Yazidi refugees receiving support from the International Rescue Committee (Photo via)

As the rolling news reports the latest round of atrocities in the ongoing Iraqi catastrophe, it’s easy to be desensitized to the desperate situation engulfing the Yazidis.

An entire people forced to abandon their ancestral homeland with only the shirts on their backs, they’re making the gruelling and perilous trek to refugee camps in Kurdistan, on foot through mountains and along desert dirt tracks. Many weren’t fortunate enough to escape mass executions at the hands of Islamic State militants, and thousands are still trapped up Mt. Sinjar in the baking heat with no food, water or shelter. Children and the elderly are dying in their droves.

As well as the attempted annihilation of an ethnic group, it’s also their religion IS want to destroy. One of the strangest survivals throughout the entirety of human culture, their faith has been viewed as so subversive and unsettling that it’s brought holy war and near extinction to the Yazidis throughout history.

In the eyes of IS, the Yazidis are Devil worshippers—something that’s actually kind of tricky to argue against; the group consider themselves to be the chosen people of Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel," who they also know as Shaitan, or Satan. In Yazidi tradition, this special relationship began when Shaitan visited their ancestor Adam in the garden of Eden, bearing forbidden fruit.

The Yazidis are an ancient rural people from the plain of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Almost forgotten archaeological layers of belief still poke through the surface here, old echoes that stretch religious absolutes held sacred by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike into weird, unsettling shapes.

The parallels between the Peacock Angel and the Satan we’re more familiar with can be baffling—Melek Taus is God’s most important angel, his commander-in-chief in this world, which was also his original role in the Abrahamic traditions. He’s also a fallen angel who rebelled against God and was subsequently cast into Hell; but in the Yazidi cosmology, after 40,000 years his tears quenched Hell’s flames and God forgave and reinstated him.

Melek Taus, the "Peacock Angel" (Photo via)

This hints at the complex, ambiguous, almost human quality of Melek Taus. In the Mishefa Re, the holy book the Yazidis believe to be his revealed word, he tells us: “I give and take away; I enrich and impoverish; I cause both happiness and misery ... All treasures and hidden things are known to me; and as I desire, I take them from one and bestow them upon another.”

The Yazidis don’t see good and evil as polar opposites personified in particular gods, but as qualities that are integral parts of creation—they exist throughout the world, within the mind and spirit of human beings, and also within the Peacock Angel. The path we choose is up to us. “I allow everyone to follow the dictates of his own nature, but he that opposes me will regret it sorely.”

One of Melek Taus’ symbols is fire, and he can illuminate as well as burn. He’s responsible for granting mankind knowledge and free will, and in an intriguing twist on the familiar Garden of Eden story, he first initiates Adam with forbidden fruit: “[God] commanded Gabriel to escort Adam into Paradise, and to tell him that he could eat from all the trees, but not of wheat. Here Adam remained for a hundred years […] Melek Taus visited Adam and said, ‘Have you eaten of the grain?’ He answered, ‘No, God forbade me.’ Melek Taus replied and said, ‘Eat of the grain and all shall go better with thee.’”

A series of paintings from 1920 of Yazidis in traditional clothing (via / via / via)

The Yazidis claim to be the world’s oldest nation, tracing the origin of their culture back to this covenant between Shaitan and Adam. Though this obviously has the ring of massive over-simplification and elaboration common to all origin myths, there’s a growing body of archaeological evidence that seems to suggest there’s an element of symbolic truth in it—that the Garden of Eden story shared by all the Middle Eastern religions might in fact be a faded folk memory of how human civilization began in the first place, a memory connected to the Yazidis in a very special way; a memory that Judaism, and subsequently Christianity and Islam, inherited from them, distorting it in the process.

You can’t convert or intermarry into Yazidism. They’re a people set apart, a distinct ethnic group who’ve always lived in a corner of the Turkey-Iraq borderland that folk memory across the wider region recalls as the location of the Garden of Eden. All very well, you might say—the Garden of Eden’s just a myth. But have you heard of Gobekli Tepe? It’s a recently unearthed archaeological site just over the Turkish side of the border that’s in the process of causing complete upheaval to all our old assumptions about the dawn of human civilization.

Ruins at the Gobekli Tepe site (Photo via)

The discovery of Gobekli Tepe came when an archaeological team noticed a curious collection of what looked like gravestones on top of a strangely isolated hill. They began to examine these graves, which they soon discovered were just the tip of an astonishing iceberg: that the “hill” was in fact man-made, and, more importantly, that the “graves” were just the tops of huge, immaculately preserved limestone megaliths. These giant stones formed a large circular sacred site that had mysteriously been buried under tons of earth in distant antiquity, the rocks adorned with beautiful carvings of snakes, boars and strange bird-gods that the Yazidi swear they easily and instantly recognise as depictions of Melek Taus and their other angels.

To say these bird-gods have come down to us from the dawn of time is, in human terms, no exaggeration. The obvious comparison is with Stonehenge, but the real shock about Gobekli Tepe is its almost unimaginable age. Stonehenge is about 4,000 years old. Gobekli Tepe has been carbon dated and clocks in at an unbelievable 12,000 years old, extending the advent of monumental human architecture—and with it a human society large and complicated enough to build it—at least three times further back into the deep past, a time before writing, before metal and also a time before farming. “Stone age” hunter-gatherers built this place. Until very recently we imagined complex society—“civilization”—began with agriculture. Gobekli Tepe overturns this assumption about the birth of human culture in a stroke.

But the significance of Gobekli Tepe doesn’t stop there. Agriculture seems to have started around this area, too, around 10,000 years ago, when the megaliths were already 2,000 years old. Pigs were first domesticated in a place called Cayonu a few miles away. The wheat species first domesticated in ancient European and Asian agriculture all descended from a common ancestor: “einkorn” wheat, which just happens to be the very same indigenous species of these ancestral Yazidi heartlands. Which makes the small detail of Satan bringing Adam knowledge by introducing him to grain rather than apples in the Yazidi version of the Eden story suddenly seem very significant.

A Yazidi shrine on the left and the Nouri Mosque minaret to the right; Mosul, Iraq, 1932. (Photo via)

So, the Yazidis are descended from the original inhabitants of the garden of Eden and worship a bird-god called Satan, who brought mankind out of the Stone Age with the forbidden fruit of agriculture, right? Who knows.

This baffling conundrum certainly poses intriguing questions about how far back into the dawn of human culture—into the “Stone Age” and its transition into “civilization”—all our familiar stories about God and the Devil and Adam and Eden actually go. It also paints the Devil in a newly sympathetic light, and you wonder if the Old Testament’s take on Satan might have been a hatchet job on the older rival religion’s god.

It must be completely obvious to anyone who’s grown up with the “War On Terror” that the first thing you do in such situations is paint the other guys—and their Gods—as evil, blood-thirsty war mongers, because by demonizing them you can justify any inhumanity you might subsequently commit. It was the basic technique of Bin Laden and of Bush, and it seems perfectly tenable to imagine the writers of the New Testament involved in similar smoke and mirrors.

This would certainly be typical of the Yazidi’s historical experience; there have been 73 attempted genocides of these “devil worshippers” since the arrival of Islam in the region. The most remarkable part of the whole story is that the Yazidis have even survived at all.

Michael Smith is a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster. He is the author of three works of fiction, The Giro Playboy, Shorty Loves Wing Wong and Unreal City.

Canada's newest monarch. Image via

Burger King’s bid to buy Tim Hortons and merge the two companies into a global fast-food monster is good news for shareholders, who stand to make a lot of money from the deal, but not everyone is psyched about the burger giant’s decision to move its headquarters up north.

First, the King’s sudden interest in taking up Canadian citizenship has a lot to do with avoiding taxes through a process of “tax inversion,” essentially an accounting gimmick that will let the company move its headquarters to Canada, where it will pay a 26.5 percent corporate tax rate compared to the 40 percent rate in the US. But the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors. The BK executives will continue to work out of their offices in Miami, and Tim Hortons brass will stay put where they are in Oakville, Ontario. The only real change will be the address on the letterhead, and as a result the already-broke US government is going to lose tens of millions of dollars over the coming years.

Jon Stewart mocked tax inversion recently on The Daily Show as “a liberating procedure for companies that have been raised American, but know in their hearts they’re really Irish.” Well, in this case, Burger King seems to have always known it was Canadian.

Moving the fast-food giant north doesn’t mean more money for Canada, though. The way our system works, corporations only pay taxes on their actual operations in the country, and since they’re probably not going to sell billions more burgers and doughnuts to Canadians, nothing much will change.

"The Americans are going to have the most downside out of this because it allows Burger King to lower their taxes paid in the US, but they won't be paying any more taxes in Canada,” Dennis Howlett, executive director of the non-profit group Canadians for Tax Fairness, told VICE in a phone interview this week. “So really we're not gaining any jobs, we're not gaining any taxes, there's really nothing in it for Canada."

Basically, don’t expect your own tax bill to get knocked down courtesy of the King.

Canada’s federal corporate tax rate has been slashed nearly in half since 2000, from 28 percent to the current 15 percent (the provinces charge separate corporate taxes on top of that). It’s been a bipartisan effort between the Liberal Party and the Harper Conservatives, and it’s made Canada the lowest-tax jurisdiction in the G7, but at what cost?

According to a 2012 report by the Canadian Labour Congress, Canada is losing out on some $13 billion a year it could make up by raising the corporate tax rate back up to a modest 21 percent. That’s all money that could be invested into infrastructure, education, health care, science and technology research—things that are often much more important to businesses than just how much they’re shelling out in taxes.

