Image via Flickr user Greyloch

The announcement has been handed down: Paul Fieg, who directed Bridesmaids and The Heat, is hereby empowered by the movie industry gods to reboot the Ghostbusters franchise with women in the lead roles. Everyone who was still, for whatever reason, holding out for the remainder of the now-geriatric original team to reprise their roles, your hopes are dashed. Your hopes are also dashed if you, for whatever reason, felt like the made-up profession of busting ghosts could only be carried out by men. 

People are already speculating about who will make up the cast, but what else should we expect as the production gears up and the movie eventually comes out?

Dad Jokes

#Ghostbusters reboot with an all female cast. expect half the movie to be complaints they don't get paid as much as the original male cast.

— Mark Smith (@marksmith2307) October 9, 2014

With their National Lampoon roots, the team behind the original Ghostbusters included some of the architects of Boomer Humor. Today's dads are the people who loved the slobs vs. snobs movie dynamic on display in Animal House and Caddyshack, and vowed to never become The Man. But then they decided they loved Reagan even more. Consequently, Ghostbusters is an overtly Reaganite movie, with its contempt for whiny liberals in government and in the academic ivory tower.

The dad jokes have already begun, and if you're not careful you might mistake them for some kind of dangerous misogyny and not what they actually are: The death rattle of a nearly-extinct point-of-view. Ghostbusters was a beacon of conservative thinking in the mostly leftist Hollywood landscape. Its fans are, over the next few weeks, going to say a bunch of things. And the fans with a lot of Twitter followers may well spark some Twitter outrage. 

Measurements of hotness

I love females. I hope that if they go that way at least they'll be funny, and if they're not funny at least hopefully it'll be sexy.

-Ernie Hudson

Obviously sex is used to great effect in series like Underworld and Resident Evil, where a sexy protagonist is almost the entire draw of the movie. But people are just as likely to focus on boobs and implausibly tight costumes even when a movie isn't overt about its sexiness. 

Bad Girls was a movie from 1994, pitched to audiences as "Young Guns with girls." It was a relatively straightforward Western with a limited amount of sex-related content. It wasn't great, but it had a lot going for it, like comedy and gunplay. Still, the reviews largely focused on sex. In the Washington Post review, the word "sexy" was in the second sentence. Another refers to the "beautiful" cast being wasted on such a lousy script.

For what it's worth, Paul Feig made a solid effort to bypass all this when he made The Heat. Sandra Bullock's FBI agent character was old enough to be experienced at her job. Melissa McCarthy weighed a good deal more than the average leading lady. But if you actually watched the movie, her belligerence and obscenity were much more noticeable than whether or not she would make a good Playboy centerfold. Conversations about sex and attractiveness were played for comedy, and the film received much deserved praise for that. 

Sexists will go to the movie

...all-female I think would be a bad idea. I don't think the fans want to see that.

-Ernie Hudson

On one hand, there's no denying that movie fanboys-and-fangirls still fawn over a lot of dude-centric movies, many of which don't deserve so much praise. The highest-rated movie on the IMDB Top 100 with a female protagonist is The Silence of the Lambs at number 24, and only ten films on the entire list have female leads. The New York Times dubbed 2012 the "Year of Heroine Worship," but that same year the University of Southern California surveyed the top 100 films and only 28.4 percent of characters were women. You can try to look at it optimistically and point out that Ripley from the Alien series is one of the most beloved action heroes ever, but she's the exception that proves the rule.  

Approached in a different way, the rare instances in which women replace men seem to go over pretty well among fans. 

The remake of the Battlestar Galactica series replaced a main male character with a female version when it swapped Dirk Benedict for Katee Sackhoff in the role of Starbuck. Just like Benedict's Starbuck, Sackhoff was a hotshot pilot who chomped cigars, slept around, and generally didn't give a fuck. Sure, Benedict was mad about it, writing on his blog that "The war against masculinity has been won," but fans love Sackhoff's Starbuck, masculine or not. The show was a massive hit and fans line up to this day to get her autograph. 

A female-sung theme song

If the producers take the path of least resistance, the new theme song will be a version of the original song featuring the original singer and songwriter, Ray Parker Jr. on guitar and—just throwing this out there—probably Nicki Minaj, or her 2015 equivalent, on vocals. This isn't my fantasy, just a pretty safe bet.

That said, I'm on the fence about whether Ray will still sing the line: "Bustin' makes me feel good," at the end.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

MEATBODIES: Meatbodies (In the Red)

If Meatbodies were a woman, they’d be the hottest grungy chick with Jun-tea breath and a Propagandhi hoodie and hair dyed a bunch of colors. I would give a year’s worth of my pitiful VICE salary to eat 2C-B and make sweet, sweet love to her in a passive-solar straw-bale home. Actually, that fantasy is pretty close to the first time I got a tuggy in eighth grade—she was also hot and rainbow-headed. This band probably knows their way around an HJ, too. What I’m trying to say is that I love this record.
THE INTREPID TRAVELER 
 

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

CHARLI XCX: Sucker (Atlantic/Neon Gold)

“Break the Rules,” the first single off Charli XCX’s new album, Sucker, premiered August 18, 2014, on BuzzFeed.com.
HANSON FUNHAVER
 

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

RUN THE JEWELS: Run the Jewels 2 (Mass Appeal)

Politically this is perfect, and the production is stellar. One thing, though: You guys have got to chill on the enunciations. I know you put a ton of thought into all those lyrics about social oppression, and I totally back them, but, like, I don’t need to hear every single syllable. Rap should be cool, and coolness is inversely proportional to how well people can understand you. That’s why people love Bob Dylan and have forgotten about Donovan. If you need me, I’ll be over here listening to Young Thug again.
FRANK LLOYD TIGHT
 

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

CARIBOU: Our Love (Merge)

Caribou was a pretty cool psychedelic rock band back in the early aughts, but then the main dude listened to way too much Four Tet and went stupid. The album cover of Our Love looks like an overpriced shower curtain you’d buy at Urban Outfitters, and the songs sound like the shit they play at sushi restaurants in Nolita.
MR. MOTTSU

TINASHE
Aquarius
RCA

Tinashe sounds great, looks great, and probably smells great. Well, I’ve never taken a whiff of her, but I’m thinking she either smells like Dove body wash and rose petals or White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, Cheeto dust, and cognac.
STEFAN URQUELLE
 

LIL WAYNE
Tha Carter V
Young Money/Universal

Lil Wayne has entered the sequined-jumpsuit, young-girls-in-white-cotton-panties phase of his career. It’s not that this album is super bad or anything, but if you put this on followed by Tha Carter or Da Drought 3, it’s like listening to two different dudes—and only one of them is clever. If you buy only one hip-hop album a year, you’ll probably get Tha Carter V. But is that necessarily a good thing?
LIL WAYNE CAMPBELL
 

ERIC BIDDINES
Planetcoffeebean 2
Self-Released

“The Man” might make you believe that rappers need to rap about sex, drugs, and violence to be cool, but like every other time “The Man” told you anything, he’s lying. No one gives a fuck about lyrics as long as the singer sounds cool, and Eric Biddines sounds as cool as what you would get if you defrosted a frozen caveman and played him a bunch of Dungeon Family records—which is why he can get away with spending half an album rapping about coffee.
ERLICH PUNDERMANN
 

FLYING LOTUS
You’re Dead!
Warp

Everybody knows that the least cool genre of music is instrumental hip-hop. Flying Lotus knows too, which is why half of this album is instrumental jazz freakouts that might impress anybody who’s never listened to Sun Ra. Congratulations, Flying Lotus, you’ve made the new favorite album of state-college stoner trash. Not even an overpriced Kendrick Lamar verse can save you.
HENRY BALL-INS
 

YUNG LEAN
Unknown Memory
Self-Released

Yeah, we gave the Flying Lotus album the finger and are currently tongue-polishing Yung Lean’s hairless Swedish asshole. We did it for two reasons. One, Yung Lean made the druggiest rap album of the year. Two, we wanted to piss off all the true heads.

