted that Eritrea was to be the victim in an international power game. Freedom from the machinations of foreign powers was one of the driving forces of the revolution. Now, still isolated, Isaias and his government continue to battle on, proudly proclaiming survival in the face of international contempt.


In 1998, the Eritreans went back to war with Ethiopia. The country's youth were quickly mobilized to go back into the trenches.

The interminable military service, for example, makes some sense in the context of Ethiopian aggression. In 1998, the two countries went to war over a small portion of disputed territory surrounding the barren, rock-strewn town of Badme. The war, which lasted for over two years and resulted in the death of up to 100,000 soldiers, was described as “two bald men fighting over a comb.” Both Isaias Afewerki and Ethiopia’s then premier Meles Zenawi were bald.

Since the end of the war, Ethiopia has failed to recognize an international court ruling that stipulates that Badme is part of Eritrea. Eritrean government officials have repeatedly told me that if Ethiopia recognized the boundary, they would be ready to make friends with their neighbors. Ethiopia funds many of the strands of opposition in Eritrea and, along with the United States, plays a crucial role in a paranoid narrative put forward by the Eritrean government: that Eritrea’s very existence is under constant threat from dark powers beyond its borders.

There is an element of truth to this, but of course Isaias and his government spin it out for all its worth. As far as propaganda goes, Ethiopia is Isaias’ greatest ally.


An EPLF member outside Asmara, 1979.

What I’m also talking about here, when I talk about Eritrea at 20 years, is the difference between the idealism of revolutionary opposition and the practical day-to-day reality of running a government. After years in the mountains fighting a guerrilla war, how was a revolutionary movement going to smoothly transition into power? Just like with the Taliban in Afghanistan, we've seen that life in grizzled, iconic opposition is perhaps not the best preparation for a calm, moral government. In opposition, those around Isaias let him do what needed to be done. There was a sense that he was “our bastard.” But, since then, the bastard has never stopped.

Ex-revolutionaries in Eritrea are often characterized as great drinkers, good talkers, and terrible diplomats. They grew up fighting in a revolutionary struggle, and the intricacies of international diplomacy were not for them. Paranoid and wary of showing weakness, they have punished innocent people for their own failings.

This is the sadness of all revolutionary dreams turned sour: the reality of freedom is never the same as the promise of freedom. It's unlikely that when the EPLF were fighting for their country’s independence they looked up at that East African sky and thought: We dream that some day we will imprison people without trial, that our people will do anything they can to escape the country, that our youth will be locked into national service and that there will be no such thing as journalism.

Every generation reacts against the previous one, though. Isaias is getting old, and with the post-independence generation now 20 years old, the next few years could see some upheaval, hopefully for the better, in Eritrea.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

See more of Dan's work at danconnell.net.

More stories about troubled African countries:

Al Qaeda Wants Africa

The VICE Guide to Liberia

Watch - Ground Zero: Mali

Restore the Fourth Wants the American Government to Stop Spying on Everyone

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Instead of getting drunk and grilling on a roof somewhere, several hundred New Yorkers chose to spend their Fourth of July protesting the establishment of the surveillance state that, as we all know by now thanks to leaker-turned-international-fugitive Edward Snowden, has the ability and authority to monitor everything anyone does online. The New York rally, along with dozens of others across the country, was organized by a group called Restore the Fourth that wants to draw attention to the domestic spying operations carried out by the NSA that many say are in gross violation of the  Fourth Amendment (that’s the one that protects you against “unreasonable search and seizure”).

The protesters gathered in Union Square around noon and embarked an hour lateron a peaceful march to Federal Hall, where the Bill of Rights was dreamed up nearly 224 years ago. Despite the sweltering heat, the demonstrators remained upbeat during the two-mile trek, chanting slogans like, “Stop the surveillance, restore the Fourth Amendment!” and, “Hey, hey NSA, stop the spying, go away!