“The fact that Canada’s corporate tax rate is significantly lower than America’s may enhance the motivation for tax-avoiding restructuring initiatives like the Tim Horton’s deal,” Jim Stanford, an economist at Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, told VICE in an email. “Supporters of tax cuts will argue that this is good for Canada, but that is debatable. Other countries will cut their tax rates too (as has occurred), leading Canadian companies to do exactly the same thing. ... This is a drain on the fiscal base of all countries.”

Howlett of Canadians for Tax Fairness said he accepts “that you can't raise corporate tax rates too high,” but Canada is nowhere near the limit of what it can ask the biggest corporations to contribute.

“You want to keep things competitive... but there's a fair bit of room to raise corporate tax rates and still keep them under the U.S. rate and maintain a competitive advantage," said Howlett.

Given the current government’s track record, that’s not really going to happen, and if anything, Canada’s budding reputation as a tax haven could become a political talking point on the campaign trail in 2015.

“Canada has moved to a highly competitive tax regime,” Finance Minister Joe Oliver said of the Burger Tim deal. “We believe this has been a constructive move that is designed to retain capital in this country, which results in more business expansion and more employment.”

As it happens, more employment might not be what comes out of the merger. Burger King is majority-owned by the Brazilian investment fund 3G Capital, known for its cost-cutting ways. When 3G took over Burger King in 2010 it fired some 450 top brass, and it shut down a century-old ketchup plant in Ontario last year that cost more than 700 people their jobs.

Although the new King Hortons won’t be able to fire staff at independent franchises, the two companies did refer to possible “synergies” in announcing the merger. Hopefully this means a Whopper with two Boston cream doughnuts as buns.

The deal still has to be approved by the Canadian government, who will “determine whether it’s a net benefit to the country,” but that’s simply a formality before Burger King becomes yet another Canadian monarch who lives in another country and doesn’t contribute anything.

@ID4RO

Marina Abramović's durational performance at MoMA. (Photo via)

Ossian Ward is one of Britain’s leading art critics. His new book, Ways of Looking, sounded a little patronizing from the title, given that anyone with eyes should probably have that down already. But reading through, it does provide a very helpful guide to the understanding of contemporary art, which—to me, at least—often seems as aimless as someone standing in a gallery repeatedly turning the lights on and off.

Ossian advises against pretentious art jargon, suggesting the only way to approach contemporary art is with a clear, open mind. Since he seemed so nice and obliging, I decided to ask him some of the embarrassing questions that pop into my mind when I’m in a contemporary art gallery (other than, 'Where’s the café?' and, 'I wonder how much Marina Abramović is going to make from sitting in that chair.')

VICE: Hi Ossian. So is contemporary art just having the balls to do something either so outrageous that it's shocking or so banal that it's shocking? 
Contemporary art is not yet a verb, nor does it have balls per se—though I'm sure Tracey Emin would take exception to that—but it does occasionally shout at you from across the room and it can be provocative, challenging and even scary. I have found myself in rooms kitted out to look like murder scenes, brothels, or a terrorist’s stronghold.

I have also tiptoed past various spring-loaded man-traps, risked severe burns at a gallery where I was greeted by a flame from the opposite wall, told not to drink from a fountain supposedly laced with LSD, warned that the tiny globe before me contained a bomb that would explode a hundred years from now... I could go on. Confrontational art is certainly one of the ways that artists aim to grab our attentions nowadays.

A Tracy Emin work. (Photo via) 

Do you ever think that Tate and MoMA are a bit like the Westfields of art galleries, as in there's just too much stuff?
If only the works were on sale at knock-down prices, with special bargain bins for obscure works of Surrealism. I would like that. But yes, our large art institutions can be bewildering places full of mysterious and exotic objects, which is essentially why I wrote my book.

We shouldn't fear the complexity, abstraction, or randomness of contemporary art, but embrace them as reflections of our culture. I often invoke Hollywood blockbuster films, theme-park rides and other forms of entertainment as reference points, rather than art historical movements or philosophical theories, as frankly not everyone has that level of interest or experience.

What's the point in durational performance? How can just being be art?
These kinds of works—performances by Marina Abramovic or 24-hour videos by Christian Marclay or Douglas Gordon—are just as much about the act of looking as they are about what is or isn't art. Quite often the anxiety they cause is not whether just being alive can be art but whether being involved or being present is also part of the work; in other words, it is about our reaction and our interaction with a work.

"How long should I stay? Where do I look? Do I take part?" These are all elements involved in figuring out contemporary art, and they shouldn't be barriers to the enjoyment or understanding of art.

A Spartacus Chetwynd performance. (Photo via)

What about Turner Prize nominee Spartacus Chetwynd—I don’t really get it. Is she so bad she's good? 
Spartacus Chetwynd is no more. In fact, she has changed her name and is now called Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, which shows you how quickly the sands of contemporary art can shift beneath your feet. But you’re right; in many ways, her shambling, DIY style—her badness, as you put it—is indeed her trademark as a performance artist, and some would say one of her best qualities.

I have been known to sit through a few Chetwynd performances and come out converted and convinced, Damascene-like, of her "goodness" on the other side. The disturbing situations and creatures she creates might have the whiff of amateur dramatics to them, but that’s also part of their charm. And she is often very funny, a much overlooked and maligned quality of contemporary art. Usually, people don't like you laughing in museums, but she doesn't mind.

Talking of which, is Martin Creed laughing at us, with us or all the way to the bank? 
His "Lights Going On and Off" is still a good example of the kind of work that gets people riled up. I read that work in many different ways, but essentially and least pretentiously I think of it as about the minimal requirements needed for a work of art—that is that you have a burning idea that just has to be materialised. It's the equivalent of the eureka moment, when a light bulb goes on in your head. All of Martin Creed's output has this clarity to it. Of course, the light bulb also goes off again, but this is a melancholic reading to his work. I prefer to see him as glass half-full kind of guy, so definitely laughing with us. 

How long does contemporary art stay "contemporary" for?
Not very long, although auction houses are trying to make it stretch back to the 1950s because it’s currently trendy and therefore profitable to do so. For the purposes of Ways of Looking, I set the start point at the millennium. Indeed, some of the works I have included already feel resolutely of the 2000s, but I did so mainly to avoid that slightly tedious debate, which is an endless one that changes every hour of every day.  

(Photo by Carsten Reksick)

Is taking selfies in art gallery dumb, or is each selfie some kind of important statement about cultural reproduction?
Dumb. But just as stupid are the museums or galleries that don't allow people to take these pictures, because that is sadly how we tend to respond to everything nowadays, by snapping images on our phones. Obviously, I am no great fan of viewing art works through a tiny screen when the thing is right in front of you, but trying to ban the practice is also not realistic.

If art is subjective, then what makes a good art critic?
I'm not sure I was ever the best art critic; I was more often even-handed rather than bombastic or scathing in my responses. However, I do believe that a good writer should be able to simply explain or give clues to even the most complex works of art without using jargon or art-speak.

The book is essentially a homage to my time spent as a critic, walking into rooms and thinking, 'WTF?' then trying to make sense of it and finally putting these thoughts down on paper. The only difference is that I don't give too many judgements in the book. I leave that final task, which I call Assessment, to the readers, who should be allowed to make their own minds up as to whether a work is good or not. 

Thanks, Ossian.

VICE readers can get a 20 percent discount on Ways of Looking. Enter the code VICE20 at the checkout on the Laurence King website.

Follow Amelia on Twitter

More stuff about contemporary art:

I'm Sick of Pretending: I Don't "Get" Art

10 Ways to Make British Art Less Annoying in 2014

This Guy Ate His Own Hip for an Art Project

An MEK oath ceremony at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, taken around 2002 by a member who has since left and does not wish to be named.

In 1979, Masoud Banisadr was a young postgraduate math student at Newcastle University, watching political upheaval in his homeland of Iran on the nightly news. Wanting to play his part in a new society after the fall of the Western-backed Shah, he joined Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Islamic Marxist revolutionary organization.

But a couple of years after the revolution, the MEK began to clash with Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic regime and were soon deemed an enemy of the new Iran. MEK suicide bombings and assassinations followed. In 1981, thousands of MEK members went into exile, and by 1986 had established a tight-knit paramilitary organization in Iraq led by the husband-and-wife team of Masoud and Maryam Rajavi.

Banisadr became the MEK’s PR man, trying to win over Western politicians and moving between Camp Ashraf (their headquarters in Iraq), Geneva, and Washington, DC. He finally left the group in 1996, went into hiding, and now lives in England.

The United States removed MEK from its list of terrorist organizations in 2012, but Banisadr still considers it a fanatical cult acting under the warped leadership of the Rajavis. He argues that any terrorist organization is either a cult or “has no option but to become one in order to survive.” 

I spoke to Banisadr about the power of cults and how this might help us understand why young men in the West are vulnerable to joining the Islamic State and other extremist groups. 

Masoud Banisadr

VICE: You were once a high-ranking member of MEK. Why do you now see the organization as a cult?
Masoud Banisadr: There was a charismatic leader, Rajavi. There was a black-and-white world view imposed: followers cutting themselves off from family, followers losing their personality. There was mind manipulation. At Camp Ashraf in Iraq there were talks lasting for days on end. I remember one task where we had to write down our old personality in one column on a board, and the new personality in a different column. I remember a guy who said, “My brother works in the Iranian embassy in London. Before I loved him as my brother, now I hate him as my enemy. I am ready to kill him tomorrow, if necessary.” And everyone applauded.

How did you justify violence?
I was fortunate not to be involved in any violence. But all group members accepted MEK suicide bombings and killings in Iran to be revolutionary acts. This was the brainwashing. And later, in my role as official representative, I would justify and explain these acts as the only means we had to defend ourselves. I was a nice person, well mannered, and could argue very rationally with politicians. So I was a good salesman.

