Now that summer is in full swing, it's easy to forget what it was like to not to have massive pit stains that spread to your entire shirt after 30 seconds outside in the sun. Luckily, our resident street photographer Vito Fun managed to squeeze in a few shots during New York's wet spring months, reminding us of the good, not-gross times we had back then.

@VitoFun

More from Vito Fun:

Vito Fun's Winter Photo Dump 2013

Superstorm Sandy, Six Months Later

Vito Fun Finally Got Around to Sending Us His SXSW Photos

Their empire extends much further than payphones. via.

The often drab landscape of Canadian media changed in a big way on Friday, after Bell Media purchased Astral Media in a deal worth $3.2 billion. Bell already owns HBO Canada, MTV, Much Music, Discovery, and a whole bunch of other stations. Now they have control of TMN, Teletoon, six other specialty channels, 77 more radio stations, two more over-the-air TV stations, and Astral's out-of-home advertising agency. At this point, Bell controls 22.6% of the French-language television market and 35.8% of the English-language market.  While Bell has always been a gigantic monolith of a company, this deal truly sheds light on just how much of the Canadian media is in their hands.

Bell and Astral first announced their plans to merge in March 2012, a proposal that was rejected by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, because it meant an absurd amount of Canadian media would be in Bell's hands. That deal would have given Bell a 45% stake of English-language TV viewership and 35% of French-language viewership. Bell's competitors and public interest groups voiced their concerns to the CRTC, because what the fuck, right? And the deal was rightly refused.

But Bell quickly came back with revisions, planning to sell off 11 of their TV properties and 10 radio stations, including three of their own if the deal was approved. They also promised to invest $246.9 million into original Canadian radio and TV content. Imposing a few of its own restrictions, like requiring Bell to keep all of its local TV stations plus the two acquired from Astral open till 2017, about a week ago, the CRTC said sure, why not, and gave Bell’s deal a green light.

Here’s why you should care: monopolistic business practices in the thrilling world of Canadian media means more money is being taken out of our pockets in exchange for content and subscription services that can maintain a crappy status quo, because there is no adversary or challenger to keep things fresh. Canada is sorely lacking a diverse array of voices in our media, as anyone who has turned on a television in Canada knows. We can barely produce watchable television in the first place, and this deal is another step backwards into mediocrity.

I spoke to a former MTV Canada employee who experienced Bell's takeover of CTV in 2010, with MTV included in the deal, to find out what the Bell-Astral merger could mean for the many new stations now under Bell's control and what it’s like to create content in a Bell owned environment. For obvious reasons, he's chosen to remain anonymous, so let's call him Robert.

According to him, the creative environment at MTV was a lot more energetic and progressive before the Bell takeover: “The culture was good – it was a really rogue type of culture. Every TV we had in the office had Much Music on, and they were the enemy. That was our goal: to outdo them, to be cooler than them or be more out there.” It was more of an “inmates running the asylum kind of vibe,” he says, recalling his early days.

Things started to change at MTV when CTV bought Chum, owner of Much Music. MTV, who had been competing against Much since their inception, were now under the same ownership as their long-time rival.

“Content-wise, I think there was a challenge to not have an enemy anymore. We didn't have Much Music to fight. That was the moment when having specific agendas and goals started to get watered down,” Robert says.

The day Bell took over, MTV wasn't high on their list of priorities. “There were a lot of speeches, a lot of new bosses that came in. They didn't really come to us because we were that low on the totem pole.” he says. “They didn't say much to us. You kind of got the impression they just wanted to own the content.”

But this seemingly hands-off approach didn't mean Bell would let everything slide. The company's culture allowed for less pushing of boundaries with the “weird, the sexual, and the crass,” says Robert. “I think Bell's a little more boring, and your boss's boss's boss doesn't want to hear about customers complaining about that sort of thing, whereas it used to be that your boss's boss was the highest up at the company.” This culture of executive influence is clearly not good for editorial independence, and it is now the norm for most television outlets in the country.

Content continued to suffer at MTV as people, including Robert, left. “That's a large part of why morale is so low and why people's view of these channels is low—they're inconsistent, all over the place, and the people making [the content] don't feel good about it. It's a bit of a mass exodus waiting to happen. Nobody is getting raises, no one is getting hired.”
“All the most talented people I know have left. Some of them are still inside, but most of them are about to leave,” says Robert, although he's optimistic about the future of the independent producer as more people leave television in favour of creating online content. “I think all the best stuff you used to see on those channels, you're seeing on places like VICE now.”

Even before this deal was approved, Canada already had the most concentrated media ownership in the G8, with over 86% of Canadian cable and satellite distribution controlled by just four large conglomerates—Bell, Shaw, Rogers, and Quebecor.  

The more concentrated a media market is, the more power owners have to bump up prices. I spoke with   David Christopher of Open Media, a non-for-profit organization that advocates for open communication systems in Canada. “Costs of TV are likely to go up, and in order to make that affordable, people are increasingly being shuffled towards bundled packages, so they're forced to get their TV, their internet, their phone access from one conglomerate, which is certainly a bad thing because the cost goes up, and there is less choice in the marketplace.”

“It's certainly very disappointing – when the news first broke that it had been approved, we started hearing from Canadians across the country who'd been hoping the CRTC would take the opposite perspective,” he says.  
In general, David explains, the situation is worrying because control on so many different levels means, for example, that Bell can exempt its own content from download limits, stifling their competition. “These companies are acting as a dead weight on the economy.”

The guidelines by which the CRTC determined this acquisition wouldn't destroy Canadian media—the Diversity of Voices decision of 2008—are outdated and no longer make any sense. According to these guidelines, a company shouldn't have any more than 35% TV market (a number set by the Competition Bureau in 2003 for the banking industry), which is ridiculously high if we're trying to make sure the media is diverse. The 2008 decision also didn't anticipate just how vertically integrated these telecom companies would become, and five years later, the landscape has changed completely.

While it would have been great if the CRTC could have revisited their own standards that are supposedly in place protecting the diversity of voices in Canadian media, they didn’t. The centralization of power in this landscape has become even more swollen. But the problem extends beyond Bell and Astral: when there are only a handful of people controlling content, the media can no longer be seen as a democratic tool. That said, as YouTube and online video in general becomes more integrated into our lives—and people start watching online content in their living rooms—monopolistic deals like Bell’s will matter less and less. In the meantime, as Canadians are faced with below average Canadian content producers owned by increasingly few conglomerates with no real motivation to improve upon itself, we can't help but wonder how long viewers will keep tuning in.


More Canadian problems:

Canadians Should Be Concerned About the NSA and PRISM

I Woke Up and Calgary Was Flooded

Phony Abortion Clinics in Canada Are Scaring Women with Lies

Photos by Nate Miller

Some tours of LA stop in a sketchy industrial area called Vernon to show people the bucolic murals on the walls of a Farmer John pork-processing compound called Clougherty Packing Co. This is where the famous Dodger Dogs come from. They also convert pigs into stuff like morning sausage and sliced ham for various West Coast grocery-store chains.

When you see it from your car, the mural is a shock to the system. It’s clearly a slaughterhouse and covered with artwork that looks like the painted backgrounds from Hee Haw. Which is partly because the piece is an incomplete work called “Hog Heaven” by the TV-set painter Les Grimes, who died in a fall while finishing it in the 1960s. It has since been completed and retouched by painter Arno Jordan and other visionaries through the years at the request of Hormel Foods Corporation. It has also gone off the rails, sanity-wise.

These cartoony pigs are pretty close together, as I assume they really are on the other side of that wall. Though I'd imagine the 7,000 real pigs inside that building are probably smiling a lot less. 

One of the many painters who's taken a crack at the mural over the years had a tendency to make their faces much too human. Like this terrifying lil' guy. 

I appreciate the frankness, but the eyelids make me uncomfortable, like Station, the alien from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

The clumsiness of the artwork tells unintended stories. Here we see a guy in a pig-catching contest. It took me quite some time to realize it wasn't a guy wearing an ascot and a miniskirt, ramming a ladle up a pig’s ass.

When you’re admiring the mural, you can easily walk too far around one corner, and get surprised by the stench venting out of this wall. This building must be where the really unseemly stuff happens: it smelled like the diarrhea of a person who eats nothing but pennies and sushi. 

Most of the time you’re near the plant, though, it just smells like hot dogs, which calls to mind pleasant associations with the Fourth of July and the ballpark for maybe the first fifteen minutes. Then it gets nauseating after about a half hour.

Is this OK? It’s just a kid. Why do I feel like this is not OK?

Perhaps the creepiest part is that, on the high wall of the house where hot dogs are cured, the mural features the souls of the pigs ascending to heaven.

I think what offends animal rights' protesters the most (and animal rights' protesters are really into hating this mural) is when the 1950s mentality of the original artist really clashes with even the most conventional modern attitudes about the treatment of animals.

Even meat eaters know it’s not an E. B. White book in there, and no one likes being patronized. Meanwhile, factory-farm conditions are such a well-publicized travesty that sheer contrast with the mural makes Hormel Food Corporation seem even more flippant and ghoulish than they need to.

So who is this for?

@mikeleepearl

More on crazy-ass Los Angeles:

Pissing in a Candy Urinal at Willy Wonka's Latest Store

Protesting Against Gay Pride Was Super Boring

America's Worst Housing Project Is Being Gentrified

The Egyptian army gunned down more than 50 supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi early Monday morning in Cairo. More than 300 people sustained injuries as well, in the latest, bloodiest, and potentially most destabilizing incident since the army ousted Morsi last Wednesday.

It happened at a sit-in outside the Republican Guard Officers' Club, where a number of protestors calling for the Islamist ex-president's return were encamped. The faithful had risen, to offer the dawn prayer, a number of witnesses said, when the army and police began to shoot tear gas from behind them, as they faced to the east.

Whether protesters provoked the army’s actions is unclear. In the aftermath of Friday’s clashes between pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators on the 6th October Bridge in central Cairo, it’s becoming clear that these first days of interim military rule are proving to be harrowing and blood soaked.

At a press conference late Monday, the army and police claimed that the protesters had initiated the attack, in an attempt to storm the Republican Guard's facility, where Morsi is rumored to be held.

However, ten protesters who witnessed the killings, whom I interviewed later that day, agreed that there was no violence prior to the initial volley of tear gas.

Photos by Justin Wilkes

According to their accounts, protesters retreated before several established a line around 100 yards away from the sit-in's initial position, on a corner by an apartment block. The army were about four yards away, one man said, as the protesters chanted, "Down with the military regime."