The march ended on the stairs of Federal Hall, where, one person took out his iPhone and read the Fourth Amendment aloud and perpetual protester Reverend Billy Talen led a skit that dramatized President Obama and President George W. Bush spying on and arresting ordinary citizens. Everyone in attendance vowed to continue the fight to protect civil liberties, and when Ben Doernberg, who led the NYC march, said his last words and people began to disperse, a man in the crowd yelled at the top of his lungs:

Snowden is a hero! Snowden is a patriot!

A final chant ensued:

Snowden is me, Snowden is you, if they arrest Snowden, we know what to do!

Afterward, I talked to Ben about how the protest came together and what the organization’s future goals were.

VICE: What is Restore the Fourth?
Ben Doernberg:
Restore the Fourth is a grassroots, non-partisan movement that has been organized over just the last few weeks to oppose the unconstitutional, sweeping surveillance policies that we found out the NSA is pursuing. Essentially, what we were about today was turning out and showing that people do care about their constitutional rights, and they’re willing to take a stand. I mean, this is a tough day, right? It’s a holiday, it’s really hot, but people care.

And why should people care?
People should care because this is a constitutional right, and when the American people don’t stand up for constitutional rights, we’ve seen the direction that that goes in—whether its McCarthyism, whether it’s the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in, essentially, prison camps. When there’s pressure to take away liberties for security, it doesn’t work, and if people don’t push back, we end up with some of the worst things in American history happening. It’s really important to take a stand as soon as possible to kind of reverse the tide. And I think we’re starting to see that.

There’s a letter written to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, by 26 senators, demanding an explanation on what’s going on. So you are starting to see a groundswell.

Do you think that Americans generally are OK with these NSA spying programs? Polls on the subject have said different things.
What you see with the polling is, depending on how you ask the question, you get different answers. What that says to people who have experience with polling is that people don’t know. People haven’t made up their minds yet. Maybe 20 percent [of Americans] feel strongly that [the spying programs are] a great idea, about 45 percent are really strongly against it, and then there are about 30 percent in the middle who aren’t quite sure yet. I think that’s where a movement like Restore the Fourth comes in—we’re hoping to convince that 30 percent that our constitutional rights are worth fighting for.

What is Restore the Fourth demanding?  
Our specific demands are, firstly, for a congressional investigation, a special committee to investigate what these [NSA] policies are and what information [the government] thinks it’s entitled to have about Americans. We don’t think that would compromise national security at all. Al Qaeda already knows they’re being watched—the question is, how is the NSA watching the rest of us? And that would follow in the steps of the Church Committee, a committee in the 1970s formed by the Senate to investigate the abuses under Nixon and under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The second demand is to reform the laws to make them constitutional,and make them explicitly prohibit blanket surveillance without probable cause. That would include section 215 of the Patriot Act, section 702 of FISA, and any other relevant statutes.

And then, finally, we’re calling for James Clapper to resign for lying to Congress when he said that the NSA does not wittingly collect information on millions of Americans, which we now know is a straight-out lie. He was warned about that question in advance, and still chose to give a false answer. So we believe that he needs to resign.

It seems like a lot of people showed up, was the turnout more than you expected? Do you know how many people came out?
I’d love to say a million, but I would guess maybe 800, something like that. I checked with the police, they said maybe 800, but an exact number is hard to know.

The march seemed carefully orchestrated and it went over incredibly smoothly. How much did you coordinate with the police?
We talked to them a little bit in advance. Next time we’re going to try to get a permit and try to have amplified speakers and everything. For this march, we basically just kept them up to date, made a few changes in the route as we went along to deal with traffic and such things, but they were actually extremely helpful in working with us and they let us come here. We were worried we wouldn’t be able to get to Federal Hall, but everything went smoother than I ever could have imagined.