Massoud Rajavi and his wife Maryam

Why did MEK members divorce their wives?
In 1990, Rajavi said all members must divorce their spouses. My own wife had already left the group by then. All members accepted these terms, and it [applied to] everyone except the leader and his wife Maryam. In a single day, everyone became celibate. Someone asked, “What about sex in the afterlife?” He replied, “I know your trick—you want to fantasize about the afterlife. But no—you must be prepared to forget about sex, about spouses, about love.”

No sex?
No sexual thoughts. The idea was that we were in a war to take back Iran, so you cannot have a family until the war is won. This was the excuse the outside world would hear, but inside we were told your spouses are a barrier between you and the leadership. We were ordered to surrender our soul, heart, and mind to Rajavi and his wife.

Masoud meeting trade union leaders at an International Labour Conference in Geneva in 1987 (published in an MEK newspaper)

How did you manage to leave the organisation?
What saved me was seeing my daughter. In 1996 I came to London to arrange some meetings. I saw my daughter, after many years of not seeing her. I had totally forgotten about the guy who was the father, the old Masoud. I only knew Masoud the MEK member. The old Masoud wanted to hug her, but the group member—living under strict rules where men and women never interacted—knew he should not. I was fortunate that I had a bad back problem, so I was allowed to go and recuperate in the hospital. And in those two weeks, being around ordinary people, seeing ordinary families, I allowed feelings for my own family to come back. And so, finally, I decided to leave the group.

Where did you go?
I had to go on the run for a time. I learned how to hide myself around the UK until they gave up looking for me.

An MEK oath ceremony at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, taken around 2002

What do you think it is that makes young people vulnerable to joining extremist causes? 
Well, terrorism is like a virus. It attacks us through our weaknesses. It kills our personality, our individuality, like a cult. I think there are three stages. The first stage is the injustice of the world. Young Muslims see injustice, become angry, and want to react. Then comes along a powerful ideology, and the Wahabi ideology offers a very simple, black-and-white worldview and a very narrow-minded interpretation of jihad, offered as a solution to young Muslims. But both these stages are not enough to make someone a terrorist, a human bomb, or a fighter for a caliphate. A third stage is required: the mind manipulation, which robs someone of their personality, makes them identify entirely with the group and cuts them off from their parents and society.

So radical ideas alone aren't enough to go off and fight for, say, the Islamic State?
If you're a young Muslim and you feel like a nobody, it's appealing to hear that we can return to the time of Prophet Mohammed—[that] we will be powerful again and feel proud of ourselves. This can make you radical—even prepared to be violent—but you will not stay a fighter or become a martyr without being entirely cut off from family and the values of the society you were brought up in. That requires the mind manipulation that goes on in a destructive cult.

Islamic State fighters in Syria

Where does the Islamic State fit in? Do you consider it a cult as well as a terrorist organization?
The signs are there. The leader—Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—is charismatic and has unlimited ambition. He has been introduced as the leader of all Muslims, the Caliph. Normal leaders want political power. Cult leaders want something more than governing a city or country—they want to govern history. They want to change the structure of humanity. For a while they were calling themselves ISIL—Islamic State of Iraq and Levant.

They wanted control of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel. Now they call themselves the Islamic State. They want whatever they think was once part of the Islamic empire, so they claim Spain, Portugal, North Africa, India, and part of China and Russia. They want the whole world, to make everyone Muslim. This is not normal leadership; this is heading toward cult. There is no limitation you can deal with, politically.

What would you say to British parents who have children fighting in Syria or Iraq?
It’s very difficult, very delicate. If a parent says anything critical against a radical preacher, or about an organization like Islamic State, that’s when a person’s mind becomes defensive. It is difficult to argue rationally. So if a parent has contact [with his or her child], they should not try to talk about politics or religion. They should show only kindness and love. This is the member’s weakness. Feelings do not die away, even if personality has changed. So the parent has to let them know they will be there, waiting. There has to be a pathway back to a life where family love is there, something that has nothing do with ideological thinking. Unconditional love unlocks the mind manipulation that has taken place.

Follow Adam Forrest on Twitter.

Photo by Lexi Tannenholtz

It’s easy to forget that before Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj... Before Missy Elliott, Eve, and Gangsta Boo... Even before Lil Kim defined a certain type of American icon, there were pioneer female MCs who fought to make hip-hop a safe space for women to express themselves through rhyme. 

This past August, those founding females of hip-hop and some of the most important women in the rap music biz descended upon Martha’s Vineyard for the second annual Summer Madness Music Festival & Conference. With a guest list that included everyone from Monie Love to MC Lyte, it made perfect sense that this year's festival bore a "Ladies First" theme. According to Sean Porter, one of the event’s co-founders, the event was a "celebration of all genres of black music" intended to "counterbalance all of that negative imagery surrounding African American women."

The time felt right. There's a lot to celebrate and discuss when talking about women, race, and hip-hop these days. In 2013, no black artists topped the Billboard 100 charts, while a white artist like Macklemore nabbed the Grammy for Best Rap Album. This year, magazines claimed that Aussie newbie Iggy Azalea and her interpretation of a Southern black drawl "run hip-hop."  Not to mention, we've seen plenty of white asses in Sports Illustrated get celebrated, while an album cover featuring a single bulbous black ass wearing a pink thong caused controversy and uproar across the web.

So instead of high-fiving everyone at the conference over how awesome hip-hop is, I took the time to ask a bunch of rap's female OGs about gender in hip-hop and the impact of the so-called "white-washing" of the culture. This week we have my conversation with the first female rapper to ever release a full-length album, MC Lyte.

You released the first female rap album in 1988. Five years later, your fourth album, Ain’t No Other, was the first to go gold. It took a bit of time. Iggy Azalea released “Fancy” in February of this year and it went platinum in May. After the second week of her debut album release, she became the first non-American female rapper to hit the top of the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop charts. What do you think about that?
MC Lyte: First off I would just say that hip-hop has grown since my first record. There’s just no comparison between the times.  It has grown wide and embedded into everyone’s culture. It doesn’t matter what color you are when you can tap into what people can enjoy and want to hear. Yes, hip-hop was born out of a struggle, but it was never intended to not encompass all cultures. Iggy is a lover of the hip-hop culture. You can just tell by the way she rhymes that she’s studied. She’s from overseas as well. They have a different level of appreciation for all of hip-hop, no matter the year. So congratulations to her.

Is it wrong to think it might take away from young black female artists trying to break into the game if someone like Iggy Azalea, who mostly makes pop hits cloaked in hip-hop, seems to have such a broader appeal right off the bat?
I don’t think it can be any harder than it already is. Prior to her coming on the scene, there was a struggle with having more than just one female on the scene representing all female MCs or representing all women or having all women looking towards one female representation. That trouble was there long before Iggy stepped on the scene, so do I think it makes it a little more difficult than it was before?

What about in terms of the commercialism of various artists, because that’s inseparable from hip-hop right now. Do you think labels might go straight for white rappers because they have this proven pop appeal?
I believe the face of rap changed with Fergie, with Nellie Furtado, and with Gwen Stefani working with hip-hop producers. You know, Will.I.Am, Neptunes...

Timbaland
Exactly. So to me it just seems systematic that hip-hop has grown. I mean, there was a white woman who did it before all of us—Blondie. Well, I wouldn’t say before all of us—Sha-Rock was first. But Blondie did it before me. The only thing record labels are interested in is making money. They’re a business. So if they find an artist who has pop appeal that the masses are going to be quicker to purchase, they'll do it. I don’t think it’s a record labels business to further the mission of hip-hop culture or to educate, unfortunately. We need to be the ones that make that decision and then you’d see it in the content of our music. But we’re not concerned with that.

What would the content be, in that case?
It would be what it was back then. It would sound a little bit more realistic. It would be more reflective of the struggle that’s actually happening. It would be the reporting of truth. And right now, it’s a big party. But people are not partying 24-hours-a-day—if they are, then there’s an issue. There’s a problem. For the most part, I think it would be like a Common album that speaks on what’s going on in places like Chicago and is more reflective of what’s really happening.

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Click here for last week's episode.

Heller after her encounter with the RCMP. 

Three years ago, 17 year-old Jamie Haller was taken into police custody in Williams Lake, BC. She was released within hours, without charges, and without an explanation.

What she was left with, however, was severe bruising all over her body, a haemorrhage of the eye, blurred vision, cuts to the inside of her mouth from being punched in the face with braces on, post-traumatic stress, and understandably, a deep distrust of the RCMP and Canada’s justice system.

On the evening of September 10, 2011, Haller says a gang of six men chased her as she was walking home. She was yelling for help as she ran away, and when a neighbour called the cops, Haller hid from her assailants behind a fence in a backyard.

Haller’s statement of facts surrounding the night were delivered in a civil suit filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia last week. They detail how on that night when she needed police protection—she instead received a police pummelling.

Haller was discovered by Constable Andy Yung, who allegedly snuck up behind the cowering teenager, tackle her, dragged her to a more open area, and pushed her face into the ground until his backup—two other officers also named in the lawsuit, Cpl. Jason Pole and Const. Daniel Hay—could arrive to slap the cuffs on.

Throughout the arrest, Haller was confused as to why the people she was hoping would help her were attacking her. According to her lawyers, she communicated: “In clear terms that she was the person who had asked the police to be called and she had committed no crime.” Once in the cruiser, Haller says she was verbally and physically assaulted, told to shut up, held down, and repeatedly punched in the face.

