Photo via

He walked into a warp. As Kiyoshi "Kiyo" Izumi toured a select few of post-war Saskatchewan's aging mental hospitals, absorbing the wards' layouts and interviewing patients along the way, the Canadian architect grappled with hallmark features of the 1950s-era clinical milieu. Otherwise neutral accoutrements flung him into a centripetal mindfuck. 

Phantasms crept out of slim gaps between mirrored tiles that lined the hallways, now the hyper-reflective, mocking sheen of a personal hell that collapsed in on itself the longer Izumi fought, futilely, to look away. Recessed utility closets swung open like massive, gaping mouths that had him convinced he'd be vacuumed down the wormhole of rabbits. The windows were barred, a fixed reinforcement to the slow-crushing reality of life as a caged undesirable. His bed rode too high for sitting with both feet firmly on the ground, and thus was more like a plank dangling precariously over a spiked pit than a place to rest a weary head. He said he wouldn't let the noises haunt him, but the ward's piped-in ambient music and sporadic intercom announcements smelled like garbage, he swore it. 

There were no clocks, no calendars; time, to say nothing of his or any patient's temporal bearings, simply did not exist, which made remembering when to swing through the nurses station, a pill counter-turned police station, damn near impossible. There was no privacy, no moment that didn't feel like standing centerstage, naked, alone, and with no clear exit; at his every entrance and turn, heads turned. And the hallways! The mirrored hallways. It was as if they did not end. They shot straight past infinity, obliterating Izumi's constancy of perception. 

He couldn't take it. He felt himself leak away. You could say he freaked out. But that's because he had a head full of LSD.

That Izumi tripped over much of his initial assessment of Saskatchewan's psychiatric wards, a structural and patient survey that lasted from 1954 to 1958, perhaps explains a lot about what exactly the architect, then in his early 30s, experienced through the hospital's physical configurations and psychic paraphernalia.

Izumi was part of a small, federally-granted team of visionaries, including British psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Humphry Osmond and Canadian biochemist and psychiatrist Abram Hoffer, tasked with developing a province-wide psychiatric hospital overhaul that addressed the affects that clinical environments had on patients. The trick? Get inside the heads of the mentally ill. The problem? Mere intellectual power and imagination would only take the trio so far.

Which is to say the success of the Saskatchewan Plan, as the provincial mental-hospital plan was officially known, hinged on mimicking the psychomimetic experince. A true, honest understanding of the at times cripplingly intense psychic distress of schizophrenics, namely, meant taking a good, hard look at the psych ward as only schizophrenics could. It meant occupying, so to speak, the minds and bodies of the committed as a way of forging an eye-to-eye rapport, and to empathize with how certain physical spaces dizzied their psychic boundaries, and stoked their anguish and fears.   

To build a better psych ward, a space unshackled from the inhumanity and stigmas of the "insane asylum," Kiyoshi Izumi would have to immerse himself in their world. He'd have to get on their level, the thinking went, to understand a patient's struggles and, crucially, how those struggles could be inverted, blended, stretched, and exploded by various design quirks, ambient anomalies, temporal-spatial glitches, color schemes, light casts and any other features that to outsiders seemed mundane, but to whose grimmery existed only on wavelengths discernible to the afflicted. He'd have to conjure up not only hallucinations but also delusions and perceptual distortions distinct to psychoses. He'd have to eat acid. Or so he and Osmond and Hoffer thought. 

It was a bold move. The insights he gleaned from levelling with patients and their surroundings, if we're to take his word for it, found Izumi envisioning what's gone on to be called "the ideal mental hospital", the first of which was raised in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, in 1965. Five more so-called "LSD-inspired" mental health clinics would be built throughout Canada, as well one in Pennsylvania. It was then only a matter of time before Izumi earned praise for the apparent humanity within his acid architecture, and also skepticism, still aired today, over the alleged problem-solving potential of his mind-altering drug of choice and the true extent to which his hospital designs effectively put the mentally ill at ease, or even helped integrate them back into the outside world.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.

Everyone knows that walls are more symbolism than impenetrable brick and mortar barriers.

This is especially true in Kabul, where concrete slabs and giant stone-filled wire baskets called Hesco barriers ring high value targets within the city. Like they did in Iraq, these gabions create a sense of perpetual siege.

However, there is one wall in Kabul that is useless in this war, but provides a physical timeline of Afghanistan’s history of conflict, which stretches back more than a thousand years.

The Great Wall of Kabul runs atop the Sher Darwaza (Lion’s Door) mountains, towering over the city below. Hard historical fact is difficult to come by in a place where rumors are as ubiquitous as weathered faces, but legend has it that the wall was the project of King Zamburak Shaw in the sixth century, built to keep out Muslim invaders. It played a role in subsequent wars against the British invaders, as well as Afghanistan's own civil war in the mid-90s.

The wall’s creation story is a dark one. Zamburak was said to have been a brutal monarch, forcing all his male subjects to work on the wall. Those who refused or became too sick to continue were said to have been killed on the spot, their bones encased within the wall, which is almost ten-feet thick in some places.

But along with the alleged bones, the wall also contains some poetic justice. One tale has it that King Zamburak was visiting the wall to see its progress when he was killed by his own workers/subjects. They buried his bones along with the others in the wall.

While the climb to the wall is cited as an invigorating hiking spot in Lonely Planet and other guides, I didn't know anyone who had made the trip. That is until I met Al Haj Aq Masoomi, the Kabul Municipal District Chief. Masoomi makes the three-hour hike nearly every Friday, along with his pal and boss, Kabul Mayor Mohammad Younas Nawandish.

They go to visit a copse of fruit trees they planted a few years ago in an effort to create an oasis of peace in this war-torn place. They have also created an elaborate pipeline running up the mountain to make sure the trees have adequate water.

Masoomi agreed to take us to the wall late in the afternoon. As he pulled on his white sneakers, he was clearly excited to get climbing.

The climb wound through hundreds of homes built on the unforgiving cliffs of the mountains. The people who live there are from other provinces and build with great skill and accuracy on these treacherous cliffs. They also build without permission. They are squatters.

We met children hauling heavy yellow water containers and green propane tanks, which they had fetched at the base of the mountain and were carrying back to their homes. Climbing twice a day for these living essentials is the price of free housing. The other is a lack of sanitation. Open sewage and garbage filled the channels between homes.

After just 40 minutes on the trail, as he scurried up the shale remnants at the start of the wall, it became clear that Masoomi was part mountain goat.

We told him we didn't have time for the full three-hour climb to the top, which clearly disappointed him. By way of consolation, we accompanied him to an impressive section about an hour’s trek from the bottom.

When we got there, we were buffeted by both the wind and wonder of this place. The wall, more than a thousand years old, is still standing high, pockmarked by artillery rounds and the bombardment of Afghanistan's civil war.

Despite both the legend and the actual history of the wall, the place felt remote, peaceful—showing us Kabul bathed in a quiet beauty. A quality that seemed unattainable in these days of weekly suicide bombings.

It was at the peak of our climb that Masoomi finished the story for us.

“These walls,” he said, “were built from the blood of people.” We nodded, having heard the legend. But he continued, “Three months ago, bones were found within the walls.”

Then he had our attention.

“They’ve been taken away and sent for scientific evaluation,” he told us.

If examined and accurately dated, the bones may help to turn the dark legend of the wall into a macabre truth. Masoomi was excited by the find and happy to revel in blood-laden history, while still hoping peace will take root in Afghanistan, beginning with an explosion of fruit trees at the top of Kabul’s wall of bones.

Watch Kevin's climb in the video below: 

All video and photos by Kevin Sites unless noted otherwise.

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

More from Kevin Sites: Confessions of a Taliban Fighter

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @kevinsites

And visit his personal website: KevinSitesReports.com

Last night, protests in Los Angeles against the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial—which had been mostly nonviolent, though there were occasional fights—turned ugly. A peaceful demonstration gave way to a brawl between police and protesters, and 14 people were arrested by the end of the evening.

For the LAPD, this marked one too many days in a row of people publicly wishing Zimmerman had been convicted of murdering Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old he followed home and killed last year. Since Saturday, when the jury came back with their verdict acquitting Zimmerman, Angelinos have been gathering in Leimert Park for protests, rallies, and marches. 

People pretty much expect LA to go crazy, of course. According to the stereotype, whenever there’s a racially charged incident (or sports fan excitement), the always-present tension in LA boils over and spills into the streets in the form of uncontrollable riots. Sunday night looked like this:

Crowd of 100+ gathered in Leimert Park Plaza to protest Trayvon Martin verdict. pic.twitter.com/wSToJlgxi4 via @kaceymontoya

— LAist (@LAist) July 14, 2013

Protesters got onto the nearby freeway and blocked traffic, while the LAPD started saying that while most of the protesters were peaceful, there were these opportunistic “splinter groups” taking advantage of the moment to run wild.

Then, most of Monday night looked like this:

The scene at Leimert Park. #TrayvonMartin https://t.co/pxc3L8yUnA

— Ruben Vives (@LATvives) July 16, 2013

Before I could even arrive on the scene, there was a spectacular show of force by the LAPD, and by the time I got to Leimert Park, there were 300 cops in the area sticking their cop car noses into any group of people gathering on the sidewalk. Not far from where I stood, journalists were being mugged by random passersby.