DREW MILLARD
 

T.I.
Paperwork: The Motion Picture
Grand Hustle/Columbia

Someone who cares more about the ethics of reviewing music than I do once said that you should never meet the artist whose album you’re reviewing, because you’ll end up reviewing the person rather than the work. Well, T.I. came to our office like three weeks ago and he was a swell fellow. This album could have been a word-for-word cover of Having Fun with Elvis on Stage and we still would’ve thought it was the best thing since the Animorphs book series. Hopefully T.I. doesn’t get into jewelry next, because I would totally buy whatever he was pushing even if it were cat turds wrapped in tinfoil with some fishhooks through them.
RIVER DONAGAY
 

JESSIE WARE
Tough Love
PMR/Island

Like a Kate Bush who reads expensive fashion magazines instead of dreaming up new types of elves, Jessie Ware makes heartbreaking English synth-pop for Pitchfork readers and other women I love who will eventually dump me. Unlike every barista who stomped on my heart, my girl Jessie understands my pain. She sings breakup songs and probably smokes Lucky Strikes outside of Tesco. She knows our pain. She’s felt it, too.
WILLIAM “REFRIGERATOR” CARLOS WILLIAMS
 

PEAKING LIGHTS
Cosmic Logic
Weird World

Peaking Lights’ latest turd takes the proverbial space cake for shameless self-parody. They only sing gibberish about telepathy, “knowing eyes of cosmic dust,” and vague non sequiturs about fucking aliens. Not actually, like, fucking aliens, but I’d be more interested in a concept album about E.T.’s sordid, coke-fueled jizzfest in Sri Lanka than this butt cheese.
HUNG SOLO
 

APHEX TWIN
Syro
Warp

01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110100 01100011 01101111 01101001 01101110
ERIC SUNDERMANN
 

KELE OKEREKE
Trick
Lilac

I am giving this a good review because I grew up listening to Bloc Party. I no longer criticize the things I liked when I was younger, prettier, smarter, thinner, and poorer. Since I’m too fat and lame to be cool now, I prefer to pine for my long-lost relevance. Thanks for everything, Kele. Even if this album were 67 minutes of nonstop fart noises looped over phone calls from inside the World Trade Center, I’d still like it.
DAVE SCHILLING
 

ZOLA JESUS
Taiga
Mute

I always wished Robyn fucked with downers and Robert Smith were a girl who sang over macabre club beats. Luckily, Zola Jesus has answered my prayers, and ironically, she’s given me more concrete answers than anything that other Jesus ever did.
WILSON DE GOUVEIA
 

PIG DESTROYER
Mass & Volume
Relapse

I have night terrors. One time I had a night terror about having a night terror in which I was terrified I would shit my pants because of a night terror. Pig Destroyer allows me to feel this same combination of doom and excitement without even having to poop.
SPEED WEED
 

SLIPKNOT
.5: The Gray Chapter
Roadrunner

God, you know the smell of those latex Halloween masks? I had a Hellraiser one and, as much as I wanted to look scary as shit while trick-or-treating, I would have rather been sodomized by a talking tree from The Lord of the Rings than breathe all night in that thing. I feel the same way when I listen to Slipknot.
FAIRY GROSS
 

OOZING WOUND
Earth Suck
Thrill Jockey

Some bands don’t give a shit. Other bands actively go out of their way to prove they don’t give a shit, but in the process end up proving they give way too much of a shit. Then there are bands like Oozing Wound that go so out of their way to prove they don’t give a shit that their music gets absorbed into the rectum of suck and then barfed out the mouth of awesome, leading to life-changing gnarly tunes that make you want to chug a beer while conducting a human sacrifice.
BARF BIKERNES
 

ANAAL NATHRAKH
Desideratum
Metal Blade

There’s a lot of good metal music and a lot more dogshit metal music. Everyone knows this—with the exception of 12-year-olds who blow their allowance money on MIW shirts and GarageBand drum samples that sound like elves violently masturbating inside a vacuum. Look, there’s endless metal out already and thousands of other records you could be listening to besides this one.
BENEDICT THUNDERSNATCH
 

SIXX:A.M.
Modern Vintage
Eleven Seven Music

I’m gonna let you guys in on a little secret: Most of the time, we don’t actually listen to the records we review. These reviews are basically repositories for our shitty dick jokes and attempts at smug self-awareness to counterbalance the overwrought poverty porn and “investigative journalism” found in the rest of this shitrag. Other times, we genuinely try to listen to the albums but are so repulsed by how dog-awful the first song is that we just stop there. Congratulations, Sixx:A.M. We gave your music a shot, and we hated it.
DREW MILLARD
 

ICEAGE
Plowing into the Field of Love
Matador

Put away your pitchforks, shotguns, bowie knives, sporks, cheese graters, dynamite, and anthrax—we’re not going to shit on the new Iceage album. It’s the soundtrack of the cartoon with the woolly mammoth voiced by Ray Romano, right? If so, ROCK ON! I love to laugh. And so does my young son, Cody. Watching Ice Age is the only way I can get him to shut the fuck up!
DICK TRICKLE
 

XERXES
Collision Blonde
No Sleep

Xerxes was the uncomfortably oily Persian god-king in the movie 300. He may have the body of Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and the face of Nikki Minaj, but his soldiers lost in a battle against the Spartans because he was too busy shaving his chest with a sharpened elephant tusk to lead an army. Xerxes was also the name of an 80s hair-metal dad band from North Carolina. And this band, too.
HADJI BEATS
 

TAYLOR SWIFT
1989
Big Machine

A few years ago, I downloaded Taylor Swift’s Red on a train ride to Scotland because a British boy I loved said he never wanted to talk to me again. “All Too Well” seemed like a good song to cry to. Two nights later, I took care of the same boy as he vomited in a bathroom at a rave. As his fag hag dragged him home, he forgave me. The album 1989 perfectly renders how I felt dancing at the rave after that, just as Red perfectly captured how I felt when he never wanted to talk to me again. It’s perfect.
HERMIONE SUNDERLAND
 

THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE
Between Bodies
Broken World

If you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if a freshman writing workshop recited their poetry about space travel, sacred geometry, and the tangential tendencies of our bodies’ atoms while seven people played guitar at the same time, this record is a good starting point.
WILSON DE GOUVEIA
 

WAMPIRE
Bazaar
Polyvinyl

When I was in high school in Oregon, I lived near a big commune-type house called Stonehenge. A guy named Samuel ran it. He wore overalls, had Pippi Longstocking braids, and owned a pet chicken named Henrietta. One night I visited his house to see Wampire play in the basement. I don’t think the band had actual songs—they just led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the police, fuck the po-lice, fuck ’em.” Later that night, the cops showed up and asked Samuel if he wouldn’t mind shutting down the party. Heading home, my buddy tripped and twisted his ankle, and the police gave him a lift to urgent care. Goddamn fucking fascists.
UNITINU OBABO
 

KINDNESS
Otherness
Female Energy

This record makes my body move in sinful, disgusting ways that would get me banned from most indoor shopping malls. I can’t listen to any Kindness songs while operating heavy machinery. I suggest staying at least 50 feet away from me while I’m jamming, because my violent pelvic thrusts might stab your eyes out. If the US military could weaponize funky grooves and hideous, erotic dancing, I could take down ISIS.
ROBERT MCNAMARA
 

EX COPS
Daggers
Downtown

Ex Cops know they’re ridiculous, but they make no feigned attempts to stop looking like assholes. The duo deliberately goes hog-wild with laser-tag and dying-plasma-ball sounds, singing lines like “You bleed on me / This dress is so expensive” with a straight face. These are meditations fit for a recovering American Girl doll as she enters her DJ phase. Whatever, let’s dance.
PERSONAL GROWTH BARBIE
 

WEEZER
Everything Will Be Alright in the End
Republic

This album was supposed to be different. White people everywhere were clawing at their flannels in anticipation for the return of mid-90s Weezer: catchy melodies, crunchy power chords, and nerdy appeal. There are no Lost actors on the cover, and the songs were going to be better than “Pork and Beans.” But alas, this album blows. Somewhere in the world, Ric Ocasek and Rivers Cuomo are high-fiving while watching a live feed of me crying.
CHARLES K. BLISS
 