Due to the psychological and physical trauma, Haller was forced to miss a week of school, and was so obviously abused that her boss at the restaurant where she was working told her not to come in because “her visible injuries were too alarming for her to be working directly with the public.” Constable Yung was subsequently acquitted of any wrongdoing last August.

By going through the process of filing this civil suit, Jamie Haller is bravely shining a light back into the eyes of the RCMP, and raising awareness not only to her individual case, but to the broader questions that surround the RCMP’s culture of policing indigenous communities—particularly in British Columbia.

The BC Civil Liberties Association has followed Jamie Haller’s story closely from day one. Since learning of the incident in 2011, they have filed a police complaint on her behalf, and called for an independent investigation.

“We have a deep and longstanding concern about systemic racism on the part of the police in and across Canada, and particular racism against indigenous people”, says Josh Paterson, executive director of the BCCLA. “I don’t know what was in constable Yung’s mind during the incident, but to us, it has the hallmarks of this same kind of under-protection of First Nations people where this teenager was the one who was in need of help, and instead she was not only not protected, but she was brutally injured and arrested. So it’s an example of both over-policing and under-protection in the same instance.”

What’s important about Jamie Haller’s resolve and determination to follow this through is that it sends a message to the RCMP and other victims—aboriginal and non-aboriginal—that police can be held accountable. And, even more importantly, that there are mechanisms in place and organizations like the BCCLA who can help hold their feet to the fire.

“This is the story of a young woman who hasn’t been willing to just walk away from what she feels is an injustice that’s been done to her by law enforcement,” says Paterson. “And she’s really showing an example, not only to other indigenous people, but to the broader community, of how to try and hold police to account.”

@ddner

Whit Stillman speaking with actor Freddy Asblom while shooting The Cosmopolitans in Nanterre, outside Paris. Photos by David Koskas/Amazon Studios

Last week, in my parents’ dining room in South Carolina, I Skyped with filmmaker Whit Stillman. On the laptop screen his face appeared as handsome as it is in photographs, younger than his 62 years, and its expression of mild discomfort reflected my own. He’d let me preview the pilot for his new show, The Cosmopolitans, that will run on Amazon through September. Twice, from an office in New York, Whit complimented the backdrop of the house he assumed was my own. It wasn't until the third time he did it that I comprehended what he was telling me, such was my nervousness. After I understood, I considered pretending I owned the house, which he said was “nicer than his”—and so then if it is nicer, might I be able to convince him to come visit it? I wondered crazily. But then where would I send my parents? So I told him the truth. Technical adjustments followed. His voice sounded northeastern, sophisticated, contemplative, sincere. I could have sent my parents on a cruise, it occurred to me.

In response to his question about how I’d become interested in his films, I told him how my friend, VICE fiction editor Amie Barrodale, had shown me a YouTube clip from his second film, Barcelona, in which the protagonist Ted dances to Glenn Miller’s
"Pennsylvania 6-5000" while reading a passage from The King James Bible for advice on romantic matters. I forwarded it to a guy with whom I’d had romantic trouble. Then I watched Whit Stillman’s films. All of them.

Starting with Damsels in Distress, I worked my way backwards. Last Days of Disco. Barcelona. Metropolitan.    

If I had to in a few sentences at gunpoint describe these movies I’d say that they were about people talking. That they were about people being in love and wanting to be in love and falling out of love and being damaged and restored by love and about people wanting to join groups of other people they found desirable and about people trying to decide what people should and should not do and how they should live and whether or not—and why whether or not—they like other people. But also the dialogue is about itself. It delights, surprises, provokes, amuses, confounds. Characters say things like:

I know that people can have useful careers in many areas—medicine, government, law, finance, education—yes, even education—but I’d like to do something especially significant in my lifetime, the sort of thing that could change the course of human history, such as starting an international dance craze.

And they argue a lot. The arguing has an intimate quality, like the kind of arguing you do with someone you sleep with or your best friend or yourself. For example, when in Damsels in Distress, Lily says she’s fine, Rose responds, “That’s a terrible expression. Fine. I’m fine. There’s something smug about it. I’m fine.” Later he would tell me of how some viewers complained of his characters “bickering,” and that “nothing is happening.” But, he said, “The bickering is what’s happening!” 

Whit Stillman characters are almost never silent. The characters in his movies talk more than the characters in almost any other movies I’ve seen.

In a New York Times magazine article, the amazing Greta Gerwig, who starred in Damsels in Distress, is quoted as saying, “Every day was like going into battle. The script pages were chock-full of dialogue.”

The character she plays, Violet, is probably the most talkative, perhaps the most enigmatic, and definitely the least sane of Stillman’s characters. 

Now here he was. We were facing each other, talking through our computers. 

“And after I saw the clip, I watched your movies in reverse order,” I told him. “I saw Damsels In Distress first.”

“Damsels is a comedy,” Whit said. “It’s very stylized and unrealistic. But some people didn’t get that.”

Damsels in Distress, which came out in 2011, takes place at a fictional liberal arts college and begins with Violet inviting a transfer student, Lily, to be a part of her small circle, consisting of two other students, Heather and Rose. Early on, Violet’s confidence—or arrogance, you might say—gives Lily the mistaken impression she’s popular, and Lily accepts. The group tells Lily they want to help her adapt to campus life and to be happy at their college. “University life is pretty bad,” Lily is told. “There are a lot of suicides.” 

“We’re trying to make a difference in people’s lives,” Violet tells Lily. “And one way to do that is to stop them from killing themselves.”

Though the four pretty women seem normal enough, just as the college itself seems like a sort of regular liberal arts school, you soon realize that you aren’t watching a typical college-y coming-of-age movie, and despite how normal, how not shocking the figures and backdrop are, the stuff that is coming out of the actresses' mouths has a sort of satirical Alice in Wonderland-like dream logic to it. Violet and her friends not only want to help Lily but also to protect the whole campus from suicide, going so far as to run the campus’s suicide-prevention program, through which they provide tap dancing and very aromatic soap as therapy for depression. 

“This scent and this soap is what gives me hope,” Violet says. 

But when after a break-up Violet herself becomes depressed, we learn the story of her first mental breakdown, which occurred at boarding school when she was a girl: There, to prevent the death of her parents, she required herself to flawlessly complete obsessive-compulsive rituals, like moving her suitcase in a particular pattern ten times. But her parents die anyway, in an accident. The film’s comedic treatment of suicide is acceptable because one intuits that only a writer who himself has experienced morbid depression could have created such a story and pulled it off so brilliantly.

Some people expected Damsels to be like his other movies, Whit told me, and didn’t like it. They judged it by a “drama yardstick” and missed the point. “We’re in the epoch of realism,” he said. Interestingly though, people who’d “by accident or whatever” ended up seeing it again revised their opinions upward.       

Another production still from The Cosmopolitans

Whit Stillman’s new series, The Cosmopolitans, is about a group of American expatriates trying to enter Parisian society. I told him I’d read him say, “it’s a very admirable culture and people want to identify with it." And also that "Paris has long been the Mecca (or refuge) for those either looking for romance or fleeing broken ones. When such choices don’t go well, the loneliness can be particularly severe.” I asked if he would say more about this, and he responded that it was very easy to be “very very lonely” in a foreign city, not really expecting what loneliness does. “Because it’s something you might get as a child when you go to camp or boarding school for the first time. And once loneliness starts, it’s very hard to stop. It’s like a crying jag or something. It’s insidious. And I thought it goes with the territory of being in a foreign city, the loneliness aspect. Paris is a Mecca for the brokenhearted—I noticed particularly among women. That a lot of women seem to come to Paris when everything has gotten messed up in their lives at home; so if they’d been married and they got divorced, they might come over; or if they broke up with their long-term partner, they might come over; and then both with men and women, I think they fall for someone—I think they’re attracted to someone who—"

Then he was gone. I mean, his voice was gone. The Skype connection had broken. After reconnecting briefly, the connection again broke, and upon reconnecting we decided to switch to the phone.

Before calling him, I fiddled around with the phone-recorder application I’d never used before. It didn’t seem to work right. Trying to get it to work took longer than anticipated. I called him, but he was on the other line. He called me back. As he was telling me we would need to reschedule, the connection broke again. But this time it was my fault: I’d accidentally hung up on Whit Stillman.

When Whit rings back—we’ve by now rescheduled through email—I’m outside a small private school, where I’ve come to pick up the two children I watch in the late afternoon, who will be released in an hour. I stand beneath the shade of an oak tree at the outskirts of campus. I remind him that when we last spoke, he was telling me about how brokenhearted women often choose Paris as a destination. “They are fleeing something or going there because they’ve met someone. I don’t think it’s necessarily a destination a broken-hearted guy would choose. He might go to Alaska and die in the wilderness.” 

We both chuckle.

I wonder if I should be in Paris. 

Though Stillman himself went to France and stayed there for quite a while, he didn’t move there because of a broken heart, or for the promise of a new love, but because his then-wife wanted to move there. “I had a list of nine cities I wanted to consider going to, all in the United States. She had one city she wanted to go to, which was Paris.”

“You were there for nine years?” I had read this somewhere but wanted to confirm it.

“Yes. I was there and not there. I was there a lot,” he replies, this comment in style reminding me of something one of his characters might say.

At which point I want to know if one of his influences could be Oscar Wilde.

“I loved Oscar Wilde when I was in my sort of wanting-to-be a writer youth. I enjoyed Oscar Wilde. I read a lot of Oscar Wilde.  Liking Oscar Wilde, I also liked the British writer Evelyn Waugh. I’m glad you asked that because while Metropolitan was influenced by Jane Austen, ultimately The Cosmopolitans could be sort of influenced by Evelyn Waugh."