Perhaps most importantly, a Walmart had been stormed, and the LAPD had decided enough was enough. They declared the protest an “unlawful assembly,” and broke it up faster than you can say “cleanup on aisle seven.” Soon the streets were so serene, they were able to safely escort newly elected mayor Eric Garcetti in for a press conference. I snuck in through a throng of onlookers to take photos with my smartphone.

He gave a speech in a cleared-out section of the park where protesters had been swarming not too long before. The cops had even cleaned the ground so the mayor wouldn't scuff his new loafers.

Garcetti told the press that there had been 150 bad guys, which is why there were 300 cops on the scene.

When the mayor wrapped up his two identical speeches, one in English and one in Spanish, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck delivered a much more substantive speech that drew a line in the sand.

“The rights of the many have been abused by the actions of a few," he said. "Because of that, tomorrow the Los Angeles Police Department will have a much stricter posture in the way that we deal with people taking to the streets of Crenshaw Boulevard. That is extremely unfortunate. We want to facilitate First Amendment rights.”

How that “stricter posture” plays out in the coming days is anyone’s guess. With the LAPD’s history of taking extreme stances against acts of political resistance (and some people's tendency to turn any protest into an excuse to start fights), there could be many more confrontations to come.

@MikeLeePearl

For more on Trayvon Martin and the George Zimmerman trial verdict:

This Week in Racism: George Zimmerman Isn't White

Lots of People Protested for Trayvon Martin in Los Angeles

Spaceghostpurrp and Florida Are Ready to Fight for Trayvon Martin

A class picture from St. Paul's Indian Industrial School in Middlechurch, Manitoba. via WikiCommons.

In the early 1990s an affiliation of Cochrane, Kapuskasing and James Bay’s OPP detectives were assigned to investigate one of the largest claims of sexual and physical abuse against children in Canadian history. The testimony they amassed by talking to hundreds of survivors of St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany Ontario was horrifying.  Residential Schools were a form of genocide—and the OPP’s special investigation into St. Anne’s provided 7,000 pages of stories that wouldn’t be out of place in memoirs of concentration camp survivors, or of individuals trapped in a country where ethnic cleansing is a government policy.

The accounts of physical and sexual abuse are brutal and numerous—hetero and homosexual child rape, children being stropped and beaten with rudimentary whips, forced ingestion of noxious substances (rotten porridge that children would throw up, then subsequently be forced to eat), sexual fondling, and forced masturbation… the list goes on and on. But one of the most appalling and debasing examples of the indignity and the abuse suffered by children at St. Anne’s is that of being strapped down and tortured in a homemade electric chair—sometimes as a form of punishment—but other times just as a form the amusement for the missionaries, who, while committing these acts, were supposedly the ones “civilizing” the “Indians”.

Edmund Metatawabin was the chief of the Fort Albany First Nation in the 1990s, and the man who first brought these allegations to the attention of the OPP. Both he and his peers had been strapped down in the electric chair and he recalled the experiences as such: “Small boys used to have their legs flying in front of them… the sight of a child being electrocuted and their legs flying out in front was a funny sight for the missionaries and they’d all be laughing… the cranking of the machine would be longer and harder. Now you’re inflicted with real pain. Some of them passed out.”

In 1997, the OPP concluded its investigation,and seven former employees of St. Anne’s were charged and convicted of a variety of assaults. The victims were never compensated, and the 7,000 pages of investigative evidence collected by the OPP was locked away somewhere in Orillia. Now, the victims are seeking compensation, and the federal government—who has subsequently become the defendant in a case involving the sexual abuse and torture of children by an electric chair—is attempting to keep those 7,000 documents from ever seeing the light of day, thus preventing the possibility of any recompense. The government is citing “privacy reasons” for their lack of transparency.

I corresponded with Fay Brunning, an Ottawa-based lawyer who is representing the victims of St. Anne’s in their compensation claims.

“In refugee claims in Canada,” says Fay, “the Federal Government accepts that electric shock is a form of torture. It was torture, according to many of my clients, to be strapped into that chair and electrocuted.”

Fay has been in contact with Detective Constable Greg Delguidice, an OPP officer who worked tirelessly on this case throughout the 90s, and who, in a ‘Will Say’ document (meaning it describes what Delguidice will say in court) Fay provided to me, Delguidice’s testimony corroborates the disturbing claims of the St. Anne’s survivors. But it also indicates that the federal government is not disclosing the most crucial evidence of abuse at the school: “None of this evidence is disclosed in the Federal Government disclosure package about St. Anne’s, which is supposed to reveal all the documents about sexual or physical abuse at the school while it operated.”

I called up Delguidice directly, at his office in Kapuskasing to see if he’d be willing to provide a comment or perspective on the case, but he respectfully declined, saying it’s “in the middle of a civil process right now” and that their “corporate communications is dealing with the matter.”

These documents—that the government is withholding—are vitally important to the process, because without some form of official record, the claims of abuse by these victims are easily dismissed as being based solely on abstract words and memories. As Fay Brunning told me, “I take the position that the Federal Government should admit liability to those former students who were electrocuted… Former students should not have to go in, on their own, and each of them convince the adjudicator there was an electric chair. Furthermore, there should be no doubt that compensation should be granted to those people who were electrocuted.”

Seeing as the government is the defendant in this claims case, it seems totally bogus that they should have any legal say on what evidence may or may not be presented. “The fact is,” says Charlie Angus, Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay, “that the federal government is the defendant in the case. So, do we allow perps in any kind of sexual rape case decide what kind of evidence comes forth? No.”

I called up Charlie to get some civil and political perspective on just why the government feels that it’s worth still trying to hide these thousands of documents of abuse evidence that are, at this point, essentially common knowledge in northern Ontario. Although not surprisingly—for an outspoken NDP critic of Aboriginal Affairs and Justice (who also hates Twitter)—he was candid on the matter, which was a refreshing departure from our often precious and handle-with-kid-gloves members of Parliament. In his words:

“They’re doing a lot of weaseling, legal weasel stuff that they always do with First Nations… To have the federal government not bother to tell these survivors when they’re coming in and having to prove their case, that, ‘yeah, we know where the evidence is, we’re just not going to provide it’"

"This is a government that talks about standing up for the victim all the time and they’re going to be tough on criminals. Well, are they telling us that there’s two classes of victims in this country? Native and non-Native? And that Native victims are just going to have to make do with less, and have their rights interfered with—have evidence of sexual torture and abuse of children suppressed. What, to save some dollars? I find that absolutely appalling. That they knew this, that they knew these documents were there and they made no evidence to supply them is mind-boggling.”

From there, I asked Charlie if he thought the government could redeem themselves—if they could turn this around and make good to the victims of St. Anne’s, on their Residential School apology, and on the commitment they made to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

“They can. The timing is important. They have to supply these documents soon. I know that at the provincial level we have people who are willing to help, we know the OPP are willing to help. People want justice done. Who would side with covering up or denying child victims of sexual and physical torture? It takes a special level of hardened depravity to want that. So, I expect this Justice Minister is going to do the right thing and they will turn those documents over. I’m sorry, They’ve been outed. The light’s shining on them. It’s time to do right, whether they want to or not. We’ve got to drag them into the daylight kicking and screaming, but we want justice.“

To not immediately release these documents shows that the current government was dishonest in their apology that First Nations groups say yielded no significant change for their way of life in Canada. Obviously it was a hollow gesture. And now, to deny the claims and withhold evidence of what amounts to torture from child survivors is, well, fucked up. Stephen Harper relished the moment to deliver an historical apology. Now it’s time to actually do something, and make things better for Canada’s Native victims.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @ddner

Previously:

The Wildly Depressing History of Residential Schools

Gerard Hodgins. (Photo courtesy of Gerard Hodgins)

The hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay has moved beyond its 160 day. Prisoners are refusing to eat in protest against conditions in the detainment camp, the fact that the majority of them haven't even been charged with a crime—despite being held there for years—and because 86 prisoners have been cleared for release but are still being held without any reasonable explanation.

To make matters worse, there have been reports of guards punishing and humiliating strikers, and officials have been accused of using the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to massage hunger strike numbers. Oh, and everyone's seen that incredibly distressing video of Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) being force-fed—that's what guards are currently inflicting upon more than 40 hunger strikers in the camp. (Except—without wishing to diminish the power of Bey and Asif Kapadia's film—it's for two hours twice per day in a Cuban prison camp rather than four minutes in a video directed by a Bafta-winning director).

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has yet to carry out his six-year-old campaign promise to close the prison.

Gerard Hodgins knows firsthand about self-starvation as political protest. Hodgins, a former member of the Provisional IRA, was on the same hunger strike in Maze Prison that killed Bobby Sands in 1981. He went for 20 days without food in the Northern Irish prison before the IRA called off the protest. I spoke to him about the politics of starvation and if there are any similarities between present-day Guantanamo and HMP Maze during the 1970s and 80s.

