Four years ago, we made a film called Inside Afghanistan with veteran war reporter Ben Anderson. Since then, we've enjoyed a harmonious, fruitful relationship that mostly involves Ben hanging out in warzones and sending us amazing stories from the frontline. The latest feature Ben put together is the film This Is What Winning Looks Like (below), which documents his time embedded in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police as they prepare to take over policing of the country when allied forces withdraw in 2014.

What Ben found was a police force riddled with corruption – openly admitting to kidnapping and sexually molesting young boys, selling their weapons, pulling down the sides of their bases to sell for scrap metal and smoking hash and heroin while on patrol – and an army still misunderstanding the rules of engagement after all these years of combat. None of those exactly being ideal when you're in charge of making sure an entire country stays on track.             

At 4PM today, Ben's going to be doing a Reddit AMA, where you can ask him about anything from his new film – which is currently sitting at the top of Reddit's documentary section btw – and the five years he spent embedded with British and American troops in Afghanistan, to hanging out with deportees and pimps in Cambodia, covering gang wars in El Salvador and spending time with third generation Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. And a bunch of other insane/interesting/dangerous stuff he's done throughout his career.               

Here's where you want to go to do all that.

Image via

You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.   

But who are these people?

Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.

Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.

I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.

“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”

Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.

George Zoley
Another prison profiteer who presumably has no moral qualms about the business is George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group and the second biggest investor in the incarceration industry. In fact, he’s so proud of his business, which has committed a laundry list of human rights abuses, he tried to get a college football stadium named after it.

Zoley made nearly $6 million last year through salary and bonuses alone, but the real money is in stocks—he owns more than 500,000 shares in GEO, and he has made $23 million in stock trades during one 18 month period. But you can’t accuse him of not earning his pay, exactly. GEO saw a 56 percent spike in profits in the first quarter of 2013, and the company’s executives reassured investors that the incarceration rate wouldn’t be dropping any time soon when announcing its earnings. Zoley will be mega rich for years to come.

Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich
Both Wedell and Zoley are big donors to the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean those from the left side of the aisle can’t play their game. Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich both donate to Democratic politicians and are involved with progressive-leaning organizations like Root Capital, a nonprofit lending company that offers loans to farmers in developing countries to alleviate poverty.

Their day job, however, is running Scopia Capital, a hedge fund that is the one of the largest shareholders of GEO Group. The fund owns about $300 million in shares in that company, which represents 12 percent of its entire portfolio. Like Zoley, they are good at what they do—their fund outperformed the market by 20 percentage points, and the State of New Jersey hired Scopia to manage $150 million worth of pensions.

I called them up to ask their thoughts about being politically liberal but heavily invested in private prisons, but Mindich refused to answer any questions and Sirovich was unavailable.

It should be pointed out that while being far on the left politically might seem incompatible with investing in prisons (or managing a hedge fund in the first place), the Democratic party is totally fine with the incarceration rate. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are largely responsible for the drug war policies that caused the prison population to skyrocket, Bill Clinton was a “tough on crime” president who continued their ideas. And current vice president Joe Biden was a principal player in the Clinton era’s crime policies—he wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, called for $9.7 billion in increased funding for prisons and stiffer penalties for drug offenders.

Though the US prison population is shrinking slightly, the number of inmates in federal lockup is increasing, and while Obama keeps saying he’s ending the war on drugs, he’s also proposed budgets that call for increasing the amount of money spent on the Bureau of Prisons. So it’s not such a stretch that a Democratic donor would also be in the men-in-cages industry.

Retired People and Probably You
The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

Together, they own about 20 percent of both CCA and GEO. That means if you have a 401(k) plan, there’s a good chance you’re benefit financially from private prisons. And even if you don’t, there are many more mutual funds, brokerage firms, and banks that invest in private prisons—it being a growth industry and all—so if you have money somewhere other than your wallet or your mattress, it’s a good bet you’re involved in some way with companies that are locking up and probably abusing inmates.

This is especially true for government employees like public school teachers because their retirement funds are some of the biggest investors in private prisons. According to NASDAQ data, the retirement funds for public employees and teachers in New York and California together have about $60 million ($30 million each) invested in CCA and GEO. Teacher retirement funds in Texas and Kentucky have $8.3 million and $4 million invested in prisons respectively, and public employees in Florida ($10.3 million), Ohio ($8.6 million), Texas ($5.6 million), Arizona ($5.3 million), and Colorado ($2.25 million) are also connected to the industry. Except for New York, which has only one privately run detention facility, each of these states has several prisons run by CCA and GEO Group facilities. And it’s not just Americans who have ties to prisons. Foreign investors have money in them as well, including the pension fund for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which recently sold off its $5.1 million worth of GEO Group stock.

Most of these employees are probably unaware that their pensions are tied to prisons—and it’s hard to say that these are “bad” investments from a purely capitalistic perspective, since these prisons are making money hand over fist. The private prison industry is entrenched in our society. And the only way to make sure that we’re not individually and collectively profiting off of it is to close these things.  

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

More on prisons:

Prisons I’ve Known and Yelped

Don’t Get Caught

Why Can’t We Cane Criminals?

I arrived in Jerusalem on Nakba Day expecting shit to get wild. But the speed with which the demonstration went from zero to fucked shocked even me, a relative veteran of the West Bank protest scene. 

Nakba Day is the bleak mirror image of Israeli Independence Day. Where Israelis celebrate the founding of their state on Independence Day, Nakba (a word that translates as "catastrophe") Day commemorates the 750,000 Palestinians who were forced from their homes when Israel became a state in 1948. Roughly one-third of the refugees and their children (now numbering around five million) continue to live in refugee camps 65 years later.

The Israeli government, of course, is not all that happy about large groups of people banding together to shout about the creation of their state being a catastrophe, and Nakba Day demonstrations are often marked by violence. The largest Nakba Day gathering this year was in Jerusalem, although clashes also broke out in Hebron, Bethlehem, and several other points around the West Bank. Luckily, they weren't even comparable to scenes in 2011, when Israeli police shot dead 13 pro-Palestine demonstrators, but that's not to say there wasn't still a disturbing amount of violence.

This year kicked off quietly enough at the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's old city. About 100 Palestinians were gathered, waving flags and chanting. I sat there for about an hour and was just getting bored enough to wander off in search of a falafel when everyone jumped up and started running out to the street. 

A much larger Nakba Day march was headed toward the Damascus Gate and the Palestinian demonstrators were rushing to meet it. The police had been watching calmly until that point, but as soon as the two groups met it was like some high-pitched police whistle had been blown that awoke them from their ennui and immediately made them really angry and unnecessarily violent. 

Cops on horseback, a favorite in Jerusalem, came out of nowhere and began trying to run down everyone in sight—Palestinian, Israeli, international, demonstrator, journalist, passer-by—literally anyone with feet. The fact that the groups had converged right in front of a police station didn't help the situation much, and riot cops were soon swarming the scene like heavily-armed fire ants keen to bash up some Palestinian skulls. And that's exactly what they did: beat up and arrest a bunch of Palestinians at random. 

Busloads of Palestinians came in from all over Israel and I chatted to a guy from Nazareth for a while. He told me that his bus had arrived early in the morning so people could pray at al-Aqsa mosque, but that they'd been turned away by Israeli police. "I had a Palestinian flag. They called me a terrorist," he said.

I hung around for a while taking pictures and trying to avoid being run down by the giant, demonic warhorses with weird ankle fringes, until I noticed people shouting at something down the street.

Industrious photographer that I am, I ran as fast as I could to see what was happening, dodging the other rubberneckers to get a better look. I ran out into the middle of the street and came face-to-face with a skunk truck. If you're not aware of what a "skunk truck" is, it's basically a truck that drives around at protests spraying something that smells worse than liquid shit at protesters. Imagine if you left a potato to rot for a year, mashed that toxic musk up with the contents of a curry festival porta-potty and used the liquid to marinate a charred, decaying horse. You're now maybe halfway to understanding how bad this stuff reeks. 

Watching the spray shoot out of the truck, I tried to skid to a stop. But since the ground was already wet with the muck, I skidded right onto my ass instead. Horrified, it took me a moment to realize that they had switched the skunk out of the skunk truck and replaced it with normal water. Apparently it's fine to spray it all over Palestine, but they can't foul up the beautiful streets of Jerusalem since the smell hangs around for weeks and is impossible to clean. 

The water cannon was directing all its energy at a single middle-aged woman waving a Palestinian flag. I watched it spray her head-on at least ten times while she held her ground and continued waving the flag, apparently completely unfazed. 

A few at a time, the demonstrators managed to make their way around the cops and headed back to Damascus Gate, where the violence intensified even more. People gathered in groups, waving flags and chanting until dozens of police stormed the square, beating and/or arresting everyone they could catch. The demonstrators would run away, forcing the cops to chase them, and then circle back for another round of chanting until the police came back and the cycle started all over again.

At one point, I saw a guy hit a cop with a flag—the flag itself, not the stick it was hanging from, meaning he basically brushed the cop with a cloth. Because of that reprehensible offense, the entire police force went completely ape-shit. Around a dozen cops with machine guns chased the guy down, cornered him, threw him to the ground, and dragged him off screaming.

At one point, a female Palestinian journalist in a hijab was taking pictures of a cop when, without any kind of warning, he grabbed her and hurled her roughly to the ground, looking incredibly proud of himself as he did it. The woman was less than five feet tall and couldn't have weighed a third of what the cop did.

Protesters started to throw stones and glass bottles at the police. The "Palestinian stone-thrower" is often trotted out in pro-Israel media as a terrorist archetype, used to justify all sorts of brutality against demonstrations in the West Bank. But the police were beating people up for at least an hour before I saw the first stone fly, making it appear less an act of terrorism and more an act of improvised (and let's face it, ineffectual) self-defense.

After a couple hours of beatings, arrests, sound bombs, and water cannons, it seemed like things had started to calm down a little. Back at the Damascus Gate, I ran into a friend of mine—a community organizer from Palestinian East Jerusalem.

"What do you think?" I asked her. 

"I'm happy," she said. 

"Even with all the violence?"

"I'm happy because of the violence. This never happens in Jerusalem."