Thinking of Oscar Wilde still, thinking of the class consciousness in much of Stillman’s work and recalling from the pilot I watched how the American expatriates aspired to enter Parisian society, I tell him I am curious about Nick’s assertion, in Metropolitan, that the surrealists were social climbers. “Do you think most artists are social climbers, really? Albeit hesitant ones—the society they want to enter often enough what they also wish to expose?”

“I think that’s true. Though it’s not my real thing because I’m not very critical of society. Paris is a very good city to be a social-climbing artist in. Paris is really nice about people who they define as artists. I remember I was leaving a Paris dinner party, and the other fellow leaving, on the early end of the evening too, was a book binder—he did this sort of high tech, rubberized book-binding for the family, for their books—and someone said, ‘The artists are leaving early!’ We were impolite enough to leave early. At Paris dinner parties, people feel obliged to stay very late.”

“How late?” I said.

“Horribly late,” he replies, chuckling. “You have to stay and eat bad French and not understand anything that’s happening.” He tells me when he got to Paris, he didn’t speak French very well. “The problem was not the dinner party. The problem was me.”

After briefly debating whether or not I want to risk getting dirt on my clothes, I sit down on the ground beneath the tree. I ask about Whit’s writing process.

“In the film business you’re constantly being pushed to tell them what the story is before you’ve had the time to think what the story is,” he complains. “I find it really unhelpful and kind of negative to try to plot out a story before I’ve gotten into the nitty-gritty of individual lines of dialogue and scenes and characters. I prefer that the story comes out of detail. I don’t like having outlines and plots. Or, it’s not that I don’t like it, but that it doesn’t work at all for me. No good result will come of it. For me the most important thing is that the character has a voice at a certain point-—that you’re working on a character. They get their autonomy, their personality. Out of their voice and personality they start thinking things, doing things, and then they come up against other people. And things develop. It’s much better if I try to do it that way.”

The conversation circles back to the Cosmopolitans pilot, with my wanting to know what it’s like working on the script for a series, as opposed to a film, and Whit replies that since he may be writing it to be seen in several segments at once, he expects it might be something like putting two film scripts together. Then he shares his excitement about the “texture” added by the European actors involved in the project, mentioning Freddy Asblom, who plays Fritz, and Adriano Giannini, who plays Sandro.

He tells me Adriano is the son of Giancarlo Giannini, the star of some of the great Italian comedies of the 70s, and praises the actor’s work ethic.

The pilot begins with a male writer and a woman (played by Cary MacLemore) who has moved to Paris to be with him. He's showing her cramped, alternate living quarters that she will have to move into because he can no longer write with her living inside his apartment. Afterwards, she's dejected and walks the streets of Paris and stops at a cafe to get a drink, where she is intercepted by a group of American expatriates—and Parisian wannabes—led by Adam Brody’s Jimmy. In Whit Stillman stories it isn’t uncommon for a group of people to pick up a stranger. (Think: Tom picked up by Nick and his group in Metropolitan; Lily picked up by Violet in Damsels in Distress). Thus the adventure begins.

Now Whit has to go, and I do too. He has more promotional duties to perform, and I have to drive around to the side of the school to pick up the children. 

The first episode of The Cosmopolitans, also starring Chloë Sevigny, Dree Hemingway, and Jordan Rountree, is now available for viewing on Amazon.com. I have been assured that there is much more heartbreak to come.

Book jacket photo of Dennis and Terence

Dennis Jon McKenna was born in Paonia, Colorado, on December 17, 1950, four years after his brother, Terence. In 1970, they traveled to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon in search of the DMT-containing plant preparation known as oo-koo-he. Instead, they found Stropharia cubensis—a psilocybin-containing mushroom—and performed “the experiment at La Chorrera,” which involved, as Dennis later wrote, “building a hyper-dimensional vehicle out of the 4D transformation of my own DNA interlaced with the DNA of a mushroom.”

After La Chorrera, the brothers co-wrote two books, and Terence went on to write three more while Dennis got a doctorate from the University of British Columbia. Dennis’ research focused on ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, and he worked at Shaman Pharmaceuticals, Aveda, and other companies before obtaining a teaching job at University of Minnesota and becoming a founding board member of Heffter Research Institute.

Dennis’ first solo book project, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna, was published in 2012. In it, he described his and Terence’s post-La Chorrera existence:

While our lives were entangled as only the lives of brothers can be, after the events at La Chorrera we later found ourselves on separate paths. Terence became the spokesman for the alien dimensions accessed through psychedelics, a philosopher of the unspeakable, a beloved and sometimes reviled bard of the marvels and occasional terrors waiting in the recesses of human consciousness. By choice and inclination, I stayed in the background, pursuing a scientific career in disciplines that ranged from ethnopharmacology and ethnobotany to neuroscience.

The Artist and the Scientist: An Intellectual Dyad

The more I engage with the McKenna brothers’ work, the easier it is for me to imagine Dennis thinking and understanding—and, given the right context and audience, even expressing—anything Terence expressed, and vice versa. Their identities influenced what they, in each situation of their lives—including the “situations” of a conversation, book, or presentation—were encouraged to think and to feel. But it increasingly seems to me that they were, at least intellectually, less influenced by their ever-shifting identities than by some shared and constant source.

In this way, I like to imagine the McKenna brothers as originally comprising one mind, which decided that the most elegant, effective, uncompromising, satisfying, and compelling way to express itself—and to have a significant, desirable impact—on Earth in the 20th and 21st centuries would be to duplicate itself and take the form both of an artist, Terence, and a scientist, Dennis. It would exist in each brother as an entity that’s both scientific and artistic, but in order to be heard—and encouraged, financially and socially, to express itself—to its fullest extent, in the physical world, it would self-consciously, functionally accept the labels “Terence McKenna” and “Dennis McKenna.”

At La Chorrera, it was apparently Dennis who supplied all of the ideas and embodied most of the motivation required to perform “the experiment at La Chorrera,” but it was Terence who observed what happened and was motivated to place it within a psychologically dense, poignant, literary narrative. After La Chorrera, Dennis wrote the technical parts of Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, while Terence wrote the parts where “the mushroom” asserts that it’s an extraterrestrial seeking a symbiotic relationship with humankind. These collaborations seem to me like successful implementations of a clever, earnest, innovative technique with which to introduce new ways of thinking—or new conceptions of “the mystery”—into the world. It’s a boundary-dissolving approach, tending toward interconnectedness rather than hierarchy or mutual exclusivity, and I like to imagine it continuing even now, after half the dyad (Terence) has left the physical world. Dennis, for example, writing in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss about his brother’s account of La Chorrera in True Hallucinations, observed:

Though his account may seem unlikely and bizarre, I believe it is largely accurate, even if interpretations vary as to what it all meant. I can’t vouch for every detail, if only because I was lost in hyperspace for much of the time, or overwhelmed by psychosis, again depending on interpretation. Anyone with an interest in the “facts” of our story, if the word even applies, should regard Terence’s narrative as required reading.

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (2012)

By my estimates, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is about 15 percent a biography of Terence McKenna; 15 percent a nuanced history spanning the late 1800s to 2012 in terms of America, psychedelics, and technology; 15 percent an essay on the brothers’ shared intellectual interests and influences; 15 percent an investigation into “the experiment at La Chorrera”; ten percent an essay on drugs; five percent an essay on Terence McKenna’s career; and 25 percent an autobiography. It’s about twice the length of any of Terence’s three books. It sounds dense, but it’s highly readable and never unintentionally, I think, obscure or vague.

I’ve extracted 20 memes from The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. Not all of them are directly related to Dennis and Terence, but I view each as providing a fractal piece of understanding regarding the brothers’ relationship to each other and, in the form of what I’ve imagined as an intellectual dyad, to the world. You may recall from Terence McKenna’s Memes that a meme, as defined by him, is “the smallest unit of an idea that still has coherency.” Terence elaborated in 1996:

Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, yellow sweaters are a meme... rainbow-colored dreadlocks are a meme. Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

Dennis McKenna photo via source images from the "Terence2012" project

20 memes from The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

1. Reality is a hallucination

At the beginning of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, after the contents page and before the Foreword, is this disclaimer:

Reality is a hallucination concocted by our brains.

Memory is a fragmented tapestry patched with confabulation.

Within those constraints, I have portrayed the events and people in this book as accurately as possible.

A few names have been changed to protect the innocent, or in some cases, the guilty.

2. Joseph Kemp (1873-1959)

Dennis wrote about his mother’s father: “By the time I showed up, he was known among his descendants as Dad Kemp.” One reason Dennis and Terence “took an early and lifelong delight in books, language, and all their possibilities,” Dennis wrote, was that Dad Kemp “loved language, loved using it, loved writing it.” Dennis elaborated:

Our grandfather was famous for his colorful phraseology. For instance, he called something new or unusual a “fustilarian fizgig from Zimmerman.” A summer downpour was a “frog strangler,” and a delicious meal or dish was “larrupin’.” I have no idea where these phrases originated, but they have persisted in our family to this day. In fact, his fustilarian fizgigs from Zimmerman may have been my first introduction to the notion of something incomprehensible and alien, from another dimension or place. Needless to say, that concept became useful much later when we started dealing with DMT and other psychedelics. The things seen on DMT were and are fustilarian fizgigs from somewhere (even if only in one’s consciousness) and the characterization is at least as apt as Terence’s later descriptions of these alien entities as “singing elf machines” or “bejeweled hyper-dimensional basketballs.”

