Yvan Benedetti at an anti-immigration rally in Calais. Photos by Jake Hanrahan and Rebecca Suner

“I was told to calm down,” shouted Yvan Benedetti, a figurehead of France's far-right, after yelling so loudly that the PA system tapped out. “But how can I keep calm,” he blared, “when the situation is so terribly serious!”

The crowd—made up of around 350 locals and far-right supporters—gathered at yesterday’s anti-immigration rally in Calais gave him a rapturous round of applause. Organized by the local nationalist group Sauvons Calais (Let’s Save Calais), the demonstration was a response to the estimated 1,300 refugees currently sleeping on sidewalks and in parks in the French town, the vast majority making the trip there with the intention of illegally crossing the English Channel into the UK.

This was the hometown nationalists’ big day. A relative newcomer on the French far-right scene, Sauvons Calais consists of about a dozen core members and had so far only taken part in small protests outside migrant squats, or organized “security patrols” around the town.

Now, they were taking to the podium in front of such far-right luminaries as Thomas Joly, general-secretary of the nationalist Parti de la France, and Benedetti himself, who used to head up the far-right L’Oeuvre Francaise movement until it was dissolved in 2013 following the killing of a young antifascist by activists allegedly linked to a number of far-right groups.

Kevin Reche

“The media says our collective is racist, but that’s not true—we’re nationalists and patriots,” said Kevin Reche, leader of Sauvons Calais. Unfortunately for the 20-year-old, the fact that he was standing next to a flag bearing a Celtic cross—a symbol associated with the kind of white people who traditionally kick up a fuss about stuff like bloodlines and racial purity—meant his argument fell a little flat.

Demonstrating his intimate understanding of the issue, Reche told me over the phone that he’s only spoken to a migrant once. “I don’t need to [speak to them],” he argued. “I know their situation already: they have a war in their countries and they’re not very happy. But French people aren’t very happy, either.”

The Sauvons Calais family portrait

Reche is no stranger to controversy; a picture of his chest tattoo—which looks a lot like a swastika—was published in the local press not too long ago. “These are all nationalist symbols,” he claimed during an interview at the rally, while someone performed a Nazi salute behind him.

Another speaker issued a warning to the French president. “Hollande, listen to us,” he demanded, “or the people may soon grab you by the throat.”

Migrants demonstrating in Calais

At a squat in a disused scrap metal plant just outside the town center, migrants were aware that the far-right were in town and were worried about how the rally might end. “I’ve fled war—my village was entirely burned down,” said a Sudanese refugee who shares the squat with a few hundred other migrants. “I know what violence is and I don’t want it.”

Since the 2002 closure of the Sangatte camp, which used to house up to 2,000 refugees, the migrants have been living in squats or “jungles”, the makeshift encampments spread throughout the outskirts of the town. Most of those living here are men from Sudan, Eritrea and Syria, but women and children also make up a small percentage of the town's migrant population.

According to local charities, the number of migrants arriving in Calais has increased over the summer, all of them winding up stuck here as they try to work out how to cross over into Britain. “I’ve traveled thousands of miles, through the Sahara desert, but these last 20 miles are a very big barrier,” added the Sudanese man.

Last week the extraordinary storming of a ferry gate in Calais by over 200 migrants demonstrated that tactics might be starting to evolve from clinging onto a wheel axle or trying to sneak into the back of an 18-wheeler before it leaves the port. “That technique is a way to circumvent human traffickers through collective action,” explained Philippe Wannesson, a local activist and blogger. “They are getting organized among themselves.”

On Friday, 400 refugees—a third of the total migrant population in Calais—held a protest of their own against police violence, which they say is on the rise. Many of them, including a 15-year-old boy from Eritrea with a broken arm, were wearing bandages.

Abdellah, a 28-year-old refugee from Darfur, told me his foot was injured after he was found hiding under a truck with other migrants. Now using crutches to walk, he explained that the police violence is still preferable to the dangers he faced at home. "If I’d stayed in Darfur, I could be dead," he told me. "I knew there were real dangers. I just hoped I could find protection in Europe."

During the terrifying boat journey that took him from Egypt to Italy, smugglers set fire to the vessel's engine to pressure refugees into paying more money for the trip.

French class at the migrant squat in Calais

The next day, the same refugees who'd been chanting against police violence were listening to a French class given by Maki, a Sudanese refugee who's been living in Calais for four years and volunteers to help the new arrivals. He was taking the group through French grammar: feminine and masculine articles, and possessive pronouns. One of the students, a Syrian refugee, was adamant that his son will study law at Oxford, but told me "Cambridge would be fine, too". 

Food was being prepared in another area of the large open-air squat, and elsewhere people were showering and going about their daily routine. In May and July of this year police cleared two previous migrant camps with barrages of tear-gas. This place is under a similar threat.

As the class moved on to typical French idioms to practice pronunciation, Maki made the 30 students repeat one phrase several times: "Vouloir c’est pouvoir."

"To want is to be able to."

Follow Rebecca Suner on Twitter.

Everyone thought the Pink Panther gang would vanish—especially after the 2012 arrest of one of its leaders. Instead, the jewel thieves have started training new recruits as a way to take revenge on a world they feel has robbed them blind.

The group, hailing from former Yugoslavia, has stolen more than $350 million worth of jewelry in the past 15 years from the world's most exclusive jewelers, according to Interpol. Now, VICE takes you inside the Pink Panthers' secret world to learn their history and see how the jewel thieves train new recruits.

Photos by Derek Kouyoumjian

On the third Wednesday of every month in Boston, grown-ups gather at the Legoland Discovery Center for Adult Night to revisit artifacts from their preschool years. You may think people are attending because they’re obsessed with nostalgia, but Adult Night’s appeal is more complicated. 

“I had come by here, and they told me I wasn’t allowed because I had no child,” said Leah, a local woman who won a tower-building competition. “Being told that you can't do something, makes you want to overcome that.”

On most days, Legoland Discovery Center only admits adults who are chaperoning youngsters—playtime evidently sucks when children compete with adults for the same toys—but on Adult Night, Legoland serves beer and wine and lets those of legal-age go HAM. 

During a one-armed tower building challenge, participants stacked oversized, injury-proof soft Legos as high as they could for two minutes. Once they completed their towers, they bashed their handiwork back into Lego rubble so the process could begin anew. In fits of manic exuberance, players fulfilled their primal impulses to create and to destroy.

“Lego bricks and creations are timeless, no matter what your generation, whatever your age,” said Ian Coffey, the curator of the festivities, who brandished a Lego sword and periodically yelled, “Happy Adult Night!” 

Coffey didn’t invent Adult Night, but he transported the idea to Somerville after he became this Legoland’s official master builder. Yes, “master builder” is an actual job title. Coffey earned the title by winning a building tournament where he put together a ski jump, self-portrait, and tributes to Toy Story and Cool Runnings out of Legos.

He’s not the only one who’s serious about Legos. During the event, I saw grown-ups compete in a speed-building tournament to win a Lego lobster. One station provided the means to test the integrity of Lego buildings through miniature earthquakes. Some patrons sat around Lego-loaded basins, focused on sundry construction projects, which made no sense. They’re not allowed to take anything they build home, so what’s the point?

“It’s Legos. It’s all temporary,” explained Jared, who had almost finished a Lego facsimile of Rio De Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue.

This work and other Lego statues catered to adults who have interests besides frolicking around like toddlers. The hall seguing into the main room featured detailed Lego recreations of Boston landmarks: Faneuil Hall, MIT, the TD Garden, and Government Center. Lego Logan Airport came complete with a functional moving sidewalk. This exhibit could make life convenient for tourists who want to see the entire city but, for some reason, only have time to visit one building.

 In addition to the Lego-oriented activities in the main room, there’s a flying carousel ride, volleyball, and a karaoke station where I had the misfortune of overhearing a butchered version of “Call Me Maybe.”

The so-called 4-D movie theater failed to deliver on its promises. Instead of taking guests to the fourth dimension, the theatre showed a 3D cartoon with a few added low-tech sensory effects: including an unseen fan to simulate wind and artificial snow. 

I was a little miffed about the false advertising, but grateful I decided to pass on the opportunity to take shrooms at Legoland. I would’ve reacted quite a bit differently to the 4D gimmickry. Well, scratch that. I wouldn’t have made it past the lobby, where vivid colors abounded, and ambient music that belongs in a Pixar movie filled the hall. 

Follow Barry Thompson on Twitter, and check out Derek Kouyoumjian's photos.

Philadelphia police are being sued after seizing almost 500 homes in the last two years. Photo by Elvert Barnes

Last week, the Washington Post released the results of an excellent—albeit alarming—investigation into the use of asset forfeiture in the United States. What is “asset forfeiture,” in plain English? Essentially: cops stealing your shit with little to no proof of its connection to a crime. With the backing of the Department of Justice, and the excuse of the war on drugs (and now the war on terror), property connected even vaguely to a crime—whether one is ever convicted of said crime or not—can be seized and auctioned off by local police, earning them a tidy profit without the hassle of a trial.

Carrying too much cash in the eyes of law enforcement is reason enough for that cash to be seized. As the Post uncovered, since 2001, $4.2 billion has been taken from members of the public under the Justice Department’s “equitable sharing program.” Not only was there no trial in these cases, there wasn't no search warrant. Only one out of six people whose property was taken bothered to fight, presumably due to the enormous legal fees involved. The state agreed to give back property in 41 percent of the cases where people did challenge the theft. However, it often took months, sometimes years, to get the property back.

The Philadelphia Police Department, in particular, seems to be engaging in asset forfeiture with great relish, so much so that it’s provoked the filing of a class action lawsuit from the libertarian Institute for Justice (IJ) against District Attorney R. Seth Williams and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

One case of asset forfeiture run amuck in Philly was recently highlighted by CNN: that involving the Sourvelis family. In March, the Philly PD arrested 22-year-old Yianni Sourvelis on charges of selling $40 worth of heroin. He was accused of dealing drugs out of the family home, which served as a great excuse to then take that family home a few weeks later. The city told Chris Sourvelis and his wife Markela to pack their stuff and get out. After a week, the compromise was that Yianni would not be allowed to stay in the house at all, but Chris and Markela could return if they stopped trying to defend the property’s innocence. (Civil asset forfeiture is bizarre: technically the property itself is guilty.) DA Williams is still trying to take the house, though Chris and Markela are allowed to live there while they fight the lawsuit.

Though the nastiness of civil asset forfeiture varies from state to state, the Philly PD is particularly aggressive. They have taken almost 500 homes and almost $6 million in cash in the last two years, while initiating civil asset forfeiture proceedings on 7,000 occasions. According to the IJ complaint, in the past 11 years Philadelphia has seized “over 1,000 residences, 3,200 vehicles, and $44 million in cash.” This has brought the city a total revenue of $64 million, which goes to the police department and the District Attorney. The lawsuit, which alleges violations of due process rights under the 14th Amendment, notes that neither the conflict of interest nor the violation of rights here is subtle. People can lose their home without being provided legal counsel and without their—or their property’s—guilt being established “beyond a reasonable doubt.” All that is required is a preponderance of the evidence and the house or the car or the cash is gone.