Several of the witnesses stories were unclear, but one man's testimony potentially offered insight into why the military might have responded so aggressively.

Ahmed el-Sayyed, 21, an engineering student, was on the front lines, when one soldier shot bullets into the ground. "He wanted to force us back," Ahmed said.

The next thing he knew, the soldier had been shot dead. Then, Ahmed said, the soldiers begun to fire live ammunition into the crowd, as well as tear gas, and shotguns with birdshot cartridges.

Ahmed says that none of the protesters whom he talked to saw who shot the soldier; he believes the soldier was shot by one of his colleagues, after having refused to fire directly into the crowd. "It must have been one of them. We did not and would not do anything like that," he said, particularly because "there were women" present at the time.


Photo by Tom Dale

Ahmed's assumption seems far-fetched, and the more obvious possibility that a protester lost his cool and fired at the soldier would seem to be a more cogent explanation, but no solid evidence exists to support or deny either claim.

But most people I talked to agreed that both sides had guns, and several said that protestors fired birdshot—which is potentially, but rarely, deadly—at the army after the first wave of tear gas.

If the army had indeed opened fire in cold blood, it wouldn't be the first time. A VICE team at a nearby sit-in last Wednesday witnessed the army's firing into a crowd after dark from the direction of an army facility—apparently, killing one and wounding three, according to activists at the sit-in. There was no evidence of an attack on the army. At a massacre outside the state TV building in October 2011, soldiers killed 28, mostly Christians.

Reports from the makeshift field hospital nearby, and from the morgue, suggest that most of the dead were shot through the back, perhaps as they begun to run. Photographs show the mortuary of a local hospital, its floors smeared with blood. Bullet casings scattered on the tarmac at the site of the massacre bear the Arabic initials for the Egyptian Arab Army.

@Tom_D_

@justice22

More from Egypt:

A Divided Egypt Battles with Fireworks, Rocks, and Guns

In Nasr City, a Demonstration Ends with Bloodshed'

Egypt After Morsi - Trailer

Photos by Jonathan Mehring

At this stage in skating’s short but illustrious history, it’s easy to assume that kids in every corner of the globe have become as enamored with it as we have in the West. The skate scene in Bangalore, India, however, is decidedly less robust than in Orange County. The streets are often dilapidated and the cops don't hesitate to chase kids away from good spots, which is unusual and unfortunate for a country that’s new to skating.

Holy Stoked, a small collective based in Bangalore, is working to create a community of skaters in a country where many people have never even seen a skateboard. Parks are important to any young skate scene—especially in places without great street spots—so Holy Stoked cofounders Shake and Soms reached out to Levi’s about teaming up to build a park in Bangalore. Lo and behold the jeans giant agreed to help.

The goal was to build a concrete park in two weeks, a prospect not unlike God creating the world in seven days. So pros Omar Salazar, Stefan Janoski, Chet Childress, and Al Partanen decided to fly out and lend a hand. European skaters Lennie Burmeister, Jan Kliewer, and Rob Smith showed up as well, and along with the German construction crew 2er and a slew of builders. They managed to put down, according to the press release, “20 tons of sand, three tons of cement, 2,000 meters of steal, and one palm tree” over the course of 16 days. You can watch the first of a three-part video series about the project below.

Skateboarder magazine’s senior photographer Jonathan Mehring was there snapping photos during the first week of the undertaking and recently stopped by the VICE offices to tell us about it. 

VICE: Can you give me a basic rundown of what you guys were doing in India?
Jonathan Mehring: Holy Stoked bought a lot of land in a decent neighborhood in Bangalore, and then Levi’s bought all of the materials, gear, and equipment needed to make a skate park. They built the whole thing in just over two weeks and then had a party, an opening ceremony kind of thing. It was actually kind of funny—a local politician came and posed, pretending he was riding a skateboard.

Like the photo of Kerry Getz frontside olleing over the Philadelphia mayor at Love Park.
Yeah. Some of the guys were actually pretty bummed on that.

Holy Stoke cofounders Shake and Soms.

What’s the story behind Shake and Soms, the cofounders of Holy Stoked?
I think they were a lawyer and a computer programmer, or something like that, who had grown up skateboarding and they just decided to start this Holy Stoked thing. They’re like 28 or 29 and they got into skating through another park in Bangalore that was built in the 80s, I think.

Is it any good?
It’s OK, but it’s kind of fallen into disrepair and is also in this extreme plaza, you know? You have to pay to get in, so that deters a lot of people. I guess they decided to build this new one because they wanted to have a free park that’s more up-to-date.

Al Partanen at Bangalore's old skate park.

How much does it cost?
It’s 200 rupees. [About $3.30]

Aside from the Holy Stoked guys, how many skaters would you say live in Bangalore?
I would guess that there were ten or 15 local skaters who were there before Holy Stoked came into being, and I’m pretty sure they’re all part of it now. There were definitely tons of kids hanging around during construction who were super into it, like super stoked. They weren’t skaters before, but they probably are now. That was kind of the goal, I guess.

I heard they founded a skate school down there, too. Is that right?
I’m not sure… I wouldn’t be surprised though. Either way I’m sure Shake and Soms are going to be teaching kids to skate.

Shake doing a "bastard plant" at the old park.

What is happening in this photo of Shake?
That is insane. I don’t think that trick has ever been done.

It looks sort of like a bizarro bean plant.
Yeah, well, we called it a bastard plant, because he threads the needle through his leg. Everyone called it something different, but the most common name for it was bastard plant.

This .gif is pretty bonkers as well. This is at the old park, right?
Yeah, that’s the old park and is insane too. He was going like mach ten and would just hit the deck and powerslide under that flat bar.

Jesus. Who was he?
Just one of the local skaters. I wanted to get photos of them as well as the pros. I saw him hauling ass across this kind of tennis court area in the old park and he just did it. I was like, What the fuck was that? So I made him do it like five more times.

Omar Salazar

What’s the street spot situation like over there?
Everything’s kind of a bust. Maybe it’s because the country was under English rule for so long, but they’re real sticklers for paperwork and permission and bureaucracy and stuff. Everyone’s like, “Do you have permission to be doing that?”

That’s strange. Usually in these places that don’t have a big population of skateboarders you can sort of skate whatever you want without too much hassle.
Exactly. I was really surprised. It was not easy to skate. I mean, some places were OK, but overall it was not accommodating.

Omar Salazar

What was the reaction from people who live near the park?
It’s in a real nice neighborhood, and the guy who lives like right next to it is a lawyer or something. At first he was real hostile, but then the producer at Levi’s talked to him and smoothed everything over. He even became kind of psyched on what it was all about, I think. Once he understood, he was a lot more willing to work with us.

Omar Salazar and Fabian "Baumi" Baumgarten.

What was the work schedule like? Seems like people would have to work about 20 hours a day to finish that thing in two weeks.
Well, at first it was, until that guy—the neighbor—got real pissed about people building at 11 PM, which I guess is understandable. So from then on it was basically just from the time the sun came up until it got dark; every hour of daylight.

I don’t see bulldozers or anything. Did you guys have big equipment to work with?
No. I mean, a truck came in and dumped the pile of gravel on the sand, but everything else was manual labor.

Old-fashioned.
Yeah. It was like, “Well, we have to put the pyramid in, so let’s shovel this five-foot pile of sand over ten feet.” [laughs] There was a lot of time spent moving stuff around.

Well, from the photos it looks like the end result was worth it. Thanks for taking the time, Jonathan.

Omar Salazar

Darryl Nobbs

Al Partanen

@Jonathan_Smth

Boulder, Colo. — The specter of John Denver dogged the preparations for our Colorado trip, but I was hoping like hell we would be able to avoid both his music and his legacy. This, however, turned out to be impossible. “Rocky Mountain High” is one of the two official state songs, after all, and when we saw posters advertising a performance by a John Denver impersonator in one of the first towns on our tour, I knew a trip to the official John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen was inevitable. By the time we encountered Don (pictured) at the Days Hotel in Boulder, we were beginning to feel Denver’s presence everywhere we went, which was sort of unfortunate.

T he project that eventually morphed into the LBM Dispatch started as a lark and an experiment. On Alec’s birthday in December 2011, he texted me that he wanted to go on an adventure. A couple hours later, we were in his Honda Odyssey trolling the exurban fringes of the Twin Cities, pretending to be representatives of a small-town newspaper. The first “lead” we chased involved a cat that had been eluding rescuers for months, living on an island in the middle of one of the busiest freeway interchanges in the metropolitan area. This cat had assumed almost mythical status, and was purported to have survived only due to fate or a couple of remarkable strokes of luck: the island on which it had been marooned contained a freshwater pond, as well as the carcass of a deer that had apparently lacked either the cat’s good fortune or its survival skills.

As our luck would have it, on Christmas day, just before Alec’s birthday, there had been a break in the story. A suburban police officer had finally corralled the fugitive cat and transported the animal to a local shelter, where it had been christened Adam (after the rescuing officer, it turned out, but the name seemed fortuitous for our own purposes). We visited the island Adam had been stranded on, where we investigated and photographed the pond, the deer carcass, and a culvert under the freeway that—based on fresh paw prints—we surmised had been Adam’s shelter. We also paid a visit to the cat at his new, temporary home. His rather surly and uncooperative demeanor suggested that the cat had perhaps been captured rather than rescued, exiled rather than liberated.

But this was all we needed to stoke our inspiration, and from there we were up and running. We had no real plan for the project; we were both just feeling regressive, I guess. Alec cut his teeth at a suburban newspaper, and my first job was with a small-town daily paper. It was fun to explore the place where we have both spent most of our lives, and even more fun discovering so many utterly foreign little pockets of weirdness in the process. 

We attended a church musical based on the Book of Genesis, poked around in the ruins of a Minnesota ghost town founded by a member of the Donner Party, and spent some time with a World War II reenactor who’d been sleeping in a foxhole he dug out in the yard of his suburban home. At an interstate hotel, during an early-morning meeting of an Optimist Club, we listened as an expert in population control did everything in his power to grind down the optimists with tales of a planet in dire peril, complete with photographs of starving children, teeming landfills, and animals wallowing in oil-slicked seas. Finally, in a fit of foolhardy (and perhaps ironic) optimism of our own, we printed business cards that identified me as the bureau chief of a fictional newspaper.

After a few months of this (we still had no idea what we might do with any of the material we were generating), we seized an opportunity to take our fake newspaper on the road. Alec had a scheduled speaking engagement in Ohio, and we decided to pack up the van, spend a week rambling in the Buckeye State, and see if we couldn’t put together and publish something on the fly.