A Bobby Sands mural in Belfast. (Photo via)

VICE: Do you see parallels between the situation in Guantanamo Bay and the situation you were involved with in 1981?
Hodgins: I can, in a way, if you leave the politics and ideology out of it. Our hunger strike was borne out of desperation. We had spent five years in complete and total isolation, locked up 24 hours a day. During those five years our political representatives had been trying to make a case for the reforms within the prison and, at the end of the process, it wasn't coming—the brutality was getting worse. We were trying to bring the H Block to an end. My understanding with the Guantanamo prisoners is that at least 50 percent have been cleared for release. In other words, they’re not a threat to the United States or anyone else, yet they’re still being held.

Exactly.
I’d imagine those people have absolutely no hope. They’ve been kidnapped from their homes halfway around the world, transported to the end of Cuba and are being kept in conditions that are pretty brutal. It’s my understanding that prisoners have died or been killed in Guantanamo, depending on what slant you believe. So the hunger strike that they’re engaged in at the moment is also borne out of desperation. They’ve been left there to rot and be the plaything for brutal Marines.

Are there any similarities between the treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners being held without a trial and some of the so-called Diplock courts [courts without juries, just a single judge] used to contain the IRA?
There would be similarities. There’s a British strategist called Frank Kitson who was posted here [Northern Ireland] and he wrote a bit of a textbook for army commanders. Kitson talked about the need for all arms of the state to be utilized in the fight against insurgents and subversives, and that included the law. So the law here was adulterated. Due process and the right to silence were abandoned, and torture evidence was admissible. So there would be similarities. The British actually have a much more refined way of doing it.

Shaker Aamer, a British Guantanamo hunger striker who was cleared for release five years ago but remains imprisoned today.

Yeah, they actually put you through a court.
Yeah. That’s not even happening with a lot of the people in Guantanamo. But yeah, they would put us through a Diplock court so they could say, “These guys went through a court.” You could be standing in front of a Diplock judge, battered and bruised from top to bottom, and a policeman would say, “He beat himself up to create propaganda against the government.” And the judge [again, there was no jury] would accept that and you’d be sentenced to 20 to 25 years.

What do you think these men in Guantanamo are going through right now?
Physically, they’re going to be very, very weak. After two weeks you start to feel yourself losing energy—you’ll have blackouts if you get up too quick. Mentally, the very fact that they're on hunger strike says a lot. Mentally, I believe they are in a very, very strong, determined place where they have themselves conditioned: either I’m getting out of this place alive or I’m going out of this place dead.

How does Obama's handling of the situation compare with Thatcher's handling of the Troubles in the 80s?
I was disappointed with Obama when he was first elected; one of his campaign promises was to close Guantanamo. He reneged on that and the conditions have gotten worse. So, in a way, he could come across as a Margaret Thatcher-type character, although he doesn’t come across as being as personally involved as Thatcher was toward us. Nevertheless, President Obama is the president and there’s that famous saying, “The buck stops here.” He made a promise and reneged on it. And rather than try to go a sort of liberal way about restoring America’s moral authority in the world, I think he’s made a colossal mistake. It’s appalling what he’s doing. I don’t see him being any different from George W. Bush in pursuing this so-called War on Terror. It’s not really a war on terror. It’s a war of terror being imposed upon defenseless people.

Obama promising to close Guantanamo Bay the year he was elected.

Your hunger strike is often cited as being a recruitment boon for the IRA. Do you think the Guantanamo hunger strikes will have a similar effect internationally? Is there going to be anything akin to a Bobby Sands effect?
Almost certainly. If the streams of bodies start coming out of Guantanamo and the media latches onto it and it starts to become the issue, it can’t not create a wave of anti-Americanism throughout the world. Particularly in the Middle East, but I’d imagine also Latin America, which has extensive experience with American involvement with right-wing dictatorships.

Tell me what hunger strikes can actually accomplish. Since this hunger strike began, Obama has rehashed the idea of closing the prison. Do you think that'll happen?
I don’t know if he’s playing to the gallery or not. I’m conscious that he said that he’s going to close Guantanamo before. I don’t think there’s any practical reason why he couldn’t. I mean, the people who are cleared for release, release them. And those who aren’t cleared for release, he doesn’t have to keep them in Guantanamo. Put them into the judicial system through due process. If there’s evidence against them, bring it against them, have the trial. But the way they’re held in Guantanamo, to me, it’s an affront to natural justice. It’s a kind of internment.

If these guys survive the hunger strike, what can they expect in terms of any long-term effects of the experience?
I’m fixated in my head in 1981. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. Physically, I don’t have any longer term effects. But it’s an experience that, once you go through it, you can’t escape from. It’ll always be with you.

Follow Danny on Twitter: @DMacCash

More stories about Guantanamo:

Hearing from Three Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Who've Been On Hunger Strike for 100 Days

Yemen Want Their Guantanamo Detainees Back

Molly Crabapple Draws Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray

According to some estimates, 30,000 prisoners in California were on hunger strike as of last week, and thousands more still are. Contacted by VICE, a spokesman for the California prison system refused the 30,000 number. If it's true it would make the current strike the largest in California history. "I don't even know where that number came from," he said, insisting that the hunger strike could not be properly considered to have started until late Wednesday, because the state doesn't acknolwedge that what it calls a "hunger strike disturbance" exists until inmates have refused nine consecutive meals. "Until then,'" the spokesman said, "we don't know if it's a disturbance or if they just don't like tacos."

Officially, more than twenty-five hundred prisoners were still refusing meals as of this week. The numbers dropped over the weekend—down from 30,000 a week prior and from 7,600 on Friday. But even that total was still more than the 6,000 who participated in the last, partially succesful, hunger strike to hit the state, in 2011.

Even if you've heard about the protests—they've been widely covered in California, but briefly mentioned, if at all, nationally—you might be forgiven for not quite understanding what it's all about. Because California's prisons have been all over the news, recently: There are the nearly ten thousand prisoners a three-judge panel has ordered to be released, to alleviate overcrowding in the system. There are the 150 female prisoners who were by some accounts coerced into accepting sterilizations, and the doctor who suggested the cost of the sterilizations would save the state future welfare payments. There are the thousands of prisoners who a different Federal overseer has ordered to be moved out of the Avenal and Pleasant Valley state prisons, where over the last several years dozens of high-risk prisoners may have been killed by Valley Fever. There is the mental health care that has been found to be illegally deficient in the CDCR system, and the overcrowding in the system that was found, separately, by the Supreme Court no less, to have created a situation in which medical care in California prisons was of such a poor quality that it fell below the 8th Amendment standard barring cruel and unusual punishment. All of this has been in the news recently, and all of it has contributed to the spread of the strike to dozens of facilities across the system.

The proximate cause of the hunger strikes, though, is the state of life in the system's Secure Housing Units, especially the one at Pelican Bay, in Calfornia's far, far, North. About two percent of California's roughly 130,000 inmates are held in these extreme isolation pods, mostly at Pelican Bay or Corcoran State, between Fresno and Bakersfield. There, inmates with exceptionally bad disciplinary records and prisoners who have been "gang validated,"—an institutional euphemism describing the process by which prison officials decide a criminally-connected inmate is too dangerous to have contact with other prisoners or the outside world—are held in windowless 80-square foot cells without human contact, behind steel grates that, according to human rights reports, produce a disorienting effect when an inmate tries to peer out. They are allowed one hour of exercise a day, phone calls are restricted in many cases to instances of "family emergency," which in practice seems to mean only in the event of the death of a family member. The only natural light available in the Pelican Bay SHUs comes from skylights in the pod corridors, heavily blocked by the steel mesh closing in each cell—a likely violation of international conventions on humane treatment of prisoners, which insist that daytime natural light be sufficient to work and read by. In the case of inmates who have been deemed institutional risks or have been gang-validated are often held in isolation indefinitely, without having gone through a judicial process sentencing them to the extraordinary punishment of permanent isolation, and without a formal process to appeal the decision.

These conditions first came to national notice when prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU launched their first hunger strike, in July 2011. They won several small concessions, including the right to wear watch caps and sweatpants, as the SHU units are notoriously cold. According to a later Amnesty International investigation, when prisoners concerned "about what they percieved as a lack of progress" in implementing changes launched another hunger strike, in September of that year, strike leaders were taken to Administrative Segregation units and punished: The wife of one gang-validated inmate said that her husband "was taken to an Adseg unit," with eleven other strikers. "He was in Adseg with no warm clothes, bed blankets, or possessions. The air conditioned was turned right up, while he had just a t-shirt and trousers." 

This current hunger strike had been in the works for some time, and was coordinated with prisoner-rights groups outside. Many of the strikers have become politicised. Last year a grouping called the Short Corridor Collective—communicating using bits of papertied to string and tossed between cells, or by other means that the CDCR hasn't been able to prevent—tried to organize a truce between gangs and racial groups in the CDCR facilities, stating in a letter that was later published by supporters that "We can no longer allow CDCR to use us against each other for their benefit!!" and that expressing a hope that peaceful protest could force the "CDCR to open up all General Population main lines, and return to a rehabilitative-type system of meaningful programs/privileges, including lifer conjugal visits."