VASHTI BUNYAN
Heartleap
DiCristina

I spread my fingers in between the soft grass, still moist from the morning dew. In my peripherals, I see a butterfly with wings of burnt amber. My insect brother perches himself atop my kneecap. “Hello, friend,” I mumble softly. A gentle breeze blows through the valley, and I’m glad to be wrapped snugly in my periwinkle shawl. I take a bite of my lingonberry crostini and wash it down with a robust sip of Vita Coco. Vashti is love. Vashti is life.
DON JUAN MATUS
 

PHILIP SELWAY
Weatherhouse
Bella Union

Philip Selway is the drummer for Radiohead, which means he could launch a nuclear-grade turd out of his butthole and people would still buy it. The dude could record himself talking to a Time Warner representative and loop it over the sound of his fist going in and out of a giant tub of cottage cheese, and his fans would pay $1.99 per download. Which is good for him, because this album is what you get when you black out on Xanax and wake up with a handful of songs.
JACK MEHOFF
 

THURSTON MOORE
The Best Day
Matador

Thurston Moore murdered the dream of true post-punk love when he decided to live a double life with a woman young enough to be his daughter. The Best Day is when Kim Gordon realized he was a two-timing dick and moved on. Behind the guitar riffs and psychedelic noise, I can only hear Kim kicking Thurston’s lying ass to the curb.
ERICA EUSE
 

FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE
Anything Goes
Republic Nashville

In a land where “anything goes,” does anything really matter? Are we prepared to live in a world without rules? Can our society handle the responsibility of pure, visceral anarchy? Who will pave our roads? Who will teach our children? Who will polish our silverware or drive our taxis? How will I get reception on my cell phone? What will come of us if anything truly does go? Florida Georgia Line doesn’t fucking know.
SACK-O AND VANZETTI
 

THE FLAMING LIPS
With a Little Help from My Fwends
Warner Bros.

Hey, Steven Drozd: On the off chance you’re buying a new American Apparel cape for your stage costume and decide to flip through our magazine, listen up. YOU’RE BETTER THAN THIS, MAN. Can’t you make some music on your own to balance out this crap? Can’t you go all Jonny Greenwood and start writing symphonies or scoring movies? I’m only giving this record a smiley because you seem like you need a confidence boost before you get matching tattoos with Wayne and Miley.
MAJOR SYRTIS
 

WREKMEISTER HARMONIES
Then It All Came Down
Thrill Jockey

Then It All Came Down is 2014’s “We Are the World” for the drone-metal community but with zero charitable aspirations. J. R. Robinson leads the chaos with a rotating roster of members of Chicago experimental staples, like Corrections House, Codeine, and Indian. The result is like that one time I got unreasonably stoned before a flight to Texas—an attractive plan until I was miles away from comfort. Don’t listen to this high.
ARMAND HAMMER
 

THE DANGER BOYS
The Danger Boys
Self-Released

Your lead singer gave me your album when he was carrying a chair around Coney Island in his underwear. He looked like Lion-O from ThunderCats. I expected beautiful tortured, bleeding-heart songs because anyone who degrades himself in public must pour some serious neuroses into his music. Sadly, the album is full of bleepy-bloopy songs that sound like drug music made by people who have never done drugs. I’ll never trust a naked man carrying furniture again.
DINGUS CORIANDER
 

Collages by Marta Parszeniew

Numbers on corporate espionage are hard to come by. The Germans recently estimated that they lose around £43 billion ($69 billion) to foreign business spies every year, but—at best—that’s basically just a piece of well-informed speculation.

The main problem with getting an exact fix on these figures is that they’re impossible to prove, because the nature of espionage generally relies on keeping stuff secret. It’s difficult to track the exchange of information, for instance, when it involves murmuring something at the sauna, or handing over a USB stick in a multi-level parking garage. And like a rigged sports game or steroid usage, it’s not something we’re in the mood to wake up to until it’s 100 percent, incontrovertibly there—an arsenal of smoking guns right under our noses.

“[Worrying about corporate espionage] very quickly becomes a matter of paranoia,” says Crispin Sturrock, who’s been running White Rock—a firm of anti-espionage specialists—for over 20 years. “There’s a very British tendency to want to shake it off. To say, ‘Oh, I must be being paranoid.’ And, of course, just to be paranoid doesn’t necessarily make you wrong.”

Sturrock has seen plenty of apparent paranoia turn out to be simple fact. The cloaks might be pinstripe suits and the daggers letter-openers, but the principle remains the same. “If I walk into your meeting room in dark glasses with a big long-lens camera, in a mac, and sit down… well, you’re going to want to investigate that, aren’t you? But if I sit down in your meeting room and put my iPhone on the table?”

The modern world has allowed us all to become constantly-transmitting information beacons. However, not all of us use that power for good—for live-blogging activism demonstrations, say, or offering our 57 Instagram followers the lowdown on what small animal we're now keeping in a cage in the garden. Instead, some people decide to be legit, shady assholes. 

“The problem is that most companies have some kind of a ‘bring your own device’ policy nowadays,” Sturrock explains. “With a standard phone, you can transmit anything to anyone in an instant. If I get a cleaning job, keep my head down, work hard… well then, at night, I’m king of the castle, aren’t I?”

The same kind of revolution that’s taken place in consumer electronics—WiFi, the Nokia 3210 and cathode ray tube monitors morphing from some distant black magic into tangible reality—has also taken place in spy-tech. Only, most of this stuff isn’t on display at your local Radioshack, so you probably haven’t noticed.

Jeremy Marks runs Spymaster, a shop that mostly caters to wealthy gadget-heads who want to play 007 in their downtime. But outside of the hobbyist realm, most of his products also have real practical value to genuine bad guys, the website offering everything from bugging devices and high-definition recording glasses to a ruler-width portable document scanner and a mini-submarine.

However, considering the progress of all those off-the-shelf electronics, I ask Jeremy whether the bad guys even need all his pricey bugs and spy-cams any more—whether they couldn't just download some basic software that allows them to record everything on their iPhone. “There is software out there to do that," he says. "But it’s not very good. Well, it is very good, but the problem is that Apple keeps updating their OS, so there’s a constantly evolving arms race.”

David Rubens runs global risk consultancy David Rubens Associates. “The game has moved on," he says. "If you look at something like Google Earth, they’re giving that away for free. So what you’ve got to ask yourself is: ‘What’s the stuff they’re not giving away for free?’ I’m a great believer that you can just presume you’re being observed. That anything that transmits or connects to something else can be hacked and is not secure.”

Last year, The Mail on Sunday ran a series of investigations into spying at 102 major companies, including accounting firm Deloitte, insurance giant AON, and banks Credit Suisse and Chase Manhattan. One of the convicted culprits they named was "infamous blagger" Daniel Summers, who managed to obtain information about his targets—including their phone bills and bank statements—by simply sweet-talking employees over the phone. 

That investigation broke the seal on a world of small British “security” and “risk” firms operating covert businesses out of their garages. In a wide-ranging probe, the Mail uncovered a security company run by a former army airborne officer who’d commissioned corrupt detectives to do one-off “hush-hush” jobs for celebrities and wealthy clients; a big rail contractor who’d got someone to go out and extract bank statements from a corporate rival; and a construction company who'd had professionals spy on three employees at the center of a kickbacks probe.

“If Corporation A wants to know something about Corporation B, it’s pretty simple,” Rubens says. “You’d ask for ‘market intelligence that may be of interest to me,' the implication being that there would be both legitimate, above-the-line capabilities—surveys, analysis—and the below-the-line stuff: the dirtier stuff. That would again be outsourced, of course; there would always have to be layers of plausible deniability.”

Some victims will go public if they feel they’ve been compromised. But according to Sturrock, for most corporate brass there’s little incentive to kick up a fuss. “The companies don’t like it, because firstly it reflects badly on management; secondly, talking about it could cause shareholders to get nervous, triggering a sell-off and a slide.”

Staying on top of who’s up to what is a challenge for anti-espionage specialists like Sturrock, as those on the other side of the game can command—and work with—a much higher budget.