I could see her point. The fact that the police resorted to such extreme measures meant that the demonstration had made an impact. If there hadn't been such a large turnout, there wouldn't have been clashes. The police could have tossed a sound bomb or two and called it a day. But the massive number of demonstrators provoked a heavy-handed police response, which can definitely be seen as a victory from a non-violent-resistance point of view. 

I went off looking for some food when everybody went crazy again. The cops began firing a massive amount of sound bombs, injuring at least one person that I saw. They brought in a second water truck, and myself and a couple of colleagues ended up crouched behind a fruit stand while the truck blasted water at us, three foreign photographers clearly doing nothing dangerous. I got soaked but managed to keep my camera dry, which I'm calling a victory. 

As we finally piled into the car and made our way home, I thought about the Jerusalem Day celebration that I'd covered the week before. For Jerusalem Day, the cops shut down the entire Muslim section of the old city, confining people to their homes to accommodate thousands of flag-waving Israelis marching to the Wailing Wall. But switch out the Israeli flags for Palestinian ones and the response is noticeably different.

Just normal life in Jerusalem. Sixty-five years on and every Palestinian demonstration is still a catastrophe. 

Follow Andy on Twitter: @HanDetenido

More from Israel and Palestine:

Dancing Idiots, Rubber Bullets and Candy Floss at this Year's Passover in Hebron

Israel's Radical Left

One Young Druze Vs. the Entire Israeli Army

In Mauritania, a country crippled by food shortages, obesity is viewed as a woman's sign of wealth and prestige. To attain Mauritanian standards of beauty, many women undergo the practice of gavage, or fattening up. While traditionally the practice of fattening includes chugging camel's milk in a nomadic camp under a sweltering sun in the Sahara Desert, for a modern-day working Mauritanian woman appetite-inducing pills have become the new way to pack on the pounds.

Watch more at the VICE show page and check out VICE on HBO every Friday at 11 PM.

There came a point on Thursday afternoon—after learning that Rob Ford had taken some time off from an important city council meeting to wander around a parking lot sticking ‘Rob Ford’ magnets to cars—that I figured it would be time to update you lazy commoners about the ongoing saga that is Robbie’s intoxicated reign over the Kingdom of Toronto. Way back when, before the already infamous crack cocaine scandal of May 2013, the magnet controversy of 24 hours earlier in May 2013 didn’t seem so important. That is, of course, until Gawker (a celebrity gossip and crack-cocaine savvy web tabloid) broke the story that some guy, somewhere, has a video of King Robbie blazin’ crack tokes from a glass pipe—and the footage is for sale. Until someone buys it, you can always watch the Taiwanese CGI reenactment.

Gawker—who have decided that this is not an “alleged” or “supposed” crack smoking incident, given that they’ve got a graphic that reads “Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smokes Crack” on their homepage—have caused a major firestorm for King Robbie the First in the City of Toronto. The Toronto Star, an ungrateful and petulant organization that is hell-bent on taking down the Mayor, has viewed the tape “three times” but was clearly too cheap to buy it and stream it for the royal subjects of the Rob Ford empire aka The Birthplace of Kardinal Offishall. Plus, according to them, they saw this video on May 3^rd. Why keep all this crack smoking mayhem a secret? And what kind of incompetent blackmail video salesman is behind this controversy? How can you mess up on monetizing such a golden piece of footage? One must assume they’re ready to let it go at fire sale prices right now—hear that, Doug Ford?

But, regardless, The Star claims they were shown the video—that allegedly shows Rob Ford raising a “lighter and [moving] it in a circle motion beneath the pipe”—by a “group of Somali men” who are “involved in the drug trade.” Apparently these upstanding gentlemen showed the Star their all-of-a-sudden infamous footage wherein Rob Ford allegedly calls Justin Trudeau a “fag,” audibly says, regarding the cell phone that was recording him, “that better not be on,” and allegedly refers to the players on his beloved high school football team (in a mumbly tone) as “just fucking minorities.” Since all this has broken, Rob Ford has denied it, but is probably angry at his buddy Don Cherry for foreshadowing this whole situation when he told a council meeting in 2010 to “put that in your pipe you left-wing kooks.” We know now that Don Cherry was probably referring to street drugs.

So this is all quite sad and lame, huh? What’s worse is that these drug dealing blackmailers—who have captivated the attention of the media very fucking quickly—also have a photo of Rob Ford chilling with (who many believe to be) a Toronto drug dealer who died during a gang-related shooting outside of a King St. W club. Now, I don’t really know what your background is, reader, but I do not encounter many crack dealing gangsters in my day-to-day life; because I generally avoid smoking crack. The fact that our King was hanging around crack dealers is a bit fucked up and suspicious—and that’s the beauty of it all.

If you could actually use your brain and flex your critical thinking muscle for a minute, you’d realize that Rob Ford is currently at the centre of the world’s most elaborate anti-drug campaign. Think about it, sheeple. What does a man with royal blood have to gain from such a bland position as Mayor of Toronto? A man with the intellectual pedigree of Rob Ford and the body of Chris Farley does not require the miserable salary and excruciating hours (which he does not keep, but, whatever) of a mayoral position to maintain his profile or accumulate wealth. This crack smokin’ hullabaloo is simply an example of performance art, in which we are all part of the audience.

Toronto evidently has a cocaine problem that Rob Ford is trying to expose. By planting himself in a room full of crack loving drug dealers—while some random dude films him on a cell phone and gets Robbie to say crazy, racist shit—Rob Ford has presented the planet with a POV look at what it’s really like to hoe your life out for a glass dick. We should be thankful that we all have such an excellent role model like Robbie, to show us what pathways to never, ever go down. Because that’s what a mayor is for! If anything, this is just an elaborate callback to the great comedian Marion Barry who Rob Ford is known to idolize*.

So don’t buy into the tabloid narrative that somehow it’s a bad thing to have a crack-smoking mayor who appears to be totally chill about being filmed while his lips are wrapped around the smoky nozzle of a crack pipe. Those people over at Gawker who are trying to make this into such a big deal don’t know what they’re talking about. Because they’re American. Canadians have much different standards for education, humor, and acceptable crack use in the political arena.

Or, maybe we don’t. Maybe King Robbie isn’t so infallible after all. It was all fun and games when he managed to get fired and come back from the dead, or when he was posing for crappy photos inside of sports cars he doesn't own, but now the guy is being secretly filmed doing hard drugs in a sketchy apartment. Perhaps it’s not a joke. Maybe King Robbie needs help*.

*Safe assumption.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Rob Ford Got a Better Photographer

Rob Ford Has a Terrible Photographer

King Rob Ford Loves Women and Gambling

Caleb "Kai" Lawrence McGillvary with Jimmy Kimmel. Photo via Facebook

Remember Kai? The hatchet-wielding hobo of SMASHH!! SMAAASSHHH!! SAAAMAASHHH!! fame? The guy who made headlines after stopping some psycho who claimed he was Jesus Christ and ran over a bystander before attacking a group of women? Well, now Kai's wanted for murder.

ABC Local is reporting that an arrest warrant is out for Lawrence in connection with the murder of one Joseph Galry, who was found dead in his home on May 13. Reports are spotty, but authorities are considering Lawrence, last seen on Tuesday, to be armed and dangerous. He was last seen at a rail yard near Haddonfield, New Jersey. No matter the outcome, it's a truly bizarre and tragic twist to the "home-free" tale of everyone's favorite hatchet-wielding hobo, who it's been said harbors a bit of a violent streak. As he told told VICE last month, recalling busting up another guy after the Jesus incident: 

He was on a trip of dominance and control. I think he had a poisoned psyche. I've heard some of the research that people have been doing about his life and apparently he was a high school basketball coach for girls. That is fucked up. That truly sickens me. When I hear stuff about him getting jumped by six guys in a Fresno County jail and getting his jaw broken, I'm not going to lie to you, I celebrate that. People like that need to be fucking stopped.

For now, all we have are these words, which Lawrence put on Facebook two days ago:

what would you do if you woke up with a groggy head, metallic taste in your mouth, in a strangers [sic] house... walked to the mirror and seen come dripping from the side of your face from your mouth, and started wretching, realizing that someone had drugged, raped, and blown their fuckin [sic] load in you? what would you do?

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com. 

Photo by Nick Gazin

Gangsta Boo is hip-hop legend. As the sole female member of the epochal Three 6 Mafia during the late 90s and early 2000s, she helped forge a space for females in hardcore rap, with aggressive rhymes on classic records like Choices: The Album, When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, and her solo debut Enquiring Minds. I've been listening to Gangsta Boo since I was a kid, and she always fascinated me—and scared me a little. As a prepubescent horndog, I loved bumping girl rappers who talked about explicit sex shit because it was perfect fodder for my wankbank. But Boo never played herself like that for her male listeners. Even when her verses started off sexy, they ended defiant—like "Tongue Ring," which begins with her "pussy wet as a river" and ends with her using a razor blade to horrifically "slice yo' shit."  There's no beating off to that. You just have to respect it, because the rhymes are hard as hell. 

I had the rare pleasure of meeting Boo at my 25th-birthday party thrown by VICE's funny-book tsar and DJ extraordinaire Nick Gazin. Boo and I hit it off talking about what's great and what sucks bloody AIDS-infected penises in modern hip-hop. As agressive as her raps are, one thing that struck me about her was how genial and graceful she was. She reminded me of the ladies who offer you a candy when you sit next to them in church when you're a little kid. Basically, Gangsta Boo is a hardcore rapping saint. 

I think she embodies a lot of what is desperately missing in the rap game right now. So, I invited her to the VICE offices in Brooklyn to continue our discussion of hip-hop, by sitting together and watching some music videos by some of the hottest lady rappers out today. Here's what she had to say:

AZEALIA BANKS'S "212"

VICE: You’ve seen this before?
Gangsta Boo: A couple of times.

What do you think of it?
She’s pretty, and she is representing for the brown-skinned ladies. I like that. She’s got an international vibe too. I don’t know too many of her songs to be honest, but I do like this one.