This didn't happen, but it did raise questions about why inmates calling for peace in the prisons were being held in freezing and isolated SHU cells without any process of appeal or hope for release into the general population. The one way some inmates can make it back into the General Population is by undergoing a process called "debriefing," which seems largely to entail giving detailed information on the gangs inmates are said to have been members of, and which creates a paradoxical situation for the debriefed inmate—debriefing they have a chance of being released from the conditions of the SHU, but they'll be exposed to retribution from people they may be suspected of naming in the debriefing.

The result has been that SHU prisoners have almost no tactics available to them besides self-starvation. They have enjoyed a surprising amount of support from the population of California, where the mood is mostly one of being fed up with the persistent problems in the penal system and with retributive justice in general—in a recent poll 60% of Californians supported simply releasing prisoners to the street to comply with Federal orders to reduce the prison population. Even Republicans in the state are hesitant to suggest building new prisons or spending more money to add beds.

They have also enjoyed support across the system—many inmates used the strike as an opportunity to protest other site-specific grievances or the general deterioration of quality-of-life in California prisons, and the CDCR seems to have been taken off-guard by the size of the protest. 

When I called the CDRD official—the one who gave me the quote about the tacos—he also said that he didn't know if force-feeding was on the table, though he said the state had a "right to maintain the health of prisoners at risk," which seems like it means force-feeding is on the table. Other methods may be on the table too: After the strikes in the summer of 2011, the wife of another strike leader told Amnesty International that "for a while he cared for a frog which he had found in the exercise yard. He would collect worms and bugs to feed the frog." She told them that "this interaction was particularly therapeutic for him, having been held in solitary confinement without human contact for 16 years. When the hunger strikes began, as punishment for his participation, the guards took the frog away."

The wreckage in Lac Mégantic. Photo by Jean-Francois Hamelin for VICE Canada.

On Monday, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, the company that owned the train that flattened the centre of tiny Lac Mégantic in what could be the biggest class-action case in Canadian history.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, MM&A has put on a clinic of how not to handle a disaster. Firstly, MM&A’s CEO and Chairman Edward Burkhardt was nowhere to be found until four days after the disaster because, according to him, he was working “20-hour work days” dealing with press, insurance companies, and officials. Or, was it because he was afraid of getting shot at by townspeople, as he told TVA?

When he finally did get to Lac Mégantic, he gave a ridiculously blunt press conference that was anything but respectful—then left town without meeting victims or the mayor. Sure, it’s been pointed out that MM&A has no day-to-day PR department to deal with this kind of thing, but do you need a team of PR guys to teach genuine compassion?

Subsequently, the guy has been pretty much blasted by every news outlet and blog, as well as by public relations experts, politicians, and on social media for his shitty response in the wake of the explosion.

The press conference in Lac Mégantic could have been a great opportunity for Ed to show his face to locals, give some hugs, and promise immediate compensation. Instead, the CEO was defensive, and made completely contradictory statements to what he and his company had been saying over the past week until then.

Now, instead of trying to generate some goodwill with the great people of Lac Mégantic, some townspeople are rightfully upset. For example, one victim’s father said on-camera that Burkhardt should “put a rope around his neck and hang himself.”

The “very good safety record” that MM&A has boasted about all along is now being called into question. Despite being a smaller rail company, from 2003 to 2012 MM&A has had three times as many train accidents per million miles travelled than the US national average according to The Federal Railroad Administration’s Office of Safety Management in the US. And this doesn’t include the eight recorded incidents related to hazardous materials over the past eight years. 

Evidently, the alarms didn’t go off for Burkhardt’s company when they should have. Instead of taking full responsibility and promising changes, Burkhardt pointed the finger at Thomas Harding, the 30-year veteran engineer who was asleep in a hotel after his 12-hour shift while his train rolled downhill towards Lac Mégantic’s town centre carrying hundreds of tons of crude oil. This is a major flip-flop from when the company called Harding a hero for helping firemen put out a small fire that was extinguished aboard the train hours before it rolled away. 

While Harding is probably partly to blame for doing something wrong or not actually applying 11 handbrakes like he said he did, the Transportation Safety Board’s Chair Wendy Tadros told the Globe and Mail that usually accidents involve a series of things and “it never comes down to one individual.” An anonymous former MM&A employee expressed sympathy for Harding, and told the CBC that because he was the only engineer on the train, it was always “a disaster waiting to happen.” A CP Rail engineer we interviewed last week echoed the same thing about the cost-cutting one-man train practice that MM&A has been championing for years.

The state of Wisconsin has gotten the message about single-engineer trains and enforced at least two-man crews since 1997, but no such law exists in Québec or Maine. Expect that to change.

While it's easy to hate on Burkhardt, it's not all MM&A’s fault as much as his PR blunders make us want to believe. The lack of regulation, the upswing in oil transport, the engineer and probably many more things too after the investigations come through. Still, if we do need to pick a scapegoat, Ed Burkhardt and co. are making it far too easy to choose one. 

Money has poured into Lac Mégantic from the government and fundraisers across the country, but more is needed to rebuild the city and give compensation to the families of the victims. Hopefully, as one of the men I interviewed in Lac Mégantic told me, MM&A won’t go bankrupt before the residents get paid what they deserve.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @JoelBalsam
 

More on Lac Mégantic:

Impressions from Lac Mégantic

Lac Mégantic Could Have Been Saved, if the Train Had a Conductor

Nuevo Laredo is a border city in northeastern Mexico, surrounded by hills and earth burned by the sun. Thousands of trucks ride its main highway, delivering legal and illegal merchandise to the United States. Although not as well-known as Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo is one of the busiest land ports in all of Latin America. Its formal economy is wedded to Texas, although its black market is linked directly to New York City, where most of the cocaine that moves through Nuevo Laredo winds up.

Beyond its main highway and asphalt avenues, Nuevo Laredo is also surrounded by labyrinths of cracked, Western-flick-looking roads that go nowhere, old rancher routes where shadows also roam. In the early hours of Monday morning, according to official accounts, Miguel Angel Treviño traveled on one of these. He was accompanied only by a bodyguard, eight firearms, and $2 million in cash. Something went wrong this time because neither the weapons nor the cash — in a region where both are essential for survival — prevented the arrest of the man known as the leader of the Zetas.

Treviño’s detention at the hands of Mexico’s Navy was immediately heralded by the government as a blow to organized crime in Mexico, and as a ‘win’ notch for President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose government hadn’t nabbed any significant bad guys since it assumed power last December. The arrest was also met with a symbolic pat on the back by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which said in a brief statement posted Tuesday that Treviño, or code-name “Z–40,” was now among the “most significant Mexican cartel leaders to be apprehended in several years.”

The Zetas organization formed in 2000 by 32 soldiers who deserted Mexico’s Army, with the blessing and financing of the then-leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas Guillen. Between 2004 and 2009, during their rapid ascent in the criminal world, the Zetas surprised observers with their dynamic horizontal structure, the cruelty of their attacks, and their capacity of organized resistance against the Sinaloa Cartel, the oldest and most powerful cartel in Mexico. Their ascent seemed limitless until an alleged deal was struck between the DEA and Cardenas Guillen of the Gulf gang, and by 2010, when a series of official and non-official armed groups began moving into their territory, the Zetas’ hold on power in eastern and northeastern Mexico began to decline.

In October 2012, the last of the founders of the group who remained active, Heriberto Lazcano, was taken out of the equation, killed in a shootout with authorities in the state of Coahuila, although his body was later kidnapped from a funeral home and remains missing to this day. With that, the mark of the Zetas’ founding — their military roots ­— was finished. At 40, Miguel Angel Treviño, who never had military training (although he had been a police officer), became the new leader of the Zetas. In short time, the federal government, which offered $2 million reward for info leading to his capture, began calling him the bloodiest cartel capo in the country. He was blamed, for example, for the slaughter of 72 Central and South American migrants at a stop-house in San Fernando, Tamaulipas in 2010. His dark fame was such that the extorsion racket in the Mexico City prison system began using his name for shakedown attempts via telephone; dozens of clips on YouTube have recorded calls from these false Z–40s.

The signal that the Zetas are done-for is the belief that Treviño’s imminent successor is his brother Omar, who grew up between Nuevo Laredo and Dallas, one of the 12 Treviño Morales siblings. With that, it’s probable that the Zetas will cease being a mercenary force, feared for its efficiency and paramilitary strength, and become a family clan typical of the narratives of classic Mexican narco-traffickers. Just like the Tijuana Cartel, which turned into the Arrellano Felix gang, or the Juarez Cartel, which became the Carrillo Fuentes group, the Zetas will likely become the Treviño Morales cartel. Even so, the Zetas brand will probably survive, marked by its love of extreme and brutal violence.

This week, the new federal government in Mexico quickly launched a campaign to brag about the detention “without a shot fired” of the Zetas leader, but in Nuevo Laredo, no one could sing in celebration as some analysts did in Mexico City. El Mañana de Nuevo Laredo, a respectable daily newspaper with more than 80 years of publication, couldn’t even bring itself to reporting the news of Treviño’s arrest on its Website. Instead it was posting detailed updates on the violence in Egypt.