“Two million’s not a bad sum,” he says, talking me through the kind of fees corporate spies can receive. “Two million buys a lot of capacity. You could keep people under surveillance. You could buy a lot of computer software. Often it’s still the more old-fashioned ways. Ultimately, you’re back to the question: ‘Who is a spy?’ Well, there are many reasons anyone might start informing. Often it’s pure ego, but equally, if you start giving someone manila envelopes of cash, you can change a lot of behavior. Or, on the flip-side, blackmail…”

“Back in the day, we used to having a saying: ‘Everyone has something they wouldn’t want to see published in the News of the World,’” agrees Rubens. “And eight out of ten of those people would pay you for it. The honey trap is as old as Samson and Delilah, and the online world makes that ever more plausible. There have been some terrible cases lately of kids being lured into sex acts online, then blackmailed with that.” 

When it comes to governments, industrial spying is an accepted norm. Every country, says Rubens, has a defined policy to gather the business secrets of the others. “How does China go from a third-world nation to an engineering leader inside a generation? Not without a lot of inside help. In fact, they have an explicit, defined policy to steal Western business secrets.”

In 2011, a couple of engineers for the US wind farm company AMSC were out in China’s Gobi desert, repairing a controller for the Chinese turbine manufacturer Sinovel, when they realized it was running its own version of AMSC's software. Further tests showed they’d somehow ripped off all the source code. Bad news, as two-thirds of AMSC’s entire business was dependent on fresh orders from Sinovel. Within weeks, the orders mysteriously dried up, Sinovel began making its own turbine controllers and AMSC went to shit.

“The key, often, is not to know what’s happening now,” says Sturrock. “That’s just backwards-engineering. People have been doing that forever. The key is to know what’s coming down the line. What the next thing is. There are many weak links in that chain."

Your paranoia is justified. That’s the sticky, awkward message these guys have for us. “If you look at it from a meta level, there’s no change in human behavior affecting these leaks,” Rubens suggests. “It’s purely that the methodologies are different; it’s just that stealing this stuff and distributing it has become that much easier.”

That noise in the distance? It's an unseen eye swivelling to look at you, to take what it wants, then move on. And why? Because not everyone is as nice as you, pal. Because a technological asymmetry has suddenly opened up between seeing and being seen. Because our obsession with making our world more omniscient has allowed the creeps and spies to take us back to some Hobbesian state of nature, where the strong and cruel can easily have their way with the weak and nice. And it’s going to take a while before we can close that gap again.

But for now, the key challenge isn’t even closing that gap. It’s simply acknowledging that it’s there.

Follow Gavin Haynes and Marta Parszeniew on Twitter.

Five years ago, Mark Grieco was a 24-year-old independent photographer travelling through Latin America. Like many tourists, Grieco was immediately struck by the continent's vast economic disparities—massive ghettoes across the street from gigantic mansions with big walls and security guards—but unlike many tourists, the imbalance spurred Mark into action. He quickly abandoned his photography ambitions, and began plotting a film that would illuminate the wealth inequalities, explore the continent’s history, and speculate on its future.

He settled on a gold-rich town of 10,000 called Marmato as his subject. Marmato was an enticing anomaly—a municipalty sitting on one of the biggest untapped gold reserves in the world (nearly $20 billion in gold deposits) while operating completely devoid of foreign mining companies. Intrigued by the way the locals continued to subsistence mine in the 2010s in the same traditional manner they had for centuries, Grieco began documenting the community. As chance would have it, shortly after he landed, the first international mining company arrived in Marmato and started buying up the local mines, providing his film with a captivating conflict to document.

The resulting film, MARMATO, is a gripping insight into the steady progression of the influence and control foreign investors have over the Colombian town, as shown through the eyes of the local miners, mine owners, and foreign executives sent in to help smooth the transition. Filmed over six years, MARMATO captures many dramatic developments—including the moment the government stops selling the locals the dynamite essential for them to mine, in order to drive them out of the mine, effectively asphyxiating the local economy so it is easier for foreign officials to take control. This leads to a protracted resistance from local workers, who enter the mines illegally and use homemade dynamite to get to the gold, leading to tension with a government unafraid of sending the military into towns to do its bidding.

After Mark visited Toronto to premiere MARMATO for three sold out screenings at the Bloor Hot Docs Theatre, I gave him a call to discuss the long-term implications of foreign investment in economically desperate Latin American towns, how the American military is used to protect foreign mining company investment interests, and why he thinks the Harper government has been dragging its feet on appointing a federal watchdog on the mining industry.

VICE: How did you end up choosing Marmato as a subject for your first film?
Mark Grieco: I started looking for a mining town that didn’t have a tourist-y environment, either presently or historically, and at the same time, didn’t have a multinational mining company controlling that resource.

When I found Marmato. I knew it was exactly what I was looking for as soon as I arrived. It’s a town where the miners themselves are still mining the same way they have for centuries and the gold is staying within the local economy. And just by coincidence, almost [on] the week I arrived, the first Canadian mining company arrived and started buying up the mines. I started filming a little bit over a year later after that first trip to Marmato.

At one point in the film, you show ads from the Canadian mining company that bought up 80 percent of the mines in Marmato—Midoro—is running on local television talking about how their advanced drilling techniques are better for the environment. They also brag about the jobs they’re going to create for the community, and how they’re going to eventually turn the mine into an ecofriendly space. Do you think that there was any truth to those plans or is that just a part of their marketing tactic?
This is an old game companies use to come in and sell the snake oil to these kinds of communities that are vulnerable to these kinds of messages and vulnerable to the attraction of capital—foreigners showing up with briefcases of dollars.

But if someone could show me a mining project that actually started by promising these things and then actually achieving that for the community, I’d be shocked. It rarely ever happens. It really is a publicity tactic. In the video in the film, I would say every single thing they promised, they never completed with the community. I know the first time it was shown to people in Marmato, it was at a closed meeting with just the mayor and the councilmen and women of town. The public wasn’t even allowed to see it.

So what they’re saying is ‘We’re going to create these jobs and this beautiful new town.’ But they rarely ever, if ever, is it explained to the community what the implications of an open-pit mine would mean to the community.

What are the implications?
It meant the ultimate destruction of a 500-year-old town. It meant eroding the social fabric. It meant death of their territory, their land. And ultimately, the destruction of the town… and they may guarantee employment, but it’s only for the short term, that this is a project that has a lifespan (at maximum) of 30 years. So then the employees of the town build them a new, employ the miners and build them a new town, but it only possibly lasts for 30 years.

In the film, It seems like a lot of the Canadians and others who traveled to Marmato seem genuinely convinced that they would improve quality of life for locals. Do you think that they’re actually convinced or is their certainty just another of their pitch?
Well, I think that on some levels, they could improve certain aspects of their lives. This case is complex. There are two major things: one, the way that the locals are mining now is just not safe and it’s really not sustainable for that community and they’re also damaging the environment to a certain extent.

The difference being between that and the big mine is that the big mine would be done on such a massive scale that the environmental impact would be huge—and so would the social impact. The other thing that I hope comes across in the film is that I’m not attacking the foreign investors. I’m allowing them to justify their type of work and their existence in a community like [Marmato] to see how they can justify these claims—and the inevitable upheaval of the culture and social fabric of this town.

I think that they truly believe what they’re saying, because if you were a foreigner who’s worked in the mining industry for decades and you’re used to regulated industrial mining, if you went to Marmato and saw the way they were mining, you would say, ‘My God, this is exactly like the stone ages,” [which is what] one of the execs says in the film. There’s this perception from foreigners that “we’re here to save the community from their primitive ways.”



Miners at the entrance of the Marmato mine. Photo via Mark Grieco.
75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada. Why do you think that is?
I think a simple answer would be that Canada doesn’t have a highly industrialized economy. And so for a long time, it’s been a resource-based economy. Canada has historically been a resource-based economy: fur trade, mineral resources, that kind of thing. And I think that part of the economy was and is a huge part of the Canadian economy.

In the case of Colombia, there’s an interesting way to look at this is in that Colombia receives the third-largest military aid package in the world from the US outside of Israel and Egypt. And what’s been happening in the last few decades in Colombia is that a lot of that military aid is going to fight the insurgent groups in the country. But where they’re kind of clearing out those insurgent groups from territory that they previously controlled, are places rich in petroleum and mineral resources. So once that’s cleared up, then business can come in.