3. The “chin-ee” method

As a child, Dennis was “tormented” by Terence, who was “a month past his fourth birthday” when Dennis was born.“I don’t remember when Terry instituted his reign of terror against me, but it must have been when I was about four or five,” wrote Dennis, calling it “probably normal sibling behavior, at least in America society in the fifties.” He elaborated:

Terry was a very creative tormentor, and employed both physical techniques and, even deadlier, a variety of psychological techniques to good effect. For physical torture, tickling was his method of choice. It was a good choice; I was very ticklish, probably in part because I became over-sensitized to it during our torture sessions. But it worked for Terry because it didn’t leave marks, and superficially it didn’t seem “that bad” because it made me laugh; but the laughter was not voluntary or enjoyable.

Terry was bigger than me, obviously. His favorite method was to hold me down on the floor, placing a knee on my chest and using both hands to pin my arms, then using his sharpened chin to poke and prod me. This became known as the “chin-ee” method.

Dennis concluded: “Other techniques were applied as well, but it was the chin-ee that I hated most.”

4. Tickle-attack mode

Dennis described an alleged technique of Terence’s:

According to Terence, he would sometimes quietly slip out of his bed, tiptoe across to mine, and stand above my sleeping form, hands raised in the tickle-attack mode, ready to pounce. And in this position he’d stand for hours, savoring the psychological meltdown he’d trigger if he acted. But he never did. It was satisfying enough just knowing that he could. Looking back, I doubt he really did this. I think his story was just another way to maintain the climate of fear.

5. Ambivalence

In another passage regarding being “tormented” by his brother, Dennis expressed ambivalence:

Certainly I pretended not to enjoy Terence’s psychological tortures, but I suspect a part of me did enjoy them. I was titillated; there was a kind of thrill in being frightened, and it was not entirely unpleasant. To titillate now means to stimulate or excite, especially in a sexual way, but its archaic meaning was to touch lightly, or tickle. Ah hah! As I’ve noted, Terence refined the practice of tickling me into a dark art; and though I hated it, I was ambivalent. Sometimes I almost liked being tickled mercilessly, just as I sometimes liked being frightened to death.

Elaborating on the above situation, Dennis revealed he was not completely helpless:

I was not always the innocent victim, of course, though I got very skilled at playing one. Like many little brothers before me, I developed offensive countermeasures as well as defenses. My offensives had to be stealthy. I cultivated the art of timing. I became skilled at selecting, or creating, situations in which it appeared that Terry had done something to me, but hadn’t really (or in which I was complicit), and I’d make sure our parents noticed. While presenting a picture of angelic innocence to them, I’d telegraph Terry, via a smirk, that this was sweet revenge.

6. High-functioning autism

“I may have had a touch of Asperger’s syndrome or perhaps even high-functioning autism as a child,” wrote Dennis, who had severe myopia from birth and wore thick glasses. “I hazard this self-diagnosis because I loved to rock, and often did so, back and forth, in my chair, quite happily for hours,” he wrote, observing that:

Unlike the present era, where the slightest behavioral anomaly is viewed as pathological, my rocking was seen as a little “quirky” but not really harmful, and anyway, “He’ll grow out of it.” And I did.

7. Big Picture people

Dennis wrote that he and Terence, from the beginning, were “Big Picture people.” Despite living in a small town where, as Terence said, you were considered an intellectual if you read TIME magazine, they wanted “the answers to the ultimate questions.” Dennis observed:

This inclination partly explains our early interest in metaphysics and philosophy. We were dissatisfied with the pat and shallow answers proffered by our Catholic faith, and with the priests who, with a few exceptions, responded angrily, or disingenuously, to our insistent questions.

8. “Extra-environmental”

Dennis described himself and his friend Madeline, whom he met in seventh grade:

We were “extra environmental,” a term coined by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan to describe someone who is in a culture but not of it, like an anthropologist living with some exotic tribe. Both introverts, we came to see ourselves as kindred spirits trapped in a milieu of meatheads, jocks, and “mean girls.” We weren’t part of the cool cliques, and didn’t care; we took pride in our extra-environmental status and cultivated a bemused detachment from the games that shaped the social dynamics among our peers.

9. The curse of the Terence McKenna library

Terence’s first library, which contained 1000+ books, was destroyed in a fire in 1970 when he was 24 years old (as you may recall from One Version of One Version of Terence McKenna’s Life). Dennis observed in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:

It took him 30 years to reproduce that wonder. His second library is the one that has become part of the Terence McKenna legend. Following his death in 2000, his books and papers were given to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. After considerable struggle I managed to ship them back from the Big Island of Hawaii where Terence had been living before he passed on. Esalen’s curators temporarily stored the collection in an old building in downtown Monterey, awaiting the construction of a proper place for it on the Esalen campus. The century-old structure turned out to be a tinderbox. In early February 2007, a fire broke out in a sandwich shop on a lower floor, consuming a number of businesses, and Terence’s books, which were stowed above. Yet again, a priceless trove had been reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes. The volumes included rare first editions of alchemical texts that existed nowhere else. It seemed almost like a curse, the curse of the Terence McKenna library! It was a terrible, terrible tragedy—for Terence’s legacy, for Esalen, for our family, and for esoteric bibliophiles everywhere.

10. Getting stoned alone

As a teenager, Dennis enjoyed getting stoned with friends, but, he wrote, “some of my best experiences were when I smoked alone, rambling around the sagebrush-covered hills outside of town.” He observed:

Being stoned was the only time I felt normal. I loved nothing more than to sit in my room, have a toke or two, and “ruminate.”

11. Science fiction novels

Dennis wrote about himself and Terence:

In the early sixties, the sci-fi authors we loved were the old-school giants: Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, James Blish, and especially Arthur C. Clarke. Jules Verne was an early favorite, as was H.G. Wells, whose novel The Time Machine had a big impact on me in my preteen years. The notion of time travel fascinated me then (and does now) and fed a preoccupation with the future and the nature of time that Terence and I shared. But it was Clarke who had the greatest impact on our thinking, thanks largely to his novels Childhood’s End (1953) and The City and the Stars (1956).

They also enjoyed Philip K. Dick, whose later novels—VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)—were, Dennis wrote, “centered on characters confronted with continuum-disrupting events that teeter on the thin edge between psychotic breakdown and mystical revelation.” Dennis observed:

These tales bear uncanny similarities to our own experiences at La Chorrera to the extent that they seemed like a validation when they came to our attention in the mid-seventies. Dick was heavily influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, as were we.

12. Carl Jung’s idea of “synchronicity”

Dennis wrote: “For Terence and me, discovering Jung was a revelation. We were aware of psychedelics by then, of course, and deeply interested in what qualified as a cultural phenomenon. If cosmology was the lens through which we learned to view the universe at large, Jungian psychology became our cosmology for the universe within.” Dennis described Jung’s idea of synchronicity:

Jung’s understanding of the I Ching was tied to his idea of “synchronicity,” or the occurrence of two events that are somehow related but not in terms of cause and effect. He also referred to this notion as an “acausal connecting principle” or “meaningful parallellism.” Synchronicity is not just random coincidence; rather, it is a phenomenon that expresses both in the mind and in the outer world, in a way that reveals a meaningful but not causal tie between these expressions

13. We are made of drugs

Psychedelics are drugs; they do what they do because we are made of drugs. You can’t get more biological than that!

14. DMT is as astonishing the hundredth time as it was the first

The problem with DMT, and part of its challenge, is that the experience is inherently ineffable; it cannot be described in ordinary language, it is translinguistic. You come down, slam back into your body, out of breath, suffused with ecstasy, babbling, sobbing. And yet we are linguistic creatures, and there is a nearly irresistible impulse to try to describe it. This begins almost immediately following the trip, as if verbalization were a protective reflex. DMT is more than the mind can handle; it’s overwhelming in its raw nakedness; we feel compelled to try to stuff it back into some kind of linguistic box, and yet to do so is to diminish it. All of the descriptions, even Terence’s, as elegant as they are, fall short of the actual experience. This is part of the mystery of DMT. It is a phenomenon that can be repeatedly experienced, and yet it is as astonishing the hundredth time as it was the first, and something that strange is worthy of our attention.

15. We will become individual nodes in a globe-spanning mycelial network

Dennis speculated that, at some point in human evolution, “there must have been a feedback between the acquisition and practice of language that resulted in a relatively rapid change in primate brain structures over a few hundred thousand years.” He observed:

The consequences are seen in the rapid emergence and spread of civilizations and technologies that started about 100,000 years ago and has been accelerating ever since. Having now literally wrapped the globe in our externalized nervous systems, we are nearing a moment when we’ll find ourselves constantly embedded in an ever-expanding totality of human knowledge.

He reflected on this possibility, which he called “a mythos built into the human imagination” and “what psychedelics have been telling us is our destiny ever since the first mushroom was tasted by the first curious primate”:

To a large extent, this has already occurred. Nature—the biosphere—is now encased within the cybersphere, and though the current instantiation is somewhat crude, made of machines and fiber optic networks and satellites and electromagnetic signals, I think that will probably change very soon. As new biotechnologies and nanotechnologies emerge, we will reintegrate our externalized neural networks, and they will again disappear back into our bodies, the boundaries between “bio” and “techno” will dissolve, and we will become a new type of human, individual nodes in a globe-spanning mycelial network.

16. Psychedelics may be alien artifacts seeded into the biosphere

Psychedelics, particularly psilocybin and DMT, may in fact be alien artifacts seeded into the biosphere millions of years ago by a super biotechnological civilization that has mastered the art and science of planetary biospheric engineering. Our planet, our biosphere, and our species could be the result of a kind of science experiment lasting hundreds of millions or even billions of years, an experiment initiated by a superior technological civilization partly out of curiosity (the real motivation behind all good science) and partly, I would suggest, out of loneliness. This hypothetical civilization may have wanted someone to talk to and thus created an intelligent species that could talk back.