When will the next event be, and what form will it take?
The next event that we’re planning is going to be on August 4, and like I said, that’s going to be a permitted event. And we’re going to try to essentially bring together all the different groups and make a really broad coalition with everyone who has these Fourth Amendment concerns. Exactly what form that event will take, we’re not sure yet, but as we saw today there are probably 800 people who are going to sign up for a mailing list for the next event, so I’m pretty optimistic.

More on the surveillance state and the NSA:

Yes, the NSA Can Spy on Every US Citizen

Surveillance Culture Is Not a Two-Way Street

A Brief History of the US Government Spying on Its Citizens

Is Canada Run by a Gay Mafia?

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J. Baird answerin' Qs. via Flickr.

When Canada's Conservative government won a majority election government over two years ago, many Canuck leftists braced themselves for a nightmare. A country run by a right-wing party that only won 39% of the popular vote? What could possibly go wrong? Everything, it seemed.

In particular, some queer lefties worried about the grim potential for a rabid right that had carefully kowtowed to their socially-conservative base of self-declared pro-life, family-values-oriented fundies.Canada's Conservatives seem to be moving closer to the British Conservative model—that is, shifting their brand away from traditional family values and attaching it to the larger umbrella of freedom and human rights.

Here's the really wacky thing, though: Canada's Conservative government appears to be run by a queer mafia that rivals the Vatican. The best part is, the press corps in Ottawa is itching to report on the gay shenanigans of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's cabinet, which seems about as straight as an episode of Glee.

First up is the most obvious: John Baird. As I wrote about in the Canadian gay mag Xtra, Baird lives in a glass closet. He was first outed by another Conservative on a radio show, who remarked on his sexuality so matter-of-factly she didn't even realize he was still in said transparent closet. Baird recently got busted for using government properties to hang out with friends during his vacations in both London and New York. And some wondered who his "handful of friends" were and what they were up to in lavish, luxurious locations.

Baird has also been incredibly active in helping out gay refugees worldwide. Many have connected his shutting down of the Iranian embassy to Canada as a response to their anti-gay laws. He has specifically stated that he helped “a large number” of gay men and women escape Iran to come to Canada.

The second question that arises, however, is for Canuck political journalists: are we reporting on the Canadian government or doing promo for a new season of The Bachelor? Indeed, covering this administration has proven taxing for writers, eager to reach for that word that might mean queer, but not really. Witness the national news magazine Maclean's, which has marveled at the number of "single white males" who populate Harper's inner circle. Indeed, writing about the current Canadian government requires employing more euphemisms than an Ed Koch obituary. Maclean's columnist Paul Wells points to several bachelors—among them Baird, Jason Kenney, the recently married and ostensibly heterosexual James Moore, and Nigel Wright—who have been very committed team players. "All four are bachelors, which means only that they can devote truly extraordinary amounts of time to their roles." Roleplaying, eh? Even reading an estimation of their commitment sounds kinky! Wells also suggests that getting ahead in Harper's Ottawa is helped with "infinite flexibility and a bottomless appetite," which sounds suspiciously like a contortionist's Grindr ad.

It must be noted that Wright recently resigned due to the senate scandal. A reporter desperate to catch up with him to pose a few questions camped out to catch Wright on his morning jog—at five in the morning. Hard to believe someone prances around a downtown street in tight track pants before sunrise just for the exercise.

Then there's Canada's first lady, Laureen Harper, seen at the Prime Minister's side, often apparently quite begrudgingly, through various public events. Spreading irresponsible innuendo and hearsay is not proper reportage, nor is it gentlemanly, so we won't go there. But it's important to note what Laureen Harper's nickname is on capital hill: The L Word.

So what is up with a country run by avowed conservatives who apparently run their private lives by an entirely different set of rules? Canada's Conservative gays may well be ruled by a cross between the Roy Cohn effect and the Stockholm Syndrome. Their fantasies may involve getting tied up at the Calgary Stampede and slapped senseless with a bible belt.