Now if it was the majority of which were American mining companies, you could easily make that connection. But if it’s a mining company from Canada that comes down and starts taking advantage of those newly controlled and secured areas, then the connection is not as clear. But what’s happening is a lot of those mining companies then trade on Wall Street. The US is getting the kickback for the military investment they’ve made in that country.

We’ve previously reported on the Harper Government dragging its feet on hiring someone to oversee the mining industry. What's the cause of their delay?
Well, it’s hard for me to say. I’m an American. I don’t know much what’s going on in terms of politics here, but I think it’s clear: [mining is] one of the cornerstones of [Canada’s] economic success. The government has a great interest in not letting there be too much regulation. A lot of the big banks in Canada are investing directly into huge projects… for example, the Canadian Pension Plan since 2011 has $6 million invested in Gran Colombia Gold, which is the Canadian company in Marmato. I just think that there’s been attempts to regulate these companies and most of the times those get crushed.

What do you think people should know about the way mining companies are conducting their businesses around the world?
People don’t even know what is happening and how this business is conducted. There may be some plausibly positive examples of this type of investment in the underdeveloped world, but most of the time it’s done by way of tactics that are shown in MARMATO. And I think that in the case of Colombia, it’s because most of the media won’t report on the story in the same way in which I covered the story: investing a lot of time and speaking directly to people who were affected by this investment.

Hopefully people who are for this type of investment and those who are completely against it, may see the film and identify all sides of the story by way of a humanistic portrayal of this kind of conflict. To say Look, we need to think about this in a more profound way and try to find a dialogue somewhere in the middle. And I think that that’s kind of the first step: to raise awareness… [finding the middle ground so we can] look at who benefits and who doesn’t.

Marmato debuts on Netflix in January 2015. For more information on the film and screenings, click here or here.

@jordanisjoso

Photos by Chris Bethell

If you're thinking of opening a restaurant, your number-one priority is probably to avoid poisoning anyone in the process. The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) is the government body charged with ensuring that Britain's restaurateurs don't subject their customers to days on a hospital drip for food-borne illness. If any eatery falls short of this minimum requirement through terrible hygiene, the FSA takes action to close it down. The agency provides a UK-wide scoring list of nearly every eatery in the country. Scanning the list for the places you like to eat at when you’re drunk can be something of an eye-opener—and an appetite suppressant.

Like every city, Liverpool is not immune to crappy restaurants serving food made in unsanitary conditions. In February 2013, Liverpool's Buffet Star Chinese closed after a rash of horror stories. Reports told of rat feces in the food-storage areas and raw eggs and defrosting meat placed next to cooked produce. Pictures of cooking areas with grease and rat shit everywhere showed that, despite the famous saying, what you don’t know actually can hurt you. This year, Shangri-La, a well-established dim sum dive, had its doors bolted for good owing to an infestation of German cockroaches first discovered back in October 2012. For those of you keeping score, yes, there were rat feces there as well.

Hovering precariously above the point where the FSA needs to forcibly shut them down are establishments that have been given an unappetizing “zero” rating for hygiene. According to the agency, these “are likely to have a history of serious problems,” but they're still free to serve food. Despite the horror stories, checking restaurant hygiene ratings isn’t something that most people do. But just how much of a risk are you taking by eating at a badly rated place? Does poor hygiene mean the food will taste bad? I decided to put my stomach on the line and find out with a gastronomic tour of Liverpool’s zero-rated eating establishments.

“How can a newsstand get a zero rating?” is a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past week, but PRM, situated right by Liverpool’s Lime Street station, has managed it. It’s popular with students owing to its free-to-use cash machine, which is pretty much its main attraction.

A quick root around led me to a cabinet housing baguettes. They looked pretty limp. I did my pilgrimage two days ago, and the "use-by" dates suggested that if I came back two days later, the same ones might still be there, presumably with slightly browner lettuce. Other than that, nothing seemed untoward here. The floors were clean and had that typical newsstand smell.

The place got its zero rating on January 17, nine months ago, but PRM looked no different from any other newsstand. Perhaps next time the inspectors will give it a better mark. That said, for a place to score zero when it mostly deals in sealed and delivered goods was worrying.

I went for the turkey salad option and hoped it would be safe. An inquiry made to the FSA revealed that there is no template for dealing with a zero rating. It all depends on the specific problems and how the local authorities deal with them, so as I took my first bite, I didn't know what I was getting into, adding a shiver of unpredictability. Was I swallowing something full of parasites that were going to eat my insides? I just didn't know.

My first mouthful contained dry meat mixed with soggy tomato and warm mayonnaise. The bread put up some resistance. I managed to finish, if not enjoy, the sandwich. I nearly gagged, but no more than I would with any corner-shop baguette. I didn’t go blind or hallucinate or anything. It seemed that I had survived for now.

Then I continued to my second stop on the tour: the Olive Tree. It sounds like a cozy Italian place, right?

In fact, it was a standard kebab shop with a glistening meat tower that made me wonder how many cow's assholes were nestling in the pile in front of me.

Given what seemed like a Sophie’s Choice of food, I opted for the Olive Tree Special Burger—a beef patty with doner kebab ladled over it. Off-color tomatoes, plastic cheese, and dry lettuce topped the dish off. After my first bite I thought about asking my host if I could have a straw, such was the amount of grease running down my chin and back into the polystyrene tray.

As at PRM, the apparently lackadaisical standards of cleanliness were matched by the food. The doner meat was lukewarm and rubbery. The salad didn’t add much to the overall taste because it tasted of absolutely nothing. The burger itself was sloppy and fell to pieces pretty quickly.

Unlike at the newsstand, at the Olive Tree the food was prepared right in front of my eyes. The food was greasy, and I would have enjoyed it much more after a few beers, but it wasn't especially bad and I couldn’t see anything particularly unusual about its preparation. Nobody was sneezing over the grill or anything, even if could have done with a scrub. I didn’t collapse in cold sweats when I finished. Maybe the place had improved since its last inspection, or maybe the FSA is a bit overzealous. I tried not to think about what was lurking out of sight.

It was a good start for Bombay Spice, my final stop. Outside and in, it looked and smelled nice enough, like a pretty normal Indian takeaway. It had a decent seating area, leather sofas in the front, the same carpet and wallpaper all these places seem to share, and a friendly and accommodating staff. The hygiene/quality correlation hypothesis that I had developed at the other two places had taken a knock. I was feeling quite confident.

Unable to stomach a full meal at this point, I stuck with two classic starters—the mixed kebab and a chicken chat. Appearances can be deceiving, and what Bombay Spice served up was the worst food of the night. The mixed kebab came first, with an onion bhaji big enough to be used as a child’s hat. Each bite saw grease swilling around my teeth like mouthwash. The lamb kofta was tough, watery, and bland. One patron watched me eat and raised his eyebrows as he waited for his own food.

The chicken chat looked like an angry paper bag full of vomit and didn’t taste great either. The pastry had the consistency of a fried bath towel, while the chicken and potato filling was hard to figure out. A lot of sugar had been dumped in there, perhaps to mask the taste, or maybe as a failed experiment. It was awful—the first and only dish I didn’t finish. But again, I didn't feel ill and had survived what I had thought would be a culinary Russian roulette.

Returning to Lime Street I had a few moments of introspection as the poorly conceived food went to work on my insides.

I didn’t suffer from food poisoning, but the food I had eaten did me no favors. That said, I had eaten three fatty meals, so I would probably have felt that way wherever I'd gone. In fact, possibly the most concerning thing about these places was how normal they seemed. There was a vague correlation between the zero ratings and the quality of the food, in the sense that a place vying for a Michelin Star is unlikely to get a zero rating. But basically these were three slightly below-par establishments that I could have come across on any night out or rush to eat before catching a train. And that is surely food for thought.

Follow Joseph Viney and Chris Bethell on Twitter.