17. Opium for diarrhea

In 1981, while searching for a plant called chagropanga in Tarapoto, a city in northern Peru, the McKenna brothers got “serious cases of dysentery.” Dennis described the situation:

For the next two days, we lay wracked with diarrhea and abdominal cramps in our hotel room. It was all we could do to crawl to the toilet and back to the bed. We could barely muster up the energy to smoke hash, and that was all we wanted to do. Terence had thought to include a small bottle of laudanum (tincture of opium) in his medicine kit, so we alternated between smoking hashish and taking periodic droppers of opium. There is nothing better than opium for diarrhea, and I believe we would have been much worse off without it.

18. Psychedelics are suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought

Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us.

19. Terence McKenna was anti-dogmatic by nature

In a number of passages in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis shared his opinions on his brother’s career. In one, Dennis observed:

Terence put his ideas out there, but he was never wedded to them, or inclined to present them as scripture. He was anti-dogmatic by nature. He always maintained a sense of humor and a bemused perspective about his theories, and that was part of his appeal. He insisted that people should think for themselves and make their own judgments about his “crazy” notions. His ability to keep those notions at arm’s length, so to speak, was an affirmation of his inherent stability. He was able to say, “Hey, here’s a whole set of really wild ideas that are fun to think about; maybe some are even true. What do you think?”

It was an irreverent stance for a guru, which he never wanted to be. He had no desire to tell people what they should think; he just wanted them to think, period. I believe he viewed himself as a teacher, perhaps in some respects an entertainer, but never a guru.

Later, in the same passage, Dennis wrote:

Sociopathic or psychopathic personalities who achieve fame are usually quite happy to exploit their status, unburdened as they are by conscience, self-insight, or doubt. Terence wanted no part of that sick dynamic.

20. Showing up in a village with a butterfly net

Dennis wrote about how Terence, at age 10 or 11, began collecting insects and “built up a fine butterfly and moth collection, including a few exotic specimens he purchased.” In his 20s, Terence “continued to seek out butterflies on his global ramblings.” Dennis reflected:

Though his passion was very real, he found the persona of the collector to be a good cover when traveling in tropical countries. As he noted, “When you show up in a village with a butterfly net, it’s immediately obvious to even the youngest child why you are there; and it’s non-threatening, it’s friendly. You are immediately tagged as a harmless eccentric.”

Terence McKenna in the Amazon in 1971. Photo via The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Next week, I’ll interview Klea McKenna about The Butterfly Hunter (2008), the book which resulted from the insect collection she inherited, at age 19, from her father when he died in 2000. As Dennis wrote in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss:

An excellent photographer with a highly refined aesthetic, Klea, the younger of Terence’s two children, eventually used her artistic skills and vision to transform the collection into a beautiful tribute to her father. She didn’t mount the specimens in the conventional way. Instead, she created a work in which each butterfly was photographed together with its envelope.

FanExpo is Canada's largest convention for nerds who love video games, aliens, comic books, science fiction, anime, and horror. But because of the covention's broad coverage of everything geeky, the whole thing is also a gigantic clusterfuck. We went to check out the hordes of costumed fanatics, but when we arrived on Saturday, we were told by FanExpo staff the building was at capacity, and ended up stuck outside in line with the rest of them. We're not sure where else FanExpo could host its nerd mania event next year to make it more inclusive for the thousands of disguised dynamos looking to buy action figures, but hopefully they sort their shit out soon.

All photos by Becca Lemire. Follow her on Twitter.

Black Swan shows Julie Andersen dancing with a oceanic whitetip shark. All videos by Paul Wildman

Sharks and crocodiles have a bum rep. Their advocates are few and far between, but a pair of intrepid camera-wielding scuba divers are on a mission to prove that they’re better off alive than dead. Paul Wildman and Julie Andersen have dedicated their lives to debunking the myth that these massive swimmers are in the business of hunting humans, by photographing and videotaping them on a super up-close-and-personal basis. By swimming with them, they’ve captured human-meets-shark footage that is literally like nothing you’ve seen before.

Andersen is a former corporate advertising guru from Chicago, who left her lucrative job in 2007 to dedicate her life to sharks. She also founded Shark Angels, the organization under which she and Wildman do much of their work as conservationists. Wildman is South African, and does all the out-of-cage filming with great whites, among other things.

Photo by Neil Andrea

Despite their portrayal in the media as ravaving killers (think Jaws), sharks actually think humans taste like ass. Wildman and Andersen have established this in their stunning footage, which shows that even when a human dangles itself in front of a shark, it still isn’t as likely as we think to take a bite. Wildman and Andersen have countless videos and photos like this, documenting their (entirely unarmed) quests down into the ocean where they come face to face with great whites, oceanic white tips, tiger sharks, hammerheads, whale sharks, bull sharks, and ragged tooth sharks, to name a few. For most of us, the closest we’ll get to a shark or a croc is a Graeme Base book, so it’s safe to say that what they’ve managed to capture is pretty remarkable. The aim? To encourage us to sympathize with the creatures and therefore care about what happens to them, because according to Andersen, “the thing that stands in our way when it comes to conservation is that people want these animals off the planet.”

And there are quite a lot of people who do. Over 100 million sharks are killed each year, and their population as a whole has dropped by 95 percent in the last two decades thanks to intensive (and illegal) hunting and culling practices. Sharks are butchered for things like shark fin soup, meat, their teeth, jaws, their cartilage for unproven “cancer” remedies, shark liver oil, the makeup industry, and also for some morbid interior design stuff. Culling is also a common knee jerk government reaction when a swimmer has a run-in with a shark. Australian Prime Minister and resident quack Tony Abbott (and his Western Australian counterparts) famously allocated $20 million of the budget to a four-year shark kill plan.

Photo by Daniel Bothelo

“We’ve done undercover filming in 15 different countries and seen a lot firsthand, but we’ve found that people turn away from the gory culling footage because they don’t want to see it,” Andersen told me. So instead, their approach focuses on "celebrating the beauty" of the animals. This way, the Shark Angels reach an audience that's different from other conservationist groups.

"We feel it’s easier to engage people by showing them these perspective altering videos, and that’s where the dialogue starts. People are then more open to hearing what sharks are facing, and consider that—love them or hate them—we need them on the planet, and that maybe we need to give them a chance," said Andersen.

Andersen and Walker on their boat. Photo by Allen Walker

So they throw themselves in the water with sharks, swim frighteningly close to them, and—shockingly—do not get eaten. As Andersen explained, “unless we trigger their predatory behaviors by doing something unwittingly, they—the sharks and crocs—do not pose a threat.”

“We’re not going to suggest that they’re teddy bears,” said Andersen. “But as long as you respect them and are aware, these kinds of interactions are possible.” And that’s what they want us to understand: that it’s OK to recharacterize sharks outside of the traditional scary-beasts-that-will-definitely-murder-me category.

Water Dragon showcases saltwater crocodiles in southern Mexico

Their videos are beyond stunning. There’s one called Black Swan, which features Andersen literally dancing beneath the sea alongside an enormous oceanic white tip. She’s twirling and flirting around the shark so effortlessly that it almost looks fake. Oceanic white tip sharks are known as some of the most dangerous sharks in the world, but again, Andersen does not get eaten. “It was one of the most incredible experiences I’ve had,” she told me, explaining that the entire thing happened organically after they hopped in the water to find it swimming by one afternoon.

Then there’s Water Dragon, a video of a 12-foot-long saltwater crocodile lurking in the shallow waters of a tiny atoll called Chinchorro, near the border of Mexico and Belize. He seems remarkably relaxed, given that there's a scuba diver with a camera in front of his face. Shown close up and underwater, it looks more like its dinosaur relatives than ever—more solid, more brutally strong, more intricately detailed, and admittedly more majestic.

“This was my first time in the water with a crocodile,” Wildman told me of his foray with the croc. “It was a slow going process, figuring out its behavior. It took a while from both sides for us to get used to each other but once that barrier was broken, it came right in and put its nose on the camera.” But the crocodiles didn't threaten him: “At one point one of the crocs turned around and I had the whole tail draped over my shoulder.”

Photo by Paul Wildman

Wildman and Andersen emphasize that if sharks become extinct, the entire ecosystem will collapse. The toothy creatures are at the apex of the oceanic food chain, which means that their survival is integral to a healthy and balanced marine ecosystem—and with a damaged ocean ecosystem, the remainder of the earth is screwed too.

“When you look at what happens in the local ecosystems when sharks are removed, it’s downright scary,” Andersen told me, and it’s true. One example is Chesapeake Bay, near the east coast of Virginia, where giant shellfish fisheries went bust because shellfish were all being eaten by the rays, which were no longer being eaten by sharks because sharks were all being killed. “There’s nothing extra in nature,” Andersen explained. “It’s easy for us to forget that and think that we can control it and take out what we don’t want anymore.”

Tigerland shows the wildlife at Tiger Beach in the Bahamas

“They’ve survived five major extinctions on this planet; do we really want to be messing with that?” said Andersen. “People don’t usually know this and if they do, they don’t usually care.”

As for the crocs? Saltwater crocodiles have a reputation for being mysterious and bloodthirsty, so Wildman and Andersen have recently started capturing similarly angled footage of them in order to continue “demystifying” the idea of apex predators. This is new ground for Wildman and Andersen, and it’ll be interesting to see where they take it.