While much of this might sound like wild speculation, the current scandals facing the Conservative government do suggest bent leadership. Evoking the dark impulses in a Cronenberg horror movie from the '70s, there is something more repressed and twisted to this cold, polite country than initially meets the eye. Perhaps Canada needs even more therapy than we thought.


Previously:

Why Did Toronto's Pride Parade Shut out the Trans March?

Live Video of Rival Protesters Clashing on Cairo's Oct. 6th Bridge

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For three hours on Friday night, pro-Morsi demonstrators and anti-government protesters waged a pitched battle on the Oct. 6th Bridge in central Cairo. Both sides threw rocks, shot fireworks, and and hurled Molotov cocktails at each other. The army intervened hours after the fighting began but let chaos reign before moving in. According to the Ministry of Health, 17 people were killed. Scroll down for videos from the mayhem. 

From VICE's Tim Pool on the ground in Cairo:

"Moments ago the Tahrir side charged forcing back the Muslim Brotherhood protesters, but after a few minutes it was reversed. The Tahrir side was pushed back over the Oct 6th bridge. It looks like a MASSIVE surge of MB protesters charging over the bridge."
 


Update: 4:00 PM EST


After the army moved in, fighting on the October 6th Bridge stopped. Meanwhile, pro-Morsi demonstrators have assembled en masse across town in Nasr City and at Cairo University.

More from Egypt:

Egypt After Morsi - Trailer

We Saw the Egyptian Military Stage a Coup in Cairo

Celebration and Trepidation as the Egyptian Military Unseats Morsi

 


Tristan Casey's Photos Make B.C. Look Like the Earth's Most Wonderful Place

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I've been to Vancouver. I felt nothing: I stared at the mountains and shrugged. I looked at the water and back into my iPhone. If I saw the Vancouver that Tristan Casey knows, I probably would have had a much better time. Working primarily in coastal British Columbia, Tristan is in the business of documenting secrets on film. Constantly exploring 'ungooglable' areas lends his work a natural air of casual discovery- traveling within a few hours of his backyard instead of jumping on a plane to overexplored terrain. While keeping his work natural, it's also very carefully framed: leaving unnecessary time-defining products behind in an attempt to capture an image with longevity. Tristan's work exemplifies the natural desire to escape, to see something in real life as opposed to on Tumblr.


Previously:

Kyle Scully's Photographs Make British Columbia Look Even More Gorgeous

Inside the Mind of a Female Pedophile

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Alissa Nutting’s first book, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, presented an impressive range of voices, from space-age pornstars to witchy cannibals to corpse-smokers and amputees. Somehow she was able to make any situation—no matter how fucked—seem feasible and hilarious. The expectation for her next book, then, was exceptionally high.

Her new novel, Tampa, just released from Ecco, takes that innate ability to its furthest possible extent. From the first sentence, Tampa promises it won’t be prone to blushing: “I spent the night before my first day of teaching in an excited loop of hushed masturbation on my side of the mattress, never falling asleep.” Essentially a portrait of perhaps major-house fiction’s first female pedophile, Tampa presents Celeste, an eighth-grade teacher who is obsessed with fucking young boys.

The trick of the novel is how deftly Nutting makes this would-be female monster into a voice you can’t put down. The insane sex-scenes and rising tension of the ongoing taboo is tempered by Celeste’s sense of humor, her lack of inhibition, and Nutting’s ability to bury any alarm ringing in the reader with bizarre and unflinching sentences like: “I pictured us, airborne and naked in the backseat of the falling car, trying desperately to crawl toward one another against the forces of gravity so he could stuff his penis inside me for just one moment before death.”

Less language-heavy than Lolita, more suburban than American Psycho, Tampa is for certain a book that forces the reader to sit up and recalibrate the shape of their beliefs, while at the same time confronting all sorts of questions about predators, gender, perspective, and the taboo.

Alissa was kind enough to answer a few questions via email regarding some of Tampa’s takes on these ideas.