What do you think about the style of the video?
It’s black-and-white, and it has a retro feel to it. It’s simple. It focuses on her teeth a lot. She’s got some pretty teeth. It’’s cute, it’s basic. It’s one of those classic New York videos.

When you were working with Three 6 Mafia, was New York a hard place for you guys to break into?
Yeah. Absolutely.

Were there any female NYC MCs you looked up to?
Yeah, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown... Rah Digga—she’s not from New York, but she is East Coast or whatever. I’m not an Azealia Banks fan, but I love how she uses “cunt” in this song. A strong a black female saying cunt is kind of ratchet.

IGGY AZALEA'S "MY WORLD"

You know she’s from Australia or something?
Really? I had no idea. She doesn’t rap like it. She doesn’t have an accent or anything. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but she’s definitely sexy and fly. She’s got swag for days and she knows how to work it in this video.

Do you think it’s weird for somebody to take on a different place’s twang—like her sounding like she’s from the States?
Nah. I’m a fan of The Walking Dead and it's so weird how they all talk like they have an American accent, but they are actually all from Australia, London, and other places. Sometimes it’s believable, sometimes it’s not. This particular video is believable, but a lot of her music isn't. However, I do like this song

Do you feel like artists taking on other styles is part of the creative process? Or are there rules in hip-hop?
Absolutely. There should definitely be rules in hip-hop because there are G-code rules in the streets. It’s cool to have fun, but at the end of the day it would be wack for me to rap like I’m from New York. It is cool to get influences from other places, but I want everyone to know that I’m from Memphis.

KITTY PRYDE'S "OKAY CUPID"

Do you know Kitty Pryde?
I know her. We have a song together.

Oh really? Is it out, yet?
No, I haven’t put it out yet, but Nick Catchdubs did the beat. It’s called “Fool's Gold.”

What do you think of Kitty?
I like her because she’s poetic. You can tell she’s a writer and what she is talking about is very believable. I hang with white girls like her all the time.

When you were first coming up, was there a lot of white female MCs?
No, but they’re everywhere now. It’s like a flood of these little white bitches. That’s what’s up though. I think Kitty Pryde is dope. She’s got that TV-friendly face.

Speaking of Kitty’s writing style, how do you write?
I get inspired by different things that I go through. That’s why I like traveling to different cities and catching vibes. I like to get outside of Memphis and get inspired by other people and new scenery.   

Do you write with a pen and a pad?
It depends. Sometimes I write on my phone, and sometimes I write on paper and sometimes I just go off the the top of my head.

WASH 'N' SET'S "PRIVATE PLAY"

I premiered this one on VICE.
Yeah, I only know about them because of you.

Do you like it?
To me, honestly, it’s wack. Everybody doesn’t need to rap, man. It is cute. But I can’t take them serious. 

I think some younger rap artists feel like they can just have fun with the art form. But when you were coming up, more doors were closed to female MCs, so you guys had to go harder on the mic than the best male rappers.  
Exactly. For me, this kind of stuff is offensive because I feel like they’re taking up space for somebody who takes it serious and is starving in a place where there are no opportunities. There’s a lane for this, and there’s a lane for real shit. I just stick to the real shit.

Damn. I like this song. Besides the rapping, do you at least dig the beat?
It reminds me of “It’s So Cold in the D.” It was like extra wack. But I would tear this beat up.

KILO KISH'S "NAVY"

What’s your take on Kish?
I think it’s nice that a lot of cute girls are rapping now, but I just don’t know if I would bump them personally. I would take this more serious at an open mic. I don’t consider these girls rappers.

You're saying she is trying to do something, but she hasn’t mastered her craft yet?
No, I think she’s mastered what she’s doing. I just don’t think she’s really rapping. It’s more poetic. My homegirl does poetry in Houston. I went to a few of her open mics and it sounded a lot like this. Not saying Kish couldn’t write a rap or be a dope MC, I just don’t think that’s what she trying to do and that is OK for her.

What do you think the line is between poetry and rap?
Rap to me is more aggressive, more in your face.

When was the first time you heard a girl rap with an aggressive flow that inspired you?   
Da Brat. She was dope.

Which song?
Probably “Funkdafied.” She was the first female MC to go platinum.

Did you ever feel like you had to be extra aggressive to get respect as a female MC?
I had to rap with, like, five different dudes, so I always had the mentality that I had to outdo everyone I was on a song with in order to stand out. I’m a girl in a man’s world, so I trained myself to always go harder than them. Period.

PINK DOLLAZ'S "BAD BITCH"

Any thoughts?
The concept is basic. I don’t consider myself a "bad bitch." I’m over that. The hook is wack too. But it does have a dope beat. I like the whole West Coast flow too. But the “bad bitch” concept throws me off. It’s just kind of tired of it. I don’t want my daughter calling herself a “bad bitch.” What does that even mean? I don’t have kids, but if my daughter said something like that, it better be because she is in school making good grades. Not because she has red bottoms. Being a bad bitch is fine, I’m just kinda over the materialistic aspect of it.

Do you think materialism is hurting rap right now?
Let’s get back to the music and less of this fashion stuff. It’s an expensive lifestyle to keep up with, and it’s all an illusion anyway. But hey, if you got it, rock that shit. I really can’t tell you what hip-hop needs today. People need to just stand out on their own and do them.

LADY'S "TWERK"

Look at those bootiess shake! I love this video. This song is strictly for...
The strippers? I’m known for making stripper anthems. Maybe she’s a stripper and she just wants to represent her set.

What do you think about the video?
Basic bitches shaking their ass.

When you write a “stripper anthem,” how do you approach it?
When I did “Where Dem Dollas At,” it was inspired by Jazze Pha. He did a beat for Tela called “Hoes in the Club.” But when I came up with “Can I Get Paid,” that was considered the stripper's anthem. Writing those songs, I was thinking about the mind frame of a stripper. I was younger then. Now that I’m older, I wouldn’t make a video like Pink Dollaz. I might make a strip-club song, but the video would be different. This looks low class.

Did you spend any time in strip clubs when you were younger?
Oh yeah. Man, watching the girls dance and do tricks—that’s what I like to do. Magic City in Atlanta has some dope females who do some crazy tricks. I fuck with the A and their strip clubs. Maybe these girls are strippers turned rappers. There’s a few of them nowadays. Make your money, ladies. But there’s a fine line between classy and trashy, and sexy and messy. And it takes time figure it out.

SNOW THA PRODUCT'S "COOKIE CUTTER BITCHES"

I found this a few minutes before you got here. I was surprised it had so many hits. A lot of people are talking about this girl.
She's almost at a million. Yeah, they're talking about her.

What do you think?
I fuck with her. I like gangsta bitches. We met at South by Southwest and may do a song together. She’s thick, she’s pretty, but she’s not showing her ass. She wants people to hear her lyrics and not that other mess. If she wanted to take off her clothes, men would just die. But they have to respect her for what she’s saying—having a nice body and being pretty is just a plus.

Because rap is a lyrical art form, do you have to come with the rhymes whether you’re pretty or not?
I think so. It’s like, "OK, I know you have a big ass. Who doesn’t? You can pay for those nowadays. Let’s hear what you can say."

BROOKE CANDY'S "I WANNA FUCK RIGHT NOW"

I love Brooke Candy.
Yeah, I couldn’t believe this video. I was like, "Oh my God."

You can tell that she has been listening to some Gangsta Boo records.
Definitely. And for some reason, I believe this video is just representing how she really is. She doesn’t seem like she is lying. She must have been a stripper or something. I can tell by the way she hits that pole. It just seems like it’s her. Plus, any chick that rocks snakes and shit in their hair is hands down, a real bad bitch.

Yeah, this video is insane. What was it like making your early videos?
I did “Where Dem Dollas At?” in New York my first time out there. It was fun, especially coming from country-ass Memphis. It was fun then and it’s still fun. The cool part about it now is receiving the love from the younger generation. It’s just dope and it feels good and that’s why I get down with the young artists like the Raider Klan.

Was it hard to get your videos played back in the day?
Not that much after we got signed. It was pay-to-play at that point [laughs]... Are all Brooke’s songs like this?

Yeah, they’re pretty intense. It’s weird because a lot of people hate on her.
What are they hating on her for?

Too much sex stuff, I guess. And they think she looks like a man or something. I think she looks great.  
Shit! They’re always saying somebody looks like a man. I don’t care. I like her. There’s so many dancers that come into the rap game and act like they don’t dance anymore and then have to end up going back to the strip club. At least she’s still in the strip club.

MIA'S "BAD GIRLS"

This is a good one.
This bitch is one of my favorite bitches of all time. This is one of the hardest videos ever, just because she’s so sexy and she’s just swagged out. And she's got that whole Sri Lankan vibe. Her and Brooke Candy are my favorites out of everybody you've shown me thus far.

When did you first hear MIA?
“Paper Planes.” And then when this video came out, everyone was talking about it, so I got on YouTube and watched it... Was that car really doing that?

Yeah. From what I hear, they really do that.
Wow. I wish she didn’t settle down and have a baby. But she went and got her some money and that’s real... Are they on skates?

Looks like plain old sneakers to me.
Boy, what are you talking about? Sneakers? I love how they have her chain bouncing on her chest. That’s crazy. Her videos are empowering.

Does it ever surprise you when you see people interpreting rap, a culture that you’ve been a part of, and spit it back at you in different ways?
I think it’s cool. It’s inspiring to know that people are watching you everywhere.

DIE ANTWOORD'S "BABIES ON FIRE"

But I don’t think this is dope. It’s weird. She looks like a fucking freak.

ANGEL HAZE'S "WERKIN' GIRLS"

OK, moving on to Angel Haze. What do you think?
To me she kind of sounds like Nicki Minaj.

Is that played out?
I don’t think it’s played out, I just think it’s Nicki. It’s that whole New York thing.

I think she’s from LA actually. That’s what’s weird about rap today and the internet. Regional sounds have kind of faded away.
She’s cool. I would need to hear some more to tell if I'm really into her.