Poultry be warned: Teens are legion. Photo via Flickr user Elizabeth Prata 

When news emerged late last week that unknown persons had broken into a Fresno, California, Foster Farms poultry plant and killed 920 chickens with a golf club—and possibly another blunt object—I could feel my adult acne tingle. I didn't know it for sure just yet, but I had a strong suspicion of who the culprits were: teens. Sadly, I was correct. This week, an 18-year-old, two 17-year-olds, and a 15-year-old were arrested for the crime.

For reasons of taste and humanity, we in the news media do not speculate about certain things, like how exactly anyone—even a quartet of highly motivated teens—could kill nearly 1,000 birds with a golf club. I'm not saying that they should be celebrated for their animal cruelty, but there's no question that it's an achievement. I've never killed a chicken, so I have no idea how difficult it is. I have been to a driving range, though, and I know that after a few dozen swings, your arms get pretty tired. Even if we assume these boys each killed the same number of birds, we're still talking a few hundred hard strokes each. Plus, it must have taken hours. Not to mention the sound, and the smell, and all the bodily fluids. As Fresno County Deputy Chris Curtice told CBS News, "You can't do that much damage to animals and not have blood on your clothing."

The whole incident is just completely unfathomable. Really the only thing that we don't have to wonder about is motive, because the only possible explanation for beating nearly a thousand chickens to death with a golf club is that you're nuts. To quote Foster Farms employee Antonio Puentes, "It's crazy that someone would break into the chicken shed to kill them. It's just crazy."

Here's the rest of This Week in Teens:

–Not all teens are animal-slaughtering lunatics! Just this morning, famed 17-year-old activist Malala Yousafzi won the Nobel Peace Prize, making her the youngest-ever winner of that award by 15 years. In 2012 the Pakistani schoolgirl was shot in the head by the Taliban as punishment for blogging in favor of women's right to education. She survived the attack and has continued working as an activist; late last year she met with fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner (remember that?) Barack Obama in the Oval Office and bravely told him that American drones are creating more terrorists. This year, she continued her streak of schooling adults by informing Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan that his country needed to do more to recover the hundreds of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram. In August, she FaceTimed with ex-teen Justin Bieber. Fun fact: Like most teens, she believes in socialism.

–American teens continue to not live up to Malala's example. At the University of Southern Mississippi, a fraternity scavenger hunt asked participants to take a photo with a flamingo. Frat pledges being frat pledges, they decided to take things to the next level—hell yeah, bro. Now one pledge has been arrested and others are being investigated after they decided to steal a flamingo instead of taking the photograph. That led to the death of both the bird and its mate from injuries sustained during the kidnapping. 

–Speaking of things that can no longer fly: In Chicago, a 19-year-old was arrested at O'Hare airport on his way to Turkey. It's alleged that he planned to head to Syria or Iraq and join the Islamic State. This incident led to all sorts of scaremongering, from local news asking if IS is a threat to the homeland to this noxious op-ed from Fox News's Greg Gutfeld arguing that the feds ought to have let him go because he should be thrown out of America “like the stinky garbage he is." While it is scary that an American got caught trying to travel to join IS, the fact is there have been very few of these incidents. According to the FBI, about a dozen US citizens are fighting alongside extremist groups in Syria. That's 12 people out of a 316 million Americans. Given the huge size of America and the relative ease of traveling around the world, it's actually kind of reassuring that more young people haven't tried to join the bloodshed. Good job, teens, at least you aren't joining the most terrifying terrorist army in the world.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

Being pregnant can apparently make you that much more criminal. Photo via Flickr user J.K. Califf

Lacey Weld of Dandridge, Tennessee, was 26 years old and in the final weeks of pregnancy when a camera attached to an undercover police officer captured her 40-minute visit to a methamphetamine manufacturing plant. In July, despite her cooperation in the case and testimony against co-defendants, Weld (who pleaded guilty) was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and five years of supervised release for her involvement in meth manufacturing. The federal judge in the case, Thomas Varlan, determined that “enhanced sentencing” guidelines regarding harm to a child justified around six years of her punishment because she carried a fetus when the crime was committed.  

Now a coalition of reproductive rights organizations is calling on outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder to publicly condemn sentencing practices that impose harsher punishments for women on the basis of pregnancy alone. In a letter sent to the Department of Justice this week, more than 40 groups—including the Carr Center for Reproductive Justice at NYU School of Law, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and the National Black Network for Reproductive Justice—described the judge’s decision to lengthen Weld’s sentence because she was pregnant as a blatant violation of constitutional law, human rights, and reproductive justice.

At the very least, as a press release issued by local US Attorney William C. Killian’s office put it, Weld’s sentencing hike on the basis of her pregnancy was “unique.”

“I don’t think this particular [sentencing] enhancement was ever designed for pregnant women,” Weld’s defense attorney, John Eldridge, told me. He points out that laws intended to prevent “substantial risk of harm to life of a minor or an incompetent” do not mention harm against a fetus. As the coalition’s letter points out, the Illinois Supreme Court decision Stallman v. Youngquist held that, “Since anything which a pregnant woman does or does not do may have an impact, either positive or negative, on her developing fetus, any act or omission on her part could render her liable…” (It's worth noting that the author of this 1990 Harvard Law Review piece on the Stallman case was none other than Barack Obama, and the Tennessee judge's decision is not in line with his administration's advisories on drug addiction during pregnancy.)

Too much exercise, too much caffeine, too little sleep—the list of ways a pregnant woman might cause harm to a fetus is practically endless. And because no human is perfect, the law does not generally permit the punishment of women for behaving badly while with child. It should be noted, also, that many illegal drugs, including meth, are not as damaging to a fetus as legal substances like cigarettes and alcohol, and the effects of prenatal drug exposure are nearly impossible to untangle from other socioeconomic factors like poverty or poor diet.

Weld’s appeal, which is pending, will make the case that she experienced illegal discrimination, a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.

As Sara Ainsworth, director of legal advocacy at National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), explained to me, Weld’s case is not really about the right of pregnant women to use or manufacture meth. It’s more about constitutional protections of gender equality and due process. In this case, Ainsworth says Weld was effectively held responsible for drug use, which—unlike possession or manufacturing, the crime Weld pleaded guilty to—is not illegal at the federal level, nor in the state of Tennessee.

“She wasn’t being prosecuted for [use]," Aisnworth told me, "and yet it’s her ingesting these substances that led to sentencing enhancement.”

The DOJ says video footage shows Weld smoking and cooking meth, but according to Eldridge, Weld can only be seen pulling her shirt up over her nose, presumably so as not to inhale fumes. For the judge, “That was enough,” Eldridge says, to pin her child's withdrawal symptoms on prenatal meth "addiction."

"I want to apologize for all the harm and wrongdoing I’ve done to my children,” Weld told the court in July. “He could have died and I just pray and thank God that my sister has him and he’s OK.”  

Eldridge says that Weld's baby tested positive for opioids and methamphetamine, but disputes what caused the withdrawal symptoms.

“There’s no proof as to what caused the withdrawal. There was drug use, and there was exposure in a meth lab," Eldridge said. "[Testimony] just said opioids and meth were in the baby’s system, so the judge concluded that it was meth exposure [which caused withdrawal symptoms]. I think it’s opioids.”

One factor in Judge Varlan's decision may have been Tennessee's controversial new law that allows pregnant women who use drugs to be given charges as severe as criminal aggravated assault—which can come with a 15-year-prison term. (Though Weld's meth manufacturing charge was technically unrelated to this law, the notion that pregnant women can and should be punished for drug use was certainly in the air at the time of the sentencing.)

Obviously, in an ideal situation, Weld would not have been using meth or opiods while pregnant. But the question isn’t whether her drug use was wise, but whether the courts should have the authority to punish women for health decisions made during pregnancy.

The coalition’s letter to the DOJ also argues that the Department of Child Services (DCS) case manager who testified about the baby’s health during Weld’s sentencing hearing is not a credible witness under the law. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, a 1993 US Supreme Court case, determined that “reliable scientific evidence, including expert testimony, is necessary to prove a causal link between in-utero drug exposure and harm to a child after birth.” Neither the DCS case manager nor the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation special agent who testified about the baby’s health “are qualified experts under Daubert,” according to Weld’s defenders.