VICE: At what point did you realize you were going to write a novel about a female pedophile?
Alissa:
From the book's inception I knew I wanted to write a novel specifically about the phenomenon of female teachers sleeping with underage male students. But the decision to write the book in first-person definitely came from a broader awareness that there aren't very many novels written from the perspective of a female sexual predator.

I was really impressed with how fluid and honest the voice of the narrator seemed. Was it easy for you to find a way into her voice, and to keep going deeper into the brain of the character as you continued?
I do think there's an advantage to writing about characters who have an obsession, because you always have their monomania to guide the voice, like a compass—no matter what she's doing, this novel's protagonist, Celeste, is always thinking about sex with young teen boys on some level, and part of the intrigue of the book is the reader getting to contrast the normalcy everyone around her assumes about her character with what Celeste is actually thinking.

Do you have empathy for Celeste? Is empathy important when writing this kind of book?
That's a great question. My empathy for her is restricted, I suppose, because she herself has no concern or empathy for others. But there are aspects of her character I can relate to, like being afraid of growing old. I did feel it was important that she be very interesting, since this isn't a book you keep reading because you deeply care about the main character as a person. Here you're reading because you're watching the train wreck of her choices unfold, or you're being entertained by her contemptuous making-fun of nearly everyone around her, or you're shocked by the situational irony of her thoughts.

It's complicated, I think, because Celeste's voice—even though everything she's describing is morally broken—has a humor to it. During the sex scenes I would sometimes almost forget this was an interaction between an adult and a child, I think because Celeste's sex drive is so insane at times, and your descriptions are so unashamed—even at times hilarious. I wonder if you'd say a bit about your approach to writing the sex scenes, if there were any rules you set for yourself—things you knew you wanted to make happen—and if it was difficult for you or if you felt removed from it?
I definitely felt that her character had to be really funny, so that there would be this disturbing pull of tension—on one hand at times you almost want to like her because she's making you laugh, but then there's the troubling context of her desires and actions that it's set against. The sex scenes were tricky. With the boys, I had to show her extreme, hyperbolic lust and her very adult approach to these interactions: she was completely turned on, which I had to reflect. But I also needed to reveal the impact and range of consequences of her behavior—how it was dishonest, damaging, frightening, or frustrating even as the boys were welcoming it. What I knew I wanted to make happen there was to display the lack of balance in regards to power, how unequal the playing field was; she’s an intelligent, manipulative, sexually experienced adult. And of course her sex scenes with grown men in the book are the least sexy thing in the world—they're atrocities she suffers through, though she does have a sense of humor about it.

It's interesting that early reviews keep comparing the book to American Psycho; the main link I see there is the narrators’ shared awareness that what they're doing is super fucked up, but they still do it, and get off on it, like pleasure is more real than law. I know Ellis was kind of acting out against a world he lived in that was full of drugs and blank people, and I wonder if there's something particular you were pushing against, whether it be the low number of female antagonists who are truly fucked up as compared to males, or a general sense in America of both demonizing and fetishizing these kinds of figures?
The book is definitely a response to each of those things, as well as to this cultural sense that physical attractiveness—much like wealth—is a form of immunity. That if you're beautiful enough the rules won't apply. In that vein, I feel like Celeste is this Frankenstein monster of male desire. She’s gorgeous and only thinks about sex: exactly what popular culture seems to state is every man’s ideal. She’s like if Maxim magazine made a wish but didn’t specify the parameters enough—“give us a perfect 10 nymphomaniac.” Well, like the proverbial monkey’s paw, here she is. Ta-da! So in many ways the character is poking fun at that ridiculous ideal.