She’s definitely a spitter, but it takes more than great bars to make a good song. When you write, how do you approach hooks?
Man, those hooks are not easy to write. It has to fall off your tongue. You can’t think too hard and you just have to go with it. Sometimes when you’re writing those lyrical songs you have to take a step back. That’s why Gucci Mane has been able to stay relevant for so long, he just says whatever. Gucci just raps. Literally. He freestyle raps. And I think sometimes when you write hooks and stuff like that, especially if you’re a rapper, you should just let it roll out of you. That’s how I write a lot of hooks. I just let it roll. Sometimes you have to—not dumb it down—but make it people friendly.

For sure. Thanks, Gangsta Boo!

Gangsta Boo has a new mixtape dropping this month called It's Game Involved, which she assures us will mark the return of Ms. Yeah Hoe. Look out for it on LiveMixtapes.

For more rap stuff from Wilbert, check these out:

Never Party with the Brick Squad

Gunplay Doesn't Fear the Pine Box or Prison

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to Be a Pretty Motherfucker

The Underachievers Talk About Stop-and-Frisk and Kimani Gray

via.

The Canadian Ufology Survey was just released and it has revealed some pretty shocking data. The report claims that in 2012 alone, the number of UFO spotting across Canada had doubled from the year before, reaching an all-time high of almost 2000 spottings in just one 365 day period. That’s kind of an insane number, so I called up Chris Rutowski, the guy responsible for running the survey, to try and find out what was going on.

Rutowski initiated the survey back in 1986 when, as an astronomy student at the University of Manitoba, he started to realize a lot of Canadians were seeing some pretty crazy stuff in the sky. “Very few people would take these reports seriously at that time, so I decided to start calling these people back to try and find out what was going on and it took off from there. A lot the time these spottings can be explained, but sometimes they really can’t be, and that’s the truly fascinating part of it all.”

“Right now we are trying to figure out why the number of spottings doubled last year. In fact in one year it went up 100 per cent and that is very unusual.” 

Chris says there are a couple possibilities for why the number increased so dramatically. “The Chris Hadfield phenomenon probably has a lot more people looking up in to the sky. Another thing is US military testing. We know the US is always testing drones (http://bit.ly/XksYtG) along the border, but we really aren’t privy to too much of that information, so it’s sometimes hard to confirm.”  

It turns out Canada has a rich history of UFO spottings. In October of 1967, citizens of a small town in Nova Scotia were calling the police, reporting to have seen a plane crash into the waters off Shag Harbour. Once arriving at the scene, the RCMP and six others, reported seeing a large craft in the water, under “thick, glittery, yellow foam,” before disappearing. To this date, the unusual spotting is still Unexplainable.

“A UFO spotting is marked ‘unexplainable’ when all other possibilities have been ruled out.”  From the 2012 UFO survey, 7.5 per cent of the reports have been marked as “Unexplainable” cases. “This type of thing really makes us scratch our heads and ask ‘what is going on here? One of the highlights from the report is a family from Winnipeg who reported seeing a flying octagon over their vehicle that then took off over a field.  Pretty incredible stuff.  We just can’t explain that.”

The Canadian UFO survey data is the foundation of which all the other speculation is based, including government cover-up, abductions and close encounters.

So I had to put it out there: Who has seen a UFO? Within a couple hours of posting the question on social media, I got a response from a young man who calls himself, Barney Rumble.

via.

VICE: So Barney, you think you saw a UFO, what happened?
It was a while ago, but, I was outside on the roof of my house with a friend, having some beers and smoking, and out of nowhere this thing, that looked like a spaceship appeared in the sky.  It was in front of us, but still off in the distance.  At first we thought it was plane, but then we realized it couldn’t be.  It was shaped like a triangle, and inside there were large, circular, red lights, and it was just appeared to be floating in the sky.  It kept getting closer and closer to us and within a matter of ten minutes it was overhead. We were amazed. We just kept watching it.

We’re you scared?
We were freaking out!  We just stopped doing anything and we went silent and didn’t move. We were both so freaked out. We were wondering if we were seeing it because we were fucked up on acid or if this was actually happening. It was so messed up.

So. How much acid did you take that night?
We’d taken a couple hits. We’d gone out to get weed, but there was a fair going on in town and our dealer had acid too, so we got some.  We ate it at the carnival and then came back and the acid started to kick in as soon as we got home. We also go out on my roof and just chill. We were just drinking some beers, listening to Wu-Tang and smoking cigarettes and laughing. Having fun, and then we saw this crazy fucking thing in the sky.

It wasn’t moving like a plane should move—it went across sky from one side of the skyline to the other. Like the Sun, overhead east to west. 

How long did it last (the UFO, not the acid)?
It lasted about ten minutes, maybe even twenty. It felt like it lasted a really long time though. Especially because at that point we were pretty messed up.

Have you taken a lot of acid in your lifetime?
Not really. Maybe 20 or 30 times. It’s $5 bucks a hit. That’s why we did it, because it was so cheap.

Did you ever see another UFO on another hit of acid?
NO. That was the only time. Which is one reason why I think it was probably real. (Or maybe just really good acid, just saying’)

Did you guys tell anyone what you saw, like your parents or the police?
We told lots of people we saw a UFO, that it was pretty crazy and that we were freaked out. Like, at first, we were really excited about it and wanted to tell everyone. But as soon as we told them we were also on acid, they didn’t really believe us anymore. They just think you’re tripping out and that part was really disappointing.

Did you see the UFO leave?
No. Eventually we went inside to grab a camera, but when we came back it was gone. Too bad. It would have been pretty awesome to have a picture of it, so we could prove it, and I guess just to have a picture of a real UFO.

That is too bad.  So what did you do next, after the UFO left?
We just kept drinking and smoking because we were so hyped, like we fucking saw an alien! It was awesome. 

I described to Rutowski what Rumble thinks he saw, and he says he couldn’t explain the UFO either. But he did recommend that Rumble, and anyone else who thinks they’ve spotted one, to email their report, so that they can collect all the data for the next survey. I also asked Rutowski if drugs could explain a lot of these sightings and surprisingly, he said no. “I don’t think it’s just people trippin’ or making stuff up, because a lot of the time we can actually explain it. Like maybe it’s Jupiter.” 

IF you ever feel like taking a hit of acid (or not) and want to make sure you see something flying in the sky, you can increase your chances by going to this website. You just punch in your co-ordinates and it will tell you everything that is flying overhead.  Rutowski says it’s a great way to start seeing what’s going on. (That’s pretty fucking cool) “The sky is a pretty happening place, there is a lot that can be seen. It’s really very fascinating stuff.”

Photo via Flickr user Keith Allison

The story of my parents’ lives can be read, or at least inferred, through their record collection. There is a long period of album purchases that suggests they were pretty fun to spend time with during their college years and immediately afterward. There's rock, preppy folk, and a lot of very good jazz records; a few edge right up to Nixon-era avant-garde, without ever crossing into the sort of Pharaoh Sanders zone that would imply a prolonged and serious dalliance with hallucinogens. Then the collection peters off abruptly right around the time of my birth. Some Springsteen albums were purchased after that, and a great deal of Handel and Bach and other things that well-educated adults of their generation played in order to get their kids to stop screaming for one goddamn minute, please.

And then my sister is born, and it's just over, virtually nothing for a decade. Later, there's a series of strange impulse buys and NPR recommendations—a long and unbroken line of A Country Christmas Anthology Vol. VIII’s and Lucinda Williams records. It isn't that they stopped being interested in interesting things, I don't think, and it isn't that they gave up, although keeping two neurotic kids in Umbros and orthodontia presumably cramped their style somewhat. I think, looking back at the story those records tell, that it might have been something as simple as things just starting to sound different to them, their ears tuning themselves to different, more parental frequencies. Their taste didn't evaporate so much as it aged. And this is fine. That is what I tell myself, at least, when confronting the fact that I have come not just to admire but enjoy the San Antonio Spurs and the way they play basketball.

There has always been plenty to admire about the Spurs, who have spent the last decade and a half as one of the NBA’s best teams—they've won four championships during that time—and also one of the league’s quietest and, frankly, dullest. Their future Hall of Fame forward, Tim Duncan, is known for his deadly midrange bank shot and ceaseless silent imploring of refs; he is as exciting to watch as unbuttered toast is to eat. There is also a crazily quick but faintly bat-like French point guard Tony Parker and mercurial, balding Argentine wing Manu Ginobili and a rotating crew of supporting professionals that brings significantly more to the table in terms of defensive rotations and savvy on-court decision making than they do in terms of personality. Their coach, Gregg Popovich is an impatient, sarcastic, supremely brilliant tactician who looks like a grouchy lieutenant demanding Michael Madsen's badge and gun in a shitty Showtime thriller—he refuses to deal with the media as most other coaches do and once gave an interview in which he only said four words. If the team never quite evinced the ulcerous Patrick Bateman-ian seethe of the New England Patriots, the Patriots still seem a reasonable enough comparison: the Spurs are also just as relentlessly efficient and effective, and as colorful and stylish as miles and miles of khaki extending into the distance.

It was natural, almost reflexive, to loathe them at their apex, and to resent the way in which they took this wild, expressive game, turned it into an especially virtuosic exercise in cubicle-bound Minesweeper, and won. The core players from the 2002–03 championship season are still there, all older without actually seeming at all old (or maybe they were old back then too), and the Spurs are still playing the same style of basketball at a similarly high level. They move the ball until an open shot emerges, never panic, play great team defense and have a seemingly never-ending supply of productive players they pick from the NBA trash heap and the lower ends of the draft. It's can be frustrating, if you have a partisan inclination toward a particular franchise, because the Spurs are almost certainly a better basketball team than the one you care about. But mostly it's just annoyingly dry, all this lockstep excellence. Yes, they're tight, smart, fearsomely close to perfect for dauntingly long stretches of time. But there's no life in it; imagine a very good wedding band playing your favorite songs, note-perfect, poker-faced, and be-cummerbunded, for hours on end. The music is objectively very good, but you simply can't dance to it.