Nuevo Laredo is in Tamaulipas, a state in Mexico where freedom of speech does not exist. Bloggers have been strung up and hung from bridges for a few tweets, while dozens of reporters have had to flee the city in silence, abandoned by the institutions meant to shield them. Journalists who’ve been killed or forcefully disappeared do not appear on the lists of well-intentioned NGOs like Reporters Without Borders because such groups have no guaranteed protections to enter this region and investigate disappearances. The enemy of the right to inform the populace has two faces here: the Zetas were not only created and raised in Tamaulipas, but the same political party has been in power for 90 years, the perfect combination for the dominance of a narcopolitick.

Just as preparations for the operation to capture Z–40 were underway, the top brass of Mexico’s Navy and Army flew to Washington this past weekend to meet the top brass at the Pentagon. It was the first official visit to the United States by the military representatives of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government. Coincidentally, also in recent days, in a few cities where the Zetas control territory, several narcomantas (so-called narco­–banners) appeared on main avenues with a supposed message from the Sinaloa Cartel, directed at none other than Miguel Angel Treviño Morales. They read:

TO Z–40 AND CORRUPT AUTHORITIES

IT HAD TO BE YOU, COMPADRE, THE GRUBBINESS THAT YOU CAN’T WASH OFF, WE’LL WIPE IT OFF FOR YOU,

LOOK AT YOU ORDERING THE KILLINGS OF FARMWORKERS IN VICTORIA, YOU SICK FUCK, YOU DIDN’T HAVE BALLS TO SPARE, Z–40, YOU HAVE SOME MISSING … BUT WE’RE GONNA KEEP CLEANING UP NUEVO LAREDO, NOT EVEN THE SUPPORT OF “H” WILL HELP YOU.

THAT’S RIGHT, COMPA, EVERY EXTRA MINUTE THAT YOU LIVE, MORE INNOCENTS DIE. LOOK AT US IN THE FACE, DICK, FACE TO FACE. THE SUPPORT OF YOUR PUSSY-ASS COMMANDER WENCESLAO GAZNAREZ, OR YOUR CORRUPT MAYOR BENJAMIN GALVAZ, WON’T HELP YOU.

WE GIVE ALL OUR SUPPORT TO THE GULF CARTEL, TO RID MEXICO OF THE ZETAS.

ATTENTIVELY, EL CHAPO GUZMAN.

With Treviño’s arrest, there are signs that after a decade of savage economic competition for the control of drug–trafficking to the United States, which has included battles and massacres that ballooned under the erratic and militaristic policies of former President Felipe Calderon, narcotrafficking in Mexico could be returning to its old framework – from a violent oligopoly to a criminal, yet peaceful, monopoly.

In the meantime, cocaine consumers in New York might suffer a few days struggling to get their product due to the market turbulence caused by Z-40’s capture in Nuevo Laredo. But soon everything will return to normal in Manhattan. And soon everything will return to normal in Mexico as well. That is the message that Peña Nieto’s government appears to be sending: the return of the narco status quo is underway.

Diego Enrique Osorno is a Mexican journalist whose recent books include La guerra de los Zetas (Grijalbo 2012). More info at www.diegoeosorno.com

The Satanic Temple, a burgeoning community of worship devoted to the Dark Lord, has performed a “Pink Mass” over the grave of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr.’s mother. A Pink Mass is a ritual performed after death designed to turn a straight person into a homo, regardless of whether or not that person is currently alive. It’s not unlike the Mormon practice of baptizing the dead, only instead of being blessed with holy water, the person’s spirit becomes totally gay.

On Sunday the Satanic Temple, which first came into the national spotlight last January when the organization announced its support for Florida Governor Rick, went to the Phelps family graveyard in Mississippi to perform the ritual. Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s spokesperson, told me a Pink Mass is performed by TK.

Two Pink Masses were performed, one with a female couple and another with men. The idea for the mass came about in April when WBC announced their intention to protest the funerals of the Boston Bombing victims. The church never showed up, but later issued a statement saying they were there “in spirit.” As is always the case when WBC does or says anything, both the initial plans and the subsequent statement pissed off everyone in the world, including Satanists. And so the Satanic Temple decided “that a same-sex couple celebrating ceremony at the gravesite of Fred Phelps’s mother was an appropriate way to meet the Westboro Baptists, ‘in spirit’, but this time on our terms.”

After the Pink Mass was performed, the spirit of Catherine Idalette Johnston was officially into other chicks, meaning her gravesite is a viable target for one of her son’s “god hates fags” protests. The press release states that “The Satanic Temple now believes that Fred Phelps must believe that his mother is now gay, in the afterlife, due to our Pink Mass… And nobody can challenge our right to our beliefs.”

The Temple is encouraging other gay couples to make the trek to Magnolia cemetery in Mississippi and perform their own Pink Mass at the grave. According to the Temple, every time a same-sex couple makes out over the grave of a Pink Mass recipient, the spirit of the deceased “is pleasured in the afterlife,” presumably with spooky ghost orgasms.

In addition to providing vocal support for Governors and turning ghosts gay, the Satanic Temple has launched a bid to adopt a highway in New York City. They are hoping that their Pink Masses will raise awareness for their highway campaign, which is lacking in public support. You can watch a video about the project above, and they’ve set up an indiegogo page where you can donate money and help the Temple achieve their dream of contributing to the betterment of society by keeping our highways clean and litter-free.

In conclusion, your mom likes to scissor now, Fred.

On July 3, Egypt's defense minister General Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi seized power from the country's elected president Mohammed Morsi.

But Morsi's supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood weren't about to give up without a fight. Now that the Brotherhood's experiment with democracy seemed to have failed, some of Morsi's supporters began to turn to more radical action.

All Egypt braced itself for the inevitable backlash. When it came, it would be deadly.

More about the uprising in Egypt:

Hanging with Morsi Supporters at a Muslim Brotherhood Rally in Cairo

Video from the Clashes on the October 6 Bridge in Cairo

We Saw the Egyptian Military Stage a Coup

Image courtesy Alec Dudson

Unpaid internships run the gamut from rewarding to thankless. I once interned at a fashion magazine where I was instructed not to look the editor in chief in the eye (so much for cultivating interpersonal skills). But I got college credit and invaluable experience—I saw how a magazine operated and left with a few bylines at the end of the semester. Others haven’t been as happy with their experiences: a group of unpaid interns who worked on Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan sued the production company for essentially using them as indentured servants and violating state and federal labor laws. A judge ruled in their favor, and now several sets of interns—normally the silent, oft-abused grunts of “glamor” industries like journalism and TV—are suing their employers, including  NBCUniversal and Condé Nast. Some are saying that this wave of litigation will convince companies to get rid of unpaid interns altogether in order to avoid lawsuits.

Alec Dudson, a 29-year-old from Manchester, UK, intends to address the debate surrounding unpaid labor with a new magazine, fittingly titled Intern. (No relation, as far as I know, to The Intern Magazine, a lifestyle website for “the Urban Gentleman.”) Alec has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the print publication, which he plans to put out twice a year. Intern will feature reflections on internship experiences along with original photography, design, and writing from people who are trying to break into creative industries. So far, he’s raised £2,900 of his £5,500 goal, which he hopes to meet by the August 7 deadline.  

Naturally, Alec is a former intern. After earning a masters degree in sociology from the University of Manchester, he decided to enter the magazine industry, like so many others. Hoping to get his foot in the door, he spent a year working as an unpaid intern at two magazines while bartending part time—and ended up no closer to a paid position than he was when he graduated.

As a current unpaid VICE intern who’s crashing on a couch in New York City for the summer, I’m obviously interested in this stuff, so I called Alec up for a chat.

VICE: Internships and interns have obviously in the news, with all those lawsuits. When and why did you decide to start this magazine?
Alec Dudson: It’s very much my experiences that led me into the whole concept. I spent 2012 interning with magazines—first with Domus, an architecture and design magazine based in Milan. I did a couple months there, and then I was with Boat magazine, which is based in London. It was toward the end of my time with Boat that the reality of my situation really started to hit home. And that made me consider the larger game I played. I had a really great time with the internships that I had, but the fact remained that a year and a lot of unpaid work later, I was nowhere near my ideal magazine job.

I perceived, to a degree at least, it was a matter of cost: you got your industry experience if you worked hard enough; if you were good enough at what you did, that there was this kind of pot at the end of the rainbow. And when I started to get the impression that that maybe wasn’t the case, it just seemed like there was space for something—I didn’t initially know what, exactly—that could have acted as a kind of resource [for me], if it had been there a year before, when I was just starting to plan my attack on getting into the magazine industry.

So what’s the idea behind the magazine?
It has sort of a two-pronged purpose. First of all, it’ll act as a showcase for some really precocious talent. I want to provide a means of getting their work out there and putting that in the limelight.

The second side to it is to try and initiate a frank and, for me, important debate about the current state of intern culture. It’s intrinsically important that interns have a voice and they’re allowed to express their opinions and their experiences. One thing I’m mindful of avoiding is a publication that is just a set of tales of interns who feel like they’ve been mistreated. That alone is not a debate, it’s just a soapbox. So there’ll be pieces from people—big names in the industry—who are looking back on their time as interns.