You became a mother shortly after this book was released. I wonder if you feel you'd have been able to write the book the same way now, after having had a child, or if the life change has otherwise complicated or altered your perspective. At what age would you let your child find this book?
I do think it would be more difficult to write the book right now in particular—in this postnatal period where I'm awash with warmly fuzzy tenderness hormones and most of the items in our house are made of fleece and patterned with cartoon monkeys. I had to channel these great reserves of callous, satirical narcissism to write Celeste's character, and that would be a much more difficult headspace for me to enter at present. The age I'd be OK with my own child reading the novel would just depend on her maturity level I think. It's a very adult book, after all, but the topic is certainly one I want to discuss with her long before. I think as a culture we tend to do a better job warning our children about predators when our kids are younger, before puberty. After puberty that conversation seems to stop happening a lot of times. It's normal, I think, for parents to be uncomfortable about their children's budding sexuality, and particularly about the fact that their child might develop a crush on an adult—it's something no parent wants to think about. But it's my opinion that not discussing the possibility that those feelings might surface and the reasons against acting on them make teenagers more vulnerable to predatory adults.

Do you believe humans are evil by nature?
Perhaps. Of course there are so many lovely people who do a pretty great job of battling the worst in themselves, as extreme or benign as their own personal worst may be. They strive to be kind and they win at it. But I've always been intrigued by books with characters who have dreadful urges they aren't at all interested in fighting against. This novel is one of them.

Previously by Blake Butler - Conceptual Writing, Gender, Murder, and Bob Seger

@blakebutler

Swimming with Warlords

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Nabi Gechi is a killer who doesn’t bother with subtleties. 

Two weeks ago the militia commander directed an attack against a house in Northern Afghanistan filled with Taliban. After his men surrounded it, Nabi brought out his favorite weapon, a rifle-mounted 40-mm Russian grenade launcher. Each grenade is capable of causing serious damage and Nabi fired not just one or two, not a dozen or 50 or even 75—he shot 123 grenades at the house all by himself. They’re meant to be lobbed in a long arc at a target hundreds of meters away, but according to Haji Mohammed, Nabi’s son-in-law and a soldier in his militia, the commander fired them straight at his target like they were bullets. The result was a hellstorm of fire that seemed extreme, even for Afghanistan.

He showed us the gory results in an after-dinner video at his compound. The bodies peppered with shrapnel and stiff with rigor were piled on the back of a pickup like cords of wood and presented as a gift at the headquarters of the Afghan National Police. The police chief called Nabi a hero in front of local TV cameras.

To many in the Qalizal district, he is a hero, a local boy who made good plying Afghan’s national trade, war. He fought and distinguished himself alongside some of the biggest names in the warlord business, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rashid Dostum. He left the fight to start a successful restaurant in Mazar-e-Sharif, but two years ago the local elders asked him to come back—the district was overrun with Taliban and in the throes of a massive drug problem. Almost half of the 30,000 residents, including children, are addicted to hashish, the result of a culture in which mothers sedate their children by feeding them pellets of hash three times a day so they can work long hours weaving carpets.

Nabi returned and reconstituted his loyal followers into a standing militia of 300 men, setting up 18 command checkpoints around the district and basically shutting down Taliban operations here.

Malika Gharebyr, the head of women’s affairs for the district, praised Nabi’s efforts. The Taliban used to harass her every time she went outside her house. “Nabi brought security here,” she said. “It’s much better now.”

Nabi also helped provide protection that allowed the government to destroy poppy fields in the area. “Without Nabi, we wouldn’t have been able to eradicate the fields in in Qalizal,” said Abdul Bashir Morshid, the head of the department of counter-narcotics in the province of Kunduz.

The Americans initially liked what Nabi was doing enough to send in the Special Forces to train, arm, and pay his men as part of a controversial, now-defunct program called Critical Infrastructure Police (CIP). These were irregular units mostly set up in Northern Afghanistan and sometimes even made up of former Taliban. They were given yellow armbands but no uniforms and were co-opted, at least part-time, to fight the Taliban. But many of the CIP units took advantage of their badges and guns and began to freelance, shaking down the local communities for food, fuel, and whatever else they wanted.