Photo by Neil Andrea

Aside from swimming with sharks and other predators, Wildman and Andersen are also heavily involved in the push to outlaw shark fin across North America and beyond. They were active in a fin-free program that was ultimately successful in banning the import, export, and sale of shark fin in Toronto, Canada. Stateside, Hawaii, Oregon, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Washington, and California are among the states that have enacted similar laws.

Wildman and Andersen also raise awareness with educational programs in schools that teach children about why sharks are important. It's become so popular that they’re teaching classes virtually, via Skype, in countries all over the world, with Russia as the most recent country to sign up. They show their videos and recount their stories, and I get why it works. As someone who previously hyperventilated in the middle of a university lecture because of a shark photo in the PowerPoint presentation, I have to say I'm a convert.

Follow Shanrah Wakefield on Twitter.

VICE contributors Grant Pardee and Josh Androsky sat down with two internet personalities who made real careers out of their social media personas.

Comedian Mike Burns is perhaps best known as the creator of @DadBoner on Twitter, which is the ongoing story of Karl Welzein, a divorced dad in Michigan who defines himself by his love of Van Halen and muscle cars. Burns recently signed a deal to produce a pilot for a Comedy Central animated series based on DadBoner.

Molly McIsaac has gained a significant following online in the opposite way: by being herself. She made her name on Twitter and Instagram by being a geek personality who advocates for body positivity. Her presence helped land her a spot on a SyFy Channel reality show about superfans called Fangasm, and today she works as a social media manager.

We spoke with Mike and Molly about how they've used social media, and how personal branding has affected them on the latest edition of the ENTITLEMENT Podcast.

PRODUCER: BRETT RADER

ENGINEER: CHRIS SOUSA

MUSIC: LA FONT

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US Attorney General Eric Holder meets with police officials in North Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by Ryan Johnson

The August 9 shooting of Michael Brown was a tragedy, but at least the ensuing backlash against myriad police sins in Ferguson, Missouri, and throughout the nation has lead to a long overdue conversation about the cops.

On the other hand, conversation—even if it includes heartening agreement from conservatives, libertarians, and liberals that something needs to change—is not enough. Having previously cast a moderately critical eye toward police, a writer for the conservative National Review wrote that protests in Ferguson were a bust and that most people, white and black alike, still support police, want more of them, want longer prison sentences, and approve of dramatic remedies for unrest such as sending in the National Guard.

The increased media attention and the belatedly concerned pandering of the political class should not be dismissed. President Obama’s sudden concern about police militarization may be cynical, but his promise to take another look at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security’s funding of local police is a welcome first step.

However, even the solutions to an established problem present an ideological quandary. Conservatives tend to distrust federal law enforcement, while excusing local police. Liberals do the opposite. Last week, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and several other notable groups sent a letter to Obama that urged a list of reforms to policing—all of which would be overseen by a federal "police czar." The reforms were not in themselves bad suggestions; they mostly consisted of proactively fighting against racial bias in police, chipping away at militarization, and encouraging law enforcement to act as a part of the community rather than as an invading army.

The flimsy, moderate liberal dream of federal oversight solving all issues of race, class, violence, and the state monopoly on lethal power does not hold up in direct sunlight. Certainly, the issue when black males are disproportionately profiled, and when poor people are shaken down for law enforcement revenue, is not just that Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles were offered to that local PD for a low, low price. But the letter to Obama suggests a worrying kind of optimism: that the feds can save the day, simply because they’re bigger and stronger.

The warped state of American policing is the result of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies working together. Asset forfeiture, which allows local police to seize property thought to be involved in the committing of a crime, provides a direct financial incentive to keep fighting—and prioritizing—the war on drugs. The war on drugs is both racially tinged and is firmly tied to federal law and federal dollars. Gun laws are used to keep nonviolent prisoners behind bars for longer sentences. “Tough on crime” policies, which gave us mandatory minimum sentences in all 50 states, were the result of a bipartisan, federal effort. Police unions are cozy with local and state governments, making the removal of bad cops next to impossible. Any solutions to this mess need to happen at the local, state, and federal level.

Creating a new “police czar” could backfire, if only to the extent that it convinces people that the problems with our militarized police are being addressed, dampening support for broader reform. It could even end up being worse than nothing: We’d have another powerful government office that would be impossible to get rid of—and which could prove useful in lending an “independent” stamp of approval to law enforcement’s worst practices, or worse still, further codifying them.

The feds have their own entrenched power, and their own desires. They are not any more trustworthy than your local police department—and not just because they have subsidized the worst law enforcement behavior in the country. It’s tempting to want the big tough feds to come knock some sense into the local police bullies, but it’s more difficult—and ultimately worthwhile—to strike down bad laws and sources of unchecked power at all levels.

Now on to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

• On August 23, police in Ottawa, Kansas, fatally shot a suicidal 18-year-old who may or may not have had a gun. Joseph Jennings, suicidal because of anxiety, depression, and a seizure disorder, was with his aunt and foster father while walking outside a hardware store. Something about Jennings’s behavior seemed off enough for someone to call 911 and apparently report that he had a gun, which his family denies.  When police arrived, Jennings made enough of a furtive moment to alarm them, so they shot him dead.
• Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday blasted the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for being “a waste of public money.” Grassley was referencing an ongoing federal investigation into $850,000 the DEA paid an Amtrak secretary for information about a suspicious passenger, even though the DEA is supposed to be able to get such information from Amtrak for free.
• Three members of the Omaha Police Department fatally shot a robber (armed with a pellet gun) and managed to accidentally kill a Cops crew member while filming an episode of that creepy, exploitive television show.
• This week, the attorney for the late Gregory Towns announced that a suit would be filed against East Point, Georgia, police officers over Towns’ death last April. According to the lawsuit, after Towns was chased on foot, he was cuffed and then Tasered a total of 13 times by Officers Howard Weems and Marcus Eberhart. Towns’ death is officially considered a homicide and police don’t dispute that they tried to shock him 13 times, though they say he wasn’t actually hit each time. Police are saying they did nothing wrong since “use of drive stun [Taser] to gain compliance is permitted under federal and Georgia law.”
• On Tuesday, a Texas Grand Jury declined to indict a police officer for the fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager last November. Navasota, Texas, police officer Rey Garza was working as a security guard while off-duty and saw two teens in an apartment parking lot possibly doing drugs. Garza ordered them out of the car, but 17-year-old Jonathan Santellana apparently refused. A girl who was with him says Garza, who was not in a uniform, did not identify himself as a police officer, frightening the teens and making them think he was a robber. Santellana then apparently tried to drive away, pinning Garza against a park car before driving through the parking lot as Garza fired. The girl ended up with minor injuries and Santellena ended up dead. A neighbor confirmed that Garza wasn’t in uniform, adding that the cop is “a bully” who tried to browbeat him into deleting phone footage of the incident.
• In news of Missouri cops behaving badly, Glendale police officer Matthew Papert has been fired for his series of alarmingly aggressive and racist posts about people in Ferguson angry about the August 9 shooting of Michael Brown. That’s good.
• On the other hand, St. Ann, Missouri, police officer Ray Albers resigned after he became a social media sensation for pointing his gun and yelling “I’ll fucking kill you” to protesters and press in Ferguson—and then adding “Go fuck yourself” in response to queries about his identity. Albers was reportedly given the option of being fired or resigning. The latter presumably makes the 19-year law enforcement veteran more eligible for future law enforcement jobs and might preserve his pension.
• In "lowest possible expectations counting as progress" news: The Ferguson Police Department is now in possession of 50 body cameras, which are being deployed during ongoing protests. Two companies donated the cameras and cops used them for the first time on Sunday. Officers are “really enjoying them,” said Ferguson Chief Tom Jackson. Still, the Ferguson PD still has dashboard cameras that they claim to be unable to use due to the cost of installation.
• On August 29, Esquire’s blog published a short but worthwhile piece on the profiling of black Americans by police. After several disturbing Tasering and pepper spraying incidents that were caught on video, the stomach-clenching question at the end: How many more dehumanizing, harassing incidents are not captured on video, and are therefore entirely impossible to prove?
• A Chicago cop facing aggravated battery and official misconduct charges is free to work desk duty while waiting to go to trial over a January 2013 incident. Officer Glenn Evans is accused of sticking his service weapon down the throat of a man suspected of stashing a gun somewhere, placing a Taser to his genitals, and then threatening to kill the suspect if he did not tell Evans where he had stashed the illicit gun. Evans could get anything from probation to five years in prison if convicted.
• Our Good Cops of the Weeks are five Waldo, Florida, police officers who on Tuesday reported an alleged traffic ticket quota demanded by their boss, Chief Mike Szabo. According to the officers, Szabo demanded that his cops write 12 tickets during every 12 hour shift. Szabo was suspended soon after the allegations came to light. The five officers who ratted on their boss should be praised for putting a few chips in the blue wall of silence. More cops should be like them.  

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

For three weeks, the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the capital of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic, has faced a near-constant barrage of deadly shellfire. Hundreds of civilians have been killed as the Ukrainian army slowly encircled Donetsk and pro-Russia forces fought for control of what is strategically the most important city.

With the Ukrainian army having made sweeping gains since late June, the rebels announced a counter offensive to relieve the siege of Donetsk and other cities under their control. On August 25, rebel forces brought over a number of armored vehicles and tanks from the Russian border on the southern coastline. They quickly made a push towards the coastal city of Mariupol, but were stopped at the town of Novoazovsk after a skirmish with Ukrainian troops and volunteer forces.

VICE News headed to Novoazovsk to investigate claims of Russian involvement, and found terrified civilians trapped in the shelling, along with desperate Ukrainian forces angry at their lack of reinforcement from their leaders in Kiev.