Not all states are as bad as Pennsylvania. And not all police departments and DAs are as ruthless as the ones in Philly. But like so many other problems with cops, the local cruelties are federally enabled and subsidized.

Now, onto the rest of this week’s bad cops:

• On the occasion of the NYPD’s body cam pilot program, VICE’s Matt Taylor has written a piece on cops and cameras, so go read that and then feel as pessimistic as he sounds. They’re not panaceas, that’s for sure.
• Over at theWashington Post, police reporter Radley Balko has a piece on how the poor all over Missouri are sucked dry by legal bureaucracy and fines. It’s essential reading.
• Photography is Not a Crime’s Carlos Miller highlights the arrest of an unnamed YouTuber for filming a 4 AM SWAT operation in Gresham, Oregon. The YouTuber is across the street from the house being raided and seems to be standing on his own property as the would-be paramilitary fellas tell him to get back inside. When he disputes them and says “it’s not past curfew” (great dystopian detail, that) they come over, order him inside, and then arrest him, all the while robotically saying he should stop resisting.
• Finger-printing little kids is based in overwrought fears of child abduction, but it’s not, ostensibly, supposed to prepare them for a life of acquiescing to authority figures. And yet, Cory Doctorow was on the nose when he dubbed Ferguson, Missouri, police’s recent attempts to do this in a community beset by police violence as “a new tone-deaf low.”
• On September 2, Ixel Perez, a Houston tenth-grader was tackled by three school resource officers, detained, and then finally suspended from Sam Houston High School. A few seconds of unclear footage of Perez screaming—she says because an officer pressed his knee on her head, and it does look that way—has made the rounds on social media and some of her classmates have protested her suspension. What did the 4’10” young woman do? She says she refused to turn over her cellphone to her teacher, and then later to the assistant principal. The reaction she apparently provoked for that teenage crime would be bad enough without the rest of the story: Perez’s father had texted her, concerned that her mother who is on dialysis had not gotten back to him. Perez says she simply wanted to make sure her mother was OK before she turned the phone over. Perez’s mother is reportedly planning to find her a new school.
• Speaking of Texas schools: On September 5, Houston television station KHOU reported that ten different school police departments received some military-grade weapons, armor, and ammunition thanks to the generous Pentagon and their 1033 program. This is all supposed to prepare them for some kind of active shooting situation, most of which are long over before a tactical team can enter a school. Spring Branch Police Chief C.A. Brawnerbacked out of an on-camera interview to speak about the weapons (after originally promising to answer questions).
• Last week, 42-year-old Timothy Sturgis fatally shot himself during a standoff that came after a narcotics raid on his home in Ashville, Ohio. Sturgis had $25,000 worth of marijuana plants. Said Dave Posten, the special agent in charge: ”No one likes the violence. We wish it didn’t have to be that way. But when people say, ‘Was this little bit of marijuana worth this man’s life?’ it frustrates me. This isn’t ever about marijuana. It’s about someone’s choices.” It’s about your choices, too, Dave. You didn’t cause the guy to commit suicide, your job just forced him to choose between suicide and prison.
• A Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officer resigned from his job on Thursday after a friend turned over to the police department racist text messages the cop had sent. Officer Michael Elsbury had expressed a desire to see other cops “pull a Ferguson” and referred to black people as “monkeys” and “niggers.” Some of the context is confusing, but the racism is clear and totally unacceptable. Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie offered none of the usual excuses, saying only he was “sick to my stomach” over the texts and that this was “an isolated incident.”
• Instead of, say, trying to steal his parents’ house over heroin like the Philly PD, two officers in New Jersey saved the life of an overdosing 25-year-old on Thursday, making them our Good Cops of the Week. Wayne Police Officers Rick Hess and Thomas Antonucci got a report of an unconscious man and upon arrival figured out he was ODing, administered the drug Narcan, and took him to the hospital.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

All photos by Karl Hess

I was staring through a window marred by heavy iron bars, with a large bullet hole in the thick glass.

“That is from when they tried to kill us,” said Pablo Escobar's brother. He looked tired, harmless, his one good eye shifting uncertainly behind his glasses. Once one of the most wanted criminals in the world, a critical part of an organization responsible for thousands of murders and untold billions of dollars in drug traffic, he was now just an old man, standing awkwardly in his living room.

“Come, let’s have some coffee, you can ask me whatever you want,” he muttered and I followed him out to the porch, the city of Medellin sweeping away in the valley below.

Everyone knows the story and the man: Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel; a bloody, inexorable rise to power and dominance. By the late 80s, Escobar had accumulated billions of dollars and established himself as a Medellin folk hero, constructing housing and hospitals for the poor, publishing a newspaper, even opening a zoo for the public. Even as thousands were brutally killed and the excesses of his violence raged out of control (he famously once blew up a commercial airliner in an attempt to kill one man) Pablo was still a hero to the poor and dispossessed of Medellin society. When he died on that rooftop in 1993, he left behind thousands of mourners, a city ravaged and torn apart by violence, and his accountant: Roberto Escobar, his brother.

Roberto Escobar is now just a simple old man

Lugging my backpack into the hostel near Parque Lleras, the city's popular nightlife zone, Escobar and his bloody legacy were about the last things on my mind. I was dirty, exhausted, and judging from the rowdy Australians playing drinking games on the patio at 2 PM on Wednesday, not about to get the long sleep I so desperately required. I was hungover from drinking rum and aguardiente (literal translation: fiery water) on Colombia’s coast for the past two weeks, and had a weird half-body sunburn from the time I had vastly underestimated how much booze a coconut could hold and passed out beneath a beach table in the midday heat.

As I stowed my belongings in the dorm room and noted with some frustration that I was going to have to sleep on a top bunk that seemed to be seven feet off the ground, a stout, red-faced South African dude in a rugby jersey stumbled out of the communal bathroom. To say that this gentleman had obviously just been doing cocaine would have been an grievous understatement: He looked like he had just head-butted a pastry chef. He snorted, slapped me on the back, and let me know in no uncertain terms that I had come to the right place to “fucking party.”

“This is the place, bruh,” he assured me. “You know a fucking guy died here last month? He went too hard. Fucking legendary, bruh!”

“Yeah... That does sound pretty great.”

At that, he laughed and pretended to punch me in the stomach, then laughed again and walked out, as my visions of rest and recuperation slid further out of reach. The death and horror of those bygone days of Medellin’s history may be past, but at street level, a tangible element of that time is still quite prevalent: Cocaine is everywhere. I would come to see that not only was it common, but it was used with a casualness I had not experienced. Bathroom stall? Not needed. Doing a bump at the urinal seemed to be a level of discretion that everyone was comfortable with.

I was only in Medellin for five days before I had to catch a flight to Argentina, and after my time on the coast I was looking to take it easy, apply aloe to the lower half of my back, go to the Botero Museum—and now, avoid that South African guy. But as I sat in the bar of the hostel, nursing a beer and listening to the Australians play a drinking game that apparently involved sporadically slapping each other in the face, something on the bulletin board caught my eye: the Pablo Escobar Tour. I asked the twentysomething Colombian girl behind the reception desk about it and she smiled.

“Oh, you gotta do it,” she said. When I pressed her for details, she helpfully added, “They, like, put you in a van and drive you around and tell you about Pablo Escobar, I guess.” With a finely honed sales pitch like that, how could I refuse?

Flowers on Pablo Escobar's grave

So the next morning, I piled into a beat-up van outside the hostel at 8 AM as a light rain fell from low-hanging clouds, still tired and bleary-eyed from a night that featured little sleep, lots of electronic music, copious beer, and shouted Australian phrases such as “argey-bargey.” I still didn’t really know what to expect from the day ahead. The first thing I noticed was that our tour guide, a nice Colombian lady, barely spoke any English. She seemed passionate on the subject of Medellin and knowledgeable about the life of Pablo Escobar, but was unable to convey this very well, and after a while just sort of gave up, put on a DVD, and turned her attention to texting on her cell phone.

The DVD turned out to be The Two Escobars, which is an ESPN 30 For 30 documentary that deals with Pablo Escobar and Colombian soccer star Andres Escobar, the rise of Colombian soccer due to a massive infusion of drug money, and the eventual murder of Andres, who was not related to the drug kingpin, after he accidentally scored on his own goal in the World Cup. It is a fascinating and well-made documentary, but a poorly ventilated van in downtown traffic packed with hungover, unwashed backpackers was not exactly the ideal viewing situation.

Still, the ride afforded me an occasion to observe the entertaining local trend of fast food, or comida rapida, establishments that featured colorful signs of either incredibly busty cartoon women or video game characters. My favorite was probably Mario Bross (a play on the Nintendo game, though spelled incorrectly), whose sign featured Mario’s warmly smiling disembodied head, a sure sign of quality. Not sure if that constitutes copyright infringement, but it did seem like an effective marketing strategy: “How can you save the Princess on an empty stomach?” “A plumber can’t live on mushrooms alone!”

Our first stop turned out to be the grave of the man himself, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, which is located on the outskirts of the city. Meticulously kempt, and wreathed with colorful floral arrangements, the grave offered everyone the opportunity to slowly file past and take photos of the headstone and then stand awkwardly in a cemetery for a while. Stop one complete. Once back in the van, our intrepid group pushed onward as the documentary continued to play and a contingent of four Australians alternately complained of their hangovers, made plans for the night, and hit on some French girls who sat in the front.

The second stop, for which we didn’t even get out of the van, featured a building that the rival Cali cartel had bombed once, trying to kill Pablo and his associates. It was pretty much just a regular building in an unassuming commercial district; no evidence remained that anything exciting had ever happened, and even the guide seemed to tacitly agree that this was the low point of tour. Group morale was on the decline, and although no one brought it up, it became clear that someone had farted in the van. Again, we pressed forward.

The glorious culmination of the Pablo Escobar Tour was Pablo’s old house—or a hideout, really—where he lived with his brother in his final months, stored cash and vehicles, and eventually met his bloody end. The van wound its way up to the hilltop residence, through the gates, and parked outside the garage that still held Pablo’s dirt bike and the old blue truck he had first used to smuggle cocaine paste over the border. As we piled out into the blessedly fresh air, our guide told us that here we would meet Roberto Escobar, Pablo’s brother, who through a deal with the government, operated this house as a museum and used the proceeds to fund this tour and the medical foundation he had set up. My first reaction was that maybe this tour could use just a little more funding, or at least a cooler van, but I kept my opinions to myself and followed the group into the house.

Pictures of young Pablo adorned the walls along with news clippings, old trophies, and a large wanted poster that offered $10 million for information about Pablo or Roberto. The same poster listed their main associates along with their photos: men with alternately grim or smiling visages with nicknames in Spanish such as Pitufo, El Pollo, and La Garra; Smurf, The Chicken, and The Claw, respectively. Overall, it was a real solid-looking group of capable henchmen. La Garra, particularly, struck me as the type of gentleman you wouldn’t really ever want to fuck with.