During the time we were driving around together in Minnesota some basic ideas and themes had started to coalesce. We were talking a lot about real-world community in the age of the internet and wondering how older forms of social networking—civic groups, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and even basic friendships—were faring in the 21st century. Our own personalities and relative failures as social beings, it turned out, led us to some conclusions that, if not fraudulent, were not truly borne out in Ohio, or in any of the other states we have visited on subsequent Dispatch trips.

In a sense, our largely mistaken assumptions have also been tested in our own working relationship and the nature of our collaboration. Commencing with Ohio in May 2012, Alec and I have now visited five states, covered thousands of miles, spent more than three months together in a van, and published five state-themed issues of the LBM Dispatch. We produce the work as we’re moving, with daily deadlines, updates on our Tumblr site, and a goal of editing and publishing the print edition within one week of our return. So far (knock on wood), we’re five for five on meeting that goal, and have amassed—on top of roughly 250 pages of printed photos and text—thousands of images and stories. The days are long, and can involve dozens of hit-and-run encounters, planned events, and a dizzying chorus of voices and gallery of faces and landscapes. When we check into a motel at night, Alec uploads his photos, we email back and forth, and I sit up late mixing and matching texts and captions.

I’ll be honest and admit that I never expected this concept to work. I think it’s fair to say that neither Alec nor I is constitutionally disposed to the interpersonal friction required for such intense collaboration. Neither of us, I’m pretty sure, would be an ideal candidate for a rock band, let alone a rock band that spends a lot of time on the road.
I am a loner with extreme OCD and like nothing better than to be at home with my dog, my books, and my music, muddling through the same stabilizing routines day after day. A day that does not require me to actually get dressed is generally a good day. The idea of creative collaboration has always had appeal, but based on my past experiences, the reality has left a good deal to be desired—and it’s always my own fault. I long ago concluded that I’m just not good at it. I also have a checkered history with deadlines. I can’t produce anything without a gun to my head, yet I resent having a gun to my head. Much of Alec’s career has been spent working alone as well, and he has a fierce work ethic. 

As a result of these concerns, the whole Dispatch idea was thrilling, but seriously daunting. And since we always travel with a third person who does much of the driving and helps with logistics and other nuts-and-bolts stuff, our particular chemistry seemed fraught with explosive peril right from the get-go.

It was Norman Mailer who said, “In motion a man has a chance,” and now, a year into this adventure, the challenge has become how to adjust to being off the road and sitting still once again. There’s an endless adrenaline rush to Dispatch trips, and it’s become remarkably easy to lose oneself in the planning, itinerary, working routines, and open-ended possibilities of traveling every day to a new place. The notebooks fill up, the photos keep coming, and we’ve started to take for granted the magic that we seem to routinely stumble into everywhere we go. Just a couple for instances: when we really wanted a Boy Scout in Ohio, there was a Boy Scout standing in a parking lot alongside the road; and just when we were wishing out loud for Mormons in Colorado, voilà—two Mormons rounded the corner on their mountain bikes.

Usually, at about the midpoint of every trip, themes and sequences begin to take shape and we start fine-tuning and filling in holes. A bad day will be followed by a flurry of unexpected encounters, and the flagging energy in the van will be replaced by what often feels like a vibrational, purely synergistic rush. A huge part of the charge comes from the self-imposed structure and deadlines, seeing the thing come together even as it’s happening, and the pleasure of knowing that we’ll have something we can hold in our hands two weeks after we wrap up our travels.

None of the trips ever go quite according to plan, but there always is a plan. We’re not simply driving around looking for pictures and people. Before we ever leave town, we’ve mapped out a route, researched the history of the places on our itinerary, scoured local events, and dug around for potentially interesting destinations along the way. We read thousands of pages of each state’s literature, research its history, folklore, and political climate, try to get a handle on current events that might be in play during our visit, and discuss possible themes or focal points for our investigation. Just for the hell of it, or in an attempt at mood setting, I try to assemble a mixtape of music produced in or inspired by the state. And then we drive. 

Having a predetermined destination every day is useful for purposes of discipline, but serendipity often dictates random detours or extended stays in one place or another. Alec and I are together all day long; while he’s shooting, I’m talking to people. Sometimes it’s the other way around, but in five trips there are only a total of three pictures that were taken when I was not present. A good story occasionally trumps a good picture, and vice versa, but by this point we both have a pretty good idea what we’re each looking for from each situation, and there’s a surprisingly minimal amount of conversation and compromising involved in the choices we inevitably make. There are always, though, painful sacrifices; once we’ve zeroed in on a theme, feel, or direction, we end up scrapping all sorts of good stuff to keep ourselves on the right track.

From a purely personal standpoint, it’s almost miraculous that this project has been so much exhausting fun and has worked as well as it has. The Dispatch trips have been the most gratifying professional experiences of my life—precisely, I think, because from the beginning, neither Alec nor I have approached this long, rambling project as a strictly professional experience, but rather as a series of road trips, random adventures, and long conversations between two friends in a van. Those conversations and our shared experience—the things we’ve seen, the people we’ve met, and the stories we’ve heard—are what it’s all about. 

To see past issues of the LBM Dispatch or buy your own copies of the “irregularly published newspaper of North American ramblings,” visit littlebrownmushroom.com. Click through to the next page for more images by Alec Soth, courtesy of Magnum Photos.

Cambridge, Minn. — This was one of the first news stories that Alec and I followed up on when we started making day trips from our homes in Minneapolis. By the time we met Scott Schmitt, he had already filled in the foxhole he had dug out in his suburban Cambridge yard. Schmitt had dug the hole, and spent a week sleeping in it, to commemorate the heroics of 101st Airborne paratroopers at the Siege of Bastogne. Demonstrating the hospitality and general agreeableness that we’ve come to expect on our Dispatch treks, Schmitt rounded up his authentic 101st Airborne uniform and gear and led us into the backyard for a portrait in what was left of his foxhole.

Westminster, Colo. — We were just driving around somewhat aimlessly when we encountered a group of US Marines recruits going through a grueling “delayed-entry” fitness program in a strip-mall parking lot. It turns out that these days most aspiring Marines can’t pass the fitness tests required for basic training and must be enrolled in a regimen of drills and exercises designed to whip them into shape. We saw a lot of people throw up, as well as a couple of the young recruits, having apparently come to the conclusion that they weren’t Marines material, simply walk away midworkout.

Redwood City, Calif. — At a meet and greet for Ukrainian start-ups in a forlorn office park in Silicon Valley, we met a guy who said that he was neither Ukrainian nor a potential investor. He then smiled, shrugged, and said, “But I am single, and I’m here for the hot Ukrainian women and free wine. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Clifton, Colo. — Gabe is a Mescalero Apache. He and his wife, Sis, own Red Rock Archery, a combination retail operation and range. On the night of our visit he hosted a group of regulars for an impromptu tournament. Our entourage was welcomed as if we’d been attending for weeks, and everyone stopped what they were doing to show us around and pose for photographs.

More photo stuff from VICE:

Jean-Francois Hamelin Takes Beautiful Photographs of Rural Quebec

Prayers, Pilgrims, and Parties

Kristie Muller's Peculiar Still Lifes and Body Part Portraits

Like most women in Afghanistan’s Qalizal District, Bebehaja’s life is told on the strings of a carpet loom. It’s a vocational inheritance of women of Turkmen heritage, who begin as early as seven and may not stop until they’re 70. It’s as linear and taut as the cords on which they weave, unspooling balls of yarn over minutes, hours, days, decades creating masterful motifs, while simultaneously emptying themselves of the same beauty and comfort they put into the things that they create.

Bebehaja is 60 now. She’s covered in a stained, blue burqua so I can’t see her face, but I hear the weariness in her voice. She tells me the dirty secret that everyone knows: the most important material in carpet making in Qalizal is not wool, but hashish.

“When we don’t eat the hashish we’re like a dead body,” she says. “When we eat it we can work hard and work more.”

Women like Bebehaja use hashish routinely three times as day. They smoke and eat it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s so ubiquitous in the region that women can secretly buy it from shopkeepers along with the day’s groceries or other household supplies.

The hashish, which is processed resin from the flowers of the cannabis plant, has reportedly been in use for medical and recreation use since 3000 BC. It has the same active ingredient as marijuana, which is THC or tetrahydrocannabinol. The effects can include relaxation, pain relief, and overall sense of well being.

But in Qalizal, hashish’s sedating effect has led to a heinous practice, which virtually ensures the enslavement of a next generation of carpet weavers. In order to spend long hours at the loom, women here routinely feed their young children hashish as well.

“The reason we’re giving it to kids is we need them to be quiet, so we can work,” says Bebehaja.

Many years earlier her own mother did the same to her. Afghan narcotics officials say the practice has been going for more than 100 years and it shows no signs of stopping. An estimated 30,000 people in Kunduz Province are chronic hashish users, and more than half of them are from Qalizal.

Poverty drives both the carpet and drug business. Husbands tend to be farmers working long hours in the fields and the only income opportunity for women, who are usually not able to work anywhere but from their homes, is carpet making. But who takes care of the children while they’re at the loom? A babysitter called hashish.

Another woman from the area, Gohar says she gave all four of her children hashish during the early parts of their life. Weaning them off as they got older was a nightmare for the children, and the process that left them in more fragile health.

“When they begin to walk I stop giving them the hashish,” says Gohar.

At the moment, the child in her arms, two-year-old Zarifullah, begins to cry. It’s nearly lunchtime, but Gohar tells us this is the time she gives the girl her second bb-sized pellet of hashish. Without it, she’s restless, cries, and is irritable—the same thing that happens to adults going through hashish withdrawal.

I’ve met both of these women at the house of Malika Gharebyra, Director of Women’s Affairs in Qalizal District. Since there’s no money for treatment programs or even education, her attempt at outreach is bringing addicted women here to share their stories with the media. While this helps to reach an audience on the outside, it does little to help with the problem in Afghanistan. She tells us the story of a family of nine who are all chronic users, including the children. In order to make money to buy more drugs the father tried to sell his eight year-old daughter off for marriage.

The cycle is unrelenting for most of the women here. Their drug habits cost around 200 Afghanis or $4 dollars a day, which is usually more than they earn weaving carpets.

There’s not much help coming on a national level either. The chief of the Counternarcotics Department in Kunduz Province, Abdul Bashir Morshid, says he’s looking for NGO’s and outside donors to help fund treatment programs in the Qalizal. Currently there is only one treatment clinic in the whole province with just 20 beds and 30,000 potential patients. But he’s most worried about the children.