That was how I used to view them. But the Spurs have become a team I no longer merely grudgingly appreciate, but actually, actively like. It's fun to watch them work, to recognize the patterns as they pull them from the game's basic state of ordered chaos; it's bracing to see the shapes and plays they make from and for each other. In San Antonio's series against the Golden State Warriors, this year's resident playoff upstart and a team that plays whirling, gunning, unconscious basketball—albeit with an itchily blessed-out Fellowship of Christian Athletes vibe—I've had the strange experience of feeling not just the usual grouchy awe but actual delight in the Spurs' perfect unity of conception and execution. I want them to win. It seems like they deserve it. My ear is retuning itself; I can finally hear something other than “ugh” watching San Antonio play, which is cool except how it parallels suddenly finding a Rod Stewart Sings the Standards record soulful and great.

But it has happened, I am on the Spurs' wavelength. Their version of basketball is suddenly not just dignified to me but actually graceful, humble, and kind of elegant. In their last playoff series, the Spurs dispatched the Warriors without trouble in six games. The younger team gunned and surged and flubbed manically while the Spurs simply moved the ball around until opportunities opened up, then took adavantage of them. They weren’t made up of flailing but talented parts, they were a single elegant whole. It's fun to watch, it really is. The shock of it is finally hearing that hook for the first time.

@david_j_roth

Previously: Leave Derrick Rose Alone

Of all the gifts that God supposedly bestowed upon gay men—a dandy fashion sense, preternatural design abilities, a predilection for the word "fabulous"—the gaydar is both the handiest, and the most elusive. To an outsider (read: straight person), the ability to instantly catalog and assess a litany of small signs and signals and determine whether any old person on the street is gay or straight might seem innate in all who enjoy homosexual romps in bed, but it is actually a learned skill, like algebra or injaculation.

And you can learn it too! These days with more and more social circles becoming sexually diverse, how can you tell if the guy swinging a glow stick next to you at some Bushwick "rave" is looking to put his pole in a hole or looking for another pole to pole all over his face? [Wait, what?—Ed.]I enlisted the help of Jeffery Self, the author of Straight People: A Spotter's Guide to the Fascinating World of Heterosexuals. He turned his sociological skills around and instead of telling us gays how to detect breeders, he's teaching everyone the best practices for finding queers and dykes out in the wild.

VICE: At what types of places or events is it easiest to spot a gay guy?
Self: Oh! I'm so glad you asked, Brian! The easiest places to spot a gay are: Broadway open calls, boutique gyms, one man shows, any major city with a bar named The Eagle, SoulCycle classes, and Kevin Spacey's Annual Memorial Day BBQ, which, as an FYI, is being moved from Ojai to Brentwood this year. Please read the invitation VERY carefully as no one is allowed to bring more than ONE guest. Last year simply got out of control and Taylor Lautner is literally just NOW able to ride a bike again.

What's one sure giveaway that the guy you are looking at is gay?
Nowadays it's very hard to tell the difference between straight and gay men, probably because gay people control the media and ultimately the world. If the guy you're speaking to refers to screenwriter Dustin Lance Black as simply "Lance," he is without a doubt homosexual. Another rule of thumb is that if you look at a gay man VERY closely you will see the off kilter glare of a guy who has genuinely wondered why Monique hasn't made a movie since Precious.

OK, let’s flip the coin. What's one sure sign that the gentleman in question is straight?
Do what I always do... surprise him by slapping your penis against his side and see if he shouts "Jesus Christ!" or "Eva Longoria!"

How do you tell the difference between a gay man and the fabled "metrosexual," or, just, you know, your garden variety European?
Metrosexuals have made everything A LOT more difficult. With the exception of Ryan Gosling, who has, as a rule, made most things A LOT easier. However, a metrosexual tends to try a bit harder than a gay man. Coco Chanel had that famous quote about taking off one piece of jewelry before you leave the house. Gay people are WAY more likely to know this quote/follow its suggestion. On a related note, few metrosexuals have heard of Coco, the Broadway musical starring Katharine Hepburn in the title role and cowritten by one of the guys who wrote My Fair Lady.

Are there different skills for picking out lesbians?
NOT MY DEPARTMENT. I'm sorry. Shall I transfer you downstairs to Ellen and Portia's Vegan Dungeon?

How can you tell if two girls making out are just drunk straight people or actual lesbians?
Drunk straight girls tend to be WAY messier than actual lesbians. Unless we're talking about k.d. lang, in which case I have reason to believe she is QUITE messy as well.

Aside from “Do you like penises?”, what sort of questions should you ask to figure out if your target is gay or not?
"Have you ever heard of The Wiz?"
"Have you ever seen The Wiz?"
"Have you ever been in a production of The Wiz?"
"What role did you play?" (This last question is more about my own curiosity, because you seem like somebody who could totally pull off Addaperle.)

Does the company someone keeps make it easier to spot their sexual orientation? What does someone's group say about who they want to bone?
Unless it's Stockard Channing, it's hard to say.

How can you tell the difference between a really butch gay and a straight guy, or a really femme lesbian and a straight lady?
First and foremost, let me say that butch gay guys are the hottest men on Earth. Period. They also make it hard to tell whether they're gay or straight. As a rule, most butch gay guys will dress the same as butch straight guys with one exception—the underwear. A butch gay guy can look as gruff and tough as you can get but underneath those distressed Levi's is a pair of blue trunk cut Andrew Christian briefs.

Femme lesbians vs. straight ladies are tricky for me. Mainly because the straight woman I've spent the most time looking at is Dixie Carter, and she's closer to a butch gay than anything else.

If you see a man who is dating Renee Zellweger, how should he register on your gaydar?
DAUNTING.

Previously - Guys, It's Time to Stop Shaving Your Junk

@BrianJMoylan

Photo via Flickr user marc falardeau

As you’ve probably heard by now, Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto and the hearts of young people everywhere, smokes crack, or at least there is a video that multiple reporters have seen of a guy who looks an awful like Rob Ford smoking something out of the pipe. Although mayors have been caught sucking the glass dick before (most notably Marion Barry in 1990), it is still big news, because, wow, it seems like if you were running a major city you shouldn’t be hanging out with shady dudes and having a puff of the old crack.

Rob Ford is somewhat of an erratic dude for someone with so much power—he’s sort of a cross between Homer Simpson and a Canadian version of Caligula—so the notion that he enjoys hard drugs recreationally isn’t the craziest idea. But what would it be like if a more respected authority figure, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was found in similar cracked-out circumstances? We wandered around Brooklyn asking people to find out what their reactions would be.  

VICE: How would you react if Mayor Bloomberg got caught smoking crack?
Kristina, attorney: I would be surprised. He seems to be a very conservative kind of guy. He keeps to himself, he’s very private. If he got caught doing it in public, that would be a huge problem for the city of New York. I think our politicians need to be role models for the people of the city.

Can a crack user be a good role model?
I think a crack user who’s in recovery and has done something positive with his life and has chosen to take a different path can certainly be a role model for other people. But if they’re going through those problems and issues, that’s what they should be focusing on, not leading a group of people.

How would crack affect the choices a leader—like a mayor—makes?
It affects the mental and psychological well-being of a person, and that’s fact. Whether or not people choose to use it is their business. But if you’re going to use something that alters your physical and mental stability, then certainly it would not be in your best interests to be leading a city.

How would you feel if Mayor Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Carlos, ironworker: So-so.

Why so-so?
Sometimes I like him, but sometimes... y’know...

Do you think it’s OK for politicians to do drugs?
Yeah. I like doing them sometimes. I like a couple of them.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Anna, dancer: I’d go “hmm, mmm.” I’d probably need more information before I got really mad or anything.

You wouldn’t be surprised? Offended?
I guess I’d be surprised. I don’t think I’d be offended, though.

Is there any personal choice that a mayor could make that would offend you?
If he said mean things about gay rights, or do anything violent.

Do you think we should care if mayors are totally strung out?
I think that’s kind of a personal thing. I think it depends if it affects his job or other people.

Javier and Diana, architects from Madrid.

Who’s the mayor of Madrid?
Javier: Ana Botella

How would you feel if Ana Botella was caught smoking crack?
Diana: I don’t think she would do it. She’s very right-wing religious.

Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto, is also a right-winger and  he was caught smoking crack.
Javier: Crack just makes it too hard for a mayor to perform his work competently.

What if the mayor were doing other drugs that didn’t get in the way of his job?
Javier: I wouldn’t care about that.
Diana: It depends if he does it in his free time or while he’s working.

Is there any job people can do while high on crack?
Javier: Well, not crack, but I know a lot of architects who smoke a lot of stuff.

How would you feel if you found out that your mayor was smoking crack?
Gertrude, journalist and radio host from Copenhagen: I would think that that’s just way too much.

Do you think smoking crack makes you a bad person?
No, not necessarily, but I think it means you make risky decisions. It’s a risky thing to do and I wouldn’t trust the ability of that person to make wise decisions on behalf of the entire community.

What do you think a mayor on crack would do differently from a clean mayor?
If you severely abuse any kind of substance, you just start making bad decisions. That’s not just for mayors, that goes for doctors and educators. They start making risky decisions because the more hooked you get on this drug, the more you’re going to take risks to keep your secret and get your drugs.

How would you feel about mayors and other professionals doing a little bit of crack, as long as they’re not abusing it?
I’m pretty liberal in terms of smoking joints and stuff like that, but crack is just the next level. You can have a spliff from time to time and still be a reasonable person and enjoy social events--it’s not my thing, but if other people like it, that’s fine. But crack is just the next level.

Who’s the mayor of Copenhagen?
He’s named Frank Jensen. And I don’t think he smokes crack.

How would you feel if Bloomberg were caught smoking crack?
Stephen, bookseller: I wouldn’t feel too good about the state of things.

Do you think it’s OK for mayors and other people in politics to do drugs?
I don’t think they should smoke crack.

But you’d be OK with them doing other drugs?
What other drugs?

Pot or acid, say.
I don’t know about doing acid. Smoking pot I wouldn’t have a problem with. I don’t really need to know if someone’s smoking pot. If they’re smoking crack, I want to be aware that they’re smoking crack.

Here at the VICE HQ we have a gigantic sand timer that we reset each week to count down the time until next week's HBO show. It takes ten interns all heaving at once to flip it, and the chances of one of them getting pinned underneath or losing a limb is real high. It adds a good deal of suspense to the buildup though, and according to our in-house risk assessment team it's totally worth it. That is all to say that the sand timer is nearing its end, meaning a new episode of VICE on HBO is nigh. Here is what to expect from tonight's episode, airing at 11:00 PM.