In the living room, amid various bullet holes left over from when the house was attacked, we finally found Roberto Escobar himself, short and soft-spoken, both partially blind and partially deaf from a letter bomb that exploded in his face years ago. Coffee was offered, and he then sat on his porch and opened the floor to questions. He spoke only Spanish, and enlisted a gregarious Irish guy in our group to translate for him. One of the Aussies was quick to jump in.

“You ever, like, kill a guy?” he asked, a little too enthusiastically.

“I’m not fucking asking him that,” the Irishman quickly responded, looking back and forth between Roberto and the group, as most people suppressed laughter. Just imagine an exceedingly Irish accent as you read that—it’s funnier that way.

Escobar nodded and seemed to understand though, as he had probably received a similar query from similarly excited twentysomethings over the years. He told us that he had been the cartel’s bookkeeper, and that he’d stayed far away from the killing, bombing, and torture end of their business venture. “I criticized my brother many times for the violence he caused,” he claimed, conveniently never addressing the fact that he used the billions of dollars gained through that bloodshed and devastation to lead a lavish life beside his sibling, above the law.

So many billions, in fact, that the cartel had to spend $2,500 on just rubber bands every month, to keep the currency together in neat stacks. So many billions that 10 percent of their profits were lost every year to rats eating the money and it rotting away in the ground where they buried it for lack of storage space. A lot of that hidden cash, rodent-chewed and mildewed though it may be, is still out there, he claimed, his one good eye blankly tracing the clouds in the sky as he spoke of the old days.

“That’s all behind me now, though; I do good now,” he continued. He then launched into a lengthy speech about how since he was released from prison in 2003, he has gained valuable medical knowledge while caring for expensive horses, and used that knowledge to find a cure for HIV.

Everyone politely listened, sometimes quizzically glancing at each other to see if this was some kind of mistranslation, but it wasn’t. For a man claiming that he used equine expertise to conquer AIDS, he was pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing. And if there’s one thing stranger than hearing a half-blind ex-cartel accountant tell you he’s made a world changing medical breakthrough, it’s hearing it translated through a hungover and somewhat bewildered 21-year-old Irish kid.

And with little to no follow up to the whole “I cured HIV because horses” thing, besides him noting that “soon we will release our breakthrough medicine and suffering everywhere will be ended,” the Q&A section was over. Roberto stood awkwardly against the wall in front of a picture of his brother’s ranch, so the group could once again slowly file past and record this crowning moment via digital camera. He posed stoically for the photos, unsmiling and stiff as he shook all our hands in turn, as he had done hundreds of times before and would again. The last we saw of Roberto Escobar was his back as he slowly shuffled down a hallway to his room, past smiling photos of his dead brother and old, yellowing headlines of the carnage they had wrought together, faded artifacts of a fallen empire.

In the van on the way back, as everyone silently asked themselves if this venture had, in fact, been worth $30, I suggested that we all go to Mario Bross for hamburgers and fries—so we did, and it was delicious. Now, I’m not saying I singlehandedly saved the entire tour, but I’m also not saying that I didn't.

Back at the hostel, as I headed for the bar, I felt a slap on my back and turned around to find my South African friend, beer in hand, already quite drunk.

“How was the tour, bruh? What’d you learn?”

“Welp, turns out, the world’s favorite Italian plumber grills a mean burger; there’s uncounted, rat-eaten millions buried all over this city; and Pablo Escobar’s brother is a pretty weird dude.”

“Fucking legendary.”

Follow Karl Hess on Twitter.

Sonja Bennett as Ruth, with James Caan, who plays her father in the film. Image via Mongrel Media.
Ruth is a perpetually hungover, 35-year-old chain-smoking grocery clerk who lives in her dad's basement. After she accidentally hits a kid in the face with a baseball bat at a baby shower, her high school besties (who all have children and grownup lives) decide Ruth doesn't really fit the clique anymore. So they kick her out. And when she gets home, Ruth's little sister, the favourite child, announces that she's trying to conceive, much to their ailing dad's delight.

Ruth's life sucks. But things start looking up when she's mistaken for a pregnant woman, after puking in a baby store. (Morning sickness, am I right? So I hear.) When her ex-best friends find out she's “pregnant” and come running back to re-friend her, she let's them rub her belly. She tries to fess up early on, but people enjoy her company so much more as a mommy-to-be. Before she knows it, everyone in her life thinks she's expecting twins, and Ruth has to come up with increasingly creative ways to keep up the ruse.

Preggoland is the first feature written by Sonja Bennett, who also stars as the film's lovable, faux-preggers screw-up. I caught up with Bennett during the Toronto International Film Festival, a day after Preggoland premiered, to talk about the “pregnancy pedestal,” writing regimens and what it's like to make Canadian movies that Canadians will actually watch.

VICE: What inspired you to write a film about a woman who fakes her pregnancy?
Sonja Bennett: There are sort of two reasons. One: I have this coffee shop that I like to go to that's across the street from my house. It's one of those situations where if you don't jaywalk, you kind of have to walk three blocks to get there. So I always jaywalk. Vancouver drivers they don't really like it when you jaywalk. Even if you're not slowing down traffic, they give you dirty looks. You're not following the rules and they honk at you. So one day, I went to step off the curb to cross the street, and this car screeched to a halt. All the cars in the line started screeching and it was like the parting of the Red Sea. I thought, this is bizarre. And I looked down and I realized that I had just started to show my pregnancy. It was such a surreal experience, a very physical manifestation of this special treatment that we give pregnant women. It made me very interested in this pregnancy pedestal. So I explored that until I eventually got to the film.

Where the concepts joined, is that I find it oddly hard to make friends with other women as an adult. It's always kind of awkward. But when I got pregnant it was just shocking to me how easy it was. I was sitting on the bus next to a woman and we were both pregnant and we kind of live close to each other. She just grabbed my phone and put her info in.

You're just instantaneously welcomed into a giant clique and you don't need to have anything in common with anybody. People will just readily serve up stories about their bodily fluids, and all you have to have in common is that you're mothers. At first, it was like this gift. But then there's the flip side of it, which is that it's artificial.

The film really got at how society tells women that they're not complete, or they're not successful if they're not a mother. Women are still pushed toward motherhood.
Absolutely. I worked with many story editors and did many passes on the script and of course some people wanted a very Hollywood ending where it cuts to Ruth with a baby. It was very important to me that that was not the message of this film. A woman does not need to be a mother to be complete, and becoming a mother—and I am one so I feel like I can say this—does not make me a better person, a fuller person. I even call bullshit—and many of my female friends disagree with me, so this is just a personal opinion—having a baby does not make me deeper.

This was your first feature. How was the writing experience? Did you have to lock yourself in a room and not talk to anyone?
I had written a little bit before, but this was by far my first thing that was produced. I started writing this film when I was very far along in my pregnancy, so I really did all of this with kids. I'd set my alarm for 4:40 AM, because the Starbucks opens at five, and I'd write from five to 7:30 and be home for when my son woke up. I won't lie to you, it sucked. It sucked. But in some ways I think it was helpful because it was a very short time frame. I remember writing before I had kids, when I was an out-of-work actor, and being like, 'Today, I'm going to write!'

Even now, when I'm writing quite a lot, I can't write more than four hours a day. It's really hard. Now I say, 'OK, I've got two hours. Let's see what I can do in two hours.' And with that kind of structure and discipline, I've found that you can achieve a hell of a lot. Eighty minutes, to me, is the golden amount. I need 80 minutes, that's it.

I'm the same way. If I have a whole day to write a story it's not getting done at all. If I have an hour...
It's getting done. And it's probably going to be awesome.

What was it like working with Jacob [Tierney, the director of the film]? Was it hard for you to hand over your project to someone else?
You know what, it was a relief. It felt really good to have someone else in charge and I was also at max capacity. I was still writing on the fly, things were changing, and I'm in every single scene of this movie. I was so glad. I respect Jacob so much and we have the same sense of humour, and the same sensibilities. I was never worried. I just really handed over the reins and I never gave it a second thought.

It was actually a really great thing because the fresh energy and the fresh perspective, no question, made the film better. I mean, it's deeper and fuller because of him and I think it's actually easier for him to see a broader picture because I was really in it. I can't say enough good things about Jacob.

How did he get attached to the film?
We worked together as actors on a pilot that didn't get picked up about seven years ago.

Which was that?
It was called Job. I thought it was really good.  But it didn't get picked up. We hadn't kept in touch or anything, but The Trotsky [Tierney's 2009 film starring Jay Baruchel] came to mind as an inspiration. I really liked the way that it balanced an anti-establishment vibe with a lot of heart. I wanted that for this film. So I reached out and he read the script and was just on board right away. He was like, 'I get it, I love it, I'm on the same page, I'm in.'

Lots of Canadian films aren't ever seen by Canadian audiences. What's it like for you to make a film and have it seen in Canada?
I don't want to be cheesy, but yesterday was a dream come true for me. It was just beyond...It was just magic. I watched it and I actually hadn't even seen it with the score, or the colour correction or anything. I really stayed out of the editing process because I didn't feel like I really had anything to add to it. So I just stayed out and decided to be surprised.

I feel so lucky and so blessed and it feels like people are actually going to see this movie. That was so important to me. I did write this with the business part of my brain activated because I've seen so many of my peers, who are oozing with talent, make things that just can't capture a mainstream audience and aren't commercial enough. I knew that even though I wanted to make something from my heart, I wanted it to be seen.

Preggoland premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 5. It opens publicly in 2015.

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Workers excavate a crime scene on the outskirts of Albuquerque, NM, where the remains of 11 bodies have been discovered. Photo by Sergio Salvador / AP

The story of the West Mesa murders begins outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, on a high desert plateau that rises up over the Rio Grande. Sun Belt sprawl and subdivisions with names like Desert Spring Flower and Paradise Hills give way to dry sand, tumbleweeds, and trailer parks. It’s desolate on this part of the West Mesa. There’s a municipal shooting range, a speedway, the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center. There’s also a crime scene where, in 2009, 11 decomposed corpses were found buried in shallow graves.

It took the Albuquerque police weeks to uncover all the bodies—which were scattered over a 92-acre swath of land owned by a home developer—and nearly a year to identify the victims. All of them were women between the ages of 15 and 32, and most were Hispanic. The women had gone missing between 2001 and 2005—long before the bodies were uncovered. Ten of the 11 victims were known prostitutes and drug users, a fact that police pointed out early and often. One victim, 22-year-old Michelle Valdez, had been four months pregnant. The 11th woman, 15-year-old Jamie Barela, had disappeared in 2004. She had gone to the park with her cousin, Barela’s mother told reporters, leaving the house with her curling iron still on. Her body was the last to be identified. Her cousin, 27-year-old Evelyn Salazar, had been identified two months prior. A second 15-year-old, Syllania Edwards, a runaway from Lawton, Oklahoma, was the only African American victim and the only one with ties outside New Mexico.

It was the most horrific murder case Albuquerque had ever seen. While serial killers are not uncommon in the Western United States, New Mexico’s largest city had never dealt with one before. Police promised the families of the victims that solving the murders was a top priority, and initially that seemed to be the case. Investigators assembled a crack team of detectives, bringing in FBI profilers and working with law enforcement agencies around the state to try to figure out how the bones of 11 women had wound up in the desert. Now it’s more than five years after the first body was discovered. Police still have no official suspects, and Albuquerque has largely forgotten about what was once known as the city’s “crime of the century.”