“I’d like to create a babysitting program where we can separate the children from their mothers during the day to allow them to work,” says Morshid. “That’s a start. But it’s possible this problem has been going on for ten generations.”

And it’s also impossible to tell how many generations have already been lost to the problem. Bebehaja provides at least some anecdotal evidence of that. She tells us that she gave birth to nine children, but not one of them is alive today.

“I was eating a lot of hashish at the time and giving it to them,” she says. “They all died after one month or so. None of my children lived more than few months.”

While it’s uncertain if hashish killed them all, medical research shows that marijuana use during pregnancy can lead to a greater likelihood of SIDS or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The debilitating effects of THC on the respiratory systems of newborns from even a little hashish is also a key suspect.

“I’m really sad that I lost my children. When I think about it, it makes me feel worse and I eat more hashish. I’m addicted,” says Bejehaja.

She wishes she would’ve done things differently. Sometimes she says she visits the graves of her children. But her time with them was short and there are not many memories. The ones she does have become hazy, as indistinguishable as both the hours of her days and the strings of her loom.

All text and photos by Kevin Sites.

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

More on VICE from Kevin Sites: Swimming with Warlords

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com

Every November a celebration known as the Vigil of the Authentic Intrepid Searchers of Danger takes place in the city of Juchitan, Oaxaca, in Mexico. In this community of Zapotec indigenous people, it's generally understood that there are men, there are women, and there are muxes (pronounced "mooshez"). Muxes are born men, raised as women, and live as women all their lives. The Vigil—or Vela—is the most important event of the year for the muxes of Juchitan, as one of them is crowned queen during the festival. In this documentary we travel to Juchitan to meet members of the "third gender" of Zapotec culture, and to hang out at the Vigil, which was honestly one of the best parties we've ever been to.

Hip-hop is having a renaissance right now in the city of New York, where it seems like every other day a new MC rises up out of the five boroughs with an even more unique style and approach to the music than what we thought was possible before. Motley crews like the A$AP Mob, the Beast Coast, and World's Fair have given us a reason to love rhymes again. We've written a lot about this stuff, but sometimes words don't do it justice. So, we've linked up with scene insider Verena Stefanie Grotto to document the new New York movement as it happens in real time, with intimate shots of rappers, scenesters, artists, and fashion fiends.

This week, Verena caught up with Action Bronson as he rocked a hometown crowd at Club Santos in New York City. As part of the Noisey Rap Party series, the Queens native gave a legendary performance of  Saaab Stories, his latest collaborative EP with producer Harry Fraud. Verena's pictures showcase the fervor of a Bronsolini show and all the cool kids who came out to show Action love, including the Underachievers and DJ Peter Rosenberg. 

Photographer Verena Stefanie was born and bred in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. The small town is not known for hip-hop, but they do make a very tasty grape-based pomace brandy there called grappa. Stefanie left Bassano del Grappa at the age of 17 to go and live the wild skateboarding life in Barcelona, Spain, where she worked as the Fashion Coordinator for VICE Spain. Tired of guiding photographers to catch the best shots, she eventually grabbed the camera herself and is now devoted to documenting artists, rappers, style-heads, and more. She recently directed a renowned documentary about the Grime scene in UK and has had photo features in GQ, Cosmopolitan, VICE, and many more. 

Check out her website and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

@VerenaStefanie

Previously - Remy Banks, Black Dave, Dillon Cooper, and A$AP J Scott

Cover by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

The annual VICE Photo Issue is a cultural barometer that has been used by historians since the age of Talbot to determine which artists are on the front lines of photography in any given year. For our 2013 issue, in the interest of fucking with the heads of future photography students, we decided to have our favorite photographers collaborate with an artist or creative person(s) of their choosing to make a brand new body of work. They came back with the type of imagery that you usually only see in dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, voodoo ceremonies, and via other mystical occurrences.

Inside the issue you'll find new work from tag-teams like Barry McGee and Jim Goldberg; Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari; Peter Sutherland and Ben Pier; Alec Soth and Brad Zellar; Sandy Kim and Maggie Lee; Richard Kern and Kim Gordon; Jim Mangan and Tadayoshi Honda; Asger Carlsen and Roger Ballen; Jaimie Warren and her mom; and even a massive piece by the dream team of Ryan McGinley, Collier Schorr, Marilyn Minter, and Roe Etheridge. We will be rolling out pieces online all through the month of July, but if you want an IRL copy of this large-format beauty to hold and snuggle with we'd suggest heading to one of these fine locations pronto.

For those in New York City, we will be blowing these images up, sticking them in fancy frames, and hanging them on the walls of a gallery for you to gawk at while you get drunk off our free booze in the near future. More info on that to come.

Happy summer and happy Photo Issue, everyone!

How most people imagine hacking... From 'Hackers.' via Flickr.

A lot of people think of hacking as a process whereby some greasy nerd clacks away on a keyboard so much that they end up gaining access to another computer, in wash of neon green, blinking command prompts—like something out of Keanu’s “Follow the White Rabbit” scene in The Matrix. That’s not necessarily an untrue or unfair way to picture it. But in reality, there’s a whole other stream of hacking called social engineering that mostly relies on tricking people into giving up their personal information, or confidential information belonging to their employer. And in a world where almost everyone’s personal and/or corporate data is floating around on the internet, social engineering is only becoming a more popular line of work for those who are trained in deception, manipulation, and computer hacking.

I met up with a hacker who specializes in offence security (protecting one’s self through data-driven attacks, rather than firewall-style defense) and social engineering, to gain some insight into how this all works. He goes by ‘Ghost,’ because well, of course he does. Over coffee, Ghost showed me some examples of the systems he had socially engineered his way into, including the backend of a major corporation whose income was in the tens of millions of dollars. In a matter of seconds, we were inside their network and from here it was remarkable how much we could see—everything from customer’s full names, Social Insurance Numbers, direct deposit slips and home addresses, to private internal emails between executives about company spending. We even had easy access to copies of employee’s passports, with none of their personal information blacked out.

After I stopped freaking out about how security is an illusion and no one is safe from people like Ghost, he explained to me how he operates in this crazily intrusive line of work, and how companies end up getting duped by people like him.

VICE: What is social engineering?
Ghost: Social engineering is the planned altering of an interaction between yourself and a target to produce an outcome that works in your favor. There are different types of social engineers, but in regards to what I do, the desired outcome is usually to gain access to a secured network. I do this by performing a social engineering attack. My job is to take a social scenario and engineer it to achieve a desired outcome after careful planning and profiling of certain targets.

What exactly is a social engineering attack?
A social engineering attack can take many forms, and can be done in person, over email or phone or without the person even realizing you’re there. The attack is the actual execution of manipulating your target using your toolkit.

Toolkit?
A social engineer’s toolkit is made up of various skills: Communication (listening skills are imperative), patience, psychology, elicitation, intelligence gathering, deductive logic, acting, and the list goes on.

What or who is “the target”?
The target is the person a social engineer decides to use in order to get into the company’s secured network. Social engineers use profiling to get to know their targets so they can better understand how it will be best to manipulate their way in.

What is the most effective or common way to attack?
The most common attack tool is the phone. A lot of social engineering happens over the phone. People will give away their lives without thinking because someone on the other line has asked what type of antivirus you use.  You should never give away anything over the phone. But I actually find direct contact is always the best way to do it, if you can.

What’s your usual approach?
The most common strategy I use is to build a rapport quickly is based around humor. Humor does something to people. If you can make someone laugh within 30 seconds, I’ve already shattered several barriers. It’s the easiest way in. You can roll with it. It’s amazing to hit someone with a few laughs and keep them going, then: “Hey, I got distracted. Do you know if Mike Bradley is here?” Receptionist: “Sure, just go in.” She’s still laughing about the joke, she thinks I’m a nice guy and I’ve built a rapport. This woman was already thinking that she knows me and at that point I can get her to do anything. 

How do you decide who your target is going to be?
This is the part that takes the most time and research. First I learn about the company, by going online usually, I can read about what they do, check out things like their stocks or any interviews they’ve done with the media. Then I start looking at whom to engage.

How do you begin that process?
I can go online and check out their employee list, see what I can find. But I usually start by calling the company. A very easy way to gain access into a secured network is through the receptionist; they are usually friendly and also are the first point of contact.

So have you personally engineered your way into a secure network through the receptionist?
Yes. Several times. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is for me to get employees to break policies I know their business has in place, just because I was able to pull on their heart strings, after profiling them. Social Engineers try to make quick friends out of people, because for the most part, people want to help their friends, right?

Right. Can you give me an example?
A couple of months ago I was working to gain access to a very large and highly secured company. I started by calling the head office. “Amanda” picked up and said, “Hello?” I hung up before responding. Then I Googled “Amanda” and the company name. I quickly found her LinkedIn profile. Then I had her last name. In this case, I headed to a site called Pipl, which is an aggregate that will search the person’s name, email account and any other online presence. With Amanda, I was able to do a background check and find everything I needed to create an extensive profile on her.  

I found pictures of her kids, what school they go to. Whether or not she is divorced, and for how long. How much money she makes, what kind of car she drives, where she lives, where she eats, who she hangs out with, if she is involved in charity work, what her extracurricular activities are. In this case, it was even valuable to know what TV shows she likes.

How so?
For example, when I saw that Amanda likes Dexter, this becomes an important part of her profile because it could be how I strike up a conversation with her. You need to have multiple angles. This kind of stuff makes it easier for me to start planning how to chat her up.

If you just stop answering the phone, you'll be safe from social engineers... From 'Hackers.' via Flickr.

What are some other things you will look for?
Honestly anything that will tell me the type of person they might be. Even their clothes can give me a good indication of who that person is.

Clothes? Really?
Yes, actually one of the best ways to judge how you might attack someone is how they dress. You can tell a lot, like how much money they make, and often the kind of music they listen to. For example, I’m probably not going to start up a conversation with a hipster about the latest Lamb of God album.

So, that all sounds pretty easy. Are there any roadblocks?
Honestly, not really. When you know how to work with the internet, it’s pretty incredible what you can find out about people by doing pretty basic searches. In this case, all the information I really needed was found on Amanda’s Facebook account. If it had been private, which it wasn’t, I would just create a fake account to make her add me—this almost always works. I was able to find out everything I needed to start a pretty strong profile on her. I also found out her address because she was publicly listed.

What would you do with an address?
One of the first things I did was use Google Maps to see where she lives, and then plan some spots in her neighborhood where I could profile her in person. For example, there’s a Starbucks near her apartment that she probably goes to—I could hang out there if I needed to do more investigating.