Indonesians like tobacco a whole lot. So much, in fact, that 67 million of them smoke it. There are no restrictions on advertising in the country, meaning ads targeted at young people abound, and kids often start smoking when they are as young as six years old. To top it off, some Indonesians actually think smoking is good for you and believe it cures all sorts of bad diseases, including cancer. We sent Thomas Morton over there to cut through the smoke and find out what's really happening. Months later, he's still coughing up weird yellow stuff.



It's something of a universally acknowledged truth that a heroin addiction is one of the hardest habits to kick. In the US we offer replacement drugs like Methadone, but unfortunately those drugs are also highly addictive. There are other schools of thought that believe in a different approach, but the drugs they use are often illegal in America, meaning users who want to get clean with their methods have to leave the country. Ibogaine is a drug used to treat addiction in many parts of the world but is labeled a schedule I narcotic in the US. It is rumored to cure physical dependency on opiates without the terrible side effects of withdrawal, and is often used in tandem with a voodoo-like ritual. VICE co-founder Shane Smith traveled to Mexico with an underground heroin clinic based in Harlem to see how well this unconventional addiction cure really works.

After twenty years, the All About Pets Show remains Canada's largest pet convention. Every year, this celebration of domestic animal life goes down in Mississauga's International Centre, next to the Toronto's Pearson Airport and a mess of tangled highways. Pet owners and enthusiasts alike cram into the event space for an up-close look at prize winning cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, and whatever other animal species people keep in their house to fill a void.

Amidst a bunch of howling kids and animals I made my way across the show floor—and discovered, nestled towards the back of the room—the Royal Canin Championship & Household Cat Show. Each section of the convention could be described as a miniature neighbourhood, and in this case, it appeared as though the dog-people and cat-people were kept separate by a divide of birds and fish (naturally). Over in cat world, a loudspeaker calls out pet names while nervous pet owners prepare their felines for a few moments on the podium. On planet canine, swarms of spectators who are clearly anxious for animal affection hang around with breeders—who discuss the peculiar particulars of their profession. It was weird, and I loved it.

See more of Nathan's work on his internet website.

I'm not sure if this story about Barack Obama is actually racist or just really disturbing, but we're going to run it through the This Week in Racism "Racism-o-Meter" anyway, and see what comes out. With the assistance of my friends at the @YesYoureRacist Twitter account, I’ll be ranking this and other news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “racist” being the most racist.

According to testimony given during the prostitution trial of his three former aides, Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was alleged to have dressed women up like Barack Obama and then had them perform stripteases. Now, I am not here to debate the erotic merits of President Obama, nor am I here to question the sexual preferences of Silvio Berlusconi. I am here to wonder if these women wore blackface. Also, what about those giant fucking ears he has? Fake mole? I think this is one of those "teachable moments" I've heard so much about lately. I'm giving this a 2, because I'm genuinely still totally fucking confused.

- Police in Agoura Hills, California, are looking for someone who spray-painted racist graffiti on the walls of the local high school. The message included the phrase “Ni**ers will die,” which school officials erased without telling students or parents. Two days later, students showed up to school to find a “hit list” of African American students painted on the bathroom wall. They're right though. Ni**ers will die. Unfortunately, so will everyone else one day. RACIST

- This is the logo for a food truck in Los Angeles. I don't know why this is in here other than it made me laugh. Also, I've often fantasized about slapping my own mother.

- In Great Britain, a newly elected councillor representing the UK Independence Party—which goes out of the way to say it’s “not racist”—found himself in hot water after sharing on Facebook a cartoon depicting Muslims being burned at the stake using copies of the Quran. "I don’t have a racist bone in my body,” said Eric Kitson of Stourport-on-Severn. “It's just a bit of bloody stupidity." Kitson added that he has “several Muslim friends,” which of course automatically disqualifies someone from being Islamophobic, as everyone knows. Also, I don't think bones can be racist. What would a "racist bone" even look like? A bunch of swastikas on a femur? 8

- Last week we told you about Jason Richwine, the Heritage Foundation analyst who once wrote that Hispanics are genetically predisposed to have lower IQs than “native white Americans.” Ignoring the fact that there’s no such thing as a “native white American,” Richwine’s assertion that Hispanics are genetically inferior is pretty much a textbook example of racism. Even the Heritage Foundation agreed, firing Richwine soon after the writing was made public. But Richwine still doesn’t see how his assertion could be racist, telling the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, "The idea that I am some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth extremist never even crossed my mind." Probably not, but then again, I've heard Chris Brown thought he was just "explaining things" to Rihanna's face. Richwine added, "The accusation of racism is one of the worst things that anyone can call you in public life." I can think of a few things that are worse, such as being told your entire race is inferior... but what would Richwine know about that? RACIST

Jason Richwine's best friend, Ann Coulter, receives this week’s Ann Coulter Award for Excellence in Racism for this:

We've already established that Jason Richwine is a huge racist prick who has no sense of shame. The fact that Ann Coulter feels the intense need to paint a total asshole as a victim is one of those twisted pieces of logic that makes me want to curl up into a ball and die.

@YesYoureRacist’s 10 Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @Jay_Flo6: “I'm not racist, but I couldn't date a white girl if she has messed with a black guy. #NoRacismIntended”

9. @Cal_E_Boi: “I'm not racist but as soon as I see a black man under the age of 25 driving a BMW I immediately shout drug dealer”

8. @RodeoPrincesss: “Im not racist but black people and white people just dont make cute couples.”

7. @bmill98: “Im not racist...but jews make themselves pretty easy to hate”

6. @2_jayyyz: “I'm no racist but I hate, hate, HATE, wet backs”

5. @SashaDaniels: “I'm not racist but im actually terrified of Jews”

4. @toriiiiz: “I'm not a racist but I f*cking hate middle eastern guys.”

3. @Mattt_Lee: “I'm not racist but that group of chinks can f*ck off. Twats.”

2. @graceegregory: “I'm not racist, but I understand where Hitler was coming from.”

1. @AlifNorazmii: “I'm not racist but ni**er really stink!!!”

Last Week in Racism:

Happy Confederate Memorial Day!

@dave_schilling

A couple of years ago, my friend moved out to Malaysia in search of a life where a winter wardrobe isn't a thing and you don't have to worry about stuff like moronic lad culture or seeing Lee Mack's face on television. What he found was a job as a bar manager in an establishment frequented by Malay punks covered in swastikas, wearing Combat 18 (a neo-Nazi terrorist organisation) T-shirts and harping on about "Malay power".  

Turns out they're a group of far-right nationalists who want to rid Malaysia of any non ethnic Malays and stop immigration into the country. Which, although pretty backwards and reductive, isn't all that surprising in the current world climate. What was surprising, and kind of confusing, is that they identify themselves as neo-Nazis, are fond of sieg-heiling and listen to Nazi bands like Skrewdriver and Angry Aryan, yet definitely aren't Aryan themselves. And adopting a worldview that specifically discriminates against your race seems a very odd thing to do.     

I was told that one of the most popular Malay power bands is an act named Boot Axe, so I got in touch with band member Mr Slay to find out why exactly a group of Malaysians are going through this bizarre, neo-Nazi identity crisis.  

VICE: Hi Slay. So what’s the deal with all this "Malay power" stuff then?
Slay: Malay power is important because we're concerned about keeping a pure Malay community all over the Malay Archipelago [the archipelago between Australia and Southeast Asia, believed by some to be the homeland of the Malay race]. I'm a second generation fighter for Malay power. The first generation, who founded the Malay power movement, have been less active recently. Malay power stems from a point in history – the 13th of May, 1969 – where the Chinese and Malay communities fought each other. However, the punk and skinhead Malay power movement started in Kuala Lumpur in the early 90s.   

As far as I understand it, the idea that there's a "Malay race" – which is supposedly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago – was proposed by German scientist Johann Blumenbach. There's a lot of contention over whether or not such a race actually exists. For a start, Blumenbach’s theory hinged around the idea that there were only five different races in the world, which is clearly pretty flawed. I take it racism features pretty heavily in your ideology?
We're extremists in regards to the Malay race, but that doesn’t mean that we're extreme racists. It’s not about racism; it’s all about being Malay.

Okay. How exactly is Nazism culturally relevant to Malaysians? Malaysia isn’t a country that most people would associate with Hitler and his Third Reich buddies.
Malaysia is home to people from China, India and foreign immigrants from Bangladesh, Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma. The government can't control the entry of immigrants and we get so many of them. There are so many protests against the government about this issue, but they haven’t done anything tangible to improve the situation. Race has become a focus because of the inclusion of uncontrolled numbers of these people in our society.

How has immigration affected you? 
Malay people have been affected in socio-economic terms. Ethnic Malays also fall prey to criminals who come from abroad and sell drugs and commit murder, rape, robbery and so on. The lesson that we can learn from Nazism is that we can take extreme racist action if the position of the Malays is affected by these factors. We won't practice overt racism if the Malay race isn't compromised, but, if threatened, we will take action.

So you aren’t openly hostile to minorities at the moment?
We don’t like minorities in Malaysia if they can’t co-exist with the Malay race. If they are good, then we are good.

What about Jews? Most Nazis aren’t too fond of them.
All Malay power punk and skinhead bands are outright anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. Study the origins of the descendants of the Malay people from thousands of years ago and you'll see that we're connected with the Jews. According to the Jewish scriptures, a "lost tribe" of children from Israel who are divinely guided – which means they must be Muslims – will kill the Jewish Zionists in Palestine. In the beginning, Zionists thought that Native Americans were the ancestors of the lost tribe. Then an American scientist and theologist called Professor Ralph Olsen concluded that the Malay in the Malay Peninsula are the descendents of the lost tribe. This hypothesis is a half-truth. The Malays are not one hundred percent descendents of the lost tribe, but Ralph Olsen’s theory about the adventures of a lost race is an interesting one.

This is all news to me. It sounds as if there's an Islamic ideology mixed in with Nazism here, which is a little confusing.
Malay power is connected to Islam. It doesn’t have links to any pro-Islamic movements, though.