“There hasn’t been the degree of public fear and alarm that you might expect. There has been very little publicity,” said Dirk Gibson, a professor at the University of New Mexico who has written two books on serial killers. “There’s a sense of physical remoteness—this place was very removed. A combination of remoteness of time and geography made it so that there has been little pressure on the police to investigate.”

Police file photos of the 11 West Mesa victims

To be fair, there wasn’t much for the cops to go on. Officially, the cause of death for all 11 women was “homicidal violence,” but the truth was, medical examiners and forensic experts couldn’t determine how the victims had been killed. No witnesses have come forward, and there was virtually no forensic evidence at the burial site, which meant that there was nothing to tie the victims together except their shared grave and “high-risk lifestyles.”

There were leads, of course. First there were the photos, released by the Albuquerque Police Department at the end of 2010, of seven women who cops believed could be linked to the West Mesa murders. Two of the women were later discovered to be alive, and one had apparently died of natural causes. Police have never said where the photos originated, or whether anything has come of the tip. Then there was Ron Erwin, a photographer from Joplin, Missouri, and a frequent visitor of the New Mexico State Fair, which is held near the burial site. But after confiscating hundreds of photos and documents from his home and businesses, police couldn’t tie him to the murders. (Erwin, rather obviously, later told a local newspaper that he was devastated by the serial-killer suspicions.) Later that year, George Walker, a private investigator, started receiving cryptic, taunting phone calls and emails from someone claiming to have information about the killer, but the lead still hasn’t panned out. Over the years, other names have popped up in the investigation—mostly local pimps and serial wife beaters, some dead or in jail—but nothing has stuck.

“There’s a possibility the killer has come and gone. Serial killers move; that’s why they don’t get caught,” Walker said. “If he didn’t get caught, I’m sure there are more victims somewhere. He could possibly be on the loose in New Mexico or another state.”

Family members of Michelle Valdez grieve at a memorial site. Photo by Adolphe Pierre-Louis /Albuquerque Journal /AP

The investigation revealed the dark side of Albuquerque, a sleepy Southwestern city of half a million people, where the rate of violent crime is more than double the national average and where women of questionable morals can vanish into thin air without anyone giving a shit. In 2007, two years before the crime was uncovered, an Albuquerque reporter discovered that the city’s lone missing-persons detective had compiled names of 16 prostitutes who had disappeared in the city between 2001 and 2006—the first sign of a serial killer. But to the police, it seemed, it was nothing but a list of missing hookers. Eventually, nine of those women were identified at the West Mesa boneyard. The whereabouts of the other seven remain unknown, leaving open the question of whether the killer might have had other burial sites—and whether he may still be out there, killing. “It’s logical that there may be more than one grave site,” said Gibson. “Albuquerque is filled with tons of these types of sites. If police discovered this one, which clearly had been discontinued, maybe there’s another one. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

As shocking as the West Mesa serial killings are, they are also not unique. While the number of serial killings in the US has declined in recent decades, those that do occur disproportionately target women. According to FBI data released in 2011, 70 percent of serial-killer victims since 1985 have been women, mostly in their 20s or 30s. “The majority of victims of serial killers are what I call the less dead—as far as the public is concerned, they are less alive because they tend to be the marginalized groups in society—in this case drug addicts and prostitutes,” said Steven Egger, who teaches criminology at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, in Texas, and has consulted for the FBI. “There’s an attitude that permeates the press and the public that reduces pressure on police to solve the crime, at least initially, until you’ve got a number of victims.”

Police in Albuquerque say that they are still investigating the West Mesa serial killings, known officially as the 118th Street Homicides. Detectives have given few details about the status of the investigation in recent years, and a spokeswoman for the police department declined to comment for this story. The Albuquerque cops have also had their own internal problems to deal with: In late July, the city announced that the Department of Justice would monitor the Albuquerque Police Department, after a civil investigation found that a pattern of excessive use of force, including deadly force, by officers resulted in 20 fatalities between 2009 and 2012, and concluded that the majority of these shootings were unconstitutional. Albuquerque and New Mexico law enforcement officials have also been racked by sex scandals in recent years, including accusations that a state police officer and an Albuquerque police officer sexually assaulted prostitutes.

In the absence of any official details or updates, though, everyone has his own theory about the West Mesa bone collector, ranging from dirty cops to drug gangs. Regardless of the answer, it seems that both the killer—or killers—and Albuquerque have moved on. “Albuquerqueans don’t relate to the victims; they think they’re just a bunch of hookers and drug addicts,” Gibson said. “Police budgets are stretched thin. There’s so little money, and there are so many crimes. Investigating a ten-year-old crime where the police think that the victims had it coming—there’s just no incentive for that.”

PTAF in the "Boss Ass Bitch" music video

It’s the original insult. It needs no introduction, no following; it works as a standalone slur for just about any scenario. Whether someone jostles you on the subway, beats you at poker, or breaks your heart, all you need is one word: bitch.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Calling someone a bitch used to be pretty straightforward, but today—after many adaptations, reinventions, and attempts to reclaim the word—it's not totally clear what "bitch" really means anymore. There are bad bitches and basic bitches; rich bitches and ratchet bitches; even perfect bitches, as Kanye West once famously described Kim Kardashian. You can bitch-slap someone, wear a resting bitch face, or just tag the word onto the end of a sentence, as in, “I’m in Miami, bitch!” When the word “bitching” is used as a verb, it means to complain; when it’s used as an adjective, it means to be cool. To be “someone’s bitch” can mean either to be owned by that person or to be his or her BFF—unless you're someone's "prison bitch," which always means the former.

The word has been so splintered that it’s unclear where “bitch” stands today, and how—if at all—we should use it. Can feminists call themselves bitches? Can men call other women bitches? Do you think I'm a bitch? We traced the evolution of the word, and the women who took on its meaning, to try to figure out where “bitch” stands today.

The word "bitch" became Jesse Pinkman's catchphrase in Breaking Bad. Video via Axilrod

The Genesis: Lady Dogs
Everyone knows that once upon a time, a bitch was simply a lady dog. Trace its lineage in the Oxford English Dictionary, however, and you’ll find that it's been used as a derogatory term for women as early as the 15th century. Back then, it was considered demoralizing mostly because it suggested that the woman in question was promiscuous (an allusion to the fact that female dogs have so many puppies), according to English language historian Geoffrey Hughes. This is, of course, why "son of a bitch" had such a sting: It meant your mother was a whore. That said, “bitch” was far from the most popular insult in Ye Olde English. Dudes like Chaucer preferred the use of words like “whore” or “sluttish."

“Bitch” didn’t really catch on as the universal female insult until the 1920s, when all of a sudden its use ballooned. Between 1915 and 1930, the use of "bitch" in newspapers and literature more than doubled. What happened? Women's suffrage.

That’s right. That Susan B. Anthony bitch got the right to vote, and men were not happy about it. Soon after, "bitch" became an all-purpose insult for annoying women. Ernest Hemingway seemed to fall in love with the word, calling many of his female characters "bitch goddesses" and, after a falling-out with Gertrude Stein, gifting her a signed copy of Death in the Afternoon with the inscription "a bitch is a bitch is a bitch." He had a way with words, that Hemingway.

The slur had another surge of popularity in the 1970s, particularly in music. Miles Davis named his 1970 jazz album Bitches Brew (the title, purportedly, referred to the talent of the artists on the album); the Rolling Stones recorded “Bitch” in 1971; Elton John came out with “The Bitch is Back” in 1974. Then, at the crowning of Second Wave feminism, Jo Freeman wrote The Bitch Manifesto, which declared: “We must be strong, we must be militant, we must be dangerous. We must realize that Bitch is Beautiful and that we have nothing to lose.”

"Bitch," it seemed, was turning its face toward feminism.

The Rise: Da Baddest Bitch 
If “bitch” was to become a flagship for feminism, it first needed women to wear its badge. That didn’t happen right away, since “bitch” was still freighted with man-hating stigma—in some ways, increasingly so. Back in the day, "bitch" had only referred to a woman who was promiscuous; later, it evolved into an insult for a woman who had done you wrong. But by the 80s, "bitch" turned violent and misogynist, harboring a much darker tone than before.

Throughout the 80s, hip-hop lay claim to the word and promoted much of the violence associated with it. Slick Rick was among the first rappers to employ the word in the 1985 song “La Di Da Di,” where the “bitch” in the song is a jealous and violent woman. A year later, Ice-T rapped about beating up a “bitch” who talked back to him, in “Six in Da Morning.” The NWA song “Bitch Iz a Bitch” (1989) defined a bitch as a woman who was manipulative, conniving, and moneyhungry; Dr. Dre plainly described them as "hoes and tricks" in "Bitches Ain't Shit" (1992). The word was fraught with violent connotations, and the message was clear: Bitches needed to watch their step, because they had it coming for them.

Given all the bad PR, women weren’t really into self-labeling as "bitches" just yet. Queen Latifah flat-out rejected the term in her 1993 song “U.N.I.T.Y.,” which opens with the question: “Who you callin’ a bitch?” Meredith Brooks gave the word a softer interpretation in the song "Bitch" (1997), but still basically defined "bitchiness" as a symptom of PMS.

But then came Trina. Her 1999 not-quite-hit single, “Da Baddest Bitch,” recharacterized the term as a symbol of empowerment. A “bad bitch,” by her definition, was smart and powerful and—perhaps most important—in charge of her sexuality. With her hard beats and don't-give-a-fuck attitude, she took the word back within the very genre that had corrupted it in the first place.

Although she never used the word “feminism,” Trina interlaced many of the aims of the movement with her reinvented concept of the “bad bitch." Her lyrics were ahead of their time, with declarations like "it pays to be the boss" and "stay ahead of the game / save up and buy a condo." Best of all, Trina loved sex and she loved to rap about it. She would eventually release a song called “Nasty Bitch,” which described her sexual prowess in graphic detail; in "Da Baddest Bitch," she plainly stated, "If I had the chance to be a virgin again / I'd be fucking by the time I'm ten." In some ways, we could consider Trina a purist in how she defined "bitch," since she preserved the original meaning of the word: a woman who was excessively sexual. Except for that Trina outwardly embraced her sexuality, and in doing so, she turned the definition of "bitch" on its head.

The 90s were a time of critical rebranding for “bitch.” Women who had previously shied away from the word started to embrace it. Take Madonna, who had stated in an interview in 1991: “I am ambitious and I’ve worked hard to get where I am. I’ve made good by behaving bad. But I’m no bitch.” Just four years later, in another interview, Madonna totally reversed the sentiment: “I’m tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, OK.” (Nowadays, if you ask Siri to look up “unapologetic bitch,” she takes you straight to Madonna’s Wikipedia page.)