I’ve got a couple of articles in the pipeline where we’ve got the person in the senior position giving the internship and the intern both looking back on that shared experience. For it to be a meaningful and worthwhile debate, each side has to have their opportunity to state their case, if you will. Then, not only will it be a resource for people getting into the industry, but also a means for helping those in industry reflect on the situation they’re proliferating. One of the first arguments that arises whenever anyone brings up unpaid internships is that you’re creating a scenario where not everyone can afford to work for free—certainly when the really desirable positions are in cities like New York or London that aren’t cheap cities to live in.

No, not at all.
Creativity is not a birthright—[it shouldn’t be the case that] just because your family is well-off, you’re allowed to be creative. If you are creative and you’ve got a real talent for it, class structures shouldn’t be holding you back. I don’t understand how those situations are doing anyone any good, apart from the cheap labor aspect, which is morally wrong.

While I have to remain impartial, to a degree, due to the way that the magazine’s set up, it’s probably clear that I’m not wild about the idea of people not getting paid for internships. I can’t plant my flag too firmly on any one side, because it’s not a fair debate if everything is tinged with my personal opinion.

Starting a print magazine is pretty risky these days, not to mention way more expensive than just setting up a blog. Are you worried about the magazine’s prospects?
The biggest mistake you can make with a new independent magazine is aiming too high. I mean, Boat is on their fifth issue now, I think, and only now are they getting to the point where they can know how many copies they can print and sell.

As much as possible, I’ve done all the work. The other week, I had to coerce a friend into helping me make a wooden display stand, rather than going somewhere where it would cost me $100 to get one made. By running a relatively tight ship and not trying to take on extra staff when they’re not really required, I’m in a situation where, as long as I don’t try to grow too aggressively, I think it’ll work out. At least the people who have contributed have already been paid, and the person picking up the slack is me. So in that respect, I think it’s a moral way of doing it.   

Lesley Thulin is a current VICE magazine intern. She hasn’t sued us. Yet. Follow her on Twitter: @LesleyThulin

To donate to Intern magazine’s Kickstarter, go here.

More on interns:

We Got Our Interns to Review Some Strip Clubs

Interns: Don’t Bother Uniting, You Have No Chains to Lose

Do Our Interns Look Like Shit?

At last night’s peaceful Trayvon Martin protest in LA's Leimert Park, I was not only bombarded with appeals to continue fighting the good fight by demanding justice on Trayvon’s behalf, but also to take home a collectible keepsake of the tragedy.

Tuesday’s gathering was far more manageable than the confrontation that erupted late Sunday and early Monday morning, when stores were smashed up and news crews attacked. When protests cease to be violent, often times the anger gives way to an atmosphere that can best be described as “carnival-like.”

People play music, dance, barbeque, and commiserate. Parents bring their kids, who invariably use the opportunity to run around the park and enjoy themselves away from the mass social movement. The notion that those kids are in danger of suffering at the hands of a violent world in the same way that Trayvon did lingered in my mind the entire time I was amongst the protestors, but for many people in the park that night, the mood was more pleasant.

Like a real carnival, there was plenty to spend your money on. Merchandising tragedies is not a new phenomenon, but that doesn't make it any less unsettling to see people peddling t-shirts with a dead boy’s face on it. A case can be made that it’s all a part of the effort to keep people from forgetting the life that was lost, but it’s also terribly macabre.

I passed on the large Trayvon painting that the artist was proudly displaying on the periphery of the protest. I didn’t get a price quote, but I can say with confidence that this particular piece is not the “conversation starter” I want in my living room.

For those who arrived without a t-shirt, there was a station set up to quickly crank out custom spraypainted Trayvon “swag.”

Others took matters into their own hands and went for a more DIY approach.

I don’t think this one was for sale, but I didn’t ask after being told in no uncertain terms to not take this man’s photo. He did not appear to have an ETSY account.

The merchandising of this particular incident goes beyond the protest environment. Pro-Trayvon merchandise is all over the internet, but unfortunately, there’s also a plethora of pro-George Zimmerman gear for the discerning, fashion-forward racist.

Woe to the individual who walks into a coffee shop wearing a t-shirt bearing Zimmerman’s face and the all-caps inscription, “YOU MAD BRO?” It’s one thing to be actively antagonistic through the medium of clothing, but it’s another, more horrible thing to also invoke an ancient meme in the process. To answer this t-shirt’s question, “Yes, I am mad. Thanks for asking.”

You can also purchase a bumper sticker that says, “I Believe George Zimmerman.” If you put that on your car, I can assure you that there are quite a few neighborhoods you should not park your car in.

Another bumper sticker that’s available to alienate nearly everyone you know sports the acronym “WWGZD.” If this is a question you ask yourself on a regular basis, I advise you to consider a new role model. May I suggest someone who didn’t shoot a child in the chest?

The creator of the auction titled “Trayvon Martin Parody t-shirt Anti Obama t-shirt Very Funny t-shirt Cool Shirt” isn’t just incapable of brevity, he or she also needs a refresher course on the meaning of the word “funny.”

Not everyone selling Trayvon/Zimmerman merchandise has an agenda, as evidenced by the person selling both “Guilty” and “Not Guilty” shirts. The title of the page does ask the buyer to “Pick One,” so don’t even think about trying to buy both. The seller doesn’t want to bother taking a position on this issue, but you certainly have to.

Whether the merchandise is being sold at a protest or online, the practice of exchanging currency for novelty items commemorating a child’s murder that are often inflammatory in nature serves only to further widen the cultural divide that this incident has brought back to the surface. If you wear a “George Zimmerman: Wanted Dead or Alive” shirt or turn Zimmerman into some kind of vigilante folk hero through a sticker, you reinforce the idea that violence is acceptable in American society, and that justice only comes from a loaded gun. The peaceful, orderly protests in LA last night are hopefully one of the ways that we can start to move past all that.

@dave_schilling

For more Trayvon Martin coverage:

The LAPD Doesn't Want You Protesting the Trayvon Martin Verdict After Last Night

This Week in Racism: George Zimmerman Isn't White

Lots of People Protested for Trayvon Martin in Los Angeles

Yeah, they are OK for a couple of girls. Image via Flickr. 

Two things: 

1. I manage a coed softball team in Los Angeles. “Managing” consists of collecting fees and making sure everyone knows what time we're playing. “Coed” means that league rules dictate each team has to field three girls. Just three. In a city the size of Los Angeles, you'd think this would be an easy quota to fill. It is not. 

2. Late last month, 12-year-old Maddy Baxter from Georgia was kicked off her football team for being a girl. Previously, in sixth grade, she played defensive end for the Strong Rock Christian School, a private academy in Locust Grove, Georgia. She had five sacks that season, according to her mom's stat-keeping. But when it was time for seventh grade football to start, she was banned from participating because “boys have lustful thoughts and might think of Maddy in an impure way.” They also read some passages from the Bible or something to justify this. 

Now, a few things. 

As an argument, men being better than women at playing sports seems to make sense. It can be seen through anecdotal evidence such as the above-described experience of managing a coed softball team. Plenty of times I've heard women express reservations to me about playing because they “aren't good enough.” It can also be seen simply in how the bodies of men and women differ. Generally speaking—and please note that “generally speaking” once more, as there are certainly plenty of women who could beat me up or destroy me in a game of pickup basketball—men are taller and stronger than women. This is due to all sorts of testosterone, gland secretions, muscles in their upper body rather than fat deposits, and other variables awarded in the jackpot of life. Someone sees that, and it's easy for them to come to the conclusion that boys are better at sports than girls. They see it as an inherent trait linked to genetics. To them, it's the same as men being unable to get pregnant and women never knowing the pain that comes with getting kicked in the balls. 

The problem is, “boys are better at sports than girls” is an argument that's fucking bullshit. 

Females are as skilled at sports as males, but there's two distinct roadblocks standing in the way making it look as though that's not the case. The first one, which will be quickly mentioned because vast volumes of sociological arguments have already discussed it, is the fact that females are not given as much instruction as males during their adolescence/growing-up-period. 

You know that silly phrase “he/she throws like a girl”? Even though you hear it bandied about on playgrounds, high school gym classes, and frat houses, it doesn't make any sense. No one, male or female, throws like a girl. They either throw like someone who has had ample instruction on how to properly throw, or like someone who has not. (If you'll excuse me, that last passage was lifted from my piece about the Lingerie Football League, which proves the point about instruction versus inherent skills. Most of the quarterbacks in that league can throw further and more accurately than any men reading this could ever hope to.) This disparity is what happens when a generation of parents give boys footballs and girls Barbie dolls for their first few years. The difference is something that's been lessening with the institution of Title IX, girl-friendly youth instructional programs, and a new generation of parents who understand that boy does not equal blue and girl does not equal pink. But there's another, thornier bit of misogyny that may be impossible to untangle when it comes to the differences of the two sexes playing sports: 

They were designed for men, to be played by men. 

Sports currently fall into two categories: male sports, and females playing sports designed for me. Basketball, football, baseball, hockey, lacrosse, volleyball, tennis, poker, NASCAR, and anything else you can think of were created during a time when women were expected to be at home preparing dinner and taking care of the six children while the men were out trying to get their balls into another team's holes. So, instead of the winner of a sport contest being determined by skills that women excel in (an extremely small sample based on my own experiences: flexibility, agility, nimbleness, intelligence, an insane pain threshold, investment strategies, teamwork, just fucking living longer), they were geared towards categories like “I can push you further” and “I can jump higher than you can jump.” 