So you’re a neo-Nazi movement with elements of Islam and some Jewish scripture thrown in for good measure? I’ve noticed that your band appears to be quite fond of the slogan "Blood and Honour", which is the name of a British neo-Nazi group. Were you influenced by neo-Nazis from over here?
We weren't directly influenced by British neo-Nazis because we realise that the extremists in the UK don't like Asian people. We just took the slogan "Blood and Honour" to demonstrate our identity.

Do you listen to British and American Nazi bands?
Yes, I listen to English Rose, Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack and Angry Aryan.

That’s quite a selection. Do you think Skrewdriver would be into Boot Axe?
No, I don’t think they would listen to our songs.

Do neo-Nazi groups exist in other Asian countries?
Yes, in Indonesia, Singapore and Japan. In Singapore, there's a Nazi black metal band called As Sahar.

Is every Malay neo-Nazi a punk? Or does Nazism extend beyond the punk and skinhead subculture?
No, all Malaysian neo-Nazis listen to punk and skinhead music.

You get anti-Nazi punks in quite a few countries – do they exist in Malaysia?
Yes, they do exist, but they dare not openly oppose us. They are afraid to speak out.

How are you regarded by the general public? Are they afraid of you as well?
Speaking honestly, maybe some people don't believe that the average, ethnic Malay citizens of Malaysia agree with us. However, we are not all that violent or extreme, as I have already told you.

How successful would you say your movement has been so far?
We make minorities afraid to commit crime in Malaysia. We always warn them not to cause trouble here. Violence isn't a solution for us because we begin with discretion, tolerance and politeness when talking to these immigrants. If they insist on continuing or if they are stubborn people, we will do what is necessary. We also do charity work for the community and for Palestine, Syria, Somalia and other countries that are at war. We've also tried to have discussions with the government about how to overcome the problem of having so many immigrants, but we were ignored. We're very different when compared to European and American neo-Nazis, who state openly that they want to eliminate races other than the white race. We start off with restraint and a zero tolerance stance, but we won't keep up this position if the Malays in Malaysia are threatened.

Okay. Finally, how do you square being a Nazi with not actually being white?
Most worldwide organisations say that Nazism is just for whites. And yes, we are not members of the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan race – our community is brown-skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired. We've just adopted the spirit associated with Nazism as a symbol for the Malay race’s response if it's threatened by racial issues.

Thanks for answering my questions. It’s been enlightening.

All images courtesy of Slay.

More stuff about the far-right:

English Fascists Took Their First Beating of the Summer in Brighton This Weekend

The Boy Wonder of the British Far-Right Is Sad That Thatcher Died

I Dodged Bullets at a Polish Fascists' Riot Party

An entrance to a Cambodian home covered in chalk drawings of crosses and skulls to ward off evil spirits.

Vitray's first memories are of the tent cities in Thailand where Cambodian refugees found safety during the killing-fields era of the Khmer Rouge regime. Vitray was one of the lucky ones, as his family eventually managed to emigrate to America—to a Nashville ghetto plighted by bullets and crack cocaine. At 24, he traveled to Phnom Penh to get engaged. A handsome American citizen, he was quite a catch, so his father arranged for him to marry Dain, his pretty second cousin. They were happy for a while. And then the nightmares started.



Vitray was haunted with visions—bloodied bodies, tortured faces, flesh torn from bones. Night after night the horrors returned until he was too terrified to lie down. Then Dain began to change; she suddenly seemed ugly and her serene expression began to look stupid and infuriate Vitray. He began to hate her and the way she affected an American accent and laughed in a high-pitched shatter of tinnitus-inducing screeches.



Vitray was originally betrothed to another Cambodian girl before Dain—a girl who, according to Vitray's family, was pretty angry that she'd been snubbed of the opportunity to marry an American citizen. Vitray’s sister Molika told me the rest of the story: “I never believed in curses until I saw what happened to my brother. He was in love with Dain, and then he suddenly hated her,” she told me. “Then he got sick with Bell's Palsy. To this day, the doctors don’t know the cause, but people told me that the family of the girl he was originally betrothed to put a curse on him.”

But c
an curses really result in mental and physical reactions? Author and Druid Emma Restall Orr thinks so, which isn't all that surprising considering she's a Druid. “Whether we call it magic, cursing and sorcery, or we call it gossip and vindictive behavior, the effect can be the same," she told me. "People can be profoundly psychologically affected and the ramifications can be extreme—sickness, accidents and spiralling down." While that explanation might not exactly be palatable to the Western mind, magic is very real in Cambodia.  



In the village where I live and work for a small NGO, folk religion is woven into the way locals experience daily life. People swap tips about the best local fortune-tellers and healers. They chalk skulls and crosses on their door frames to protect their homes from malevolent ghosts, and leave fruit and incense out for the good ones. Western medicine is available in the town, but it's dispensed by poorly trained pharmacists and doctors at a price beyond the income of most villagers. Here, the vicissitudes and uncertainties of life are taken to the local fortune-tellers, healers, and sorcerers rather than doctors and psychologists.

The fortune-teller.

The village fortune-teller is a middle-aged woman with two gold teeth and a diamond ring—status symbols earned by her supernatural perceptions. She was born with no lower legs, and when I met her, the lower half of her pajama trousers were folded underneath her thighs, so—if you didn’t know any better—you'd assume she was just kneeling. Grabbing a deck of playing cards, she arranged them on a thin blanket in front of her. I immediately drew an ace of spades. She screwed up her face and made a noise like she'd just seen a horse kick a man in the groin. Apparently my pick meant that I wouldn't find my lost camera, which was kind of a relief after the teller's ominous groan. 



A different arrangement of cards for a different question, and it seemed two girls were in love with me. The fortune-teller grinned, her gold teeth snatching the afternoon sun. I asked her how she got her powers; “I was very sick when I was 18,” she told me through a translator, “then three spirits took pity on me and cured me of the disease. They have stayed with me ever since and help me tell fortunes.”

The spirits came from Phnom Kulen, Cambodia’s holy mountain and birthplace of the Angkorian king, Jayavarman II. She uses the cards in the same way as Western tarot readers: “The ghosts taught me how to arrange the cards so I can see the future of any person,” she explained. While I'm unsure if two women are in love with me, my camera is still lost, so I guess I've got to give her that.



The author after being coined.

While the fortune-teller relied on the supernatural for her powers, Sarong—the healer—learned her skills from her mother. I went to see if she could cure my cold. After the initial bows and salutations, she told me in English to remove my shirt and lie down on a wooden platform that Cambodians traditionally use as a sofa and eating area. She smeared eucalyptus oil on my back, took a coin, and began to scratch from my spine outwards. She scratched the same patch of skin over and over again. Then she scratched harder. I tensed up. It was far more painful than getting a tattoo.

The practice, known as “coining,” creates marks on the body similar to hickeys—incredibly sore, painful hickeys—and the hue of the bruise denotes the illness you're suffering from. Sarong made a clucking sound. “Your back is very red, you must be ill with a fever,” she said. Forty minutes later, and I felt like I'd been through ten rounds with Charles Bronson. The healer wrapped me in a thin blanket and put me in a hammock to recover. “There is bad wind in your blood,” explained Sarong. “Now it is escaping through the scratches. We put this blanket on you so the wind will not infect our family." While I can't say the treatment worked for me, I have seen sick Cambodians come up smiling after a coining session.

After my experience with the healer, I wondered how much worse the Apb Thmob (sorcerer) could be. Trying to locate a sorcerer in a Cambodian village was like trying to score drugs at a music festival: embarrassing and largely met with cagey, suspicious responses. “Why do you want to see this person?” asked my friend, Raksme. “They don’t want people to know their history. It's dangerous; I can't help you.” Sambo, the energetic village teacher, looked uncomfortable when I asked him the same question. “This is bad luck for you,” he warned. I pointed to the small cross I have tattooed on my wrist. “This will protect me,” I pushed. Sambo looked skeptical. “Yes, sometimes holy tattoos help protect us, but not always. And anyway, Cambodian ghosts don’t believe in Jesus.”

It was Pring, a handsome 20-year-old from a nearby village, who agreed to help me. “So he can curse people?” I asked on the phone. "Oh yeah, sure,” said Pring. I considered how I could use black magic within the boundaries of journalistic ethics. In the end, I decided to cast a love spell on a friend who had given her full consent.

The Apb Thmob.

The sorcerer lived on a jungle road in a wooden house with a palm-leaf roof. He was 40-ish, wore a collarless white shirt, and white pants. He sat cross-legged on a thin cushion. On the wall behind him were pictures of blue Hindu deities. To the side was a statue of Buddha, curtained with thin gold lace and surrounded by mounds of melted candle wax. Around him were offerings left by clients: lotus flowers, incense, and packets of cigarettes and herbs. His eyes opened, focused on me for a second and then closed in an expression of benign concentration.



Like the fortune teller, the Apb Thmob obtained his powers during a period of sickness. “I was very ill three years ago. I lost weight and thought I was going to die, then ghosts came into my head,” he told me through Pring's translations. “They cured me and have stayed with me ever since, and now they'll do what I command.” As if to prove his point, he handed me a hardback bearing a picture of Buddha. Inside, the pages were covered in a strange script. “The ghosts tell me what to write,” he explained. Pring, who knows Sanskrit and Pali – the religious languages of Cambodia – took a look at the book and told me he didn't recognize any of the symbols.



I brandished my Blackberry with a picture of the girl I wanted to cast the love spell on. The atmosphere became suddenly changed. The Apb Thmob’s family members, who had gathered around to see what this white man wanted, tensed up. “It is not good for you to do this,” he said. “Even if I did cast the spell, it will not last. One day she will stop loving you.” In my village, people love gossiping, and I didn't want to earn the reputation of someone who uses black magic, so I acquiesced and asked him instead to heal my cold. He began to chant and flicked holy water on my forehead. “You will be cured in three days,” he said.