If "bitch" was ever to be reclaimed, it was during this era of "girl power." In 1996, feminists Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler founded Bitch magazine and, when asked how they chose the title, Zeisler explained: “It would be great to reclaim the word ‘bitch’ for strong, outspoken women, much the same way that ‘queer’ has been reclaimed by the gay community.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel echoed the sentiment in her 1998 book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, where she also aligned bitchiness with feminist goals: “I intend to do what I want to do and be whom I want to be and answer only to myself: that is, quite simply, the bitch philosophy.”

The Mainstreamification: It’s Britney, Bitch 
“Bitch” was everywhere by the turn of the millennium. The use of the word on television shows tripled between 1998 and 2007, which had much to do with the word's feminist facelift in the previous decade. But with mainstreamification comes misunderstanding.

A brief sampling of music in the early 2000s reveals rampant disagreement over the word’s definition: Jay-Z used the word as a stand-in for “woman” in “99 Problems” (2003). Rock band Buckcherry released “Crazy Bitch” (2006)—their most popular song to-date—about a woman who was bananas in bed. Busta Rhymes used the word affectionately in “I Love My Bitch” (2006). Kelis, of “Milkshake” fame, enthusiastically declared “I’m bossy! I’m the bitch y’all love to hate” the same year, in “Bossy.” There wasn’t much agreement on what a bitch was, but as Too $hort put it in 2006, “One thing’s for sure / You will get called a bitch / Bitch!”

Even Britney Spears, whose public image had thus far been sweet, demure, and innocent (but not that innocent) started to announce herself in 2007 by saying, “It’s Britney, bitch!” The word had gone totally mainstream.

All women—and sometimes, men—were eligible for the "bitch" label, in some form or other. It became an all-purpose salutation (as in, “what’s up my bitchezzzzzz?”). Gay men and Valley girls started affectionately calling their friends “betches.” People invented new iterations, like "beyotch" and "biznatch." It became a meme. Lady Gaga called herself a "free bitch, baby!" David Guetta’s summer club-banger in 2009 was “Sexy Bitch,” which didn’t seem to have any lyrical point whatsoever, other than to suggest that “every girl wanna be her” because she, the subject of the song, was a “sexy bitch.”

The word "bitch" was like a handful of Silly Putty—you could make it into anything you wanted. To be sure, it was still used to call out mean women (as Mean Girls taught us in 2004, if you're a "mean girl" then you're also a "bitch") and it was still used to promote the feminist cause. But sometimes, and increasingly so, the word didn't really mean anything at all.

The Fragmentation: Bad Bitches Only 
Since it had developed so many incongruous meanings, “bitch” briefly became controversial again in the late 2000s. Women had tried to reclaim it, but was it really OK to call a woman a bitch? Didn't the term still promote sexism, misogyny, and the patriarchy? Was “bitch” a form of linguistic violence?

There were certainly lots of people who thought so. In 2007, the New York City Council attempted to ban its usage, citing its “deeply sexist and hateful” connotation. A yet, a few years later in 2012, the Federal Communications Commission took the opposite stance and ruled to unbleep the word on television networks, suggesting that it was harmless.

Such contradiction! Such confusion! What did it all mean? Nobody knew. After Jay Z and Kanye West recorded the song “That’s My Bitch” on their 2011 album Watch the Throne, both artists seemed to have existentialist struggles with the word, bringing the "bitch" controversy back into the spotlight. There were rumors that Jay Z would swear off the word when Blue Ivy was born in 2012 (but then he was like, “Siiiiike! I’m a rapper!” and continued to use the word egregiously). In 2013, Kanye published a string of tweets debating whether or not using the word “bitch” was OK. (His final verdict? It's totally OK to call women "bitches"—and Kim is the perfect bitch.)

What remained problematic, however, was the way “bitch” related to power dynamics. When women have too much power, they’re called bitches as a way to knock them down a peg. But when men aren’t asserting enough power, they’re called bitches too. In the E-40 and Too $hort song "Bitch" (2010), we hear both versions of the word: E-40 tells men "don't act like a bitch" and criticizes men who have "feminine tendencies like a bitch," but also calls a woman who has sex with multiple men a "bitch."

It was clear that the word could sometimes refer to a woman laying claim to their own power, as in the 2012 PTAF song “Boss Ass Bitch,” which proudly declares “I’M A BOSS ASS BITCH, BITCH, BITCH, BITCH, BITCH, BITCH, BITCH.” (A year later, Nicki Minaj remixed it, because that beat is so, so good.) This was also seen in the Britney Spears song “Work Bitch,” which has motivated women everywhere to push through one more minute on the StairMaster. But it could also be an assertion of power over others—either from one woman to other women, as in Beyoncé’s song “Bow Down (Bitches);" a man to a man, as in Ludacris' "Move, Bitch;" or, most commonly, a man to a woman, as in Tyler the Creator's "Bitch Suck Dick," which suggests women should use their mouths for giving blowjobs, not talking.

According to Dr. Christopher J. Schneider, a sociologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada who has studied how "bitch" is used in rap music, the word is so damn popular—both in a negative and a positive light—because of its relationship to the patriarchy. "The dominant role and conditions of patriarchy help enable the widespread use and acceptance of the term—both as misogyny, and also as a form of empowerment used to counter patriarchy."

Nowhere is this clearer than in politics, where pretty much any woman in power is called a bitch. If Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel had a nickel for every time they were called "bitches," they'd have enough money to pay off the national debt in both of their countries. There was a real article about Janet Yellen earlier this year entitled “Janet Yellen: The Bitch of the Fed.” And poor Katie Couric—what the hell did she ever do to deserve the bitch title? But if you can’t change the word, change the conversation. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was apparently called a “bitch” all throughout law school, to which she responded: “Better bitch than mouse.” Call them bitches if you want, but bitches get stuff done.

The Present: Bitch Bad, Woman Good
These days, "bitch" has been used to death—to the point where all of its meaning has pretty much rubbed off, and it's honestly become a little boring. Oh, you're calling me a bitch? Yawn.

That said, most scholars, linguists, and women alike would agree that the word hasn't really been rehabilitated to mean something wholly positive. "I recognize that some women feel empowered by the word, but that doesn't mean they are empowered by it," said Dr. Sherryl Kleinman, a sociologist who wrote about the social harms of the word in 2009. Sheryl Sandberg underscored this idea in a recent op-ed for Cosmopolitan and started a campaign to Ban Bossy, which is basically like the PG-version of "bitch." In April, Duke University launched the "You Don't Say" campaign, where students argued against using the word because it "insists femininity is inherently negative." 

As Lupe Fiasco so eloquently put it: “Bitch bad, woman good, lady better.”

But perhaps the problem isn’t really so much what we call women—it’s how we treat women. "Bitch" has come a long way, sure, but perhaps the reason it hasn't been truly reclaimed is because conditions for women haven't really changed, either. If there ever comes a time when women aren't made to feel ashamed of their sexuality, when they don't have to fight for fair wages or the opportunity to speak in a meeting, when they don't constantly fear the possibility of violence or sexual assault, and when women feel that they have some say in the society that we live in, then "bitch" will shed that last layer of stigma for good. Words only make sense in context. When we see the day when the context is changed, then the core meaning of the word will change, too.

But has that day arrived yet? Bitch, please.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Chicagoans chant, "No justice, no peace!" and "Get out of our community!" at police at Roshad McIntosh's funeral. Photo via Ze Garcia-Puga

The story is a familiar one on the streets of Chicago. A black man runs from the cops. At some point he displays a handgun—or an object that looks like a handgun—and police, fearing for their lives, fire their own weapons, leaving him dead in the street. On August 24, the lives of two men ended in such fashion, according to authorities. But the official version of events surrounding the deaths of Roshad McIntosh, 19, and DeSean Pittman, 17, are now being questioned.

In the wake of high-profile killings of citizens by cops in New York, Missouri, and Louisiana, the two teens’ deaths have attracted more attention than such shootings might ordinarily, sparking vigils that in one case led to some of the attendees being arrested. In the process, an already strained relationship between police and the black community in which the teens lived got even more frayed.

“It’s a devastating feeling to bury your child,” said Reggie Pittman, DeSean’s father, when I spoke with him on Monday. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

At the vigil for Pittman, some of the mourners turned their grief to anger: One rammed a car into a police officer, and Pittman’s mother, Natasha Haul, was arrested for assaulting a cop. (She made bail the day before her son’s funeral thanks to $7,500 raised by activists and community members.) But participants say that the police were also responsible for their share of aggression. Max Suchan, an attorney representing Haul, said police “aggravated” the vigil attendees, and Pittman’s father, Reggie, told me that an officer disrespected the deceased and provoked the crowd.

“He walked to my son’s candles,” Reggie said of the cop. “He kicked my son’s candles and tore posters down and said, ‘Oh, that’s too fucking bad he’s dead.’”

Police—both in Chicago and all over the country—rarely apologize for shootings, and it’s even rarer that one results in an officer being disciplined. Since November of 2007, 176 people have been shot by Chicago police. All of those incidents were reviewed by Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the agency charged with investigating police misconduct—but the cops’ use of potentially lethal force was only found to be unjustified three times, the Chicago Tribune reported last month. (IPRA is now looking into the deaths of McIntosh and Pittman.)

“I find it ridiculous that in just three out of 176 you find something wrong,” said Quovabis Green, a community activist in McIntosh’s Lawndale West Chicago neighborhood.

The dismay and distrust felt by Green and Reggie Pittman are likely representative of the frustration felt by scores of Chicagoans who’ve lost loved ones gunned down by cops over the past few years. It’s not just the deaths, which are tragic enough, it’s that official police accounts don’t add up to what neighbors and witnesses say went down. Adding insult to injury, the families and the community at large haven’t been getting much of a response from the police department.

Reggie Pittman wants answers, but right now he’s getting answering machines. And that’s the way it’s likely to remain for at least the next year, IPRA spokesman Larry Merritt told me.

“Generally speaking, shooting investigations take 12 to 18 months at best,” Merritt said.

The night Pittman’s son died, two rookie officers said they heard shots and rounded a corner to find the teen standing over 22-year-old Amelio Johnson. DeSean was holding a gun that he had just used to shoot Johnson—who later died from his injuries—police said. The officers opened fire when Pittman refused to drop his weapon. In an official statement, the Chicago Police Department said one officer carried out the shooting. Reggie Pittman said his son took at least eight bullets to his chest that night. But the number of shots fired has not been released by police, and all media inquiries about Pittman’s and McIntosh’s deaths have been directed to IPRA, which has declined to comment.

The family couldn’t afford an independent autopsy, and following the young man’s burial had yet to secure a lawyer. Money is tight after DeSean’s funeral, but his father remains hopeful that a thorough investigation will reach the same conclusion he has.

“I feel they executed my son,” he said. 

Anti-police protesters at Roshad McIntosh's funeral. Photo via Ze Garcia-Puga

As for McIntosh, police have said the teen was being chased by officers when he stopped and pointed a gun at cops while in an “elevated position” and refused to drop it. But Green, the community activist, disagrees with that account. He and others, including a Lawndale resident who witnessed McIntosh’s death, said the Chicago Police Department’s familiar narrative of a weapon-wielding runner doesn’t add up.