OK, so how did you attack Amanda?
After profiling her for about a month, I was able to have a pretty specific outline in terms of how to approach her. I showed up at the company on a day I knew they were doing interviews. Amanda is a single mom, so my character was a single dad who was a half-hour late for an interview. I showed up frazzled at her desk, and pretended I couldn’t find my resume. I started a conversation with her about how I’d had to drop off my kids with the sitter and now I was late. “I really need this job,” I explained while looking for my resume. There was a lot of manipulation used here obviously. I didn’t want to be too pathetic, but I was searching for sympathy and empathy in this scenario, I was trying to provide her the power to help me. I‘m late, I couldn’t get my suit on right, “I cannot get a break.”

And she fell for it?
Yes. I waited until I had her so locked in that she hardly realized I was putting a USB key on her desk and that she was printing my resume. I had to keep her engaged in a conversation about how my awful luck keeps getting me into trouble while she printed it off.  The USB has a resume.pdf file, but embedded into that file is what is called a “reverse shell.” The file is infected; it has a reverse TCP exploit.

What does that mean?
Basically when she opens that file, this exploit is going to trigger it. Back at my place, I have a piece of software – an attacking framework – that is waiting for a connection. If I can get you to open an infected file, it’s going to send a connection right over to my computer, which is waiting, that will then allow me to operate from home as whoever is logged in at that moment. From there, it’s pretty straightforward stuff, but it’s also where my computer skills take over. I work to escalate my privileges. Amanda’s access to the network is limited, she can print documents and read her email and that’s about it. My goal is to escalate my privileges to the administrator account.

How easy is that to do?
Well, now that I’m connected to her machine all it takes is time. I have remote access, and I’m going to infect her computer because she’s part of the company’s network. Then I will do an exploit attack to get in and then Pivoting begins. 

Pivoting?
From home I can start pivoting through the network to access pretty much everything I want, including everything on the network. My goal in this job was to see if I could get into the accounting server and get the data off of it. I was successful. I was able to get everything. In a pretty short period of time, I was able to retrieve not only all the information on employees, but also all their customer information too, including credit card numbers, Social Insurance Numbers, direct deposit slips with signatures, addresses—pretty much anything you could ever need.

What could you do with this information?
Well, I’m a good guy, but if I wasn’t, I could easily steal someone’s identity, for starters. Not to mention all their money, if I wanted to. Something popular these days, is organized crime that is utilizing hackers for things such as financial theft and bribery. Things like denial of service attacks that basically shutdown sites until someone pays to get it back. Destructive hacking isn’t uncommon.

All because Amanda is a nice person?
Yes, basically.

Do you find it is easier to hack into a computer or a person?
People are much easier to work, absolutely. The number one flaw in any system is the human condition. People’s minds are not as secure and tough as they like to think. They’re usually pretty easy to manipulate. You don’t need a degree in psychology to do what I do. The way I grew up and the experiences I had, really allowed me to learn very quickly how people work, think and react. 

What was your childhood like?
I grew up around a lot of hidden emotion. I was always watching for subtle changes in people—there was no obvious love or emotion flowing around my house. It was all about people being cold and hiding things. But I realized that those thoughts and feelings, that we all have, are always bursting through, whether you like or not. So I was always watching and learning this stuff, studying how people work. Basically a lot of fake shit, but I’ve been logging it all in my head, like taking quick snapshots of how it looks when someone is actually happy or surprised or mad and kept filing it away.

What’s the hardest part of being a social engineer?
Detaching from feelings can be hard, but it’s something that you need to do. The hardest part is remembering who you really are and what your actual values are. It’s very easy to compromise that in my line of work. It’s also very easy to stop liking yourself because of the situations you get into. You can easily cross your own lines when your job is to pretend and basically to lie to and manipulate good people. Is it what I do? Yes. Is it who I am? No.

How does someone become a social engineer?
Well, it usually starts with being a hacker. Social engineering is basically the next step. You have to be good at manipulating and be ready to engage actual people. You need to be willing to find the weakness in all systems and humans as well.

What else should people be aware of?
Never give away your password to anyone. It absolutely blows me away that this happens. If happens all the time. Also, people need to find a way to get past the idea that you are letting down humanity because you don’t do a stranger a favor. If I’d worded it differently with Amanda, for instance, and I’d said what was really happening: “Please risk your job and the security of all your co-workers for me” she probably wouldn’t have helped me. In fact, I can guarantee you she wouldn’t have. 

Follow Angela on Twitter: @angelamaries

More on hackers:

Meet the Anonymous Member Who Broke the Steubenville Rape Case, Then Got Raided by the FBI

A Chat with Some Immoral Hackers Who Don't Care About Your Feelings

Speaking With an Alleged Member of the SEA About Hacking The Onion's Twitter Account

A few weekend’s ago was the summer solstice—high time to shed your seasonal depression and leave the apartment—so I journeyed forth to attend Silver Rocket Summa Summa, an annual music event thrown by the Czech record label Silver Rocket. The Prague-based label has been around since 1997, and has been throwing a yearly summer bash since 2003. This was the tenth anniversary of the Summa parties, and to celebrate—or perhaps to put those ten years into a relative temporal context—the organizers rented out a 600-year old castle to party in.

Točník castle, located on a hill above the tiny village of Točník, was built in the 14^th century under King Vaclav IV, a contentious and embattled ruler. Crowned king of Bohemia in 1363, Vaclav IV was jailed twice during his long and chaotic reign, and at one point was dethroned under charges of “futility, idleness, negligence and ignobility.” He was reputed to be a serious alcoholic, and when he died of a sudden heart attack in 1419, it plunged the country into decades of crisis and war. The castle at Točník never found a new owner, and slowly fell into ruin. Its rubble-strewn remains finally came into the hands of the Czech Association of Tourists in 1923. 

Castles are ubiquitous to the landscape of the Czech Republic, constantly looming on hilltops in the distance. As I drove through the countryside outside of Prague on the way to the Silver Rocket event, I found myself riveted by the rolling landscape. It was easy to squint and imagine the middle ages. The castles are what provide this effect: always elevated, presiding over a small cluster of hamlets in the vicinity, the social and economic ordering of medieval times expresses itself, even centuries later, in this clear visual metaphor.

Arriving at the castle gate in Točník, I met Aran Nenadál, one of the organizers of Silver Rocket Summa Summa. Bearded, well over six feet tall, and dressed in the all-black attire of the contemporary heavy music listener, Aran presented an imposing physical presence, though his demeanor was cordial and soft-spoken. He showed me around the castle grounds, pointing out the vast stable where an indoor stage had been erected, as well as the various courtyards and alcoves with food and drink stands. We ended the tour on an elevated outdoor platform with a panoramic view of the village of Točník and the surrounding countryside.

It was late afternoon, and a crowd was slowly gathering in the main courtyard, pressing up against the cool stone walls or sitting cross-legged in the shade to avoid the blistering summer sun. Pivo stands doled out beer for 25 crowns a cup under a clear blue sky. I made the mistake of referring to the event as a festival, and Aran politely corrected me.

“We don’t use the word festival,” he explained. “To us it embodies the very worst of music.” He did not explain exactly why he was so against this word. I could imagine either that the phrase “festival” conjured up the soulless commercial forces driving the music industry, or that he was trying to avoid Renaissance Fair connotations. But it was hard for me to escape my primary association with the word, which is festivity. Indeed, despite the hundreds of people of various sub-cultural affiliations happily mingling everywhere, there was something deeply gloomy about the Točník castle itself. The ruins represented the erosion of time, the fleeting nature of power– I thought of poor Vaclav IV, who built this place as a refuge after his other castle mysteriously caught fire. I imagined the isolated, lonely king drinking himself to death within these crumbling walls. The bricks themselves seemed to exude woe, to contain all the ancient, unlearned lessons of time.

As dusk approached, the music began, an open-air stage in the main courtyard providing a venue for punk and post-punk bands, while the cavernous interior hall hosted eclectic acts such as the banjo player Tim Remis and the Brooklyn-based DJ team MRC Riddims. The line-up was diverse and the crowd seemed to shift their attention effortlessly and enthusiastically from genre to genre. The German punk band Auxes headlined the outdoor stage, whipping the crowd into a fist-pumping frenzy, while MRC Riddims finished up the evening with trance-inducing electronic dance beats that rattled the centuries old stable walls.

I caught up with Aran again, who explained the concept behind Summa Summa to me in more detail. “We do this thing, or event– we do this for 10 years, and each year it’s in a different location, a different name, and a different date,” he said. That seemed like a recipe for confusion, I thought. But for Aran the amorphousness was all part of the plan. “We don’t want to repeat ourselves. One year we did it only for the smallest bands from all over the Czech Republic. One year we did only spoken word. One year we did only solo artists, no bands. So each year it has a different meaning, a different approach. In 2005 we did it here in Točník castle, and since this is our 10-year anniversary, we wanted to do it somewhere where we knew what to expect. And it’s a beautiful place...”

That was certainly undeniable. I asked Aran to free-associate on castles. What came to mind when he thought of them?

“Knights, dragons, princesses,” he said, after a short, thoughtful pause. “All the mystery that surrounds them.” It was a much more fantasy-based answer than I had expected. What about history? What about the Vaclav IV? I asked Aran whether he knew much about the original owner of the castle. “Yes,” he replied. “Vaclav IV was the son of one of the most famous Czech kings, Charles IV, who built the Charles Bridge. Vaclav built this place to have his time off from Prague and from the duties of being king. He had many enjoyments here– women, wine. I can imagine....” His voice drifted off, and he smiled serenely, looking over my head at the revelers around us. “I know it all looks effortless,” he said, “but it was very hard to make this happen.” He looked weary, but quite happy. All the hard work and organizational headaches had paid off. Despite his protestations, he had achieved his goal: the atmosphere was festive.

Baroness Susan Greenfield. (Photo via)

Baroness Susan Greenfield, a controversial neuroscientist, has an idea. It’s been hard to pin down exactly what that idea is, because rather than publishing a proper explanation of it, she’s spent the last few years promoting scare-stories about the wickedness of modern technology in the tabloid press. Greenfield, a 65-year-old who claims never to have visited Facebook—she loathes it that much—usually spends her days writing articles for the Daily Mail. In them, she routinely accuses technology of turning the latest generation of teens and 20-somethings into feeble mouth-breathers who'd sacrifice their physical, mental, and sexual health for a hearty broadband connection.