Similar allegations surfaced in the case of Nabi’s militia. While each member was paid about $200 a month from a NATO discretionary fund, Nabi’s group was accused of supplementing that income by “taxing” the locals for providing them with security, taking payments in bags of wheat, chicken, or other foodstuffs they would eat or sell. Nearly a year ago, Afghan’s president, Hamid Karzai, began to phase out the CIP program—after being surprised to learn of its existence—fearing that irregular forces with no official or financial connection to the national government could one day post a threat to it.

Though the CIP program has gone away, Nabi’s militia has not. He’s still taxing the locals and shipments of foodstuffs are regularly delivered to his compound and checkpoints. Nabi may have evolved into what President Karzai has feared most: a battle-tested, salaried warlord who has no official allegiance to the Afghan government.

Qalizal’s elders, who showed up by the dozens to meet with me at Nabi’s compound when I arrived, said they support the government but need Nabi for security. They thought Karzai should turn the militia into a full-time local police force paid by the government, or send in his own security forces. Until then they need to the safety Nabi’s militia provides, even if they have to pay for it, though they admitted not everyone in the community is happy with the taxes.

Nabi claimed he’s here because the people want him to be. If they asked him to leave, he said, he’ll oblige, but added that he and his men have done nothing wrong.

“The people asked me to come here and provide security,” he told me in a soft voice incongruous with the stout build typical of the Turkmen who make up 95 percent of the Qalizal population. “I’m happy to serve them, and if I’ve done anything wrong, I should be in a court and let them speak out against me for my crimes.”

In order for us to report on Nabi, it’s also necessary for us to stay in his compound, so my interpreter and colleague Matin Sarfraz, who is from the province, made the arrangements. Nabi proved to be a gracious host to us, giving us watermelon and tea and then feting us with a big dinner of pilaw (rice and meat), heavy flat bread, yogurt, and Mountain Dew. We were joined by Nabi’s friends and comrades in arms—including Mullah Jilani, a former Taliban commander who switched sides and joined Nabi after he outmaneuvered the larger Taliban force who had come to assassinate him.

“There’s a $500,000 reward to kill Nabi,” said, Jilani. “The Taliban are very afraid of him.”

I am too, a bit. While he’s very kind to us, there’s a quiet malevolence about him, which I think he can summon at any moment.

This is in part because I know some of his stories, but I also felt it at the broad, muddy Kunduz River earlier in the evening when he took us there to swim. We jumped into the water like kids on summer break—the current was so strong you had to swim full force to avoid being swept miles downstream.

When we got out to take a photograph to document the event, Nabi slapped me hard on the shoulder and threw his leg in from of mine, ready to toss me to the ground just for fun. I’m not a bad wrestler, but felt that even a half-hearted effort to take him on could turn disastrous if our host thought he was losing face in front of his men. He attempted to take me on several more times, wrapping his arms around me and butting his head against mine. I held him at a distance, smiling, trying to maintain equilibrium and to avoid provoking him—which is exactly the same position the Afghan government finds itself in.

Kevin Sites is a rare breed of journalist who thrives in the throes of war. As Yahoo! News’s first war correspondent between 2005 and 2006, he gained notoriety for covering every major conflict across the globe in one year’s time and fostering a technology-driven, one-man-band approach to reporting that helped usher in the “backpack movement.” Kevin is currently traveling through Afghanistan covering the tumultous country during "fighting season" as international forces like the US pullout. Keep coming back to VICE.com for more dispatches from Kevin.

More on VICE from Kevin Sites: Revisiting the Battlefields of Afghanistan 12 Years Later

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com

A Divided Egypt Battles with Fireworks, Rocks, and Guns

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The young man's face was covered in a flag made to serve as a bloody, makeshift shroud. His unconscious head bounced with the jog of the men who carried him.

He was among hundreds hurt in Cairo on Friday, when tens of thousands of supporters of former President Mohamed Morsi—summarily removed by the country's military on Wednesday—took to the streets to demand his reinstatement.