I was better three days later, but then I had also been taking antibiotics and colds don't usually stick around for much longer than a few days. Molika, the Cambodian American sister of Vitray, remains convinced of the powers of the Apb Thmob. “I’m 85 percent sure that it was an Apb Thmob who was responsible for sabotaging my brother’s wedding and ruining his health,” she asserts. Molika, like most Cambodians, whether raised in America or in Cambodia, doesn’t believe in the existence of ghosts and magic—she knows they exist.

More from Cambodia:

Evil People Are Exploiting Cambodia's Orphans

Is Kok An Trying to Become Cambodia's Next Dictator?

Watch - Cambodia Fashion Week

Photo via

Remember those billboards that were all the rage during the summer of 2011, the ones boldly claiming the world was going to end on May 21 of that year? When that didn't come to pass, they moved the goal posts a bit, because they forgot to carry a one or something, to October 21. And, as you now well know, that also proved to be false. Those predictions were put together by a California-based Christian cult called Family Radio Worldwide. (I interviewed one of them about it a while back.) Now, the religious group is destitute, because they spent all their money that summer thinking there'd be no need for cash post-Rapture. 

While it's easy to feel pleased with this news—charlatans getting their comeuppance always feels nice—it was no fun realizing that Family Radio was funded exclusively by listener donations. That means the estimated $100 million spent on billboards and commercials a few summers ago was not coming from the pockets of their own Board of Directors or some kind of insane hedge-fund gambling that this "end of time" prophecy was going to be right, but instead by the true believers among us. Which, if you've ever visited a church on a weekday morning, when only the most devout are littering the pews, means the money came from the generally less fortunate, the simple-minded, and the elderly looking for hope of continued existence after their final days. The ones with little money to spare. The same folks who throw their money away at state lotteries. But in that, at least they have a shot of winning, albeit an extremely long one. In the game of Which Prophet Is Telling the Truth?, there's never a winner. 

Onto the roundup!

- A 49-year-old pastor at a church was arrested for downloading and viewing child porn while at his other job, which is working as a custodian...  at Disney World.

- In Pakistan, a pair of bombs that exploded near mosques killing at least 15 people, while injuring at least another 100.

- Three Georgian soldiers (the country, not the state) were killed after a suicide bomber rammed his rigged-up-with-bombs truck into their base in Afghanistan. Later in Afghanistan, the Taliban killed three US soldiers with a roadside bomb. Still later, a pair of suicide bombings killed at least 16 people.

- On the subject of Georgia (the country, not the state), the Eastern European nation had themselves an antihomosexual protest march on Friday, which ended in a whole lot of rioting.

- Pat Robertson's advice to women on how to deal with their cheating men? Suck it up and fix the home you're living in, because he's a man and he has needs, and if you're not fulfilling them, he will look elsewhere.

- Awesomely named Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan has declared the country to be in a state of emergency, in order to send troops to battle the current Islamic militant insurgency.

- In Iraq, gunmen using silenced weapons attacked a handful of liquor stores and killed at least 12 people in Baghdad. Folks are blaming the attack on ultraconservative Islamists who don't believe that liquor should be allowed. Later in the day, a bunch of car bombings killed at least 35 more. The next day, another 17 people were killed in a series of car bombings and gun attacks. But that was all the leadup to the big day, on Friday, when a series of bombs struck mosques in Sunni areas, killing at least 76 people, making it the deadliest day in more than eight months.

- A woman who saw Trey Parker and Matt Stone's The Book of Mormon has ignored their satirical take and instead converted to Mormonism.

- The Church of Scientology held an event to celebrate their new facility in Portland. They didn't think it was a good look to only have 450 to 700 people there, so they used their Photoshop skills to make it look more like 2,500. And failed miserably.

- A little while ago, a student athlete running the 100-meter-relay race in Texas was apparently disqualified for pointing to the sky to thank God. The right-wing media, always looking to hype some ways everyone's attacking religions, sprang into action and started condemning anyone and everyone involved. But then, with some further investigation, it was learned that the runner was actually pulling the ol' “we're number one” gesture, and was DQ'd for rubbing it in the faces of his opponents. But the aforementioned right wing media folks kind of just ignored this last little bit and continued beating the drum of Religious Persecution. So it goes.

- Maybe you were following this weird story about Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro in Scottsdale, Arizona, and how the owners had themselves an old-fashioned meltdown after receiving criticism on their Facebook page? One of the stranger parts of the story is just how many references to them being chosen by the Man Upstairs there were during their rant. Things like “I AM GODS CHILD” and “WE WILL TEACH OUR CHILD EXACTLY WHAT >>GOD<< WANTS IN THEIR PATH” and “We have God on our side.”

- Bradlee Dean, one of those religious activists with a radio show, went apeshit last week after the good folks in Minnesota legalized gay marriage in their state (see below). It's a pretty epic rant that any kind of summary here won't do justice, so I'll just suggest listening to it.

- And Our Persons of the Week: The folks in Minnesota, who are apparently trying to make up for the fact they elected a verifiable insane person into Congress for the past six years (Michele Bachmann) by becoming the 12th state in the nation to legalize gay marriage. Well done, Minnesotans.

- And a bonus Person of the Week: The always-great George Takei, who went on Imgur, some kind of photo-based social network, and responded to a bunch of people's proclamations about why they love “traditional” marriage. Give 'em hell, George!

Previously - Obama Governs Like Bush on Reproductive Rights

Photo via Flickr user DonkeyHotey

You should probably be afraid, at least a little, of the federal government. The reason for this doesn’t have anything to do with conspiracy theories about fluoridation or the Obama administration hoarding ammo to keep it out of the hands of True Patriots. It’s simpler than that: you should be worried about the US government because it is huge and well funded and powerful and, most importantly, you don’t know what it’s doing.

The civics-class version of government—that there are three branches, each with its own checks and balances and blah blah blah—is hopelessly outdated. For one thing, the legislative branch is paralyzed by partisanship and a set of rules that make it impossible for it to do anything but stop laws from getting enacted. For another, as documented by the Washington Post in 2010, the governmental agencies that are in charge of “national security” have grown like not-all-that-benign tumors, consuming billions of tax dollars, constructing massive top-secret facilities, and employing hundreds of thousands of people whose job descriptions you don’t have the security clearance to know. The national security state is vast and unknowable, practically its own branch of government at this point, with its own secret history. Millions upon millions of documents are classified, many unnecessarily. By some counts, there are more pages of classified documents in the US than there are unclassified—and the government spends $12 billion a year keeping all that information under wraps.  

Against this, what are ordinary people supposed to do? We could tune all of this out and only notice the massive but mysterious network of intelligence gathering and decision making when it butts into our everyday lives—like when the TSA searches your bag without your consent as you travel across the country, or when a manhunt in Boston reveals how much cops resemble soldiers now—or we could dig through documents and poke and prod the unelected officials who know what’s going on and hope they let a nugget of information drop. Except you probably don’t have the time to investigate the government, and that’s what journalists are for.

The most important reason that the media exists—maybe the only good reason—is to tell the public what’s happening and what the people in power are doing about it. That’s increasingly difficult when the decisions that matter are shrouded in multiple levels of secrecy, and officials who reveal that information are prosecuted for crimes. The First Amendment's protection that lets journalists write whatever they want isn’t enough—they need to be able to be free to gather information that gives them the ability to write something that’s not just a reworked government press release. 

That’s the context in which people have been getting upset about the Department of Justice subpoenaing the Associated Press’s phone records while investigating a leak, and it’s why it should be even more outrageous that the DOJ called Fox News’s James Rosen “an aider and abettor” in a crime for getting a source to reveal classified information to him. 

In the first case, the DOJ looked at phone records as part of an investigation not into the AP itself, but into which official gave a reporter information about counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Even though the AP delayed reporting what it had at the government’s request, it’s possible that the story made it more difficult for the US to catch the bad guys, and some people have argued that the DOJ was investigating a serious breach of federal law and acting legally and in the government’s best interest.

The investigation of Rosen is even more worrying if you think that the press should be in the business of reporting on the government. Rosen wrote a story in 2009 that revealed the CIA thought North Korea would perform more nuclear tests based on information the agency had gotten from inside North Korea. For this, the DOJ aggressively pursued Rosen and Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government employee who leaked the information to him, even going through the reporter's personal emails. Rosen wasn’t charged with a crime, but unlike the AP investigation, the FBI accused him of engaging in criminal activity in an official document—for trying to find out what the government was doing and thinking, which is his job.

When most of the US’s overseas operations are deliberately hidden from public view, leaks and the reporters who are smart and connected and lucky enough to cajole them out of sources are the only way we have of knowing what the hell is going on. Just to give an example of how this works: McClatchy got its hands on some classified intelligence reports on drone attacks recently, analyzed them, and published the results, and now we know, definitively, that the campaign of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan is way less accurate than Obama administration's officials claim. That’s how journalism works. That’s the only way information emerges into the light of day.

The government wants to stop this process because if people know about its decisions, presumably they can second-guess or criticize those decisions. The Obama administration likely figures it has nothing to gain from transparency and has ditched the idea of accountability to the public entirely. How else to explain the administration’s quote about letting the press be “unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism” at the same time it's prosecuting any government employee who says anything at all to a reporter? If the administration was serious about letting the press do its job, why is it supporting a “media shield” law that wouldn’t protect reporters who are reporting on matters of national security?

The problem won’t be solved by voting Obama out of office. For years, the national security state has grown like some kind of ugly animal in a terrarium, fed by executive orders and ever-expanding budgets, and when it’s threatened by reporters like Rosen, it defends itself. It’s no longer concerned with defeating the version of al Qaeda responsible for 9/11, since that war is largely won. It just keeps growing and growing and creating new reasons for itself to exist, along the way treating the media like unfriendly viruses trying to infect it. Change the names of the people in charge, and the self-perpetuating security state will still be in place, churning out reams of documents no regular taxpayer is allowed to see.

The spy agencies, by the way, cost those taxpayers $75 billion a year. It’s not clear what they buy with that money, because any further information about that budget is classified, since it’s a matter of national security. Presumably, to try to find out more would be a crime.

@HCheadle

More on the policies of the Obama administration:

Big Money's Obama

Obama Governs Like Bush on Reproductive Rights

Obama Wants to Kill the Penny and so Should You