It's the sort of baseless, hysterical rhetoric you're probably used to by now: “Facebook and Twitter are creating a vain generation of self-obsessed people with a child-like need for feedback,” “social websites harm people's brains," that kinda stuff. Inevitably, this leads, among other things, to “the fragmentation of our culture.”

However, as people like Dr. Ben Goldacre and Professor Dorothy Bishop have pointed out on numerous occasions, her statements are pretty vague on detail and tend not to be backed up by any direct scientific evidence. In 2010, Goldacre issued an exasperated plea to the Baroness: “You have a responsibility to your peers and most importantly the public to present your theory clearly and formally in an academic journal.”

It’s taken three years, but Greenfield has finally responded. Well, sort of. In lieu of doing any actual research she's sat down and written a science fiction novel. It's a disease vector for stupidity.

Some feeble, fickle human brains (Photo via)

When writing a book set centuries in the future, one of the big challenges is explaining that world to the reader. Greenfield achieves this by introducing the protagonist with the evocative opening line: “My name is Fred,” from which point Fred inexplicably launches into a history of the last century, almost as if he knows that he’s writing for an audience in 2013.

It turns out a lot of bad stuff happened. We learn that climate change was easily fixed using sensible laws like “banning all cars,” but that nobody—apart from Greenfield, obviously—realized a much bigger threat was coming. “The skills honed by video-gaming and information processing gradually edged out those other human talents, such as understanding and wisdom.” Internet porn became so good we stopped having sex. Social networks replaced physical contact. Soon, everyone stopped thinking and turned into mindless, sexless hedonists, trapped in a limited two-dimensional virtual world. And it was all because of Mark fucking Zuckerberg.

At some point along the line, society fragmented into two groups of people. The elites—the "Neo-Puritans," or "N-Ps"—spotted what was happening and led everybody to a new land behind some convenient mountains that were inaccessible to normal people for reasons that are never really explained. Safe in their mountain kingdom, they banned screens outside the workplace and lived like arrogant technocratic monks, avoiding any sort of over-stimulation and probably eating sugar-free All-Bran every day for breakfast.

The rest of our descendants—imaginatively named "The Others"—wander the streets dancing and getting distracted by shiny lights. They became unable to comprehend words like "knowledge," yet are still able to develop and maintain technologies far in advance of anything we have today.

Facebook, the scourge of modern society and the catalyst for a sexless world.

Through alternating chapters, we follow the narration of Fred, an enlightened Neo-Puritan neuroscientist; Zelda, an unusually intelligent Other; Hodge, another N-P scientist senior to Fred, and a couple more minor characters. None of this really matters, for within a few chapters it becomes painfully obvious that Susan Greenfield’s book is little more than a fan-fiction about Susan Greenfield. The narrators are lifeless caricatures devoid of any real voice or personality of their own, and seem to exist solely for the purpose of regurgitating Greenfield’s theories over endless pages of mind-numbingly tedious exposition.

Take this passage, for example: “Most transformations have been gradual, hardly noticed, but cataclysmically fundamental to the way we now live. As technology has increasingly provided for us, so first our muscle power and then our brainpower has become barely necessary for devising the means by which we are sheltered and fed. We remain permanently like children from earlier eras.”

Those words could have come straight from one of Greenfield’s articles, but they were supposedly spoken by the character Zelda from the unthinking, hedonistic "Other" culture. Again, though, this doesn't really matter: In Susan Greenfield’s world, everybody admits that Susan Greenfield is right.

The scientist character speaks like Susan Greenfield. The other scientist character speaks like Susan Greenfield. The hedonist characters speak like Susan Greenfield pretending to be slightly stoned. Whole chapters pass by where nothing much happens other than a thinly-veiled Susan Greenfield avatar explaining, in excruciating detail, every minute facet of how this world works. The effect is like watching a child sitting on an imaginary throne, gathering all their cuddly toys at their feet before putting on a funny voice and getting their teddy bears to deliver them obsequious compliments.

Several chapters of clumsy world-building pass, before a plot suddenly appears with the suddenness of a bird flying into a window, its carcass splattered haphazardly over a couple of pages of awkward monologue from a character we’ve never seen before.

Another dubious imagining of the future. (Image via)

Here’s the plot: For reasons that were unclear to me—possibly because, by this point, I was only reading every third word in an effort to get to the end—some government guy decides that The Others are a problem (aren’t they always) that needs fixing right now. He figures that there are three possible solutions: change their brains to be more like N-Ps, keep them as pets, or commit a casual act of genocide. Hodge, the senior N-P scientist, is put in charge of trying to implement the least ridiculous of those three options, on the strange basis that genocide would be beyond 22nd century technology and the fact that nobody wants an idiotic human as their child’s pet. Tedium ensues.

The rest I’ll spare you. Fred wanders into the world of The Others, because "more research required," and inevitably becomes far more tangled in their lives than he anticipated. Naturally, this includes fucking one of the uncomprehending subjects, Sim, which gives Greenfield an opportunity to write one of the weirdest sex scenes I’ve ever read.

“Fred was already loosening the Helmet strap with the other hand that wasn’t angling my chin," Sim begins. Asked by Fred to remove her "dress thing," Sim then explains, “It was still stranger now to step outside of my garment. I only did so in the wash-waste, and never outside.”

Then they have sex, at which point Fred realizes that Sim may not actually know what sex is, which carries the awkward and tragically unexplored implication that Fred is actually a rapist.

“Sim,” asks Fred, “do you know what we’ve just done?”

“I think so. I think the Fact-Totum says it’s what people used to do before the reproduction programs made everything so much easier.”

As a work of fiction, this reads like something devised by Floyd Mayweather Jr. after ten rounds. But how does the science stand up? The answer is… it doesn’t, because there isn’t really much science to be found. Last year, I wrote about the elusive hypothesis of Susan Greenfield, saying at the time that, for all her talk about modern technology damaging our brains, she’s incredibly vague about what exactly her theory is: “As far as I can understand it,” I complained, “Greenfield's hypothesis is that an unquantified level of exposure to an unspecified subset of modern technologies may be affecting an indeterminate number of people's brains in an undefined way, with a number of results.”

Greenfield talking about "mind change," the term she coined to describe how computers are changing our brains.

What kind of technology? What sort of damage? How? For years now, Greenfield has refused to be pinned down by these sorts of questions, and it’s more than a little convenient that by setting her book more than a century into the future she can mostly ignore them. Technology has somehow melted human brains to the point where we don’t even enjoy sex any more. How? Why? Who cares—it happened, and the people who said it wouldn’t were stupid and wrong.

People often ask me why Greenfield bothers me so much—it’s because I’m sick and tired of watching middle-aged, middle-class reactionaries direct torrents of thoughtless abuse at my generation. Her book is little more than a catalog of absurd prejudices directed by a 62-year-old at a generation she seems pig-headedly uninterested in engaging with, refusing to read blogs or look at Facebook. "I don't have to go bungee-jumping to have an opinion on it," she told the Independent, when asked if she should try visiting the site just once.

According to this person who's never legitimately interacted with us, we are becoming stupid, impulsive, violent, socially incompetent, and unable to think properly or plan ahead. We are increasingly addicted to screens and trapped in a limited two-dimensional universe of instant gratification. Apparently we’re even losing our desire for sex, which is certainly news to my penis. It’s hard to see how anyone who actually speaks to people under the age of 35 could take this seriously, but then I suppose there will always be people who are scared by the world changing into something they no longer fully understand.

Apparently humanity is in decline, and my generation proves it. “Most people,” Greenfield told the Independent, “agree with what I'm saying." My response to Greenfield and her friends, as a 31-year-old watching my peers struggle to gain a foothold in a world built by baby-boomers like Greenfield, is a resounding “fuck you.”

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

Previously - I Watched Homeopathy Fanatics Protest in London

A Pasola warrior about to throw his spear at a fighter from a rival clan. The spears may be blunt these days, but they do occasionally kill fighters and spectators.

Sumba is an island the size of Jamaica in the Indonesian archipelago that has been cut off from the rest of the world for so long that its ancient animistic traditions survive to this day. It is the setting for ritual battles called Pasola which take place every year in February and March. The Pasola is a fight between rival clans who hurl spears at each other on horseback in order to “fertilise” the soil with spilled human blood.

To get to Sumba from Bali, we hopped on a small propel- ler plane for a one-hour flight. Most of the passengers were Sumbanese commuters, but there were also brawny leathery surfers on the hunt for uncrowded waves, and Western and Indonesian businessmen, probably land speculators. Land on Sumba is in demand because the island, rich in culture and blessed with perfect beaches, is tipped to become a hot tourist destination.

As we descended over rice paddies lined with palm trees and rolling hills dotted with wild horses, we passed clusters of thatched bamboo huts with muddy courtyards where pigs, chickens and dogs roamed. In contrast, the modern, half-built Tambolaka airport feels out of place. For now, Sumba is still far too wild to attract casual holidaymakers. The clans on the island still practise head- hunting, sorcery and ritual blood sacrifice according to their arcane Marapu religion, and the official Indonesian law often gives way to adat – local clan law and traditions.

We had come to film the lead-up to the Pasola battle in Wanukaka, a village in West Sumba where members of the Praibakul clan, from teenage boys to elderly men, had been prepping their spears and horses for this year’s fight against the neighbouring Waihura clan. The battle was set to take place a couple of days later, although that could change depending on how the ratus – the local shamans – would read the moon.

Pajura ratu Bapak Kameme Bili having a cigarette before this year’s boxing match, which takes place before the Pasola.

Before driving into Wanukaka, we stopped by some ramshackle roadside stalls to stock up on gifts of psy- choactive betel nuts called pitang and Gudang Garam clove cigarettes for the ratus and Pasola warriors. We had arranged to stay with Rudy, a descendant of Wanukaka’s royal Mamodo family. His house on the outskirts of the village was surrounded by palm for- est hills and rice fields where farmers pushed heavy wooden ploughs behind their buffalo; it looked like a prettier version of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Rudy hadn’t arrived yet, so his sister, Monica, served us sugary tea on their front porch which was lined with pig jaws. “Animal jaws and skulls are signs
of richness. It shows the family have many animals and can afford to eat meat,” she explained.