Green says that McIntosh was actually hiding behind a dresser on a porch as police looked for him following a traffic stop. The cops fired some warning shots into the dresser, and McIntosh came out of hiding. The witness told Green that he pleaded with the cops not to shoot and that he could get McIntosh to come down, but they fired anyway, and the young men fell dead.

Residents of Lawndale have an especially contentious relationship with police, community activist Jose “Ze” Garcia-Puga told me. “People in the community describe it as an open-air prison,” he said. There have been notorious and shocking incidents of police brutality in the area, like the time in 2013 Glenn Evans, a veteran commander who oversees patrol operations there, allegedly stuck a gun in a suspect’s mouth. (He was recently relieved of duty and is being charged with aggravated battery.)

Three days after McIntosh’s death, about 1,000 protesters marched to the local CPD headquarters where Evans works demanding answers about the shooting and the Evans case. Garcia-Puga told me that in the course of the demonstration the cops pointed weapons in his face and asked he was there to start a riot. (He later complied a Storify about the shootings and the protest.)

Whatever happened to the two teens on the night of August 24 will likely remain a point of contention for months, if not years. Rumors that federal investigators were looking into the deaths of McIntosh and Pittman have since been rebuked. Attorney General Eric Holder, who visited Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown, probably won’t be coming to Lawndale anytime soon. And odds are that IPRA will find that the shootings of McIntosh and Pittman were justified, just as the agency usually does.

Meanwhile, the people in Chicago’s predominantly poor and black neighborhoods will probably continue to view the police not as public servants dedicated to keeping them safe, but as a hostile occupying army.

“You can’t back a person into a corner. That’s when they’re the most dangerous because they’re scared,” Green said. “The community at this point feels pressured by the police, and they feel like they’re against a wall. Like there’s nowhere to go from here.”

Justin Glawe is a freelance journalist based in Peoria, Illinois. He writes about crime there, and recently launched a reporting project that will address issues of child welfare on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation.

Photographs from the book courtesy of Klea McKenna

When Terence McKenna died in 2000, his belongings included his art, his books, and, among other things, an insect collection. In 2007, his library of more than 3,000 books was destroyed in a fire that started in a Quizno’s. The next year, his daughter, Klea McKenna, creatively preserved his insect collection by publishing a book called The Butterfly Hunter featuring 122 insects—119 butterflies/moths and three beetles or beetle-like insects—that Terence collected between 1969 and 1972.

The insects are photographed with the pieces of scrap paper that Terence used to wrap them in—magazine ads, newspaper articles, typewritten manuscript pages. Each photograph is an arrangement, and each page is a part of a narrative. As Klea, an artist and photographer, wrote in the book’s foreword:

The years of 1969 to 1972 were deeply formative for him; he had left home and childhood behind, but did not yet have a family or a public persona. He was deciding who he would be. As I examine this period I choose to accept the myth. I see it as filled with romance and gravitas, as though he is a character in a book, his chosen and serendipitous actions writing each twist in the plot.

Also in the book: maps showing Terence’s route through Southeast Asia and South America; a four-page story called “The Butterfly Guru” that was found “in Terence’s old digital files” dated “June 8, 1990, 10:42AM”; an image of Terence’s passport (6’2”, brown hair, brown eyes); and three photographs along with little notes that Terence (writing about himself in third person as “H.C.E.”—a Finnegans Wake reference) sent home from Asia.

The Butterfly Hunter may be ordered on Klea McKenna’s website. The following interview was done by email.

*

VICE: I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has been interested in butterfly collecting. It seems like a rare hobby. What were your impressions of butterflies and butterfly collecting/hunting growing up?
Klea McKenna:I knew from a very young age that it was something that had been important to my dad and was part of his life before we were born. It was consistent with his general obsession with Victorian-era explorers and naturalists. Close observation of nature was built into my family’s worldview by both of my parents, and so my brother and I were conditioned to think and see that way. But for me the practice of butterfly collecting always had an air of mystery, romance, and even darkness about it. In our house we had one big chest of glass drawers with butterflies that Terence had spread and mounted, but the vast majority of them (about 2,000) were still folded in their original scraps of newspaper and tucked into this ancient looking trunk. I don’t think they’d been opened since he caught them. My mom remembers that back in the 70s when he was still collecting he had become quite squeamish and even guilt-ridden about the act of killing them and that’s what had led him to stop collecting, and probably kept him from opening that trunk for many years. When I was about nine or ten years old he saw that I was interested and trained me in the basics of how to spread and mount them, so for the first time I got a glimpse into that strange treasure trove. It was a special activity we shared for a while.

Did you—or do you now—know what the hunting process was like for Terence? There’s a photo of him in your book in all white clothing, carrying a deep, white net attached to a six-foot or so pole. I’m curious how the butterflies and the four beetle-seeming insects that are also in your book were captured and killed and preserved. I imagine Terence, whom I’ve read was 6’2”, strategically waving the long pole around in the foreground of a waterfall.
Yes, it’s sort of a romantic scene to imagine, but also very comical. He had had a fascination with the Victorian naturalists and explorers since he was a kid, particularly Alfred Russel Wallace (whose collection of Amazonian specimens famously caught fire and sunk into the ocean while in transit back to Europe). So for Terence to embody that persona, take on the look and dress and methods of those fellows, was in part practical, but it was also a bit of theater. He was playing a role. He was very self-aware of his own legacy, particularly when he was young, as though in living his life he was consciously authoring the story of his life. During that period he would type little narrative captions on the back of his snapshots that referred to himself in the third person (and with a pseudonym). Now, to me, it seems like a kind of youthful naiveté, but also charmingly theatrical. We all play various roles throughout our lives; he just chose such an unlikely one.

As for the actual collection method, I don’t know all the details of it, but I do know that it wasn’t random, he wasn’t just catching whatever he found. He was seeking particular species and going to locations where he thought he would find those. He primarily collected in Indonesia and Colombia, and way off the beaten path. He really educated himself on Lepidoptera, and, as we know, he had the kind of mind that could retain incredible detail, so he applied that skill to this pursuit as well. He then folded each specimen into a piece of paper and wrote on it the exact location and date of where he had caught it. It’s this information that allowed me to map his travels all these years later.

As a child, growing up in an environment that—much more than the average household, I imagine—supported and featured “close observation of nature,” what kind of hobbies or interests did you develop?
Both our parents were ethnobotanists of sorts, so observing nature closely was a given. It was drilled into us to examine and decipher what we saw around us, particularly during the early years when we lived “off-the-grid” on the Big Island in Hawaii. But actually, I wanted to be a dancer and I danced quite seriously well into my late teens. I remember at about age 12 telling myself “my parents and my brother are nature people, but I’m not, I’m about people and culture and cities.” It must have been a way of trying to differentiate myself from my family, to individuate. But around that age I also got into photography and visual art, which ultimately took over and led me back, via abstraction, to the natural world and now, of course, my work is all about it. My mom and my brother both have always made art as well. So really we are all cut from the same cloth, it’s unavoidable.

While creating this book—and the interactive photographic installation that preceded this book—did you gain any new perspectives on your father, the world, or butterflies?
Absolutely. I began this project in 2008, so eight years after Terence died. I can see now, that on a personal level it really was my way of finally mourning him. I had been 19 when he died and in the throws of all kinds of personal turmoil, so I think it took me that long to get to a place where I was ready to fully process it. The act of sifting through 2,000 of these hand-folded envelopes and insects, and then handling them and photographing them, felt like a sort of reenactment; the mirror image of what he had done 40 years earlier. I’ve always seen this project as a collaboration between he and I, so it felt as though there was a bit of communication happening across the decades. I did this work very methodically, for two hours every morning, taking advantage of the natural light in my studio. I was struck by the incredible poetry that can be created by chance and by the temporal parallels between nature and culture. The bizarre combination of these fragile bodies with fragments of headlines from that volatile era (1968-1972) certainly taught me about the parallel narratives present in any history, and about art and how image and text can combine to evoke emotions far bigger than what they represent.

Can you share a little about the photo installation in 2008 that was the first iteration of The Butterfly Hunter?
Yes. The first form The Butterfly Hunter took was a gallery installation of 105 photographs of the specimens and the papers they had been wrapped in. I had sifted though all 2,000 of the specimens, photographed about 400, and edited it down to these 105. So really the creative process was one of editing and finding a way to let the strangeness of this material speak for itself. They were printed at a size that was true to life and installed in a giant grid, 25 feet long and just barely pinned to the wall, dangling so that as you walked by they would sort of flutter and shift from the air movement. I wanted you to feel the scale of this archive, but also feel that it was temporary and fleeting rather than enshrined. While making this work I had thought a lot about preservation and what it takes to preserve a rare species, a paper image, the memory of a person—it all seemed wrapped up in this material. I think that often our instinct is to covet something we want to preserve, hide it away and keep it to ourselves. But there’s a burden in this action and I was looking to let go rather than hold on. So in that first exhibition I gradually gave away every photograph in the installation to gallery visitors. People took their choice very seriously and I had great conversations with them about why they chose the one they chose. It became a sort of interactive performance and it was my hope that this gesture of dispersal would lift the burden off of me and find a more collective form of preservation. It felt great. I can still say that it was the most pleasurable exhibition I’ve ever had.

The following summer I reworked the material into book form and published the artist book The Butterfly Hunter as a different way to share the archive. Ultimately I plan to place the actual specimens with a natural history museum or institution, but I have yet to find the right fit.

What were some of the reasons that people gave for their choices?
They were mostly personal. They remembered where they had been the day they had seen that same newspaper headline, that sort of thing. It’s interesting how the news unites us, creates a collective memory.

This seems to be your only project that involves images of creatures and people, a family member, and also a public figure, and it involves all four of those. I’m curious how you view The Butterfly Hunter in the context of your other work.
Most of my work consists of photograms; I use analog light-sensitive methods and am deeply invested in the physics of light and a very hands-on kind of material experimentation that often results in near-abstraction. But it’s all rooted in the observation of nature, risk-taking and a kind of visual alchemy. The Butterfly Hunter was different because the material that generated it was so unlikely and came to me in such a unique way, it’s not often that you inherit a trunk filled with exotic insects and little scraps of history, so in that sense it was an anomaly that couldn’t be repeated. That said, it has certainly informed the work I’ve made since and there are several common, if subtle, threads: the close, almost meditative observation of nature; working in a method that forces me to go out into the landscape to inconvenient places and interact with the elements much the way a natural scientist would; constantly subjecting my process and its results to chance and risk. And on a very simple level, many of my photograms involve intricately folding the paper before it’s exposed to light. I can’t help but think this fixation on folding might have started with all the unfolding I did while making The Butterfly Hunter. To fold something is to make it more complex, more concealed and more material. It’s a simple act that turns an image into an object and reminds us that every photograph is just a piece of paper, ephemeral and decaying.