By the day's close, at least 30 were dead nationwide, and Morsi's supporters had been beaten back from the center of Cairo, in clashes that saw both sides deploy automatic weapons. The position of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's major backers, seemed to have weakened as a key leader was arrested, even as their rhetoric remained defiant.

The injured young man was being carried from a demonstration where a few thousand of Morsi's supporters had gathered to demand his release. Police and soldiers had fired into the crowd. Video footage posted to YouTube appears to show officers shooting a man dead from close range, in cold blood.

Later, near the barbed wire, I saw one officer fire a tear gas canister into the crowd with no visible provocation. Attack helicopters dipped low over the protest.


Soldiers face off with supporters of former President Morsi

Most Morsi supporters say they have a simple demand: democracy. The millions of protestors who hit the streets on June 30th called on the military to intervene to depose Morsi claimed that the President had lost his legitimacy by governing in the interests of the Brotherhood, rather than the nation as a whole.

As daylight faded, a march of Morsi's supporters made its way over the 6 October Bridge—named from Egypt's 1973 war with Israel—towards Tahrir Square, packed with people celebrating Morsi's fall. Marching to Tahrir was no doubt an act of provocation.

By the time the VICE team arrived on the scene an anti-Morsi crowd had also arrived to stop the march from reaching Tahrir Square. There was fighting on the bridge and on the corniche below it. The blasts of homemade weapons rang out, whistling overhead; fireworks, petrol bombs, and rocks were lobbed in both directions. Eventually, we saw a couple of guys with AK47s moving toward the front line.  A few seconds later, rifles cracked, and several more casualties were carried back, a young kid screaming. The back and forth continued for hours, with occasional bursts of automatic fire.

Eventually, Morsi's supporters appeared to withdraw, and the military appeared, rumbling over the bridge towards us in armored vehicles. Civilians sat on the vehicles with soldiers, chanting with the jubilant crowd, "The people and the army are one hand."

Less than two years ago, crowds fought the military—which then held the reigns of political power—in clashes that were nearly as bloody, chanting "down with the military regime."

Since then, I've watched street fighting evolve. Once, civilians chucked rocks and the occasional petrol bomb at police, who fired back with shotguns, tear gas, and sometimes with rifles. By November of last year, most of the fighting was between civilians, and shotguns were pretty common. Friday, the police didn't even bother showing up, and civilians shot at each other with automatic weapons in the center of town.

An influx of automatic weapons to Egypt from Libya is supplemented by makeshift shotguns and pistols made in back-room metal shops across Cairo. Increasingly, some people feel the need to be armed and don't feel they have anything left to lose by using them.

I didn't manage to speak to many of Morsi's supporters after they ran back across the bridge. But those I spoke to earlier in the day were already feeling disenfranchised and angry. Unless the country's new politics gives them some reason to believe they can make a place for themselves again, they'll likely go to the streets again.  And now, people are bringing guns.

@Tom_D_

More from Egypt:

Egypt After Morsi - Trailer

Video from Friday's Clashes on October 6th Bridge in Cairo

 

In Nasr City, a Demonstration Ends in Bloodshed

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Near the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque in Nasr City in Cairo, hundreds of supporters of the deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party voiced their disbelief that the mechanisms of democracy that installed their leader were so summarily dismissed by the Egyptian Military. As the demonstration moved to the headquarters of the Egyptian Republican Guard, where Morsi is supposedly being held, the Egyptian army fired tear gas at them. Almost immediately rounds of gunfire went off as well. Although it’s unclear whether or not the army opened fire first—a military spokesperson claimed that the army only fired tear gas and rubber bullets—three supporters of ex-Egyptian president are reported dead.

@justice22

More from Egypt:

Video from Firday's Clashes on October 6 Bridge in Cairo

Egypt After Morsi - Trailer

A Divided Egypt Battles with Fireworks, Rocks, and Guns

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