Maybe think about it like this: Way back in the day, when James Naismith invented the game of basketball, what if instead of making the height of the baskets 10 feet, he decided to make them 8 feet? In this alternate reality, your favorite team's roster would be composed of entirely different players. Gone would be the crazy high jumpers or 7-foot plus monsters, because height and flight would no longer be as important of an asset. In their place would be... Well, I don't even know. No one really does. I imagine thy would be more muscular and compact athletes, like a rugby players. The fact is, the average height of an NBA player would no longer be nearly a foot higher than the average male because that kind of height wouldn't be necessary. Height would still assist, as it does in just about every competition this side of horseracing, but it wouldn't dominate the proceedings.

Now, multiply that subtle change in game construction by every little bit of difference between how male and female bodies are designed, and you'll get somewhere near our current state of affairs. 

“What's the big deal?” is, no doubt, a question on everyone's minds. “Women play women and men play men, so it doesn't make a difference,” they'll go on. Except that is does make a huge, vital, and indisputable difference in one particularly important category—income. 

The WNBA will never overtake the NBA in popularity. Softball will never be as popular as baseball. If you're a top female golfer, or an Olympic female volleyball player, you may make a nice bit of change in endorsement deals. But you don't sniff what the top males make. Men will always make more money than women in sports, because there will always be more money in male-played sports than in female-played ones. 

Spectators, when choosing where to spend their money, invariably choose to see the best players of that particular game take the floor. (Example: No one's paying top dollar to see hockey players shoot a basketball around.) So when it comes to watching the male version of a particular sport versus the female one, more money will always find its way into the coffers of the former. And that's always going to be the case, because ever since the first sport was designed—when the first two cavemen boxed the shit out of each other while a third sold tickets—they've been designed exclusively with the male skill-set in mind.  

Which is all to say: The games are rigged. Equality does not exist, and will never exist, in the world of sports. Until, that is, someone has the powerful genital fortitude to scrap the current understanding of what constitutes as a “sport” and designs one with the female skill-set in mind. 

@RickPaulas

More from Rick Paulas: 

Sacrificing Virgins

People Who Love God Also Love Porn

Don't Bet on the Apocalypse

Click through to the next page for more images by Roger Ballen and Asger Carlsen.

More photo stuff from VICE:  

Interfearance

The ‘LBM Dispatch’ Brings the Good News

Exogenesis

Image by Courtney Nicholas

In honor of I don’t know what, I’ve been delving back into the films of George Lucas. I suppose it’s because of the news of a new Star Wars trilogy. I recently read Skywalking, the biography by Dale Pollock. The book details the struggles Lucas endured working himself up to the place where he could have artistic independence, something important to him because of how he was burned by those overseeing THX-1134 and American Graffiti.

Isn’t it fun to think about that young weirdo thinking up Star Wars in his writing room, pulling his hair out as he wrote what was to become a new religion? It's crazy to think that one guy just came up with all that crap and now it’s embedded in all our heads, as deep as anything. Say what you will about Star Wars, it's a cultural touchstone with a footprint that is larger than than the foot that made it. It's also a great film.

There is a moment in Raiders of the Lost Arc when Indy threatens to blow up the arc with a bazooka. His archeological rival, the blue-eyed Belloq, says something like, “You won’t blow it up, Dr. Jones. This [the arc] is history. We are just passing through.” This is how I feel about the Indy and Star Wars films—at least all the ones made before 1999.

There is something about my loyalty to the original sets of trilogies and my rejection of the later Indy and Star Wars movies that says something about the endurance of the original films and their status as pieces of history. Of course, it’s nostalgia. Those films aren’t just part of film history, or cultural history—they contain my personal history. I can go back to the original films and remember my childhood. Like a favorite song form the past that evokes a period in time, those films can instantly bring me to the days when I spent so much time imagining myself in those worlds. Like Proust, the images on screen take me to my younger self, who sucked up everything about those films and painted my suburban life with their spectacle.

Lucas was a guy who was just making stuff that he loved. American Graffiti was an ode to his youth. He was a faux greaser who sucked in school. He would have probably lived a quiet existence if he hadn’t had a life changing car accident that set him on the road to seriousness. He eventually enrolled in USC film school, a place where a young technician could thrive. His early student film, and then the eventual feature, THX, revealed his penchant for sci-fi. American Graffiti, was a way for him to do with film what many young writers do with their early books. He immortalized the young fuck up he once was, encapsulated the time and mood of the period right before he started to become what he is known for. I know I did the same with my first book. The title says it all, Palo Alto—I’m writing about a specific place.

Star Wars and Indy were things that at one time didn’t exist. George and eventually Lawrence Kasdan dreamt them up. They took from many sources like Buck Rogers, James Bond, and even some old World War II  films, and created something indelible. And as they were inspired by the old serials, their movies have influenced everyone from Ridley Scott with his Alien film to Jerry Bruckheimer and his National Treasure franchise.

I know that Han Solo had a huge influence on how I thought about the Wizard in Oz, a loveable rogue who is reluctantly pulled into the fight for good. And it turns out that Indiana Jones is more of a model for my life than I could have ever imagined: a college professor who splits his time between teaching and traveling the world having adventures.

I thought I would get into why I rejected the more recent incarnations of these series, but I don’t think it’s important. What is more important is that the guys behind those franchises made more. They tried to give everyone what they wanted. South Park can mock Spielberg and Lucas all they want, at least they tried. We waited two decades for our follow-ups. The problem was that the follow-ups were released into a different world with different expectations than the early films. When the first Star Wars was released it came out on less than 50 screens! That’s how little the studio believed in it. It took everyone by surprise. But when people deal with sequels there are new expectations. And when something has dominated the cultural consciousness for decades and served as crown of the popular film cannon, then the expectations put on a follow up are infinite.

The other issue is that the films that were game changers are now having to compete with audiences who have grown up within the new environment that the old movies created. Technology and taste change. Something that is treasured through the gauze of nostalgia can be preserved in the public favor, but if the same movie were made today that was made 20 years before, it would not be received in the same way. Like Borges’ Pierre Menard, if Don Quixote is rewritten in a different place and time, the exact same text, it takes on a completely new significance. It becomes a new book.

Lucas isn’t remaking the same movies. He’s trying to do things that are new. But, like the arc in Raiders, his movies have become history. So even though he has gained his financial independence from Hollywood and controls these films, they really belong to all of us. The Nazis could carry the arc around and open it if they wished, but when they did they had to face the spirits that such an act unleashed. In that case, the Nazis had their faces melted. When Lucas reopens his cultural box, he always runs the risk of either pulling out the Ten Commandments (the arc’s original contents) or the wrath of the viewership that he created.

Previously - Swim On, Cheever

Even more by James Franco:

Are You a Nerd?

Brand-Funded Films and the Trailer for La Passione

American Psycho: Ten Years Later/Twenty Years Later

My Name Is Tom and I'm a Video Game Addict

Dress by Anna October

PHOTOS AND STYLING: Synchrodogs
MODEL: Amatue

Hair and Make-up: Inna Betily
Nails: Georgia Rose Fairman

Be on the lookout for our My Life Online documentary on Valeria Lukyanova, a.k.a Space Barbie, coming to VICE.com next week. Watch the trailer here.

Click through to the next page to see more pictures.

Dress by Anna October

Clothes by Anna October, head piece by Yulia Paskal

Clothes by Anna October, headpiece by Yulia Paskal

Dress by Anna October

Photo by Josh Sandulak.

The Calgary Stampede has never really been my bag. I never manage to get up early enough for free pancake breakfasts, I’m not interested in the midway—because I’m afraid of most rides—and I don’t really like crowds. Generally, I tend to mentally glaze over and passively enjoy the country music wafting out of every establishment in the downtown core, marveling at the sheer spectacle of an entire metropolis sporting hay bails outside of skyscrapers, while a million Kathys dress up like they’re going to the ho-down.

Post-flood, it’s been heartwarming to see the way citizens have banded together to save the ol’ Stampede; the grounds were essentially under water less than a month ago but organizers cleaned up in just a few weeks to hold Calgary’s largest cultural event. I wondered if maybe this was the year I’d finally start to give a shit. I got a job serving at a western themed bar to make some extra cash for ten days, serving tequila to corporate parties while country bands played in the background.

I did end up getting into the spirit of Stampede, but it wasn’t from hearing over 200 covers of “Folsom Prison Blues.” It was because I went to the gay rodeo and realized how goddamn sexy cowboys are. Fuck.

About 40 minutes east of Calgary in Strathmore, the Alberta Rockies Gay Rodeo Association holds their annual rodeo and music festival during the last week of June. It’s very legit. Rural men and women from all over the midwest come to compete in traditional rodeo events, like steer wrestling and barrel racing. Chatting with participants and attendees, I got my first real exposure to the rugged masculinity of the true rural Alberta cowboy. And after a day of chatting with some sexually assertive gay men, the sex appeal of the cowboy became about as obvious as getting hit in the head with a horseshoe.