I like this: “To fold something is to make it more complex, more concealed and more material.” What are you working on now or next?
My solo show, No Light Unbroken, just opened at Von Lintel Gallery in Los Angeles and will be up through October 14. It includes a lot of new work from the last two years, so it’s exciting to put it out there and see it all together in one space. As for what’s next, I always have a backlog of ideas that I’m mulling over and testing to see what floats to the surface. When I’m busy working on one project I keep a running list of ideas, so that when I reach a lull I have material to pull from. That said, my process is so driven by the possibilities and limitations of light sensitive material that I really have to dive in and just try things, get my hands dirty, it can be dangerous for me to get too wrapped up in preconceiving a piece.

In addition to making new work I would actually love to exhibit The Butterfly Hunter again. I have new ideas for how I’d like to change and expand the installation if it were shown in a public space or museum. It’s something I like to think about in the middle of the night. But I’m in no rush; I’m waiting for the perfect context.

*

Next week in this column I’ll interview Klea’s brother, Finn, who was born in 1978. Finn’s internet presence is currently limited, from what I’ve found, to some photographs and a few peripheral appearances in “Terence McKenna on the Natch" (1999).

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Image via YouTube.
The Canadian government’s decision to send up to a hundred Canadian military “advisers” to Iraq in the midst of the Islamic State’s brutal advance through the region is currently raising more questions than delivering answers.

The choice to call them “advisers” is particularly curious when you consider who they actually are—Canadian Special Operations Forces.

Based in rural Petawawa, Ontario, The 700-strong Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR) has been tasked to do the job. Here’s a breakdown of who they are and what they can do.

These elite soldiers are basically a mix between the United States’ Army Special Forces—the Green Berets—and the 75^th Ranger Regiment, a highly-trained unit of shock troops whose job is, among others, to conduct quick raids on enemy positions—what is called in military jargon “direct action,” or drop from the sky and quickly seize enemy airfields as they did in Afghanistan in 2001 during Operation Rhino. The Green Berets, while able to perform direct action missions as well, are usually tasked with training and advising foreign troops, ranging from allied militias to standing armies.

As with most of their missions, details about CSOR’s mission in Iraq are classified but, in all likelihood, seems to aim towards the latter—training and mentoring military units who are fighting against ISIS terrorists along with their American counterparts who have been on the ground for several weeks. They already have on several occasions and have gained a lot of experience over the years. They trained Afghan National Army Special Forces. They mentored Jamaican SWAT teams. They were deployed to Mali in 2012 to help train Malian forces.

According to the Canadian Special Operations Command’s own literature, special ops units rarely work independently—they’re usually mixed together with one of them leading, be it CSOR or Joint Task Force 2, Canada’s counter-terrorist unit. But one of the key words that defines special ops is flexibility, so CSOR could, and likely is, operating on their own.

Political spin

The Canadian government keeps insisting that this is not a combat mission, but the Opposition still wants a debate and vote on the matter. Last Monday, New Democratic foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar asked why should Canada send troops to Iraq and, most importantly, how could Canadian soldiers train and advise hardcore Kurdish fighters also known as Peshmerga, Kurdish for “those who defy death."

But years of being untested in battle combined with recruiting problems has turned the once-feared warriors into what can be described as a “checkpoint army.” Recruits come more often from cities than the mountains and a critical number of veterans who fought against Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish troops for years have long since traded their AK-47s either for a cell phone or a walking stick. Often considered to be the key strategic ally in the region against the Islamic State, they can no longer face the threat of the Islamic state on their own. Mostly equipped with old, Soviet-era weapons, they stand no chance against ISIS fighters geared with modern weapons looted from fallen Iraq and Syrian forces or bought with their $2 billion dollar war chest.

A unit like CSOR could do wonders—teaching them advanced weapons handling and marksmanship techniques, modern small-unit combat tactics, combat driving lessons. They can also provide intelligence about the enemy that Iraqi and Kurdish forces don’t have due to lack of resources—special ops units are highly skilled in reconnaissance and, most importantly, handling local information sources, called “human intelligence” or HUMINT.

Still, the government is facing critics about the 30-day mission they wish to give to CSOR. The NDP asked for not just a debate, but also a vote on the matter. Yet, deployment of special operations units never requires any such measure, as most of their missions are covert. As University of Ottawa professor Philippe Lagassé told me: “No military deployments require votes, legally speaking." But it seems transparency about this particular operation led the political opposition to criticize the ISIS initiative and to withdraw their support. 

This act of resistance could prove politically costly for the NDP. With a federal election coming, handing the Conservative majority government an opportunity to appear strong by easily passing a vote on a small-scale, non-combat military operation to take stand against a widely hated enemy, is not likely to end in the orange party’s favour. 

They're strong and menacing, but do Americans need to go after them? Photo courtesy of VICE News

At this point the Islamic State (IS) has much of the Western world in a perpetual state of apoplectic shock. Everyone from fashionistas to Mia Farrow to the old white men who set US foreign policy in Washington are terrified, and they want to do something about it. Once a ragtag band of jihadists, IS has conquered generous swaths of Iraq and Syria, and maybe more important, they look scary, wield machetes, and behead American journalists on YouTube. They also have a fondness for ethnic warfare that inches toward genocide and long to establish an Islamic caliphate—which naturally inspires hatred and fear all over the world.

The question is, after the disaster that was post-invasion Iraq, should America be attempting to solve the Mesopotamian quagmire again? According to President Obama, the answer is maybe—he'll be giving a speech Wednesday night outlining his strategy. But given that his administration has already launched airstrikes against IS in Iraq, it seems like ground troops might be an inevitable next step. The good news for doves (of which there seems to be an ever-decreasing supply in DC, especially now that Rand Paul is on board with destroying ISIS) is that one anti-war Democrat from Florida remembers all too well what happened the last time neoconservatives decided Iraq needed saving. Congressman Alan Grayson sent a letter to the US ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco last week with a simple ask: pony up a few thousand troops each so we can take down the bad guys. But the "we" in this case would not involve non-Muslim Westerners, potentially reducing the backlash that cowboy-style intervention tends to engender.

I talked with Grayson about his plan, why the same people who got us into Iraq still have so much influence over foreign policy, and whether the hysteria over the Islamic State makes it easier for elites to avoid dealing with climate change. Here's what he had to say.

VICE: Everyone from celebrities to think tanks to the president seems to be preparing for a war with IS, but is it really an American problem?
Alan Grayson: There is sort of a "You first!" problem here, which is that there are many countries that feel something should be done about this, but they don't want to be the first to step forward and do it. We've developed a sort of cultural dependency throughout the Middle East among our Arab allies. They expect us to solve their problems for them. I think we have to try to break that habit. We've already been involved in numerous wars in the Middle East over the past several decades, and often create new problems with those wars.

Are you hearing about this from voters in your district?
I had a meeting in Orlando with some constituents yesterday, and I asked them what was the most important issue to them. One said she didn't want to see any more beheadings on her TV. That indicates that concern about what's happening in Iraq and Syria has now broken through to the general public. Usually people are preoccupied with their own concerns and their own lives. But the sheer brutality of what IS has done to two Americans now has made it clear to many people that something needs to be done about this. The problem is the president said he didn't have a plan yet—his words, not mine. I felt somebody needed to do something to develop a coherent plan.

Explain the logic behind getting Arab countries to take on IS.
I think it's obvious that a regional military group composed of soldiers who share the same language as the people on the ground in Syria and Iraq, have the same religion, and understand the culture and the nuances of local life there are more likely to be successful than, say, US forces were occupying Iraq for almost a decade. And by successful I mean to reach a conclusion that everyone regards as a genuine peace. These are countries with military capabilities—we're not talking about Mauritania here. Every one of these is a predomianntly Sunni country, because we're talking about reclaiming and pacifying Sunni territory in Iraq. The Shiite-run army of Iraq has found it impossible to do so. I believe Sunni fighters from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and so on, are more likely to be accepted by the local population than either Shiite soldiers from Baghdad or, for that matter, US fighters. Somebody had to get the ball rolling, so I did.

We're hearing from a lot of the same voices that were loudly calling for war with Iraq in 2002 and 2003. What does it say about our democracy that they still wield tremendous influence?
The military-industrial complex is extremely powerful. Clearly, there are neoconservatives who desperately want us to be in one war, two wars, five wars—the more the merrier as far as they're concerned. And in fact it's an identifiable group: We see them on our TVs from time to time, and they pop up frequently on Sunday morning news shows. They have never learned from their mistakes. Last year, those people wanted us to bomb Syria to help IS, now they want us to bomb IS to help Syria. Think this through: Last year, these very same people wanted us to bomb the command-and-control structure of the Syrian military that was controlling chemical weapons. If we had done so, those chemical weapons would have fallen into the hands of the opposition, and specificialy IS. So today we wouldn't be talking about beheadings, we'd be talking about IS conducting chemical warfare! 

Do you worry that IS—the novel threat of the year—is distracting from more existential problems?
It's postponing what we have deserved now for decades, which is our peace dividend. With the decline and fall of the Soviet Union and the absence of any existential threat to the United States, people expected we could wind down our military to the point where it was not consuming any more of the economy than it does in, say, Europe. But it didn't happen. And it didn't happen because of 9/11. Now bin Laden is dead. We seem to have figured out how to avoid major terrorist attacks within our borders, and yet we are still spending half a trillion dollars a year on our military. And I am concerned that IS—which does not in any sense threaten the 50 states—that the bright new shiny object is once again keeping us from repairing our economy. We have major imbalances in the economy, and the fact that we spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined is one of them.

Polling has shown Democrats see climate change as more significant threat than the Islamic State. Does starting a new project in the Middle East make it harder to deal with that problem?
I remember candidate Obama telling us all in 2008, "You have to be able to work on more than thing at a time if you want to be president of the United States." And I think that principle applies well here. The fact that people want to take action to avenge two dead Americans is not to the exclusion of taking action to save the planet. He's got two years and two months to figure it out.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

All photos via Kadeem Ellis.
“I’m not able to answer the church bells right now. I’m in a sermon,” the throaty, voicemail message of Carlie Ritch, aka Mizz Barbie Bitch, informs me. Her voice sounds exactly the way a cat’s would if it could speak English.

I’d been trying to get in touch with the dominatrix and self-proclaimed high priestess who is running for Mayor of Toronto for a couple of weeks at this point, and I wonder if I’m imagining her strange answering machine message. Then I realize no, we’re talking Toronto politics here, where reality televison-esque characters reign, and policy often seems to come second.

Now that everyone’s favourite horse-riding dreadhead Sarah Thompson has just dropped out, Ritch can now claim the title of least conventional candidate, a far cry from the be-suited John Torys and David Sonackis of the race. For the record, it’s not Ritch’s job as a dom that makes her so unconventional, it’s her ideas, as I was to discover when she called me back. But in a city where the sordid life of our mayor has become a musical, she’s not too out of place.

Anyway, once we finally got on the phone, here’s what she had to say.

VICE: Given your status as High Priestess, tell me from the beginning, how your church came to be.
Carlie Ritch: I was raised Catholic, made all my sacraments, was confirmed, everything. And I was denied absolution when I went to Montreal to Notre Dame. It was Labour Day weekend many years ago, and—I’ll never forget this—I put on a Goth festival, and a coffin almost fell on me. We were loading it off the stage, and it nearly almost killed me! It grazed my back, everything. That was right before I went to Montreal.