“In other words, the DOJ and the court drew conclusions about the origins of the child’s health problems based on presumption rather than qualified scientific evidence,” the letter reads. “Pregnant women, no less than others, have a right to due process of law and the protections afforded by the Rules of Evidence.” 

According to Answorth, “It's not so much you have a civil right to be pregnant in a meth lab, but that you have the right to be treated in the criminal system on equal footing with someone who is not pregnant.”

The coalition hopes that a public response from the DOJ decrying the sentencing as unconstitutional would improve Weld’s chances of appeal—and maybe even deter other federal prosecutors and judges from using pregnancy as a factor when doling out prison terms.

“We support treatment and access to health care as a solution for health problems during pregnancy, and addiction is one of those health problems,” Ainsworth told me, pointing out that pregnant women facing arrest or punishment may avoid important medical treatment out of fear of punitive consequences.

The greatest concern is that the current climate for reproductive rights—hundreds of restrictions have been put in place around the country in the last few years—may prioritize the fetus over the person carrying it. That leaves women susceptible to incredibly high standards before the law. NAPW has identified hundreds of cases since 2005 in which pregnancy was a determining factor in prosecution and sentencing.

“What this case tells women who are pregnant and cannot overcome their addiction is, really, to get an abortion,” said NAPW’s executive director Lynn Paltrow. “Because you’re going to be punished more harshly otherwise.” But with abortion access dwindling, women have less and less control over the outcome of their pregnancies. The worst-case scenario, advocates say, is a society in which women face criminal outcomes for a variety of reproductive decisions and outcomes, whether that means the choosing to use drugs or choosing to terminate a pregnancy.

That's why reproductive rights groups are stepping up to make sure the feds know that, in addition to high-profile outfits like the ACLU, women’s eyes are on them. We won’t allow stigma to dictate policy that affects our health and reproductive autonomy.

Kristen Gwynne is a freelance journalist covering drug policy. Her work has appeared in The Nation, RH Reality Check, and RollingStone.com, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of SFCitizen.com

From 2005 to 2013, the San Francisco Police Department killed 19 civilians by gunshot. Data collected by local public television channel KQED shows that 11 of them suffered from a mental illness. The bulk of these killings occurred during a three-year period between March 2007 and December 2010, during which time nearly every person killed by the SFPD was reported to have been mentally ill. As shocking as these statistics are, this is not a unilateral indictment of the police. Rather, it’s a sign of the total inadequacy of the city government, the health department, and more directly, the population of San Francisco, who are apparently willing to turn mental illness into a police problem, which the SFPD is woefully unequipped to deal with.

For at least the past half century, San Francisco has been considered a haven for those with nowhere else to go. The city has a growing homeless population, 63 percent of whom have a mental illness, addiction, or debilitating physical condition. Yet public perception of the less fortunate has changed dramatically in the last few years. Back in the 1990s, former police chief Mayor Frank Jordan tried to tackle the problem by instituting a series of violations aimed at cutting down the homeless population, including citations for public drunkenness, blocking the sidewalk, aggressive panhandling, and public urination, an initiative known as the “Matrix program." He was voted out of office after one term and the program was abandoned by the next mayor, Willie Brown, who described Matrix as “persons in uniforms operating as if they are occupational officers in a conquered land.”

Photo via Flickr user Nate Bolt

Mental health issues are exacerbated by hostile policies toward homelessness, including the decisions to close city parks at night and prohibit lying on public sidewalks during the day. But there are also large swaths of mentally ill folks living with their families and in sponsored housing. In a recent series of interviews with people living in SROs (single-room occupancy housing), I discovered that there is a lot publicly-funded housing secured for those with existing mental health issues. Having shelter is no guarantee of safety, however; many of those shot by police in the past few years were shot within their homes, or just outside of them.

Despite the passing of California Proposition 63 in 2004, which taxed those making over $1 million for the purposes of expanding mental health outreach in the state, the San Francisco Department of Public Health cut $40 million from those same mental health outreach services between 2007 and 2012, with the government proposing that those who needed aid could seek help at alternative care centers (of which there are few) instead of at San Francisco General Hospital, where in 2008 a quarter of their inpatient psychiatric beds were removed as part of the cuts. That same year the SFPD saw a 15 percent increase in their funding.

Photo via Flickr user Dave Fayram

The obvious problem with eliminating outreach in favor of self-service is that many of those suffering from mental illness are often unable to seek help themselves, since a major aspect of mental illness is the inability to judge one’s own mental state. This catch-22 was “solved” in July 2014 when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved Laura’s Law, which allowed courts to force treatment on people who’ve been hospitalized or jailed twice in the past three years due to mental illness. Advocacy groups, such as the San Francisco's Coalition on Homelessness see the law as “falsely linking mental illness to violence, and focusing on forced treatment as the silver bullet that will solve the crisis,” as well as allowing “a family member, a roommate, or a police officer to petition the court, and through court order, drag someone before a judge where he or she is mandated into treatment under threat being held in a locked facility for 72 hours.”

Without the resources to get help, or housing, or medication, more and more of the city’s mentally ill are falling through the ever-widening cracks into inevitable confrontations with the SFPD. This is not to say that the police are blameless, but the brunt of responsibility can't be borne by a law enforcement agency simply because the rest of the city has failed to address the issue. But despite the knowledge that those confrontations are on the rise, the police department is also slow to take the necessary steps to protect the proportion of its population that needs their help the most. Take, for example, the widely publicized 2008 case of Teresa Sheehan’s near-fatal shooting.

Photo via Flickr user DC Atty

Sheehan, a 57-year-old woman with schizo-affective disorder, lived in a group home for people with chronic mental illnesses when a social worker came by unannounced to check on her. According to him, she verbally threatened him and ordered him out of her room, which prompted him to call the police and initiate a “5150” involuntary psychiatric hold. The two officers who arrived forced open her door, found Teresa clutching a knife and demanding a warrant, then proceeded to pepper-spray her, and, as she advanced toward him, shot her five times. When she hit the ground, an officer came up to her and shot her point-blank in the head through the temple.

Somehow, Teresa survived and was charged with assault, which ended in a mistrial when the jury failed to come to a verdict. Now she is suing the SFPD for their use of excessive force, as well violating her civil rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case is still pending.

Photo via Flickr user Jason Legate

San Francisco has tried on more than one occasion to teach officers to deal with unstable, uncooperative individuals without shooting them. Back in 2001, San Francisco rejected the idea of having a dedicated crisis intervention team, and instead attempted to train all officers in the necessary techniques. But training was cut due to funding issues, and less than half the department had undergone the course before it was canceled. Then in 2011, after police had shot and killed six mentally ill individuals in the previous three years, the SFPD adopted a program designed to educate its cops on high-tension encounters with the mentally unstable by training officers in crisis intervention. (It was based on the “Memphis Model,”)

Despite being called a "Crisis Intervention Team," the point of the program is not to establish a dedicated group of responders who can help mentally ill people. I reached out to the SFPD for clarification, and was told, "There is not a crisis intervention team. There are officers that have received crisis intervention training and are in our patrol forces available when called upon... We definitely understand to address persons in mental crisis with different measures. That's the reason we are in the process of training more officers... in crisis intervention."

Though some cities considering similar measures have created a team of cops who specialize in dealing with the mentally ill, Police Chief Greg Suhr has spoken out against that idea, telling KQED: “Police officers by nature find niches... I don’t want cops to find a niche and be expert on what they do and don’t do. I want them to do it all.” On the bright side, since the start of the program, only half of the last eight fatal police shooting victims were mentally ill.

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The John Lennon Wall, which contains tens of thousands of Post-Its, notes, and drawings in support of the Hong Kong protests. All photos by the author

The Hong Kong protests have been given many names, among them "Occupy Central," the "Umbrella Revolution," and the "Umbrella Movement." But perhaps a more apt name would be "the Polite Protest." Never before have I seen a group of people so determined for change go about their mission in such a well-mannered, peaceful way.

No litter is strewn about, signs thanking people for their observation or participation are everywhere, and the protesters line up to wait their turn to go over barricades, where they're helped up and down on each side by two volunteers making sure they don’t slip or fall. 