On the side porch, Rudy’s cousin Dedi, a fierce young Pasola warrior, was polishing his spears, a cigarette dangling from his lips. We asked him about his preparations. “We don’t prepare. We just go there and fight because we have to, for the harvest,” he said. “If you get hit by a spear and you start bleeding, it means the harvest will be good.” Dedi has fought in the Pasola since he was 14, and showed us the scars all over his body. “The pain when the spear hits you is incredible, especially if you get hit in the head.” He offered to take us to a bare-knuckle boxing match that night called the Pajura which traditionally takes place before the Pasola. We gladly accepted, before he warned us that spectators often get punched, and that some boxers wrap rocks, horns or broken glass around their fists. A senior family member added that until recently the Pasola had been much bloodier. “It was only 40 years ago that the government forbade the use of metal-tipped spears and parangs [long-bladed machete-style knives, carried by every Sumbanese man] during the Pasola. Now fighters use blunt spears,” he said.

After a dinner of fried Pot Noodles and dog meat, Dedi and his friends, cheery having drunk the crate of beer we’d given them, decided it was time to go to the Pajura in Tetena. Riding on the back of a drunk Pasola warrior’s motorbike, through jungle roads and without a helmet, to go to a bare-knuckle moonlight boxing match might sound alarming, but the ride under the stars was pretty awesome. We must have driven for 45 minutes, past endless palm trees and surrounded by bats, when the road came to an abrupt end by a field of shoulder- height vegetation. Dedi and his friends kept driving at full speed through the high grass until we reached a small path that led to what must have been hundreds of steps leading down to a beach. We were early. A few people were sitting on the sand, profusely smoking Gudang Garams to repel the swarming mosquitoes.

Dedi led us to a tent where some men had gathered around a ratu who was sitting cross-legged and wrapped in impressive ikat, preparing his betel nuts in a wooden mortar. He was the Pajura ratu – for one night only, the world’s coolest-looking box- ing referee. He explained the rules of the fight via a long-winded legend in a local dialect. The tale involved a man who was lost at sea whose wife had married another man, which resulted in clan battles and ended with the exchange of holy nyale, a sea worm that appears once a year, determining the day of the Pasola. Even so, we were none the wiser about any technicalities. By now, hundreds, if not thousands, of people had gathered on the beach, and more were descending the crowded steps.

A ratu trying to catch holy nyale sea worms that only come to shore once a year, heralding the day of the Pasola. The nyale’s colour is believed to predict the quality of the forthcoming harvest.

Suddenly, the entire crowd formed an impromptu circle around a fight that had kicked off. Then random fights broke out all over the place. The only graspable rule was that if a guy from the Praibakul clan spotted someone from the Waihura clan, they would fight. Dedi reassured us that the ratu had “tree bark” to treat injuries.

When our cameraman was punched in the stomach, and shit- faced local politicians started picking fights with people, hands on their parangs, we felt it was time to move, and spent a good two hours queueing to climb the narrow steps.

Rudy works as a law adviser for the Sumba Foundation, a nonprofit charity that has established malaria clinics and schools on the island and supplies clean water to villages. The morning after the fight, one of his colleagues, a Danish doctor called Claus Bogh, who has spent the best part of a decade on the island, had tea with us on the porch.

“In Sumba, blood represents everything from food to war and life,” he said. “At the Pasola, if there’s not blood on the ground, the ratus will not stop the game. They have to make sure that next year’s rice harvest will be good. For that, there has to be blood.”

He told us to be careful. “A spectator was killed a few years ago. A spear hit him right in the eye and he died within ten minutes.” He warned us that every Pasola ends in mayhem, usually with a lot of stone throwing. He also confirmed the rumours we’d heard about headhunting clans.

Sumba’s most famous ratu, Dangu Duka, chewing betel nuts before the Pasola.

“A couple of years ago, a clan kidnapped a girl because she refused to marry one of their men. When her clan found out, they came for her and chopped off the heads of her kidnappers and sent them to the kidnappers’ clan. In 1982, I think, there was a major falling out between two clans and 200 people were killed, all of them had their heads chopped off.”

We later found out that the day before we left the island, seven people had been decapitated in a land brawl a few kilometres from where we had stayed.

After we’d spoken to Claus, Rudy took us to meet Sumba’s most famous ratu, Dangu Duka, half of whose face has mysteri- ously turned black. “The gods from the heavens and the gods from the underworld tell us when the Pasola needs to take place by sending the nyale. We pray at sunrise and sunset to the gods, and measure the moon cycles to predict when the nyale will come,” the ratu explained. As well as setting the date of the Pasola, the nyale predict the quality of the harvest, depending on their colour and shape. “The soil needs blood,” he said. “If someone is killed in the Pasola, it’s treated as a local issue, it has nothing to do with Indonesian law.”

All the while, he was crushing his pitangs and chewing them with chalk powder and a green plant that he kept in a small straw bag. We tried some. The pitangs tasted like coffee beans soaked in chlorine. Following his example, we spat out the copi- ous amounts of red saliva that the nut produced, and enjoyed a feeling of relaxed euphoria.

In the evening, we made our way to the holy village of Ububewi, where three ratus were about to begin the Pasola ritual. Dedi and his friends gave us a ride but stopped in the middle of a jungle dust road, saying we had to walk the rest because noisy motorbikes would disturb the sacred ceremony. When we reached the top of the hill, the ratus were chilling out on a porch chewing pitangs. We had just missed the first ritual, a sacrifice of chickens to read the future of the Pasola in their entrails. As the moonlight grew stronger, and once the ratus were done wrapping themselves in intricately patterned ikat, amulets and feathers, they picked up baskets of pitangs and flasks of coconut oil, and installed themselves on the ancient stone mega- lith platform overlooking the jungle and moonlit valley. They sang shamanic hymns, calling the nyale by humming at the moon. Without ceasing their incantations, they walked down the hill to the beach where the sea worms would hopefully make an appearance.

A spear split this Pasola fighter’s nose. The guy who threw it rode a victory lap, cheered on by the crowd. The Sumbanese depend on the rice harvest and believe blood must be spilt on the soil to fertilise it.

We followed them, trying hard to avoid the deep cracks that were hardly visible in the dark. As we proceeded, more villagers joined us. We finally reached the beach in the early hours of the morning, watching the sunrise while the ratus walked into the sea to catch the nyale they’d been calling for since midnight. After 20 minutes, they strolled back to the beach with their catch. Hundreds of people swarmed to hear the predictions for the coming harvest. This year’s sea worms were green and brown. Green meant that the rice field will be infested with moss, and brown warned of problems with insects. Not great news. At about 7 AM, Pasola fighters came riding in on their decorated horses. When the blaz- ing sun was up, the first Pasola began. More and more people arrived, eagerly pressing themselves into the crowds to get closer to the flying spears. After about an hour and a half, the Pasola warriors, now warmed up, rode off to the main Pasola field on the other side of the village.

Thousands of people had gathered, all trying to get to the front. Some climbed trees for a better view. The fighters, tire- lessly hurling spears at each other, seemed to take little notice of the heat and appeared completely fearless. They believe that dying in the Pasola is honourable, and that you return to your ancestors. Whenever someone was hit, the warrior who’d thrown the spear threw his hands up in the air victoriously, while his clan peers cheered.

Several hours later, our tans were approaching the stage of second-degree burns. By 3 PM, feeling like the battle would never end, our cameraman, desperate for shade, stole a family’s flowery umbrella to take a nap under it. Just as he’d settled into a comfy position, members of one clan, frustrated with the lack of blood spilled in the Pasola, started throwing stones at the fighters and the crowd. At that, the armed Indonesian police, who until then had kept a low profile, started firing their ma- chine guns in the air, inducing panic and scattering the crowd, including the warriors on horseback.

As Claus had promised, the Pasola ended in chaos. Dedi, who had fought impressively for a long time, rode a final vic- tory lap, his eyes gleaming with pride. He then rode up the hill to his house, where we joined him and his family for the Pasola feast. As we snoozed on Dedi’s porch, between being served rice, dog stew, nyale goreng and pitangs, it dawned on me that rather than the bloodthirst I had initially expected, the Pasola has more to do with restoring peace, venting ag- gression and resolving disputes between the clans. Once you overcome the fear of being trampled or speared, the chaos is really liberating.

Watch Milène hang out with Sumbanese shamans and Pasola warriors in The Vice Guide to Travel: Blood Sacrifice In Indonesia, coming soon on VICE.com. In the mean time, here's the trailer:

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Photos by Nate Miller

Every year, for four days at the end of June, Dauphin, Manitoba becomes a disgusting mess of mud, blood, beer, and world-class country music. Branded as a family friendly affair, there is an unseemly underbelly that pushes up against the wholesome finely starched pearl-snaps of “Canada’s longest running country music festival.” However, the duality of a God-fearing, family friendly image and a hard-scrabble, raucous reality are as ingrained in country music as the high and lonesome singing of Hank Williams himself.

Located 200 miles to the northwest of Winnipeg—Canada’s reigning Murder Capital—Dauphin Countryfest annually brings in big name headliners like Carrie Underwood, Dierks Bentley, and Reba. The festival attracts 14,000 paying customers, along with thousands of artists, crewmembers, volunteers, merchants, media types, and other hangers-on. The overwhelming majority of whom are white, drunk, and sunburnt as hell.

The festival grounds are nestled just north of the pristine wilds of Riding Mountain National Park. The grounds boast an impressive hillside amphitheatre, along with two side stages, multiple food, trinket, and booze vendors, and an expansive campground that houses everything from pup tents to massive 34-foot RV monstrosities.

“We’ve got two bunches of people coming here, the tent kids, and the big campers,” Eric Irwin, president of Countryfest and mayor of Dauphin, explained to me over a beer on the first day. “So fitting them all in is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, but we’ve got people working on that in the campground.”

That jigsaw puzzle includes plenty of portable shitters, pay showers, and over a dozen confused or outright racist campers flying Confederate flags. Some of these were flown alongside the Canadian standard, while others were flying loud and proud, lone wolf style.

“I’m from south of the Mason-Dixon line and I wouldn’t pull that shit,” said Sean Multan, harp player for a few bands over the weekend and my drinking companion Sunday night, when the subject was raised. “What the fuck are those people thinking?”

The campground itself is divided in two, with quiet camping for the old folks up at the top of the hill, and the muddy, rowdier camping (where all the Confederate flags were sighted) below on low lying ground that smells strongly of manure. It is at the far reaches of lower camping that you find the “Back 40,” where a heavily intoxicated and horny mass of 16 to 24 year olds completely lose their shit from Thursday through Monday morning.

“This is my fourth year coming,” Kylie Parker, 22, told me, while standing knee deep in a nearby muddy creek where hundreds of people were drinking, recklessly throwing their empty cans and naked bodies into the rushing water. Parker was camping in the Back 40. “It’s all about the music, but the party too, man.”

“How would you tell someone who’s never been to Countryfest to prepare?” I asked him.