If you’re not already aware, cowboys undeniably exemplify a conventional sexual stereotype just waiting to be objectified by men and women alike. Big and broad shouldered, sometimes a little on the heftier side, most rodeo participants sport hip hugging jeans, collared shirts, and dusty leather chaps. Watching the rodeo events, it’s impressive to observe the grace and speed with which cowboys can move on horseback.

Photo by Josh Sandulak.

I think there are many reasons why the cowboy has resonated for so long as a sex symbol. Part of it likely harkens back to the old-school attraction of the “capable man”. Let’s face it, most of us can barely set up our internet, let alone ride a bronco. I can see the appeal to Generation Y especially, as we more and more attach value to the authentic, the analogue and the organic, trying to grasp some sense of tangible quality in our often overwhelmingly synthetic, cerebral, and highly metropolitan lifestyles. It’s the same reason why people spend ten dollars on mason jars in boutique, downtown “general stores.” We all kinda want to be a cowboy, the physical manifestation of this quest for the authentic, the salt of the earth, which happens to be wrapped up in a handsome, tanned, tall drink of water.

There’s a certain romanticism to the cowboy as well. The western film’s common myth proclaims that the protagonist will always do the right thing, often with great sacrifice. If you’ve ever seen High Noon, Shane,or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, you know that the cowboy can be both a reckless and cavalier loner, and a brave and stoic hero.

Gary Cooper: unstoppably dreamy.

Perhaps it’s this long cultivated ethos that explains why people enjoy dressing the part over Stampede—and why I found myself totally loving it. From July 5th to 14^th, every guy in Calgary was walking around in wranglers and a crisp white button-up looking like Jason Stackhouse. Suddenly, I was attracted to accountants and engineers who would normally be wearing Tap Out shirts, or suits with bad, pointy loafers. Previously, their aesthetic banality would have set off a red flag in my mind; this person is likely boring, or votes Conservative, or likes Metallica records after the Black Album. But for one beautiful week, I tricked my brain into thinking I was surrounded by a bunch of Gary Coopers. 

Jesus motherfucking cowboy-loving Christ, there is just something so attractive about the cowboy archetype. It only took a bunch of gay men to clue me into it. I spent so many years avoiding the spectacle side of the Stampede that I disregarded the whole men rolling around in the dirt and riding beautiful horses aspect.

Clearly, I’ve been blowing it.

Follow Grace on Twitter: @GraceLIsaScott

Previously:

I Woke Up and Calgary Was Flooded

I Want to Bone Justin Trudeau

Finished DIY mortars loaded onto a pickup truck at the Free Syrian Army's secret munitions factory in Aleppo.

During my five months in Syria, there's one remark I keep hearing from the rebels: we need ammunition and we need heavy weapons. The makeshift army fighting Bashar al-Assad's troops may be armed with plenty of ancient Kalashnikovs, a steady stream of young men ready to fight and die, and an unshakeable belief that Allah is on their side. But they're facing a regime equipped with Russian-made tanks and fighter jets, a regime that's apparently happy to unleash huge scud missiles and chemical weapons on its own population to keep itself in power.

The rebels and Assad's forces are locked in a particularly sticky, horrendously bloody stalemate; the rebels can hold the front lines but find it almost impossible to advance because they don't have the weapons and ammunition to make a push. The regime is able to fire heavy artillery at the residential neighborhoods held by the rebels, occasionally picking off fighters while simultaneously destroying the homes of ordinary citizens.     

That's clearly not an ideal situation to be trapped in. So it was inevitable that, at some point, the rebels would stop relying on the West to ship over weapons, and instead work out how to make them themselves.

Mohamad's Molotov cocktail factory on the frontline in Salaheddin, Aleppo.

I decided to root out one of these DIY weaponry workshops and started my search in Aleppo, Syria's biggest city and the center of the conflict since fighting erupted in 2011. On the front line, which runs through the city’s Salaheddin neighborhood, I met 17-year-old Mohamad. Together with two of his friends, he's set up a Molotov cocktail factory in what used to be a little girl’s bedroom. Mohamad showed me how he fills glass juice bottles with oil, stuffs the tops with mattress foam and bits of ripped-up bed sheets, before lighting them up and flinging them towards the regime’s troops.

But there’s a big problem with Mohamad’s Molotovs: they tend not to explode when they smash. The only oil available in areas held by the rebels is the thick black stuff that comes from Syria’s eastern desert provinces. The rebels have captured most of the oil fields but the refineries are still in the regime’s hands, so it’s left to local villagers and tribesmen in the provinces to refine the black oil with homemade equipment. These guys don’t really know what they’re doing, so the fuel you buy from the jerry cans on the roadside will eventually screw up your car engine—and it’s completely useless for making Molotov cocktails.

A tank in Abu Firas' workshop that's had its regime logo replaced with the rebels' logo.

Away from the front lines I found a slightly more professional operation. Three months ago, a local Free Syrian Army commander named Abu Firas realized that his fighters were missing a trick by attacking the regime’s tanks with explosives and leaving them burnt out on the side of the road. Now when the rebels attack a regime checkpoint they try to leave the tanks in one piece so they can bring them over to the other side.

“Now that we are capturing heavy weapons, our fortunes will change,” Abu told me. He explained that some particularly fearless jihadist fighters from Yemen leap onto the regime’s tanks as they're still moving, rip open the doors, and unload their weapons upon the soldiers inside. Brutal and foolhardy, perhaps, but definitely effective, and a method that results in only superficial damage inflicted on the tank.

A rebel-captured Syrian government tank being fixed up in Abu Firas's workshop.

The rebels bring their prizes to a mechanic’s workshop opposite Abu Firas’s office, where they're soon fixed up and made battle-ready; a bit of welding and a new rebel logo to replace the regime’s and they’re good to go. It was Ramadan when I visited so the mechanic isn't working. As Abu swung the garage doors open open—we're met with the bizarre sight of two camouflaged tanks parked up next to a Toyota pickup truck—he told me he used to work on bulldozers and trucks and was able to teach himself how tanks operate pretty quickly.

After my visit to the war workshop, I heard about another rebel-run battle studio, a factory where fighters are turning out hundreds of weapons every day. The commander in charge is named Ahmad Afesh and he's the leader of Aleppo’s Free Syria Brigade. He got nervous when I first spoke to him—he’d never let a journalist anywhere near the factory before and he was unsure about letting me in, never mind allowing me to take photographs inside.

A worker cuts down lengths of metal tubing to make casing for grenades at the FSA's secret munitions factory.

After two days of negotiations via Skype and over the phone, he came back with his answer: he'd granting me access on the condition that I don't photograph the outside of the factory or reveal its location. That's a compromise I was perfectly happy to make, so the next day we drove to the factory with the commander.

It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did I found myself in front of a scene resembling a cross between Santa's workshop and a Industrial Revolution–era Britain. Only instead of gift-wrapped toys or steam engine parts, the factory is cluttered with mortar casings and rockets—a Christmas grotto fit for the most battle-ready child you know.

By taking apart weapons they've captured from the regime's checkpoints, the rebels' manufacturing team has worked out how to reverse-engineer them, meaning Assad's troops are getting carbon copies of their weapons fired back at them. 

A workstation at the FSA's secret munitions factory.

Fifteen men churn out 200 mortar rounds a day in Afesh's workshop along with countless rockets, hand grenades, and cartridges to be fired from the captured tanks that are being fixed up in Abu Firas’s garage. Aleppo was Syria’s industrial city and, when the factory owners fled as the fighting started, they left behind a treasure trove of machinery and materials that the rebels are now putting to use.

A worker cuts down scaffolding rods to make the casings for rockets at the FSA's secret munitions factory.

At one workstation, I saw a young man cutting down lengths of scaffolding poles to make rocket casings. At another, a worker was shaping and welding the rocket tips. And at a third, once the body got packed with explosives, the two parts got stuck together and sealed. It’s a tightly run operation, which Afesh is clearly very proud of. He smiled as he held up the finished product for me to inspect.

“We’ve waited for the West to send weapons to us for two years and they’ve sent nothing at all,” he said. “It’s hypocrisy—your David Cameron talks a lot but does nothing. Now we don’t need the West anymore because we’re making all of our weapons ourselves.”

Grenades assembled by the FSA.

In the furthest, darkest corner, Afesh showed me the grenade production line. Cases made of thin tubing are clamped shut at one end, loaded with nails and explosives, topped off with a fuse, and sealed with molten wax. “These are better than Assad’s, better than the Russians!” Afesh told me as he held up an example. It’s packed with a pound of TNT and, he claimed, is five times more powerful that anything Assad’s soldiers can lob at his men.

An FSA rebel holds up a homemade grenade.

He handed me one. “This is for you, it’s a present,” he said. I turned it over in my hand wondering just how volatile TNT is, how I might explain a homemade grenade in my rucksack to the Turkish border guards on my return to the place I'm staying, and how I can gracefully reject a gift that’s been given to me by a man who‘s in charge of a munitions factory. Luckily he spoke again before I had the opportunity to say anything stupid: “Why don’t you throw it at David Cameron?”

Follow Hannah on Twitter: @hannahluci

More on the Free Syrian Army:

Syrian Rebels Are Getting Serious Help from a House in Suburban Ontario

Meet the Ladies of the Free Syrian Army

Interviews with Syrian Army Defectors