I should have known something was up right then and there. [I went to mass in Montreal] and I look over and see this very ornate confessional, with a hot pink cross. I said ‘Father, it’s been a while since my last confession. Here are my sins.’ I said I don’t know if I believe in any god. Why does god make somebody suffer? I see so much sickness. I said that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, that he lived, and that Mary Magdalene went on to have his children, and they had a tomb and he had up to nine kids. Just stuff like this.

And he goes: ‘Ay yi yi yi yi yi yi! Your sins are greater than this! How can you ask for forgiveness if you don’t even believe in God?’ So, yeah. Denied absolution.  And because I’m not married, I lied to the priest to get my children baptized. If God loves all creatures, great and small, should God not love my children? I merely pointed out some very valid points, I must say.

Ok… So what does your church look like?
No matter who you are, in any way shape or form, you will be allowed to come to my church. As different as you want to be, you can be different, because we’re supposed to accept people for who they are. We’re supposed to be equals. It’s in the Ten Commandments, but that’s not the case at all. How come the pope is not equal? Go to my church’s website. It’s run out of my condo. I’ve got altars, and all kinds of stuff. In my church, here’s the difference: God is supposedly a man. Not in my church. It’s a woman. That’s right. It’s the woman that gives birth and that bears you. So they should be the most supreme in that way.

Of course. Carlie, tell me a bit about your mayoral platform.
We could actually have rooftops that had solar panels. There all these little nuances that make it so hard for solar panels. You realize that it’s rather expensive but you’re like, why don’t more people get into that market? [Laughs] It’s a simple solution.

Why don’t they make them a little less expensive, open up a few more branches of them, and that will control the hydro? Even if they had some rooftop garden, something that gave back to the environment, rather than it being such a waste of space… Like, I just don’t get it. I’ve lived in one of those condos down on Fort York, and I just don’t understand why they’re not greener.

There’s nothing in place to enforce child support. Why? It’s funny that that’s the only debt that can be exonerated. You can’t exonerate a student loan, you can’t exonerate anything like that. But you can exonerate child support, you can wipe it off. These are issues that I just don’t get.

Somebody actually commented on my interview with the National Post saying, ‘Oh that sounds like a good idea, going after parents for child support.’ And she goes, but that’s [a provincial responsibility]. And I’m like, 'OK, provincial turns around and they say what the parents should be paying!' … There’s no government that actually enforces it.

We don’t have any nutrition programs in our schools. You know we’re raising a bunch of little monsters.

The transit situation is, in addition to children’s nutrition, one of the most fucked up things about Toronto right now. No one can get anywhere, no one can move while they’re on the streetcar… What do you think should be done to alleviate that?
I’ll tell you. We definitely need subways, and we definitely need above ground transportation. We need both. If we wait for just a subway line, we’ll be waiting too long, and it’s too costly. Stations like Kennedy should be extended to go east. OK? And then eventually extended out further, like say Morningside or something like that, you know?

It’s something we don’t have enough research on. It’s a good idea, but we don’t have all the facts on it. There’s so much they’re shrouding, and so much they’re not telling us and making public. Let’s face it: I’m not privy to that fabulous four information. We’re only hearing what little snippets we hear in the news. We’re not hearing, you know, the nitty gritty. So I think more information needs to be exposed to us.

Everything should be done. The Gardiner, it’s falling apart!

Right!?
It’s a joke. We need to reconstruct the Gardiner! And we need to get resources. If we actually went after deadbeat parents, let me tell you something. We would make enough money to pay the deficit ten times over. And the amount of money owed to childcare is astounding.

So speaking of work, you’re well-known for working as a dom. How do you think that will come into play in this kind of stuffy political climate as we lead into Election Day?
Let me tell you, a dom stands for absolute, complete authority over bad behaviour. We stand for respect. We actually have morals. That’s something our city has gotten away from. We’re just bickering and fighting, and we are mudslinging, but nobody’s actually getting into the ring and saying: ‘OK, let’s slug it out. Let’s duke it out, and we’re going to come out with one absolute winner.’

So at the end of the day, what do you think is a more powerful role? Being a mayor or being a dom?You know what, to be honest, I think it’s to be a dominatrix. You have total power over that person. You have complete and utter control over your background, your setting, what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to do. Keep in mind people have their guidelines. If people don’t like feet, I’m not going to put my feet in their face, right? But at the same time, it’s a whole fantasy right? It’s written by you, illustrated by you, constructed by you, and thought out by you. It’s complete and utter control in every possible way. You don’t have control over the weather, but in your dungeon, you do have control over that.

Whether it’s going to be too cold or too hot—it’s called a thermostat. You know that partner is a willing partner, to submit to you in every way they can, with total control given to you.

If you take a mayor, you’ve got 44 councillors. So you have to have 44 votes to yea or nay or anything. Well, I don’t have that. See what I mean? You gotta think about it. There’s two words for that: ball gag. You don’t have to worry about anything. That’s what it is.

You have way more control being a dominatrix, you have the absolute power, authority, everything. Not so with the mayor, right?

@sarratch

Skateboarding has a long and sordid history ever since Marty McFly ripped the handlebars off a kid's scooter in 1959 and invented the sport. Skateboarding is an insane thing to do because it involves speeding wrecklessly around cities on a flat wooden board, with all your brittle body parts exposed and ready to be shattered. Basically, anyone who skates is a luntatic. Thankfully, lunatics do things like spit blood on their bathroom walls and 50-50 grind off the Grand Canyon, so they make for interesting film subjects.

Today, VICE Films is bringing you All This Mayhem, the story of two legendary skaters and wild men, brothers Tas and Ben Pappas, from the pinnacle of the sport to their ultimate undoing. Crammed with archival footage taken through the brothers' lives and paired with interviews with other skateboarding stars, All This Mayhem follows the brothers' meteoric rise to number one and two in the world through their feuds with Tony Hawk, urestrained drug use, and eventual fall from stardom. It's a tragic story of Shakespearean proportions.

FilmBuff (in parternship with VICE) is releasing the film theatrically and across whatever On Demand platform tickles your fancy—Apple App Store, Amazon Instant Video, Google Play, XBox Video, you name it. 

Check it out iTunes and hop over to the official website for more information, download links, and select theaters where the film is playing. Don't miss it.

A familiar protest sign in Detroit. Photo courtesy via Justice for Renisha McBride 

We still don’t know how or why 19-year-old Renisha McBride wound up on Theodore Wafer’s suburban front porch on November 2, 2013. But the rest of the events of that night aren’t in dispute: At around 1 AM, McBride, a black woman from Detroit, crashed her car half a mile down the road from Wafer’s home in Dearborn Heights. Hours later, at 4:30 AM, she was banging on Wafer’s door. The 55-year-old airport maintenance worker responded by grabbing his shotgun and firing through the screen door, shooting McBride in the face and killing her.

“I would call it the worse mistake of your life, but I don’t know if you can use the word mistake to describe a murder,” Wayne County Judge Dana Hathaway told Wafer last week, moments before sentencing him to at least 17 years in prison for McBride’s death.

The choice of words was significant: Throughout the trial, and even at last week’s sentencing hearing, Wafer’s defense attorney Cheryl Carpenter tried to convince the court that he had acted not out of malice but out of self-defense, making the crime more akin to manslaughter than murder. "He has never been so afraid in his life. He was in an extreme emotional state,” Carpenter told the court Wednesday. “It is Mr. Wafer's state of mind that you need to look at.”

Ultimately, that distinction—between manslaughter, which lacks malice, and second-degree murder, which is unpremeditated but intentional—became the centerpiece of the trial. Jurors were asked to consider whether Wafer “honestly and reasonably” believed that McBride presented an imminent threat to his life; in other words, whether his fear of a 19-year-old black woman pounding down his door was a credible reason for shooting that woman in the face.

The case draws obvious parallels to the February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black 17-year-old whose killer, George Zimmerman, claimed to have acted out of fear and self-defense. On the stand, Wafer described McBride’s banging on his door as “unbelievable,” testifying that, terrified and groggy, he had reached for his loaded shotgun. Crime was rising in his neighborhood, Wafer said, and he had loaded his shotgun because he didn’t want to “cower” in his own home. Using evidence from an autopsy that showed McBride had been drunk at the time of her death, Wafer’s defense implied that she had been belligerent enough to incite fear.

But while Zimmerman was ultimately acquitted of both second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, thanks to Florida's Stand Your Ground law, the court was not swayed in the McBride trial. Last month, the jury decided that the shooting was intentional, and that Wafer’s fear, though probably real, was unreasonable. He was convicted on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter, as well as a related felony weapons charge.

At Wednesday’s sentencing, Carpenter made a tearful plea for leniency, reminding the judge that the crime was not premeditated and arguing that 17 years in prison would amount to a life-sentence for Wafer, whose health is failing. Wafer also asked the court for mercy, and offered a brief apology to the McBride family. “Parents, family, friends of Renisha McBride, I apologize from the bottom of my heart,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I can only hope and pray that somehow you can forgive me. My family and friends also grieve from my fear that caused the loss of a life that was too young to leave this world. For that I’ll carry guilt and sorrow forever. And I ask the court and your honor for mercy.” 

In the end, though, the judge was unrelenting, sentencing Wafer to 15 to 30 years for second-degree murder, a concurrent 7 to 15 years for manslaughter, and 2 years for felony with a firearm. “Although the evidence clearly showed that Miss McBride made some terrible choices that night, none of them justified taking her life,” Hathaway said. “I do not believe that you're a cold-blooded murderer or that this case had anything to do with race or that you're some sort of monster. I do believe that you acted out of some fear but mainly anger and panic. An unjustified fear is never an excuse for taking someone's life. So what do we have? One life gone and one life ruined."

The statement succinctly sums up the tragic, and presumably obvious, lesson of McBride's death: People can’t just shoot guns whenever they feel scared. More so than race, the case raises profound questions about gun control, gun ownership, and our increasingly loose definition of “self-defense.” Would Wafer have gone out and murdered someone in cold blood? Probably not. But when faced with a supposed threat, he went first for the gun rather than follow any of the appropriate channels of law and order designed to keep us all from killing one another.

While Wafer’s attorney has announced the 55-year old plans to appeal the case, for the moment the McBride family is satisfied with the court’s ruling. “I thank God the judicial system worked,” McBride’s older sister Jasmine said in her tearful public comment. 

Taking photos at Fashion Week sucks. From an objective standpoint, it's pretty formulaic: You take your fancy DSLR, head to the show early, crouch in the photo pit, and take head-on, head-to-toe portraits of various weenies wearing things. All the while, the guy next to you who works for some other magazine/media company/blog essentially takes the same picture.

So in the spirit of youthful rebellion (and continuity) we sent out-of-bounds photographer Nick Sethi to document backstage at Hood by Air's latest showing. And since HBA is known for sending pipe-laden jackets, snowboard boots, and crutches down the runway, he figured it'd be cool if he left his DSLR at home and take his iPad instead. We didn't disagree.

For more wacky photos of Travis Scott, Timberland Foamposites, plexiglass guillotines, and Great Danes visit Nick's website and follow him on Twitter.