“For the worst,” he replied, laughing into his Solo cup of “Rocket Fuel”—a potent but not unpleasant mixture of Budweiser, Bacardi, and Sour Puss.

The Back 40 is the wildest scene on the festival grounds, where people are partying incredibly hard on a constant basis. One patron, Ryan Krause, broke his ankle Thursday, but refused to leave the party, somehow locating a wheelchair for $40 nearby. By Saturday night, however, he was taken away by ambulance as the condition of his leg had deteriorated rapidly. His bros were seriously bummed.

One particularly wild campsite, known as the Honey Badger, loudly proclaimed to passersby and a local film crew that they were the undisputed “wildest partiers” at Countryfest.

“We don’t give a fuck,” one guy proclaimed after chugging his booze and hurling his empty mason at the side of the Honey Badger itself—a fifth-wheel camper. By Monday morning, the Honey Badger had been completely demolished, flipped on its roof, stomped to bits, and abandoned beneath a mountain of beer cans.

With thousands of impaired guests running wild, it comes as no surprise that onsite security and the RCMP ran ragged over the course of the weekend. Despite the dozens of charges laid at Countryfest—everything from drunk driving to possession of narcotics to assault—Irwin and the Countryfest organization are quick to downplay any negative reports to the public.

“Some of our stats get a little exaggerated because police reports seem to suggest that anything that happens on one of Manitoba’s major highways that runs by the site is somehow related to Countryfest,” Irwin said in an official Countryfest release following the festival, under the subtitle “Uneventful Event.”

You can’t blame the Countryfest folks, though.

In the past, the festival has been mired by routine violence, death, and widespread but unconfirmed rumors of sexual assault. When one of Thursday’s female performers who was having trouble locating her campsite late in the evening told an unhelpful member of the security staff that she was “not surprised women are afraid of getting raped here,” she found herself heavily reprimanded by event organizers the next day.

“That does not happen here,” she and her bandmates were stringently assured.

The festival is run primarily by volunteers—with only three full-time staff operating behind the scenes each year. Proceeds from the festival and attendant economic development bring millions into the community of 8,500. Local organizations like minor hockey, Air Cadets, and the school band depend on that money to maintain programming through the year. As such, a safe, wholesome image is crucial to Countryfest.

But country music itself is constantly struggling to bury its very real problems beneath the veneer of a rosy, family-values based aesthetic. From Hank Williams to George Jones, Steve Earle to Randy Travis, the mainstream country music establishment will ignore almost any problems on an artists’ homefront, so long as it moves units or puts butts in the seats. Until it’s too late.

And so country music continues to struggle with itself, caught between the wholesome, family-first ideal and the wild livin’ honky reality. Somewhere between lies Dauphin Countryfest, a tawdry affair where the whitest, drunkest people in western Canada congregate annually to blow off a little steam, watch some country music, and attempt not to succumb to alcohol poisoning, violent misadventure, or death. It really is a great time… if you’re into that sort of thing.

Follow Sheldon on Twitter: @badguybirnie

Previously:

Why Are Some Dumb Canadians Waving the Confederate Flag?

This is what the inside of a mine looks like. via Flickr.

While working on a piece I wrote last month about a Canadian gold mine being shut down by protesters in Kyrgyzstan, I came across a statistic that I thought must have been a mistake. With all of the noise and criticism both domestically and internationally of Alberta’s Tar Sands, it seemed to me shockingly underreported that 75% of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada.

All over the world, companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and run out of lawyer’s offices on Bay Street or skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver (whose real financiers may live in Australia or Nevada) are handling the mining game at home, throughout parts of Asia, South America and surprisingly, even with all the talk of China’s investment in Africa, it turns out that it’s Canada, not China, who is quietly dominating and exploiting African mining. All told, almost 1,300 mining companies based out of Canada are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in over 100 countries around the world.

So the question is, why? What makes Canada such an attractive option for the ‘extractive sector’? Canadians don’t own all of these mining companies—but these organizations do plop their headquarters down here—what is it about this country that makes it such an industry haven?

I asked Jamie Kneen, research coordinator with Ottawa based MiningWatch Canada, a non-profit organization that describes itself as “a direct response to industry and government failures to protect the public and the environment from destructive mining practices and to deliver on their sustainability rhetoric.” Just why it is that Canada is the go-to place for mining companies to set up shop?

“There’s two sides to it,” he said. “One is that there is a concentration of expertise in mining finance and mining law, it does have a historical basis” He is of course referring to the various Canadian gold rushes, the nickel deposits in Sudbury, coal in Cape Breton, etc. “The other side is that Canada provides very favourable conditions. The listing requirements for the TSX are pretty lax, the disclosure requirements are pretty lax, you don’t have to have Canadian directories or Canadian shareholders to be a Canadian company... and the Canadian government doesn’t ask too many questions about whether you’re paying your taxes in other jurisdictions (i.e. foreign countries where the mines are operating).”

I was getting the impression that companies just pay taxes on their offices here and are sent on their merry way overseas to do whatever they want. I asked Jamie if there is any Canadian government oversight that’s keeping an eye on how these companies are operating—insofar as their relationships with the local populations, how they’re treating their employees, or the mine’s surrounding environments—and he responded: “In a word, no. There are really only two Canadian laws that apply internationally to mining practices, and one is against having sex with children. The other is against bribery and corruption. The RCMP has told us that there’s absolutely no way that they can control that at all. They’ve had a lot of resources thrown their way to try and make Canada look better as far as bribery and corruption activity abroad, but there’s way more than they can keep tabs on. It’s just kind of, cross your fingers and hope that they act responsibly.”

While the RCMP reportedly has trouble policing our overseas mining interests—and how could they not have trouble, when you think about it—there still have been some successful mining-bribery busts. Just this January, Griffiths Energy, based out of Calgary got booked offering a $2 million dollar bribe to the government of Chad on a resource deal. Try again, Griffiths.

While a Google search of something like “Canadian Mining Abuses” will turn up a plethora of stories that point to a systemic problem of conquistador and Avatar-esque narratives, here are a few examples from different regions that illustrate just how brutally these mining companies are acting while representing Canada overseas.

Barrick Gold Corporation is a name that comes up on a number of issues. Based out of the TD Canada Trust Tower at 161 Bay Street in Toronto, their gold mine in Papua New Guinea has been the site of fatal shootings as well as of hundreds of rapes, gang rapes,and beatings of indigenous women by the mine’s security forces. Barrick has acknowledged the problem by offering victims some compensation—on the agreement they sign away their rights to ever legally sue. I wasn’t able to find any evidence of Canadian government investigation or intervention in the matter.

In the Congo in 2005, Anvil Mining Ltd, based out of Quebec, allegedly provided logistical support and transportation to the Congolese militaryas it made its way to the port city of Kilwa where it massacred hundreds of people. A Canadian organization representing survivors of the massacre, the Canadian Association Against Impunity—whose mandate is to hold mining companies in Africa accountable for their actions—had their class-action suit thrown out by the Supereme Court of Canada, saying the complaint should be heard in the Congo (whose military the mine supported). This, again, reinforces my understanding that our mining companies can act with impunity overseas, without the threat of any legal repercussions in Canada.

Calgary based TVI Pacific has employed its own paramilitary force in a remote region of the Philippines to intimidate and remove the indigenous population from their ancestral lands so they can mine for gold. In one documented incident, members of TVI’s security force—all of which are employees of Canadian companies—entered the house of a local man, beat him with a hammer, smashed a small-scale piece of mining equipment that he owned – likely his only livelihood – then, just for good measure, slapped his pregnant wife, and shot at the feet of their teenage daughter.

A protest in Vancouver over our mining operations in Tibet. via Flickr.

The recklessness of Vancouver-based China Gold International left 83 Tibetan miners after a landslide in March—a natural disaster that many believe was caused by the environmental disruption that the mining industry has caused in the area. Apparently more than 5,000 Chinese troops were sent in to “serve as rescue efforts” but a Tibetan monk from the area, who lives in Canada, believes they were actually there to curb protests by the locals.

In Central and South America, Canada’s reputation is being dragged through the dirt to the point where in some countries, it’s apparently better for travellers to say they’re American than Canadian, and it’s not hard to see why. Vancouver-based Pacific Rim is suing the government of El Salvador, a country with a GDP of $23 Billion (Canada’s is $1.7 trillion) for $315 million dollars because they didn’t let them follow through with a mine that threatened to pollute the Lempa River—a watershed that accounts for 60% of the country’s clean water.

As if that’s not enough, a region of Guatemala was militarized last month—and the right to protest or form meetings has been suspended by the president—following clashes between local protesters who are concerned for their drinking water and employees of Vancouver-based Tahoe Resources inc.

While most companies probably do operate ethically and to the best of their ability—while maintaining healthy and sustainable relationships with local cultures and their environments—unfortunately these few stories really are the tip of the iceberg as far as Canada’s mining reputation that is beginning to be noticed as the worst in the world.

The basic Canadian government line on mining abroad, according to Jamie Kneen, is that “we expect Canadian companies to respect the law of whatever country they’re operating in and the fact is they may or may not. And that’s subject to whatever the law is in that country and their ability to enforce it.”

Despite the recent history of environmental abuses by our mining industry worldwide, we are still doing our best to keep up appearances with our global partners. Just a couple of months ago, Minister of International Cooperation (Everyone’s favourite Ex-Toronto Police Chief and former Chief of the Ontario Provincial Police) Julian Fantino was in Cape Town promoting Canada’s “responsible resource development in Africa.” Clearly, though, we are not as responsible as we should be.

Canada has a longstanding history of getting involved in foreign conflict under the banner of human rights—and we certainly enjoy maintaining the veneer of our role on the world stage as one of the good guys. But why aren’t we holding our mining companies to those same standards that we hold other guilty nations to? After learning about what’s happening with Canada’s extractive sector, it’s impossible to distinguish Canadian foreign policy from Canadian mining policy—and our hypocrisy is glaring.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @ddner

Previously:

A Canadian Gold Mine in Kyrgyzstan Was Shut Down by Rock Throwing Protesters

It's a drone! It's a solar plane! It's... a single slice of classic cheese 'za mounted to a weather balloon that's pumping EDM into the heavens?

Well, of course it is. That's because when Anamanaguchi decides to make a music video the sky is the limit, and the secret ingredient is always a healthy dash of absurdity. So when we caught wind of what the Brooklyn-based memewave quartet had cooking for the video for "Endless Fantasy," the title track off their new record, we knew we had be there to see it all take off for ourselves.