“Please, careful. You are very welcome here. Thank you very much,” is something I’m told virtually every time I’m helped over a barrier. And in the downtime, when there aren’t speeches being made or food or water being passed around, the protesters—a large majority of whom are students—can be seen doing their homework as they camp out in the streets.

From the students’ considerate disposition, to their determination, to a level of political awareness that's arguably unmatched among the youth of Western countries, there’s much to be admired here. Another aspect to be praised is all the artwork, created by protesters, taped and tacked up around the protest areas. Below is a small percentage of that.

A single note taped to the ad hoc John Lennon Wall, which contains tens of thousands of Post-Its, notes, and drawings in support of the Hong Kong protests. The dove flying against the rain carries the yellow ribbon, which has come to symbolize support for the protests. The words read “Embrace Freedom."

One of the dozens of one-of-a-kind line drawings taped around the Admiralty MTR station—the central hub of the protests. The anime girl is surrounded by four umbrellas in addition to the one she is holding. The characters on the umbrellas read, “Hong Kong Democracy," and the characters on the masking tape say, “We support Hong Kong.”

A sketch depicting the area between the two pedestrian footbridges across Connaught Road Central, which is normally a six-lane highway but is now blocked by thousands of protesters who organize, eat, do their homework, and sleep on it. Three days ago one distraught protester climbed to the footbridge’s central arch and threatened to jump. The characters read: “Fuel for the charge. We support Hong Kong.”

A poster of Tebybear, the character created by Hong Kong-based fashion designer, stylist and illustrator Teby Chow. Tebybear wears a respirator mask common among commuters in Hong Kong and he holds the yellow umbrella that has come to symbolize the protests. The characters mirror the “Umbrella Revolution” wording on the poster.

A drawing of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, CY Leung, who's not exactly popular with the protesters. Leung has been accused of being a puppet for Beijing. The protesters see him as a shill and are demanding his resignation. The numbers “689” reference the number of electoral votes Leung won his Chief Executive role with in 2012—a 57 percent majority. The wolf is frequently seen in protester artwork because Leung’s name sounds like the Chinese word for “wolf."

In tune with the communal spirit of the protests, one person made these faceless images and distributed them. They allow anyone to draw Leung’s likeness as they see him. The characters say, ”Shameless asshole."

Water bottles used by the protesters to quench their thirst in the 86-degree heat. These have been arranged in the form of an umbrella and mark the spot where the first protester camped out on Connaught Road Central.

Posters showing Leung in the likeness of King Kong. He perches atop a Hong Kong skyscraper, content in his rule over the city. The characters say, “Overriding Hong Kong."

Another image of Leung. Here, he's represented as a zombie with grasshoppers crawling from open wounds in his undead head. In China, grasshoppers represent good luck and abundance, suggesting these two forces—which the protesters believe they possess—could devour the zombie Leung. The characters say, “We support Hong Kong.”

Paddington Bear makes a trip from the UK to Hong Kong to support the Umbrella Revolution. The bear, known for his politeness—like the protesters—faces overreaction from the heavily armored police.

A line drawing of Leung imagined as the genie from Aladdin—a Middle Eastern folk story set in China. The broken lamp signifies the broken system Leung presides over. The characters say “come out,” a common refrain at the demonstrations, as many protesters say Leung hides behind the television cameras and refuses to address the protesters in person.

This banner from the footpath over Connaught Road Central says everyone below could be a hero like Batman.

A banner professing love, thanks and peace to both the protesters and the people who support them. The yellow ribbon reads, “We Support Hong Kong.”

An installation of multicolored umbrellas showing support for the protesters in Hong Kong.

This group of young people, some of them students, are representative of the tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong pushing for a fairer, more transparent democracy. The man in the white shirt in the middle is Ming Kin Yuen, 20, and the man in the black shirt next to him is Hinson Ling, 21.

Both helped me translate and contextualize the dozens of protest artwork pictures I took. They and their friend continue to make signs in support of the Umbrella Revolution.

Thanks to Hinson Ling, Ming Kin Yuen, and their friends for helping me translate the characters in some of the art. It should be noted that any translation errors are mine and mine alone. 

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If your life already feels like a soap opera or one big practical joke, then the last thing you would want to learn is that your illusions are actually reality and your existence is in the hands of some omniscient force. Or maybe it would be a relief to not have the pressure of free will weighing on you? The premise of the wonderful short film The Gunfighter by Eric Kissack explores the issues that come with dealing directly with an omniscent force. In the film, the all-powerful entity takes the form of a narrator who is voiced by Nick Offerman of Parks & Recreation.

Set in a saloon in the old American West, the short opens with a cowboy walking into the bar. Every move he makes is described by the narrator. But instead of the audience just hearing the voice, everyone on screen hears it too. As unsettling as the meta aspects of this is to the townsfolk, it’s not nearly as upsetting as the rash of infidelity, murder, and bestiality the narrator describes happening within their ranks. Pitted against each other, the folks start to realize that maybe there is something more sinister at work. The voice is an evil puppet master who wants to force them in a ballet of death for his own amusement... It's pretty scary for an absurdist Western comedy.

The comedy in The Gunfighter comes from its sharp dialogue, which contains a lot of literary flourishes. It’s the type of verbiage that you only ever read and seldom hear in film. That’s probably because when Kevin Tenglin wrote the story, it was just that—a story, for print. However, was rejected for publication and was neglected until a few years later he showed it to Kissack, who loved it. Together they turned it into a short film.

“I love Westerns, so I started writing [The Gunfighter] in that old Western style, about a gunfighter named Ned,” Tenglin said. “And I'm just a silly person by nature, so as I was writing it, I was pretending I was writing one of those Western movie voiceovers. But then Ned, the character, just started being able to hear my scene descriptions and started getting pissed at me for how I was writing it.”

Tenglin mined Western movie clichés and crammed his characters full of them—from the STD-ridden prostitute and the philandering men to the dumb bounty hunters. The Gunfighter is all about execution within the tropes and there’s lots of amazing executions in it.

I chatted up director Eric Kissack about the story, the casting of Nick Offerman, and more. 

VICE: How much did the story change as you made it? 
Eric Kissack: It changed quite a bit. In the short story, there was just the Gunfighter and the Henderson brothers. As Kevin and I kept coming up with ideas for more jokes, we kept adding more characters. Eventually we realized that we had so many people who were pissed at each other that the only logical ending was a Mexican standoff and shootout. Clearly.

You stuff a lot of sex into this script. 
There was a version of the script where we had the secrets that everyone was hiding be a lot more absurd... Like one guy was secretly obsessed with basket weaving and another was studying Immanuel Kant's writings on morality (and everyone made fun of him for it). In the end, the sex stuff just seemed more humorous. My instincts tend to go pretty sophomoric.

Was there something in particular that was more difficult about this production than your others? You went all out on the set design, costumes, guns, and even squibs.
The production was a massive challenge because we didn't have a lot of money. We knew that for the comedy to really work, everything had to feel as "real" as possible. That was the best version of the joke—a film that looks and feels like a real Western, but quickly takes a sharp left turn. So that meant getting an "authentic" set, costumes, and props, which also meant a lot of begging. Personally, I'm terrible at begging. Luckily my amazing producer, Sarah Platt, was great at it.

How did you get Nick Offerman on board? 
It's funny. I was re-watching the first season of Deadwood for visual inspiration and I flipped out when I realized that Nick Offerman is in the second episode of the first season. He gets killed almost immediately and he spends a good portion of the episode buck naked, but he's absolutely amazing in it. From that moment, I got it in my head that he would be the perfect narrator. I had worked with a director named David Wain [of The State and Stella] for a number of years. David knew Nick and offered to reach out to him for us. So we shot the entire short, edited it, and had one of our friends record a temporary voiceover. Then we emailed it all to Nick with a message saying that we knew he would do a much better job than the hack we got to do the temp. A few days later, he wrote back saying that he agreed.

What's next?
A feature, but not of The Gunfighter. We're content with that story and we don't think it needs expanding. So we're going to do something else. Actually, Kevin is writing one and I'm writing one, too. Hopefully we'll shoot one of them early next year. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the Senior Curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

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